Defining transcomedy: Humor,tricksterism,and postcolonial affect from Gerald Vizenor to Sacha Baron Cohen

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between language, humor, and postcolonial affect in the work of British performer and satirist Sacha Baron Cohen. His four major characters, Ali G, Borat, Brüno, and Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, each uses an intentionally unreliable pattern of inter-ethnic word substitutions as a defining characteristic of their performances. Guttural word-sounds, invented ‘foreign’ gibberish, and fractured English collectively offer a metatextual critique of the power of western spectatorship in contemporary global media. This linguistic fracturing technique, defined in this article as ‘transcomedy’, uses the incongruous sensibility of humor to visualize what Homi Bhabha describes as the bifurcated status of the colonized subject. An earlier example of transcomedy is located in this article in the work of Native American essayist Gerald Vizenor.

Keywords

comedy humor globalism linguistics postcolonialism Sacha Baron Cohen transcomedy

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