| This dissertation is an exploration of "Satan comedy"; it examines the complex symbiotic relationship between both sides of the religious-secular argument regarding the nature of evil and the new meanings that comic images of Satan create within our cultural conversations. Satan comedy's very nature as transgressive and eccentric (that is, outside the safe center of mainstream convention), further, becomes one portal into larger questions and debates about social, religious, global, and academic border-crossing. Foundational to this project is a study of Satan's traditional role in Christian religious practice, his evolution into a rhetorical figure with many positive significations, including his latest incarnation as a contemporary ally and guide along our path to a global, pluralistic consciousness. By these lights, this study examines Satan's transformations within works from both "high" and "low" American culture, including Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Twain's Letters from the Earth, Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," New Destiny Christian Church's Hell House, South Park, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.;Interpreting these texts through the lens of critical works by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, Arthur Koestler, and Northrop Frye, this dissertation concludes that "dealing with the devil," or more specifically, engaging in the comic mode of bisociative thinking, enables us to create and live within a global community characterized by convergent pluralism, rather than homogenization or confrontational parochialisms.;In order to advance this argument, this study investigates the relationship between profanity, sacrilege, border-crossing, and comedy, and demonstrates how cultural "tricksters" such as Mark Twain, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Matt Groening, and Jack Black, as well as rock legends such as KISS and Ronnie James Dio, have facilitated Satan's contemporary transformation as a paradoxically evil-but-positive archetype who invites us to find the truth and humor within conflict and outside of accepted norms. The proliferation and popularity of comedic Satan imagery is stripping away his power as an embodiment of absolute evil, and presents him instead as a figure who argues for and facilitates an inclusive, critical, and individually-empowering conversation between adversaries, in order to confront the problems of subjectivities and pluralism. |
