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Tamara Warhol
This
paper explores how actors in a sketch-comedy program, Saturday Night Live,
discursively constructed satirical social identities for the 2008
vice-presidential candidates. Mass media offers sites to preserve and
circulate words, phrases, and discourse styles from popular culture in both
local and global communities of practices (Spitulnik 1996). However, these
sites are not static reservoirs for unchangeable text. Rather, they
represent dynamic resources for creative entextualization and
recontextualization of voices and chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981) of popular
culture. In some instances, the voices and chronotopes can be transformed
to present humorous personae, such as the chronotopes presented in
Saturday Night Live skits about the 2008 vice-presidential candidates.
Furthermore, the social construction of these chronotopes can be used to
present ideologies about gender, political beliefs, etc. Thus, this paper
specifically examines how Saturday Night Live actors entextualized
and recontextualized the discourse of the 2008 vice-presidential candidates
to present humorous voices and chronotopes that critiqued particular gender
and political ideologies.
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