This dissertation takes a discursive approach to Hawai'i stand-up comedy, which is a highly dramaturgical genre, and it examines the cultural specificity of Hawaii comedy in an explicitly interactional context. This culturally-specific performative genre is a discursive site where comedians and their audiences jointly construct multivocal humor through a body of shared knowledge and ideology about linguistic forms, styles, and identities. The dissertation conceptualizes how language, interaction, and social structure are ideologically mediated by one another, and it examines how the comedians use various codes, such as Pidgin and English, and other historically loaded semiotic resources, such as place names, in the moment-by-moment development of performance. Using these inferentially rich semiotic resources, the Local comedians--Frank DeLima, Andy Bumatai, Augie T, Bo Irvine, and others--build interpersonal relationships with their Local and non-Local audiences, invoke intertextual links with past and relevant texts about Hawai'i and its relation to the continental United States, and successfully draw laughter from their audiences. My data collection included obtaining not only performance but also meta-performance data to demonstrate the way the comedians and their audiences conduct multilingual categorial work to make sense of the cultural specificity of Hawai'i humor. Based on meta-performance data taken from interviews and focus groups, the dissertation also investigates the reception of Hawai'i comedy in order to expand this relatively underdeveloped area in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. A claim is made that multilingual, multiracial, multicultural Hawai'i comedy constitutes an ideological niche and complicates our understanding of sociolinguistic and discourse analytic ideas such as performativity, multivocality, and stylization. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]