Four Field Colloquium: Double-Voiced Parody: Stewart Huff Plays a Bigot

This talk investigates the creative process of standup comedian Stewart Huff as he recounts, in a video-taped interview with the ethnographer, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. While speaking of his own process Huff breaks into a performance that demonstrates the cathartic power of building a parodic scenario that uses two voices. Beginning from Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into one’s own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s re-creation as providing the comedian himself with an empowering act of transformation from horror into humor, while simultaneously providing humorous recreation for his comedy club audiences.