Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

English

First Advisor

Granville Ganter

Second Advisor

Dohra Ahmad

Third Advisor

Elda Tsou

Abstract

Humor has a long tradition of being used both positively and negatively to reinforce or undermine the dominant order. Even worse, a contemptuous humor has often been used on behalf of the cultural majority to further isolate and denigrate social "others." This dissertation tells a different story using the humor expressed by minoritized comics in the United States and Canada: the story of how their uses of humor can be an alternative, or counter-narrative, to the jeering humor of xenophobes and racists. This dissertation examines the work of comic writers whose memoirs and personal writings seek to integrate the perspectives of North America's underrepresented peoples into North American identity. Rather than making fun of people with less cultural power than them (punching down), or propelling their memoirs with bitter sarcasm and venomous humor, the comic writers explored in the study employ softer and more nuanced humorous techniques. Although warmer, this humor can be provocative. Margaret Cho can be lewd, angry, and controversial, but her comedy is driven by a desire for belonging, not division. Other writers in this study, like W. Kamau Bell and Trevor Noah, can be wickedly ironic and also educational without seeming preachy; and still others like Scaachi Koul and Tina Fey fall somewhere in between the outrageous and the educational, expressing a complicated relationship to North American ideals of hard work and cultural belonging. The dissertation explores the different ways contemporary humorists employ satire. Although the United States’ current political moment in 2025/2026 is highly divisive and politically explosive, all five of the comic writers I explore in this dissertation specialize in creating broad, good-humored satire as a counter-narrative to political hate and xenophobia. And while some of these writers might be faulted for not being political enough by the standards of the United States’ cultural Left, they have become very successful at expressing their progressive politics in the realm of genuinely belly-laughing prose and good humor. Their great skill has been to extend North America's multicultural identity through shared laughter, rather than exclusionary mockery.

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