Catherine E. Davies
 

Whereas all four of the 2008 candidates were mocked on SNL, Sarah Palin’s dialect, at all levels, provided the focus for Tina Fey’s humor.  This paper theorizes the mocking, examines its linguistic dimensions in detail, triangulates with both media commentary and also Tina Fey’s own explanation of her linguistic creation, and briefly explores the effects of the humor by drawing on both media commentary from across the political spectrum as well as interviews with both fans and detractors.  Drawing on Bakhtin (1981), Morson (1989), Coupland (2001), Silverstein (2003), Chun (2004), the mocking is theorized as the creation of voice that is clearly intended to create a negative metamessage about the source.  Whereas typical mocking chooses a few iconic features and creates a new discourse that exaggerates in various ways the discourse it is parodying, as in, for example, the parodies of Martha Stewart analyzed by Sclafani (NWAV 2007), a particularly striking dimension of some of the mocking performances under analysis here is that they reproduce virtually exactly the utterances of Palin.  In the analysis of accent, the study builds on recent work by Purnell et al (2008)  on Palin’s speech (the raised æ before nasals of the Northern Cities Shift, the unglided o of the Minnesota influence in Alaska from the 1930s migrations, the substitution of alveolar nasal for velar nasal).  It also considers observations by linguists (Sheidlower, Pinker, R. Lakoff, Language Log), other commentators (Cavett, Paglia, Parker, Brooks), and in the media on morphosyntax (e.g.,  “you betcha,” “we need to progress the country, ”“But not me personally were those cheers for”), and discourse patterns associated with a “working class” presentation of self (e.g., Joe Sixpack, hockey mom, heck of a…,  goshdarn). All of Fey’s mocking performances were examined, comparing them with the videos of Palin that were available before the humor was constructed.  The analysis is triangulated with Fey’s own commentary in the media explaining how she created the linguistic persona.  The most widely-viewed example of the mocking (the Couric interview) was achieved by reproducing Palin’s discourse almost exactly as it was first uttered.  The final section of the paper explores the possible effects of the mocking humor by considering media commentary on the left and right, and by analyzing interviews with both fans and detractors of the vice presidential candidate.