Diogenes was doing stand-up: the Cynic method as performance

I've just read the Diogenes stories in Diogenes Laertius, and I'm convinced the man was doing comedy, in the serious sense.

Look at the famous ones. Plato defines a human as a featherless biped; Diogenes plucks a chicken, brings it to the Academy and says "here is Plato's human." He walks through the market in daylight with a lamp, "looking for a human being". Alexander the Great offers him anything he wants, and he asks him to stand out of his sun.

None of these is an argument in the usual sense. Each one is a bit: set up the convention, then break it in front of an audience so they laugh and then think. That is exactly what a good stand-up does. You don't argue that the call-centre script is absurd; you read it out loud on stage in the voice of a hostage.

I know these stories are anecdotes written down centuries later, and probably half invented. But maybe that's the point: the Cynics were remembered as bits, not as doctrines, because the bit was the method. If what causes us distress is mostly convention, showing it is more effective than arguing it.

Does anyone know whether other traditions had philosophers who taught this way? And is there a risk that the bit becomes the whole thing, all performance and no point?