Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender

Historical and Cultural Perspectives

A. Foka, J. Liliequist, A. Foka, J. Liliequist

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137463654
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Throughout history, it has played a crucial role in defining gender roles and identities. This collection offers an in-depth thematic examination of this relationship between humor and gender, spanning a variety of historical and cultural backdrops.

P A R T I

Laughter, Humor, and Misogyny—Reconsiderations and New Perspectives

Introduction

Anna Foka

Premodern concepts of gender, laughter, and humor have often been interpreted as primarily rigid, binary, misogynistic, and patriarchic. In feminist scholarship, studies often analyze the association of women with evil, the non-normative or the other abound, across disciplines and cultural contexts. Mythology, epic, and forms of folklore have certainly displayed the ability for female heroines to scheme against others (women or their patriarchs), exercise power behind the scenes, use their sexuality, and manipulate their surroundings.¹ Early feminist scholars interpreted these negative female paradigms as a consequence of a binary patriarchal order. In her book Le Rire de la Meduse, Hélène Cixous, like Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe, traced the battle between the sexes back into Graeco-Roman antiquity, specifically classical Greek literature, performance, and oral tradition as a way for phallocentric societies to control women.² By projecting the Greek myths of Medusa and Abyss, Cixous argued that apotropaic, laughable portrayals of mythical women in the past were a means to cast them away and to alienate them from civic processes. In the same breath, and throughout history, women are often portrayed as scheming, corrupt, selfish, and with hegemonic tendencies. For example, there is a long tradition of using Roman upper-class women to illustrate the corruption of Roman society. In Roman literature the scheming, sexually voracious, and uncontrollable woman is often used as a negative paradigm. Tacitus and other writers such as Dio Cassius and Suetonius used Messalina’s sexual voracity to illuminate the corruption and decay of the Roman Empire rather than to represent accurately historical womanhood in Rome.³ As a result, the idea of using women’s behavior to represent the corruption of or deviation from societal norms has become a common device in both ancient and contemporary portrayals. The hegemonic shrewd behavior and lack of chastity of women are represented as symptomatic or interrelated to the societal corruption.

The vast majority of evidence about women is often filtered through male viewpoints, let that be material (archives, inscriptions, paintings, mosaics) or literary. Due to anachronistic receptions and misconceptions of social history, scholars concerned with gender have tended to interpret ancient concepts of gendered humor as primarily rigid, binary, misogynistic, and patriarchal. Women tend to be spoken to instead of speaking of themselves, and therefore their appearance in historical records needs to be considered in that light. Indeed, women who deviate from the norm have been a part of literature, history, and popular culture since the dawn of recorded text and permeate almost every narrative, especially before the advent of feminism. Recent research, however, has delved more deeply into concepts of gender in both macro- and microhistory, and consequently concluded that these older interpretations suffer from historically restricted assumptions, the outcome of adopting hierarchically stratified categories of analysis. In Classical Athens for example, the notion that female seclusion characterized gender relations is therefore currently considered an ideological ideal perpetuated by earlier male-dominated discourse, whereas earlier, binary oppositions (man–woman, citizen–noncitizen, etc) fail to describe and articulate societal dynamics in Greek culture adequately.⁴ Therefore, current gender theory adds further complexity to the nexus of gender and humor in antiquity and beyond.

Females who deviate from pervasive norms of femininity and into the sphere of comedy have more or less always populated the pages of literary works in disparate societies and cultures and historical eras. They have invariably occupied a conspicuous place in popular culture. Beyond first and second wave feminist theoretical approaches, feminist theory proves to be a powerful tool for a stark sociocultural analysis at any given time and context. Against this backdrop, the present section explores how comic portrayals of women have been often interpreted as misogynist, and correspondingly how such gendered comic narratives can be interpreted within a feminist framework. The aim of contributions in the first section is to question modern stereotypical expectations by delving into the ambiguities of jokes in genres with a traditional reputation for misogyny. Contributions deal with classical Greek texts, Byzantine mimes, Ottoman poetry, and medieval fabliaux.

Reconsiderations of Misogynistic Representations

David Konstan’s essay, “Laughing at Ourselves: Gendered Humour in Classical Greece,” discusses Greeks and Roman misogyny. He argues that ancient Greek humor was not in principle hostile to women; rather, that the butt of the joke was often men themselves, and their comically absurd expectations of the other sex. His case studies of this self- deprecating style of gendered humor include: Homer’s Odyssey, Semonides’s satirical poem on women, Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen, an epigram by Marcus Argentarius (a contemporary of Ovid), and Plautus’s comedy, Casina (based on a Greek original by Diphilus).

Accordingly, Martha Bayless’s contribution discusses how Medieval comic genres establish a mini-Utopia, a world of abundance and enjoyment.⁵ Her study inquires into the rules and characteristics of that Utopia, asking whether women enjoy equal access. Deconstructing the misogynistic morals appended to comic tales, it becomes clear from an analysis of fabliaux and jest-book tales that the fundamental elements of the comic mode—appetite, satisfaction, pragmatism, cleverness, and bodiliness—are identified with women, who are in turn identified with the human condition, so that in fact medieval comic tales evince a radical and unexpected configuration of gender.

Lisa Perfetti’s chapter analyzes how female labor satirized women who might attempt to wield the power rightly belonging to men.⁶ A man doing housework signified a world turned upside down, and men must uphold their proper roles by ensuring that their wives stayed in their place. Perfetti focuses on the relationship between labor, gender, and humor in the figure of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the mostly lower- or middle-class heroines of late medieval drama. Although these texts in many ways can be seen to reinforce gendered divisions of labor, they also point to the economic and social value of women’s work and question the norms relating to the lower status accorded it, showing that women’s work, no matter how laughable, was to be taken seriously.

New Perspectives on Gender Subversion and Female Agency

Returning back into the Roman east, Anna Foka’s “Gender Subversion and the Early Christian East: Reconstructing the Byzantine Comic Mime” brings together scattered evidence about a largely improvisational, comic entertainment. Her case studies include earlier broad outlines of the late Roman mime, narratives about popular performers (Theodora, Pelagia), and the Christian polemic of the genre.⁷ She discusses how these reflect the frequent association of the comic mime with immense sexuality, gender ambiguity, and prostitution. She concludes that humor—and the consequent censorship of these performances—can be understood as both challenging and enforcing the new, early Christian social order.

Kristine Steenbergh’s “Gender and laughter: City women in the early modern theatre” audience discusses Ben Jonson’s comedy The Staple of News (1626) and how it features four female spectators among its characters: the gossips Mirth, Tattle, Censure, and Expectation.⁸ These four gossips take center stage during the interludes between the Acts, commenting on the comedy as well as the qualities of the actors. This chapter explores how the affective experience of the comedy by these four women relates to their position in the public sphere of the theater in early modern London, as well as how the role of these four spectators may have been experienced by actual women in the audience at the Blackfriars theater. If we view relation between gender and humor from the perspective of the female spectator, we may catch glimpses of possibilities for resisting the view of women in the playhouse as victims of patriarchal judgment; indeed, it may allow us to see female mirth as empowering.

Didem Havlioğlu’s contribution discusses the use of humor in early modern Islamicate world as socially pervasive. She specifically includes case studies such as the puppet theater and representations in miniature paintings. In particular, the consistent use of mockery while dealing with sexuality in both classical and folk literatures points out to the dual and paradoxical function of humor: allowing liberation and enforcing gender roles. The double function manifests itself through layers of meaning that were clear to the audience. In other words, humor as an artform is one of the legitimate ways to achieve ambiguity which was considered the highest form of artistic expression. As a case in point, the early modern Ottoman court poetry sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• General Introduction
• Part I   Laughter, Humor, and Misogyny— Reconsiderations and New Perspectives
• Part II   Humor, Laughter, and the Rhetoric of Manhood
• Notes on Contributors
• Index