Dialogic Catharsis in Standup Comedy: Stewart Huff Plays a Bigot

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.