Hey, where you from? What do you do? Nice shirt.

Are these really the building blocks of an emerging art form?

Crowd work, the comic’s chatter with the audience in between jokes, has long been derided as the cheapest way to get laughs. But lately it’s been receiving more attention and respect from performers who have moved it from a supplementary part of their act to the main event.

In the past few years, the stand-ups Judah Friedlander, Andrew Schulz and Ian Bagg released specials built around crowd work; Big Jay Oakerson recorded a crowd work album, his second; and last week, Moshe Kasher released his own, “Crowd Surfing.”

Asked why this subgenre is booming now, Kasher pointed to the broader proliferation of stand-up specials that typically erase the spontaneous banter of live performance. “The living-in-the-moment part of stand-up, which is integral, has gotten short shrift,” he said in a recent interview by Skype, suggesting that these specials are less of a departure from traditional acts than a return to fundamentals.