Home Land, by the way, is a delightful novel that happens to fall into many of the carnivalesque tropes, especially in the climactic scene. I will relate this scene with extended commentary because I have a captive audience, but first: a brief summary of the plot. Our narrator - I would not go so far as to say “hero” - is Lewis Miner, nicknamed Teabag because of an unfortunate incident, a failure in almost every way, who has responded to his high school alumni newsletter’s request for updates about his life. He sends monumentally inappropriate updates, which they of course do not publish. He ends up in attendance at the high school reunion, under protest. There is a banquet. This is as close to a banquet scene as modern day literature can get, and now let me interrupt to explain Bakhtin’s feelings about banquets.
	Eating is one of those activities, as mentioned earlier, in which the human body admits to its incompleteness and connectedness with the world.3
All of this is true of the scene I am about to quote almost in full.
Here we have an ironic reversal. While the expectation in a high school reunion is for the successful graduates to speak, the ones who did pan out, and most likely the ones not nicknamed Teabag, instead we have the failure give a speech. In true carnivalesque fashion, the social hierarchy is inverted.4

 Has any sentence ever fit that description better than “I’m a fat fuck”?
Again, they are asking the least successful student at this reunion for advice. Hilariously, they are saying he should have answers for them because he has the microphone. This implies that the position itself holds the power, not the person in it. Lewis “Teabag” Miner is just as legitimate an advice-giver as the principal (true, in this case) or any of his successful former classmates. The only thing that can lift one of them above the others is the microphone.

Very little of this is “uncrowned and renewed on the material bodily level,” except maybe those last two sentences, but it would be too much to ask nothing about the carnivalesque to change. 
The lower and the higher more seriously interact, with platitudes sandwiching social commentary. I believe “don’t rob Peter to pay some other guy” blends “the spiritual and the material,” but I could be wrong. Boundaries are blurred, platitudes are subverted, and most relevant for the carnivalesque, the humor is ambivalent. 

Meaning exists within the text, but pure joy of subversion is just as relevant.5
In a banquet scene, of course entertainment beats out politics. 
These binaries don’t work at all according to the logic of rationality, because they force a choice between one and the same, or suggest a choice of two opposites simultaneously. In the carnivalesque these choices are possible, and setting up a choice between binary opposites is just as nonsensical.
	Another characteristic of carnivalesque folk humor that has been preserved surprisingly well and translated smoothly into internet culture is excess, particularly in the case of affectionate abuse. 
