New Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Regina Barreca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000579314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1992, the twenty-one original essays in this volume explore the way women have used humor to break down cultural stereotypes between the genders. Examples from literature and the performing arts deal with humor and violence, humor and disability, humor and the supposition of women's shame, lesbian and ethnic humor, and particularly women's responses to men's humor. The essayists present traditional issues from new perspectives and take us from Italy in the Renaissance to today's New York comedy clubs. They may make you laugh; they may make you nervous. They will certainly make you reevaluate the importance of placing women at the center of a discussion of comedy.

1 Making Trouble: An Introduction

Regina Barreca

I laughed, as, indeed, it was impossible to do otherwise.

Charlotte Bronte, Villette

What you say is most generous and kind; I don’t mean for a moment to correct your judgement. It is only that I have my girlish, mocking way of looking at things...

George Eliot, Middlemarch

We are not alone in the oddity of our beliefs. Our neighbor, whom we never thought would laugh when we laughed, actually does.

Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice

Carrying the twenty essays for this book down the green cinderblock hallway of my university, a concerned senior colleague paused briefly before asking, in sympathy and with great earnestness, what we were going to do about Swift and Pope in this collection on comedy. I clarified my position by explaining that, for the most part, this was a book about women writers of comedy, not about how women were presented in texts by male writers. “Yes, yes,” he replied, “but my point is: have women done anything differently from Swift and Pope?”

This is a book about what women have done differently from Swift and Pope. Or Twain and James, for that matter. Or Amis and Heller. Our arguments will focus on literature by women writers. Male writers are invoked for purposes of comparison but appear as attendant lords only, their function to delineate even more precisely the roles of the main female players.

The goal of this volume (which, until very recently, was fondly known as “Daughter of Last Laughs”—a.k.a. DOLL), is to provide further information on women writers of comedy, women cartoonists, female comics and perfomance artists, and the ways that men’s humor and women’s humor differ in a number of settings. What we found working on Last Laughs was that, as comprehensive a volume as we believed it to be, there was an enormous amount of work to be done. In New Perspectives, several essays deal with work produced by women of color: articles concerning Native American, Afro-American and Asian-American writers illuminate these pages. A number of essays deal with women in performance, both from inside and outside “the business”; these essays can be twinned with those concerning women cartoonists, also written from both inside and outside the business. There are essays dealing with lesbian humor, humor and violence, humor and disability, humor and the supposition of women’s shame; these essays take us from the Renaissance Italy to this year’s Manhattan comedy clubs. Yet, despite the different perspectives and occasionally widely divergent conclusions, certain significant patterns of women’s comedy reappear in almost every essay.

We cannot underestimate the continuing need to focus on the particulars of women’s comedy, humor and, in addition, women’s response to men’s humor. It is of particular importance to place women at the center of a discussion of comedy because it has been done too rarely even in contemporary critical studies. Without being defined as such, the study of comedy has been the study of male comedy.

Why “male” comedy? Why make it gender-specific? Why not see comedy as the last frontier of the universal, humor as that glorious patch of hallowed ground where we all meet and laugh with equal joy? A charming thought, but dangerous in its attempt to seduce the reader into a belief that we all laugh at the same things, even when we happen to laugh at the same time, that we all see the same thing when we stand next to one another. Comedy, out of all the textual territories explored, is the least universal. It is rigidly mapped and marked by subjectivity. It is most liable to be filtered by history (we don’t make Napoleon jokes), social class (do people on federal assistance find the line “poverty sucks” as funny as the yuppies do?), race and ethnicity (would you tell an Italian joke at a Sons of Italy meeting if you weren’t Italian?), and, it would seem more than self-evident, gender.

For example, Peter Farb wrote an article called “Speaking Seriously About Humor,” which was published by The Massachusetts Review in 1981. Farb, in a standard scholarly explanation of the forms and effects of various types of humor, offers without apology or embarrassment, as an example of the “Spooneristic Conundrum” the following: “What’s the difference between a pygmy village and an all-female track team? The pygmy village is a cunning bunch of runts” (773). If this is such a terrific example of a certain form of word play, then (as the graduate student who photocopied Farb’s article for me wrote in its margin) “how come I’m not laughing?” Farb’s joke should perhaps be praised for its economy, since it manages to be both sexist and racist at the same time. But Farb’s example is most useful in illustrating that a joke is not, in fact, always a joke. A joke depends on the teller and the told, and if something is not funny it does not mean the person listening has no sense of humor. It might be that the person telling the joke is not funny. Women have been told that they have no sense of humor based on those times when they do not laugh at jokes or stories told by men.

Any one critic’s definition of comedy simply cuts a swatch from a larger fabric and proclaims it whole cloth. The writers of these essays cannot claim to do otherwise; we can merely make our patterns available to the reader. A critical overview of three hundred years of women’s comedy must necessarily encompass many and various conceptions of the general term “comedy.” When the central argument being made is that few of these various conceptions are fruitful when applied to texts by women, the necessity to explore a number of positions becomes further complicated by the need for constant qualification, rebuttal and redefinition of these positions. The texts under discussion are not meant to represent the full-flowering of all women’s writing, performance or art; rather, they were chosen to illustrate particular forms of comedy and humor.

The following discussion of women writers does not seek to prove that every woman who ever wrote, wrote comedy; it does not seek to prove that everything every female character in every text every woman ever wrote speaks satirically, sarcastically, ironically or with intent to subvert (although the writers here tend to argue that there are more trouble-makers than has been previously noted); no one argues that the ending of The Mill on The Floss, for example, is really a slapstick take-off on traditional couplings or that Virginia Woolf should have done stand-up routines. For the most part, the writers included in this volume tend to use the term “comedy” in a broad sense (so to speak), applying that term to the narrative structure of certain texts which refuse to take seriously the supposedly serious matters of the cultures in which they take place. “Humor” applies to those specific textual strategies where the refusal to take serious matters seriously is rendered explicit.

Bronte is capable of writing in Villette, for example, the sort of shocking metatextual statement we usually associate with such contemporary writers as Margaret Drabble when she interrupts her own text to instuct us: “Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral—an alternative, text-hand copy—” (118). The “text-hand” copy will draw much of our attention in all the works to be discussed. So will the idea of the “alternative” text. Villette is a particularly intriguing example of a genre-defying novel, in fact, because of the consideration of alternatives. If Monsieur Paul returns to marry Lucy, for example, then does the book become a comedy? If he dies in the storm, does the book become a tragedy? By traditional definitions, whether the sailor comes home from the sea will determine whether the waiting woman’s life is comic or tragic. Is it any wonder, then, that Bronte refuses to supply the scene that would determine Lucy’s textual fate? Lucy has had, according to her own account, the best years of her life while he’s been away. What, in fact, would be her happy ending?

Women’s humor has not so much been ignored as it has been unrecognized, passed over or misread as tragic. Because literary critics, analysts, novelists, and academics can all supply reasons why the creation of comedy by women is impossible, it does not follow that women have not created comedy. It is similiar to the situation in which experts in physics and aeronautics have explained to their own satisfaction that the bumble-bee can’t possibly fly given its weight and wingspan, even as they dash about hoping not to be stung.

In other words, if you’re not looking for it you are probably not going to find it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not there. “Universal negatives are seldom safe,” explains Arabella from Lennox’s The Female Quixote, “and are least to be allowed when the disputes are about the objects of sense; where one position cannot be inferred from another. That there is a castle, any man who has seen it may safely affirm. But you cannot, with equal reason, maintain that there is no castle because you have not seen it” (414).

The subjects of women’s comedy are far from unimportant, however unofficial their designation within the dominant discourse. Most apparent during an investigation of available research materials on women and comedy has been the prevailing attitude that comedy written by women must be gentle and conciliatory. This may seem reductive but it is not misrepresentative. The number of histories of comedy which classify women’s comedy in these terms confirms what I, for one, believe is central in the misreading of women’s texts: the belief that women actually are incapable of producing the challenging, angry and subversive comedy that they do in fact write. Aside from a few articles which raise the possibility for this uncommon interpretation, such as D.W. Harding’s discussion of Jane Austen in terms of “Regulated Hatred,” or Wilt’s “The Laughter of Maidens, the Cackle of Matriarchs: Notes on the Collision between Comedy and Feminism,” there exists the mostly unassailed conviction that those few women who write comedies write them only with a desire to provide mild entertainment, a textual fliration, a batting of the rhetorical eyelashes.

Judith Wilt, however, unhesitatingly confronts the relationship between women’s comedy and anger. Wilt argues that there is, for women, a: “boundary where comedy ceases to cheer and succor and becomes violent, destructive, murderous....”¹ Women’s comedies have often been misread since they often do not adhere to the essentially conservative conventions of comedy. If comedy written by women is meant to include certain elements (reconciling gentility, soft admonitions for social lapses, sweet mirth) and if these elements are markedly absent, the work might be misread as non-comedic. This might occur despite the fact that the work contains aspects of fiction usually associated with “traditional” comedy: irony, hostility, aggression, the grotesque, explicit or implicit political agendas, for example. While providing at least some of the distinguishing signs of comedy—exaggerated characters, use of puns or wordplay, absurd situations—women writers still manage to undercut the conventions they employ by shifting the very framing devices used as definition. What can be regarded as a nominal happy ending might, for example, include a number of elements usually regarded as tragic. When the heroine of a Fay Weldon novel has burned down her house (asphyxiating a gerbil in the process, displaying a markedly unfeminine indifference to a housepet), abandoned her children, destroyed her husband’s career and killed off her rival, we still regard the book—in this case, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil— as a comedy. It is women’s comedy: “A comic turn, turned serious,” as Weldon herself explains in the last line of her novel.

As the essays in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy illustrated, women’s writing of comedy is characterized by the breaking of cultural and ideological frames. The woman writer’s use of comedy is dislocating, anarchic and, paradoxically, unconventional. I say paradoxically because, of course, there is the constant problem of discussing works that must be grouped under a conventional heading such as “comedy” while simultaneously claiming that they subvert the elemental aspects associated with that convention. The woman writer of comedy will often mask her satire by appearing to describe faithfully a series of events, a method to which the heroine in Lennox’s Female Quixote is devoted: “When actions are a censure upon themselves, the reciter will always be considered a satirist” (315).

The woman writer forges a comedy that allows for complexity and depth without the generally oppressive didacticism so often found in the social satire of writers from Swift to Amis. As I have argued elsewhere,² in comedies by women the very idea of the “universal” is challenged, confronted and, finally, shattered. Even the existentialist male writer will write from within the dominant discourse in terms of his gender. The most economically oppressed of male writers nevertheless writes from a position of privilege awarded to him by a culture that equates value with maleness in much the same way that an Anglo writer writes from a position of privilege in the Western world. Despite the fact that these observations may cause discomfort to the existentialist, economically depressed Anglo male writer—or critic—who regards his own oppression as unique, they remain valid. Nancy Walker, in her study of American women’s humor, explains that “[e]ven when the white male humorist adopts for his own purposes the stance of the outsider...he writes with the authority of the insider, the person who is potentially in a position to change what he finds wrong, whether it is the law or the cut of a dinner jacket....”³

Certain forms of comedy can invert the world not only briefly but permanently; can strip away the dignity and complacency of powerful figures only to refuse to hand them back these attributes when the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• List of Contributors
• 1. Making Trouble: An Introduction
• 2. What to Do with Helen Keller Jokes: A Feminist Act
• 3. Just Kidding: Gender and Conversational Humor
• 4. Roseanne Barr: Canned Laughter—Containing the Subject
• 5. Belly Laughs and Naked Rage: Resisting Humor in Karen Finley’s Performance Art
• 6. Sylvia Talks Back
• 7. Why Women Cartoonists Are Rare, And Why That’s Important
• 8. Return the Favor
• 9. The Parallel Lives of Kathy and Mo
• 10. The Politics of Humor: An Interview with Margaret Drabble
• 11. Wendy Cope’s Struggle with Strugnell in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
• 12. A Duel of Wits and the Lesbian Romance Novel or Verbal Intercourse in Fictional Regency England
• 13. Louise Erdrich as Nanapush
• 14. Confirming the Place of “The Other”: Gender and Ethnic Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
• 15. Feminist Humorist of the 1920s: The “Little Insurrections” of Florence Guy Seabury
• 16. Irony and Ambiguity in Grace King’s “Monsieur Motte”
• 17. Violence and Comedy in the Works of Flannery O’Connor
• 18. Laughter as Feminine Power in The Color Purple and A Question of Silence
• 19. The Goblin Ha-Ha: Hidden Smiles and Open Laughter in Jane Eyre
• 20. The Art of Courting Women’s Laughter
• 21. The Ancestral Laughter of the Streets: Humor in Muriel Spark’s Earlier Works
• Index