Looking Through the American Ideal: The Politics of Violent Humor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

Huckleberry Finn is the pinnacle of American humor and the violent humor of the novel criticizes the moral values of American society. Despite the laughter-induced surface, underneath the story lies a bitter humor which attacks and ruptures different value systems. Besides the extremely violent humor, the other strategies that aid humor in fulfilling its political mission are grotesquery, and narration. The collaboration of strategic violent humor with grotesquery and narration results in the liberation of the readers from static mind-sets. Huck Finn effectively reveals the spuriousness of the American ideal despite its claims of being genuine through juxtaposition of heterogeneous characters, worlds, and lives which reveal the crudity of everyday life. To this end, humor theories of the scholars like Plaza, Walker, Cox, and Camfield and violence theories of Zizek, Schinkel, and Galtung are drawn upon in order to clarify the interconnected mechanism of humor, violence, and grotesquery in assailing putrid value systems. Deployed violent humor aligned with focalization of the novel through Huck, a naïve narrator, highlights the disparity between the American ideal and realities of life that break the readers free from opiated visions of society and gives them a clear vision, free from biased value systems.