Cynics, Hypocrites, and Nasty Boys: Senator Larry Craig and Gay Rights Caught in the Grotesque Frame

KB Journal: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society Sep 2010 web Open Access

Cynics, Hypocrites, and Nasty Boys: Senator Larry Craig and Gay Rights Caught in the Grotesque Frame

Abstract

In 2007 US Senator Larry Craig plead guilty to soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, a notable irony as he has a consistent record of voting against gay-rights. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart sought to punish Craig for homophobia by hoisting him with his own homophobic petard, using homosexuality as a punch line. Turning to Burke to untangle this rhetorical knot, we see The Daily Show providing a grotesque response to Craig’s troubles. As a transitional frame, the grotesque has received relatively little scholarly attention, due in part to the fact that this particular response to social and political strife does little to resolve the conflict at hand. As analysis shows, by punishing Craig as a grotesque figure while using a strategy of prejudice he, himself, would employ (i.e., homophobia) the social and political struggle over gay-rights becomes mired in cynical mud rather than providing either defense for homosexual acceptance or potential for Craig’s personal redemption. By contrast, we can see that a comic response focusing on Craig’s seeming repressed homoerotic desire would redeem Craig as lost, not hopeless, and gay rights as a logical course.

Journal: KB Journal: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society
Published: 2010-09
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Topics: rhetorical criticism editorial matter
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