Dialogic catharsis in standup comedy
Stewart Huff plays a bigot
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12196859 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susan Seizer (Indiana University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 211-237 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humor - International Journal of Humor Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0933-1719 • E-ISSN: 1613-3722 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter Mouton (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/humor-2016-0026 |
| OpenAlex | W2591760046 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 12 |
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
Aesthetics · Arcadia · Art · Catharsis · Comedy · Comics · Dialogic · Lament · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Subtext · Visual arts · Humor Studies and Applications · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Psychology · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |