Finding some citations in the onanistic self-googling way.
I finally got a copy of Roberta Mock's "Stand-up comedy and the legacy of the mature vagina" in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 22.1 (2012). Speaking to the later work of Joan Rivers, she nicely summarizes one of my arguments about the relationship between stand-up and legendary:
“Ian Brodie has offered a model of stand-up based on ethnographic work on legend, the central features of which are the comedian’s collaboration with an invested audience and the subsequent production of the illusion of intimacy. A performer’s persona is established over the course of a career and audience members use this as a framework to interpret ‘‘what is true and what is play. The comedian provides cues and clues, and will quickly try to establish how best to guide a particular audience towards the preferred interpretation. Her aim is not to assist them in the discernment of an actual truth, but to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter, at the time or over the course of the performance’’ (2008, 175).”