Addiction, Abjection, and Humor: Craig Ferguson’s Confessional Stand-Up

Abstract

This chapter studies the relationship between dark humor, addiction, and abjection. As a case study, it examines a stand-up routine by comic Craig Ferguson in which the comedian touches on such varied topics as peeing his pants, vulnerable populations, and alcoholic amnesia, noting how each relates to abjection. Since drunkenness frequently leads to vomiting and accidental urination, those examples provide the clearest cases of how alcoholism connects gross-out humor to bodily abjection. Ferguson also discusses how addicts form vulnerable populations, which demonstrates a social understanding of abjection as people left behind by society. Finally, Scepanski investigates drunken blackouts as temporal abjection. Since memory is so fundamental to understanding oneself, blackouts create an alienating disconnect between present and past.