Dr. Robert Lawrence Caserio Jr., Thesis Supervisor Dr. Robert Lawrence Caserio Jr., Thesis Supervisor Janet Wynne Lyon, Thesis Honors Advisor Toni Jensen, Faculty Reader
Keywords:
David Feinberg AIDS humor
Abstract:
This thesis explores the humor in David B. Feinberg’s two novels Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991) as well as his collection of autobiographical essays, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (1994). Feinberg was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, and his writing humorously accounts the reality of living with AIDS. My intention is to argue that Feinberg combats the social stigmas of being an HIV-positive gay man through the use of humor. I stress the importance of humor when discussing AIDS by contrasting Feinberg’s writing with that of Larry Kramer. I show how theorists of humor have described their literary effects, and I survey examples of humor in gay literature. I then demonstrate how humor functions in Feinberg’s fiction. His narrator uses humor in order to build a community of gay men while simultaneously alleviating the narrator’s social, physical, and medical concerns. Finally, I examine humor in Feinberg’s nonfiction before comparing Feinberg’s works to other AIDS novels, memoirs, and plays.
