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Dialogic catharsis in standup comedy: Stewart Huff plays a bigot

  • Susan Seizer

    Susan Seizer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has conducted ethnographic research on comedic performance both in India and in the United States.

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 9. März 2017
HUMOR
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Abstract

This essay investigates the cathartic creative process of a standup comic who recounts, in a video-taped interview with the author, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. Through reflexive engagement with his own creative process, Stewart Huff recounts building a scenario that splits his experience into two voices, enacting a breakthrough into performance within the taped interview itself. Taking to heart Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into our own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s performance as a classic example of double-voiced parody. The transformation from horror to humor is an empowering performative re-creation for the comedian that serves simultaneously as humorous recreation for the comedy club audience. This essay contributes to extant scholarship on the efficacious use of parodic double-voicing and the possibilities it opens up for dialogic catharsis in comedic performance.

About the author

Susan Seizer

Susan Seizer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has conducted ethnographic research on comedic performance both in India and in the United States.

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Supplemental Material

The online version of this article (DOI:10.1515/humor-2016-0026) offers supplementary material, available to authorized users.


Published Online: 2017-3-9
Published in Print: 2017-9-26

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 21.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/humor-2016-0026/pdf
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