Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers - Sabrina Fuchs PDF

PA L G R AV E
STUDIES IN
COMEDY
TRANSGRESSIVE
HUMOR OF AMERICAN
WOMEN WRITERS
EDITED BY SABRINA FUCHS ABRAMS
Palgrave Studies in Comedy
Series Editors
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
Sharon Lockyer
Brunel University
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Sabrina Fuchs Abrams
Editor
Transgressive Humor
of American Women
Writers
Editor
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams
School for Graduate Studies
SUNY Empire State College
New York, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Comedy

ISBN 978-3-319-56728-0 ISBN 978-3-319-56729-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56729-7
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To my daughters, and all the women who find a voice through laughter
Acknowledgements
This book arose out of a special session on “Transgressive Humor of

American Women Writers” that I organized at the Society for the Study
of American Women Writers in November, 2015. Thanks to Rita Bode,
the Conference Director, and Beth L. Lueck, the Associate Conference
Director for organizing the conference, and to the original presenters,
Regina Barreca and Diarmuid Hester, for contributing to such a lively
and provocative panel. I am grateful to the Commissioning Editor at
Palgrave Macmillan, Ryan Jenkins, for his interest in the project, and
to his successor, Literature Editor, Allie Bochicchio, and her Editorial
Assistant, Emily Janakiram, for their expert assistance in guiding me
through the publication process. I am also indebted to the editors for the
Palgrave Studies in Comedy series, Roger Sabin and Sharon Lockyer, for
their interest in pursuing the project and their astute advice in shaping
the collection. Thanks are also due to the production team at Springer
Nature: Sridevi Purushothaman, Sneha Sivakumar, and Rachel Taenzler.
I would like to acknowledge Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard
Archive, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, for their permis-
sion to reprint images for the essay on “Suffragist Humor in the Popular
Press.” I am grateful to the cartoonist Roz Chast and to Bloomsbury
Publishing for granting permission to reprint selected illustrations from
Roz Chast, 2014, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, and
Roz Chast, 2006, Theories of Everything. This collection would not have
been possible without the outstanding and varied contributions from
essayists Margaret D. Stetz, Amanda T. Smith, Sean Zwagerman, Mary
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Catherine Loving, Sonia Alvarez Wilson, Diarmuid Hester, Anne-Marie

Evans, Linda A. Morris, Joanne Gilbert, and Rebecca Krefting. Thank
you for your insights, your wit, and your inspiration in sharing the
empowerment of female laughter with your readers.
Thanks to Dr. Nathan Gonyea, Dean of the School for Graduate
Studies, State University of New York, Empire State College, for his sup-
port in enabling me to pursue this project and to Empire State College
for its institutional support through faculty development funding.
I am also grateful to the students in my Women and Humor graduate
seminar for modeling a community of funny, fierce women. My deep-
est debt belongs to my family: my father, Dan Fuchs, a writer and wit;
my mother, Cara, an elegant and incisive woman; my sister, Margot, a
strong, insightful woman; my husband, Dave, an independent thinker;
and our daughters, Natasha and Susannah, the next generation of smart,
sassy women.
Contents
No Joke: Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers 1

“To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly”: Carolyn Wells and

Literary Parody 17
Margaret D. Stetz
From Headlines to Punchlines: Suffragist Humor in the

Popular Press 37
Amanda T. Smith
The Scholarly Transgressions of Constance Rourke 59

Sean Zwagerman
Embattled Embodiment: The Sexual/Intellectual Politics of

Humor in Mary McCarthy’s Writing 81
Humor as Clap Back in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry 97

Mary Catherine Loving
ix
x Contents
Fidel and Gummy Bears?: Transgressive Humor in

Contemporary Latina Fiction 115
Sonia Alvarez Wilson
Humor, Gentrification, and the Conservation of Downtown

New York in Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life 135
Diarmuid Hester
Funny Women: Political Transgressions and

Celebrity Autobiography 155
Anne-Marie Evans
Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression 175

Linda A. Morris
“My Mom’s a Cunt”: New Bawds Ride the Fourth Wave 203
Joanne Gilbert
Dueling Discourses: The Female Comic’s Double Bind

in the New Media Age 231
Rebecca Krefting
Index 251
Editor and Contributors
About the Editor
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Associate Professor of English in the School

for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State
College, USA. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and
the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Literature of New York, in which
her essay on “Dorothy Parker’s New York Satire” appears. She is cur-
rently working on a book, The Politics of Humor: New York Women of
Wit, is founder and chair of the Mary McCarthy Society, and is Book
Review Editor of Studies in American Humor.
Contributors
Anne-Marie Evans is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and

Subject Director for English Literature at York St John University, York,
UK. Her main area of interest is early twentieth-century American
Literature, and she is particularly interested in how models of consum-
erism are interrogated in women’s writing. She has published articles
on the work of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Mae West and Anita
Loos, and has also edited two collections of essays on the contemporary
American novel.
xi
xii Editor and Contributors
Joanne Gilbert is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of

Communication and New Media Studies at Alma College, Michigan,
USA. She is the author of Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and
Cultural Critique. Her work on the discourse of marginalized voices has
appeared in Women’s Studies in Communication, Text and Performance
Quarterly, and in edited volumes such as Women and Comedy: History,
Theory, Practice and Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters,
Consuming Culture. Her performance background includes acting,
directing, and performing professional stand-up comedy.
Diarmuid Hester holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of
Sussex, Brighton, UK. His research focuses on twentieth and twenty-
first-century American culture, especially the art and writing of
Downtown New York. His work has appeared in places such as Studies
in the Literary Imagination, French Forum, Textual Practice, and The Los
Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at the University of Sussex's Center
for American Studies.
Rebecca Krefting is Associate Professor in the American Studies
Department at Skidmore College, New York , USA. Her research spe-
cializations are studies in humor and performance; identity and differ-
ence; media representations; visual and popular culture; and American
subcultures. She is author of All Joking Aside: American Humor and
Its Discontents and contributing author to several edited collections,
including Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy and Taking a Stand:
American Stand-up Comedians as Public Intellectuals.
Mary Catherine Loving was Associate Professor of English at New
Jersey City University, New Jersey, USA and is currently Adjunct
Professor of English at Paul Quinn College, Texas, USA. She has written
a book, Poets for Young Adults, and articles on Phillis Wheatley, Audre
Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua among others.
Linda A. Morris is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at
the University of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of Women’s
Humor in the Age of Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam
Whitcher; editor of American Women Humorists: Critical Essays; and
author of Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression.
She has published a number of articles about nineteenth- and twentieth-
century women’s humor and about Mark Twain.
Editor and Contributors xiii
Amanda T. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Southwestern

Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma, USA, and editor of Westview. She
has published on British and transatlantic humor at the turn of the nine-
teenth century.
Margaret D. Stetz is Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s
Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware,
USA. She is author of British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990: Not
Drowning, But Laughing; “The ‘Transatlantic’ and Late Nineteenth-
Century American Women’s Humor” in Studies in American Humor
(2015); and numerous articles on Victorian British women writers and
feminist theory.
Sonia Alvarez Wilson received her doctoral degree in post-1900
American Literature from University of North Carolina, Greensboro,
USA, where she wrote on exile, immigration, and migration in US
women’s writing. Her research and teaching interests include Latina/o
and multi-ethnic literatures. She currently teaches Latina/o literature
and culture and composition at Catawba College in Salisbury, North
Carolina, USA.
Sean Zwagerman is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser
University, British Columbia, Canada. He is co-editor of Women and
Comedy: History, Theory, Practice in which his essay, “A Cautionary Tale:
Ann Coulter and the Failure of Humor,” appears. He is author of Wit’s
End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy and is
interested in the intersections of rhetorical theory and speech-act theory,
the rhetoric of humor, and public anxiety about plagiarism and literacy.
List of Figures
From Headlines to Punchlines: Suffragist Humor in the Popular Press

Fig. 1 Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of
Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA 38
Fig. 2 Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of
Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA 47
Fig. 3 “Tune In, Turn On, Tune Out,” Full Frontal with
Samantha Bee, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. 2016 51
Fig. 4 Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University
of Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA 52
Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression
Fig. 1 Bad mom cards 179
Fig. 2 True confessions 181
Fig. 3 Police log from suburbia heights 184
Fig. 4 For their own good 187
Fig. 5 Things 188
Fig. 6 A blast from Chast 191
Fig. 7 Where’s mom 192
Fig. 8 Assisted living 193
Fig. 9 Something you should know 194
Fig. 10 Gallant and Goofus 196
Fig. 11 DNR 198
xv
No Joke: Transgressive
Humor of American Women Writers
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers is the first collec-

tion of essays to focus on the transgressive and transformative power of
American female humorists. It takes as its premise that there is a distinct
body of humor by women and American women writers in particular,
and that this humor tends to be subversive in nature. By transgressive,
I mean that these humorists challenge certain patriarchal norms and
assumptions regarding gender roles and identity and women’s place in
society. Drawing on various theories of humor, from the so-called supe-
riority theory to the incongruity theory to the relief theory, this book
looks at how humor, as an expression of sublimated aggressive and sex-
ual impulses, is often transgressive in nature, and thereby considered by
some to be “unfeminine.” The female humorists have had to mask their
aggressive and often politically and socially subversive messages through
the indirect form of laughter and the double-voiced use of irony in order
to have their voices heard. By looking at the unique body of American
women writers, one gains a particularly diverse and rich range of voices
representing different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and regional identities
from the nineteenth through to the twenty-first century. This collection
S. Fuchs Abrams (*) 
School for Graduate Studies, SUNY Empire State College,
New York, NY, USA
© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Fuchs Abrams (ed.), Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers,
Palgrave Studies in Comedy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56729-7_1
2 S. Fuchs Abrams
construes the term “writers” loosely to include a range of genres and

comedic forms including poetry, fiction, prose, autobiography, graphic
memoir, comedic performance, and new media.
Theories of humor have traditionally identified the aggressive, intel-
lectual, and sexual tendencies of humor to be largely “masculine” and
thereby inaccessible to women. From eighteenth-century conduct manu-
als to Victorian ideals of the “cult of true womanhood,” women were
bound by feminine ideals of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domestic-
ity.” In “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” Barbara Welter
describes how the image of ideal womanhood emphasized emotion over
reason and intuition over rationality and intellect.1 Women were seen to
uphold the spiritual and moral foundations of the domestic sphere while
men would become educated, go out in the world, and secure a financial
future. Sexuality for women was in the interest of procreation not pleas-
ure in perpetuation of the goals of motherhood and marriage. Virginia
Woolf among others warned that women must “kill the angel in the
house” in order to find themselves. Access to higher education (begin-
ning in the nineteenth century) and an increasing role in the work force
during World War I, as well as the advent of birth control, gave women
the financial, intellectual, and sexual freedom that defied traditional gen-
der roles.
This newfound freedom was seen as a threat to the existing patriarchal
power structure. Gilbert and Gubar have noted that this demonized the
figure of the independent woman, creating a split between the domes-
tic “Angel” and the liberated “Monster”.2 This defiant figure is identi-
fied with female empowerment, wit, and humor, which, according to
Hélène Cixous, is falsely identified by men as a threatening, monstrous
figure because they cannot see her for who she is. “You only have to look
at the Medusa straight to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beauti-
ful and she’s laughing.”3 According to Greek myth, Medusa’s power is
deadly because Perseus refuses to look at her directly; if he could really
see her, he would find her to be beautiful, not monstrous. Likewise, if
men (and women themselves) could see women in all their capacity and
not through the distorted male gaze, they would not appear threaten-
ing and monstrous but beautiful and enlightened. Laughter can be seen
as castrating and emasculating, a sign of intellectual and sexual potency.
Laughter can be seen as a physical release, like a kind of orgasm, espe-
cially when originated by woman, as opposed to the “faked” laughter of
a woman at a man’s joke of which she or some other subordinate person
NO JOKE: TRANSGRESSIVE HUMOR OF … 3
is the butt. But it can also be seen as an assertion of female sexuality,

knowledge, and, ultimately, power. The laughing Medusa, says feminist
theorist Susan Rubin Suleiman, is a “trope for women’s autonomous
subjectivity and for the necessary irreverence of women’s writing and
rewriting.”4 The relation of humor to knowledge (intellectual, physical,
emotional) and of knowledge to power is at the root of the female claim
to humor and the denial by some men of women’s humor.
The resistance to women’s humor is rooted in various psychoana-
lytic and philosophical theories of humor. Whether one considers the
more psychoanalytic theories of humor such as the “relief theory” of
Freud and the superiority/disparagement theory of Bergson, or one
turns to the more cognitive theory of incongruity, the traditional view
of women as not having aggressive, sexual, or intellectual tendencies
calls into question their ability to express or even understand humor.
For Freud, “tendentious jokes,” or jokes with purpose, are like dreams,
an outlet for hostile or obscene thoughts and feelings that are tempo-
rarily uninhibited and released through laughter. In keeping with the
superiority/disparagement theory, these jokes are often used by those in
positions of greater authority with the purpose of insulting or wound-
ing those in subordinate positions, thereby reinforcing the status quo
(note the many sexist and ethnic jokes used by Freud as illustrations).
Beyond this, Freud also notes the potential subversive value of jokes
in their capacity to invert the existing power structure by allowing for
expression of otherwise forbidden hostility by those in subordinate posi-
tions against those in authority: “tendentious jokes are especially favored
in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in
exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then repre-
sents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure.”5
Freud elaborates that through the masked form of humor, jokes can
thereby be directed against people in authority, hallowed institutions,
and the social conventions themselves that underlie such injustices: “the
object of the joke’s attack may equally well be institutions, people in
their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion,
views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can
only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed
by its façade,”6 (my italics). This notion of humor as a masked form of
social criticism or even rebellion by those in subordinate positions against
injustices perpetuated by existing power structures is at the root of much
of women’s humor. Henri Bergson sees laughter as a social corrective
4 S. Fuchs Abrams
used to mock eccentric or deviant behavior in the interest of preserving

the status quo in his reputed study, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of
the Comic.7 The superiority-disparagement theory often has an aggressive
component similar to that underlying the relief theory in that it often
involves the intention to humiliate as a kind of “social ragging” in the
interest of social conformity.
Unlike the relief theory and the superiority-disparagement theories
of humor, which emphasize the sexual/aggressive tendencies and the
social nature of humor, the “incongruity theory” of humor is less emo-
tional and more cognitively based on the perceptual and verbal aspect
of humor, in particular of irony and wit. Incongruity theory, which is
considered the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology
today, is based on the “assumption that human experience works with
learned patterns and expectations. When a thing violates our expectation
or mental pattern, it is incongruous.”8 The incongruity theory of humor,
with its emphasis on the verbal presentation and cognitive perception
of a double or ironic meaning (of a socially accepted and an underly-
ing aggressive and subversive meaning), is central to an understanding
of women’s humor. In “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine Showalter
identifies the dual text found in much of women’s writing: “The feminist
content of feminine art is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subver-
sive; one has to read it between the lines, in the missed possibilities of
the text.”9 Gilbert and Gubar further describe the necessity of women
and other marginalized groups to use a double-voiced or “palimpses-
tic” discourse in order to mask the subversive intent of their words; such
“works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessi-
ble (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning. Thus these authors
managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary author-
ity by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary
standards.”10
Such “double-voiced discourse,” says Judy Little, is common among
comic writing by women, which “deconstructs or exposes the ide-
ologies of authority and power, often by juxtaposing the male voice of
solemn formality and the female voice of buoyant hysteria.”11 This “car-
nivalization” of dialogue is traced by Little to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion
of “heteroglossia” or the “dialogic” voice found in “the Menippea”
(Menippean satire), which, according to Bakhtin, displays “dialogical
parody.”12 While Bakhtin sees the multivoiced discourse as expressing
the spirit of “carnival” as a temporary state of transgression or challenge
to the status quo, Little suggests that women use this carnivalesque spirit
to pose a more lasting challenge to the status quo through a masked,
double-voiced discourse. This double meaning can take different forms:
the voice of a narrator commenting on the actions of a character; the
voice of one character over another; or the splitting voice within a single
character commenting on his or her own thoughts or actions (think of
the speaker in Dorothy Parker’s “The Waltz” whose interior monologue
expresses a more authentic, ironic, subversive meaning over the polite,
socially prescribed external dialogue).13
The double voice of much of women’s writing and of women’s humor
in particular is part of the modernist project, which often uses irony to
pose a critical, subversive meaning beyond the literal or overt meaning.
In her study Irony’s Edge, Linda Hutcheon identifies what she terms the
“transideological politics” of irony, questioning whether the use of irony
is necessarily radical or subversive or if it can be seen as conservative in
the literal sense of reinforcing the status quo. According to Hutcheon,
“there is nothing intrinsically subversive about ironic skepticism or
about any such self-questioning, ‘internally dialogized’ mode; there is
no necessary relationship between irony and radical politics or even radi-
cal formal innovation. Irony has often been used to reinforce rather than
to question established attitudes, as the history of satire illustrates so
well.”14 The question about the subversive nature of ironic or parodic
language is part of a larger debate about the feminist nature of women’s
humor, or whether women’s use of a double-voiced language is subver-
sive or a means of channeling anger and thereby reinforcing the social
hierarchy. The “ambiguity” of irony is that it is at once elitist (in that to
say one thing and mean another implies a certain privileged or shared
knowledge) and subversive (in that it challenges the apparent meaning).
A further “problem” of irony is that in the postmodern sense, how can
one find a hidden or dual meaning if a primary or singular meaning and
language itself is considered unstable?15
The performative aspect of women’s language and gender identity
itself is the subject of feminist theorist Judith Butler’s notable work,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, in which she
writes, “within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance,
gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it
is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not
a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed … There
is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; the identity is
6 S. Fuchs Abrams
performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its

results.”16 The split between traditional gender roles of “masculine” and
“feminine” and the dictates or pressures of “compulsory heterosexuality”
are, in Butler’s view, socially constructed. The dichotomy between “mas-
culine” and “feminine” identity and concomitant “masculine” and “fem-
inine” language and behavior harks back to the outmoded, Victorian
ideal of “true womanhood,” which even among twentieth-century
women writers continued to create a double bind for outspoken women
of wit. This split creates a double bind for women, says Regina Barreca,
between the “Good Girl,” who doesn’t swear, tell jokes, or engage in
sexual or aggressive behavior, and the “Bad Girl,” who does all of the
above. “Learning to sound like a Good Girl, while half-concealing the
text of the Bad Girl,” says Barreca, “has been the subject of a great deal
of women’s humor.”17 As evidenced by reviews of women writers such as
Mary McCarthy, who was labeled as “our leading bitch intellectual” and
the “dark lady of American letters,” while at the same time being dis-
missed for being a “trivial lady’s writer,” having a sharp wit and a sharp
tongue to match was perceived as a threat to male writers and to the very
foundation of female identity. Through humor and the double-voiced
narrative of irony and satire, however, these women of wit were able to
find a voice.
The question remains whether there is a distinctive body of humor by
women, and if so, why has it been overlooked? Furthermore, is women’s
humor transgressive in nature and does it tend to subvert or reinforce
traditional gender roles? Nancy Walker identifies certain distinctive char-
acteristics of what she terms “women’s humorous writing” that empha-
size a more communal purpose and a deeper sense of empathy behind
women’s humor that comes from being in a more subordinate posi-
tion in society: “women tend to be story tellers rather than joke tellers.
Humor functions for them more as a means of communication than as a
means of self-presentation, a sharing of experience rather than a demon-
stration of cleverness … women’s humorous expression is almost never
purely comic or absurd … it carries with it not the lighthearted feeling
that is the privilege of the powerful, but instead a subtext of anguish
and frustration.”18 Conversely, traditional “male” humor would tend
toward jokes and put-downs directed against those of perceived lower
social standing as an expression of hostility and a demonstration of one’s
own cleverness and an affirmation of one’s social superiority. Emily Toth
elaborates on this sense of difference in women’s humor in identifying

what she terms the “humane humor rule” in much of women’s writing,
namely, “the belief that a writer should not make fun of what people
cannot change, such as social handicaps, race, sex, or physical appear-
ance … Rather, women humorists attack – or subvert – the deliberate
choices people make: hypocrisies, affectations, mindless following of
social expectations.”19 By contrast, “male” humor would be considered
as a more aggressive attack on those of perceived inferiority due to innate
differences such as race, gender, physical appearance, and so on.
Critics of women’s humor have noted numerous reasons why wom-
en’s humor has been overlooked and even resisted. The primary resist-
ance to women’s humor goes back to false assumptions about male/
female identity and the belief that “feminine” ideals of submission, pas-
sivity and spirituality were seen as incompatible with the “masculine”
expression of intellectual, sexual, and aggressive impulses associated with
humor.20 Women were not supposed to “get” jokes, and they were cer-
tainly not expected to tell jokes. Furthermore, humor was considered a
“public” or performative function, usually requiring an audience, while
women were traditionally constrained to the “private” spheres of home,
church, or other gatherings of women. Walker notes that most nine-
teenth-century women’s fiction tended to take place in such private or
domestic spheres and to revolve around domestic subject matter. Thus
if women were acknowledged to have a body of humor, it was dismissed
(by predominantly male critics) as revolving around “trivial” domestic
or “lady’s” matters. In “Why We Aren’t Laughing … Any More,” femi-
nist Naomi Weisstein notes that women are no longer submitting to the
nervous, acquiescent laughter when men tell jokes at their own expense;
hence they are accused of not having a sense of humor. “So when we
hear jokes against women and we are asked why we don’t laugh at
them,” Weisstein defiantly retorts, “the answer is easy, simple, and short.
Of course, we’re not laughing, you asshole. Nobody laughs at the sight
of their own blood.”21 Women have traditionally been put in the subor-
dinate role of laughing at others’ jokes (and not telling their own jokes)
out of a kind of economic necessity. “Whenever men control women’s
political, economic, and personal lives,” says Walker, “humor that makes
men the target must be shared in secret.”22 In The Unruly Woman:
Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe makes a similar point
that stand-up comediennes today still combat gender stereotypes of the
8 S. Fuchs Abrams
quiet, demure woman who doesn’t swear or tell dirty jokes and that
comediennes like Roseanne Barr and Kate Clinton are seen as defiant in
their overt feminist agenda.23
So, can humor in general, and humor by women in particular, be
seen as inherently subversive or conservative? In following the Freudian
relief theory, humor can be seen as an outlet for hostile impulses, thereby
turning anger into acceptance. Such is the view held by feminist activist
Betty Friedan, who faulted domestic humorists of the 1950s for using
humor as a means of sublimating their dissatisfaction with traditional
roles as wives and mothers. Domestic humorists like Phyllis McGinley,
Jean Kerr, and Shirley Jackson, says Friedan, cause women to “dissi-
pate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation.”24 Humor,
argues Joanne R. Gilbert in Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender,
and Cultural Critique, undermines its own revolutionary potential and
is “antithetical to action. First, it functions as an ‘anti-rhetoric,’ always
negating its own potential power by being just a joke. More impor-
tant, humor renders its audience passive. It disarms through amusing.
Laughter is not generally a galvanizing force toward political action.”25
As an aspect of the carnivalesque, humor allows for expression of sub-
versive or forbidden impulses but ultimately returns to the existing social
order. The paradox of humor, however, is that it allows for this dis-
ruptive impulse, this challenging of authority under the guise of social
acceptance. So it is, one might say, safely subversive. Other critics of
women’s humor, like Regina Barreca, find a more overt feminist agenda
behind women’s humor, seeing a split between masculine humor as
“deflective” allowing for the “oh-I-was-kidding disclaimer” and female
humor “not as a safety valve but as an inflammatory device, seeking,
ultimately, not to purge desire and frustration but to transform it into
action.”26
In Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire, Gloria
Kaufman makes a distinction between “female” humor and “feminist”
humor. “The persistent attitude that underlies feminist humor,” says
Kaufman, “is the attitude of social revolution—that is, we are ridiculing
a social system that can, that must be changed. Female humor may ridi-
cule a person or a system from an accepting point of view (‘that’s life’),
while the nonacceptance of oppression characterizes feminist humor and
satire.”27 Feminist humorists tend toward more overt political action
surrounding issues of, say, women’s suffrage in the 1910s to 1920s or
women’s rights in the 1970s. The “Heterodoxy” was one such group of
women activists in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1912 to 1940,

including feminist humorists like Alice Duer Miller, whose Are Women
People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (1915) parodies anti-suffrage
sentiment, or Florence Guy Seabury, whose The Delicatessen Husband
and Other Essays (1925) explores the conflicts of the “New Woman” in
her quest for equality, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose female uto-
pian novel, Herland (1915), is a feminist tract.
But not all women’s humor needs to have a “feminist” agenda in
order to be subversive. Nancy Walker makes the important qualifica-
tion that, while not expressing an overt, revolutionary call for social
change, so-called “female” humor can be quietly subversive by expos-
ing the limitations of gender stereotypes, thereby fostering not revolu-
tion, but reform. There are two types of women’s humor, says Walker:
“One, operating subversively within the cultural system of subjugation,
acknowledges a women’s subordination while protesting it”; the other
“explores the fundamental absurdity of that system and calls for differ-
ent ways of conceptualized gender definition.” So-called female humor
“is not merely ‘accepting’ the status quo but is calling attention to gen-
der inequality in ways designed to lead to its rejection.” Thus, argues,
Walker, many female humorists “have displayed a feminist consciousness
that approaches the problem indirectly.”28
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers addresses the vari-
ous ways in which American women writers use humor as a form of
transgression, from the more overt feminist humor of comediennes like
Amy Schumer and Whitney Cummings to the indirect use of irony and
satire by such writers as Roz Chast and Mary McCarthy. In each case,
the female humorist is challenging patriarchal assumptions regarding tra-
ditional gender roles in the interest of personal transformation or social
reform through the socially acceptable form of laughter. The collec-
tion begins with a historical perspective through an examination of the
neglected poetry of nineteenth-century humorist Carolyn Wells. In her
essay, “‘To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly’: Carolyn Wells and Literary
Parody,” Margaret D. Stetz focuses on Wells’ use of literary parody to
target her fellow writers, who were frequently male poets, and, espe-
cially, their representations of women. “That Wells did so with works by
canonical male authors ranging from Milton and Shelley to contempo-
raries such as Swinburne and Kipling attests to her fearlessness in trans-
gressing the boundaries for women, as she asserted her right to ‘amuse
intelligently and cleverly’ by poking fun.” Amanda T. Smith reframes
10 S. Fuchs Abrams
the turn of the nineteenth-century suffragist humor of Marietta Holley,

Alice Duer Miller, and Florence Guy Seabury in challenging the liter-
ary and political gender conventions of the day. Drawing on feminist
humor theories, she posits the cultural and literary impact of suffragist
humorists in the popular press, including such periodicals as Peterson’s
Magazine, The New York Tribune, Harper’s, and The Woman Voter. Sean
Zwagerman reexamines the “scholarly transgressions” in both content
and rhetorical style of reputed humor critic, Constance Rourke, whose
landmark study American Humor: A Study of the National Character
(1931) challenged the gendered assumptions of her male predecessors.
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams exposes the sexual/intellectual politics of humor
in Mary McCarthy’s writing through an examination of the embattled
embodiment of women of wit in such autobiographical fiction as The
Company She Keeps. McCarthy’s use of satire can be seen as an indirect
form of social protest against traditional gender expectations in modern
American society.
The next part of the collection looks at diverse perspectives of mar-
ginalized voices in American women’s humor, as well as more con-
temporary perspectives. Mary Catherine Loving restores the neglected
poetry of African American poet Lucille Sayles Clifton and her use
of humor, irony, and history to admonish the male species, to assert
the “transgressive black body,” and to celebrate a life against obsta-
cles. In examining the humor of contemporary Latina fiction writers
Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Cristina Garcia, Sonia Alvarez
Wilson “explores the various ways Latina authors challenge cultural
confines with wit, humor, and a pioneering spirit.” Through an explo-
ration of the writing of American authors of Caribbean and Mexican
origin, Alvarez Wilson “highlights their use of transgressive humor
to resist and challenge cultural norms and stereotypes.” In “Humor,
Gentrification, and the Conservation of Downtown New York in Lynne
Tillman’s No Lease on Life,” Diarmuid Hester subverts the represen-
tation of Lynne Tillman as a “transgressive writer” associated with
New York’s Lower East Side in the 1990s. He argues that she “seems
to extend the transgressive strategy … with jokes that are variously
crude, racist, anti-Semitic, innocuous, and inane.” Thus she “ironically
enshrines in prose a rapidly fading culture of Downtown New York in
its irreverent spirit which, by the late 1990s, had given way to waves of
gentrification.”
The remaining essays in the collection identify the transgressive nature of

contemporary American female humorists in various media, from comedic
performance to graphic memoir to new media. In “Funny Women: Political
Transgressions and Celebrity Autobiography,” Anne-Marie Evans “explores
the relationship between transgressive humor and popular feminism in the
autobiographical writings of four contemporary American comediennes,”
including Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling. She
argues that these autobiographies serve not only as a source of humor but
also “primarily as a vehicle for social criticism.” Linda Morris looks at the
movement “from whimsy to transgression” of New Yorker cartoonist Roz
Chast, focusing on her 2014 graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something
More Pleasant? which uses humor to cope with the illness and death of her
parents. In “‘My Mom’s a Cunt’: New Bawds Ride the Fourth Wave,”
Joanne Gilbert looks at the performance of marginality through the align-
ing of what she terms “bitch” and “bawd” personas with an intentional
emphasis on difference and the rhetorical form of female comediennes Amy
Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and Whitney Cummings. “The impact and impli-
cations of this particular comedic discourse,” says Gilbert, “are critical to
discussions of gender, power, and fourth wave feminism.” In the final essay,
“Dueling Discourses: The Female Comic’s Double Bind in the New Media
Age,” Rebecca Krefting challenges what she terms the “Content is King”
discourse that maintains that the internet levels the playing field in the com-
edy industry, and she shows how the “dueling discourses” of “virtual parity”
and gender bias “lock women comics into a double bind.” Using ethnogra-
phy, textual analysis of women’s comic performances, and feminist discourse
analyses of popular media, Krefting interrogates “the ways those discourses
circumscribe women’s professional success as comedians and the various ways
female comics are challenging such discursive lies.”
Given the scope and originality of the collection, including a num-
ber of new perspectives by leading scholars in the field of American
women’s humor, as well as current voices from emerging scholars,
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers is already antici-
pated to make an important contribution to the field of women’s
humor. Women’s humor has been the subject of critical inquiry since
the 1970s by such groundbreaking theorists as Nancy Walker (A Very
Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture, 1988), Emily
Toth (“A Laughter of Their Own: Women’s Humor in the United
States,” 1984), and Regina Barreca (They Used to Call Me Snow White
12 S. Fuchs Abrams
… But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor, 1991) and in the

popular press as seen in the notorious Vanity Fair article, “Why
Women Aren’t Funny,” by Christopher Hitchens (January, 2007) and
the rebuttal “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” by Alessandra Stanley
(April, 2008) as well as the more recent Atlantic article, “Plight of the
Funny Female,” by Olga Khazan (November, 2015).29 It is particu-
larly relevant today, with the recent surge of female comediennes in
the media and new media, including Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Mindy
Kaling, Whitney Cummings, Lena Dunham, Issa Rae, and Ali Wong.
While there are earlier, almost canonical collections of essays on wom-
en’s humor and humor in general,30 most of these date back to the
early 1990s or before and focus on what was then the emerging field
of women’s humor studies. More recent collections, like Women and
Comedy: History, Theory, Practice31 offer a more far-reaching overview
of the history and theory of women’s comedy internationally. This is
the first contemporary collection to focus on the particularly rich and
distinctive area of American women writers and the subversive nature
of much of their humor. With the resurgence of female humorists in the
media today, many of whom are overtly transgressive in their style and
content, there is a renewed interest in the history of American women’s
humor, as well as a reexamination of the subversive, sublimated, and at
times self-deprecatory nature of American female humorists. This book
will find an audience in a broad readership as well as in academic cir-
cles for those interested in women’s and gender studies, humor studies,
urban studies, American literature and cultural studies, and media stud-
ies. Humor is hot, and American women of wit are especially hot right
now. What are the assumptions behind such categories and why are they
so important? Read this book and find out!
Notes
1. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American
Quarterly vol. 18 no. 2 part 1 (Summer 1966): 151–174.
2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence: The
Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” in The Madwoman
in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination, 2nd edition (1979; rpt., New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2000), 79.
3. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and
Paula Cohen, Signs vol. 1 no. 1 (Summer 1976): 885.
4. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 168.
5. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans.
James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 105.
6. Ibid., 108–109.
7. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 1911,
reprinted in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, New York: Double
Day Anchor Books, 1956).
8. John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 10.
9. Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist
Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, No
Man’s Land, 138.
10. Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence,” 73.
11. Judy Little, “Humoring the Sentence: Women’s Dialogic Comedy” in
Women’s Comic Visions, ed. June Sochen (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1991), 20.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 106–137.
13. See Paula A. Treichler, “Verbal Subversion in Dorothy Parker: ‘Trapped
Like a Trap in a Trap’” in The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of
Dorothy Parker, ed. Rhonda S. Pettit (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2005).
14. Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.
15. Claire Colebrook, Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 2004),
18–19.
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990; repr., New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 34.
17. Regina Barreca, “They Used to Call Me Snow White … but I Drifted”:
Women’s Strategic Use of Humor (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 16.
18. Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xii.
19. Emily Toth, “Female Wits” Massachusetts Review (Winter 1987): 783.
20. June Sochen, ed. and intro., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1991), 11–12; Gail Finney, ed. and intro., Look Who’s
Laughing: Studies in Humor and Gender, Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge,
1994), 2.
14 S. Fuchs Abrams
21. Naomi Weisstein, “Why We Aren’t Laughing … Any More,” Ms. 2.2

(Nov. 1973) 49–51 rpt. in American Women Humorists, 134.
22. Walker, “Toward Solidarity: Women’s Humor and Group Identity” in
Women’s Comic Visions, edited by June Sochen (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1991), 66.
23. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
24. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1963) qtd. in Walker “Toward Solidarity,” 58.
25. Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural
Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 172.
26. Regina Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor
in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 18.
27. Gloria Kaufman, introduction to Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist
Humor and Satire, ed. Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely
(Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1980), 13.
28. Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 145–147.
Culture; Emily Toth, “A Laughter of Their Own: Women’s Humor in
the United States,” in Critical Essays on American Humor, ed. William
Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner (Boston, G.K. Hall, 1984); Regina
Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White … But I Drifted: Women’s
Strategic Use of Humor; Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t
Funny” Vanity Fair, January, 2007; Alessandra Stanley, “Who Says
Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair, April, 2008; Olga Khazan, “Plight
of the Funny Female,” Atlantic, November, 2015.
30. Linda Morris ed., American Women Humorists: Critical Essays (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994); Sarah Blacher Cohen ed., Comic Relief: Humor
in Contemporary American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1978); June Sochen ed., Women’s Comic Visions, 1991; Regina Barreca,
Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (New York: Routledge,
1988); Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British
Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994).
31. Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon,
Sean Zwagerman, eds., Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice
(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014).
Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 106–137.
Barreca, Regina. “They Used to Call Me Snow White … but I Drifted”: Women’s
Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
———, ed. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York:
Routledge, 1988.
———, ed. Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British
Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 1911, 61–190.
Reprinted in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher. Garden City, New York: Double Day
Anchor Books, 1956.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990.
Reprint, New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen. Signs vol. 1 no. 1, Summer 1976: 885.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American
Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Dickinson, Peter, Anne Higgins, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon,
and Sean Zwagerman, eds. Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice.
Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.
Finney, Gail, ed. Look Who’s Laughing: Studies in Humor and Gender, Vol. 1.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963.
Qtd. in Walker “Toward Solidarity,” 58.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James
Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960.
Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural
Critique. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman
Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
———. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of
Authorship.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edition (1979). New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Vanity Fair, January, 2007.
Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and
New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kaufman, Gloria and Mary Kay Blakely, eds. Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist
Humor and Satire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Khazan, Olga. “Plight of the Funny Female.” Atlantic, November, 2015.
Little, Judy. “Humoring the Sentence: Women’s Dialogic Comedy” in Women’s
Comic Visions, ed. June Sochen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Morris, Linda A., ed. American Women Humorists: Critical Essays. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1994.
16 S. Fuchs Abrams
Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995.
Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985. Qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land.
Sochen, June. ed. Women’s Comic Visions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1991.
Stanley, Allesandra. “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair, April, 2008.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Toth, Emily. “Female Wits.” Massachusetts Review. (Winter 1987): 783.
———. “A Laughter of Their Own: Women’s Humor in the United States,” in
Critical Essays on American Humor, ed. William Bedford Clark and W. Craig
Turner. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1984.
Treichler, Paula A. “Verbal Subversion in Dorothy Parker: ‘Trapped Like a
Trap in a Trap’” in The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker,
ed. Rhonda S. Pettit, 166–186. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2005:.
Walker, Nancy. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
———. “Toward Solidarity: Women’s Humor and Group Identity” in Women’s
Comic Visions, ed. June Sochen, 57–84.
Weisstein, Naomi. “Why We Aren’t Laughing … Any More.” Ms. 2.2 (Nov.
1973): 49–51. Reprinted in American Women Humorists, ed. Linda A.
Morris.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American
Quarterly (Summer 1966): 151–167.
Author Biography
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Associate Professor of English in the School for
Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State College,
USA. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar
Intellectual and editor of Literature of New York, in which her essay on “Dorothy
Parker’s New York Satire” appears. She is currently working on a book, The
Politics of Humor: New York Women of Wit, is founder and chair of the Mary
McCarthy Society, and is Book Review Editor of Studies in American Humor.
“To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly”:
Carolyn Wells and Literary Parody
Margaret D. Stetz
In the Introduction to his 1984 volume, The Faber Book of Parodies,

the British novelist and anthologist Simon Brett began by paying trib-
ute to an American predecessor of eighty years earlier, saying, “In taking
entertainment value as my guiding principle, I am following that excel-
lent anthologist, Carolyn Wells, who wrote in 1904: ‘The main intent
of the vast majority of parodies is simply to amuse; but to amuse intel-
ligently and cleverly.’”1 This acknowledgment of Wells not only as a col-
lector of humor, but also as a theorist of it, was as welcome as it was
rare. She had indeed been a groundbreaking thinker on the subject of
comedy, who analyzed the functions and purposes of parody in her own
Introduction to A Parody Anthology, issued by Scribner’s in 1904, while
also defending it as “a true and legitimate branch of art.”2 What Brett
chose to ignore, however, was that Wells had been more than a mere
assembler and critic of the works of others—that she had also been a
widely published humorist, adept at many genres including parody, and
that the anthology Brett cited had contained numerous examples of her
own efforts.
M.D. Stetz (*) 
University of Delaware, Newark, USA

18 M.D. Stetz
By producing parodies, Wells broke with turn-of-the-century literary

expectations around the subject of gender. Her own “guiding principle,”
which was indeed to “amuse intelligently and cleverly,” flew squarely
in the face of assumptions about women’s writing as being chiefly sen-
timental—perhaps as sometimes capable of a superficial cleverness, but
never as intelligent per se. Her literary parodies violated the norms of
gender hierarchies, for they almost invariably imitated and exaggerated
the flaws of high-status male authors and thus implicitly laid claim to a
woman’s right to mock her masculine peers and antecedents. Moreover,
many of these parodies in verse form were directed at the exemplars of
British and European artistic movements held up by American critics as
the ne plus ultra in sophistication. To recover Wells as a parodist now,
therefore, is to reconsider the canon of late nineteenth- and early twenti-
eth-century American women’s comic writing and to see it as participat-
ing self-consciously not only in social debates over the rearrangement of
gender roles, but in cultural debates over the formation of taste.
Despite the scholarly interest in earlier American women’s comic writ-
ing that began in the 1980s and that brought to light the significance
of nineteenth-century pioneers such as Frances Whitcher (1811–1852)
and Marietta Holley (1836–1926), Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) remains
a neglected and understudied figure. Today, it is easier to name the many
places where her name ought to appear, but does not, than to locate
discussions of her comic work in general or of her parodies in particu-
lar. Although she is, for instance, represented with an entry in Steven
H. Gale’s Encyclopedia of American Humorists (1988), she is nonethe-
less absent from Kenneth Baker’s Unauthorized Versions: Poems and
Their Parodies (1990) and from John Gross’s 1995 The Oxford Book of
Comic Verse (which includes work by her American male contemporaries
and associates, such as Gelett Burgess), as well as from Gross’s later The
Oxford Book of Parodies (2010), where other Americans are again pre-
sent as both subjects and authors of parody. Perhaps more surprising is
her omission from Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor (1993), with
its sections devoted specifically to “The Sex Problem” and to “Parody,
Burlesque, Criticism, and Pain”—either of which might have offered an
appropriate opportunity to reproduce her verse. Among the few modern
collections to acknowledge her achievements at all is William Zaranka’s
The Brand-X Anthology of Poetry: A Parody Anthology (1981), which
uses two brief examples of her parodies—one of John Dryden and one of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.3
“TO AMUSE INTELLIGENTLY AND CLEVERLY”: CAROLYN WELLS … 19
The unkindest cut, however, comes from a latter-day feminist scholar

of humor studies, Regina Barreca. In her important 1996 anthology, The
Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, Barreca allows space for only one of
Wells’s poems, albeit a particularly biting one that exposes to ridicule
long-accepted traditions in both gender and genre. “To a Milkmaid,”
Wells’s parody of pastoral conventions in verse, sends up lyrics that rhap-
sodize condescendingly over the “inevitable” figure of the rural girl of
“eighteen summers,” with her “impossible milkpail” and “improbable
bodice,” who is always on “the wrong side of the cow sitting.” The
poem ends as it begins, with the sort of gaseous apostrophizing that usu-
ally comes from (male) pastoral poets:
I hail thee!
I hail thy vernality, and I rejoice in thy hackneyed ubiquitousness.
I hail the superiority of thy inferiorness, and
I lay at thy feet this garland of gratuitous
Hails!4
Wells’s poem illustrates perfectly Barreca’s intention, as expressed in

her “Introduction,” to demonstrate that “women’s humor often satirizes
the social forces designed to keep women in ‘their places,’ a phrase that
has become synonymous with keeping women quietly bound by cultural
stereotypes,”5 even as the parody suggests why women readers and writ-
ers, in particular, should be impatient with the persistence of those ste-
reotypes in literature and should wish to sweep them away by means of
derisive laughter. It is, therefore, both disappointing and somewhat baf-
fling to find Wells otherwise shut out of The Penguin Book of Women’s
Humor. At the same time, the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–
1973), a writer by no means famous for producing comedy, is repre-
sented by ten selections from various works. Indeed, samples of Bowen’s
prose are allotted fully twenty pages in Barreca’s anthology, while no fur-
ther poem by Wells appears—although, unlike Wells’s long-out-of-print
books of comic verse (including the 1900 volume Idle Idyls, from which
“To a Milkmaid” was drawn), novels by Bowen were readily available in
the 1990s.
In many ways, the struggle for representation that Carolyn Wells’s
works faced in the late twentieth century—a time when both comedy in
20 M.D. Stetz
general and feminist comedy in particular had become newly respectable

as scholarly subjects and as the focus of editorial projects—mirrored the
difficulties that their author had confronted originally, at the start of her
career in the 1890s. She would quite rightly boast, in her memoir The
Rest of My Life (1937), of both her prolific output and astonishing com-
mercial success: in 1902, as she reports, “I published eight books,” and
from “that time on my minimum output has been three or four books a
year,” so that “altogether I have written one hundred and seventy books.
That is, so far.”6 These titles would include numerous works for chil-
dren, along with dozens of detective novels for adults. Her introduction
to professional authorship, however, came through poetry—primarily
comic verse—and through the expanding world of magazines at the end
of the nineteenth century. She was one among many women who “rec-
ognized that the magazine market offered a flexible form of publishing,
in which ideas could be refuted, debated, and modified,”7 as well as, in
her case, played with humorously. Nonetheless, although the wide circu-
lation of “commentaries on the wisdom (or folly) of women in journal-
ism bore witness to their growing public presence,”8 Wells’s entry into
the public sphere was not made easy by the gatekeepers who controlled
access to it.
Wells’s The Rest of My Life records the persistence that it required to
break into one of the most influential literary environments of the fin
de siècle: the exclusive circles around “little” periodicals. These month-
lies and quarterlies were not, as Kirsten MacLeod explains in American
Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in Print (2013), associated
with mass consumerism, but were instead targeted at an elite US coterie
that wished to affiliate itself with the British and European avant-garde.
Little magazines were literally just that—“small in format and number
of pages,” as well as in circulation; they rarely contained advertising, dis-
tinguished themselves by being “attractively designed, in an Arts and
Crafts or Aesthetic style,” were printed on “bamboo paper, even wall-
paper,” and “featured woodcuts, wood engravings, and poster-style art,
eschewing the new cheap half-tone illustrations that dominated the pop-
ular periodicals”; and in content they favored the sort of “Aestheticism,
Decadence, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau” found in British models such
as the Bodley Head’s quarterly, the Yellow Book (1894–1897).9
Among the most attention-getting of these little magazines was the
San Francisco-based Lark, founded by Gelett Burgess (1866–1951) in
1895. Each monthly issue was described as having been created by les
jeunes, but the group responsible for its literary contents was composed
of men, rather than of young people in general, who had “hatched their
plans … at their retreat at Camp Ha-Ha.”10 Unlike similar periodi-
cals, which proclaimed allegiance to a serious artistic mission, the Lark
declared itself to be precisely what its title suggested: a mere jeu d’esprit
and a fanciful indulgence in wit for wit’s sake. As both editor and author,
Burgess made his aesthetic and his intentions clear with the inclusion, in
the inaugural number of May 1895, of his nonsense poem, “The Purple
Cow” (“I never saw a purple cow,/ I never hope to see one”), which
proved an unexpected source of lasting popularity for him and of notori-
ety for the Lark.
To this idiosyncratic publication—which was, in the words of David
Weir, meant “mainly as a means of pulling off literary … pranks”11—
Carolyn Wells found herself irresistibly drawn. She began a campaign of
ardent letter-writing, determined to persuade Gelett Burgess to accept
some of her own humorous verse, even after her first attempt met with
an unequivocally negative response. The policy of his magazine, as he
informed her, was non-negotiable: “‘Only the joy of life,’ he wrote me;
‘no advertisements, no satire, no criticism; no timeliness and no women
contributors.’”12 But Wells, who was “in the first flush of glee at having
landed contributions in Life, Puck, and Judge”—all three of them main-
stream magazines dedicated to satire and to so-called light entertain-
ments, and with circulations much larger than that of the Lark—would
not be turned away; Burgess’s unapologetic misogyny merely spurred her
own stubborn persistence: “This should have been a blow, but to me,
at that stage of the game, such a blow was as stimulating as the tickle of
the whiplash to the eager horse” and, therefore, her correspondence with
the editor of the Lark “continued to grow in volume and frequency”
until she had achieved her objective of proving herself to him—or, at
least, of wearing him down.13 Burgess eventually welcomed her as one of
“les jeunes” and bestowed upon her the nickname “HRH, the Princess
Perilla,” writing whimsically about this imaginary character in the Lark.
He also published some of Wells’s humorous verse under her real name,
thus announcing his own change of policy and of heart.
Among her works for the Lark was “From Vivette’s ‘Milkmaid,’”
another comic assault upon pastoral forms and upon the figure, in par-
ticular, of the naïve and often-celebrated milkmaid, which to Wells, in
her autodidactic study of the lyric tradition, proved a perpetual irritant.
At the same time, Wells’s references in the poem to a purple cow signaled
22 M.D. Stetz
that she had penetrated the elite masculine coterie around Burgess,
where to be allowed to play imaginatively with his uniquely colored
creation (one already both famous and infamous) constituted a badge
of membership. Thus, her poem, which appeared in the October 1896
issue of the magazine, was both a literary parody, written in Chaucerian
style, and a confirmation of Wells’s surprising status as a woman insider
at the Lark. In the mid-1890s, she was still based geographically in her
hometown of Rahway, New Jersey, and moreover, she continued to earn
her living in the very bourgeois occupation of librarian at the local pub-
lic library; yet she had been able to convince the bohemian male San
Franciscans who congregated around Gelett Burgess that she belonged
among them, sending up poetic clichés and doing so while writing in
pseudo-Middle English:
A Mayde ther was, semely and meke enow,

She sate a-milken of a purpil Cowe:
Rosy hire Cheke as in the Month of Maye
And sikerly her merry Songe was gay
As of the Larke uprist, washen in Dewe:
Like Shene of Sterres sperkled hire Eyen two.14
Later in the poem, she extended the inside joke about the “Larke” (as
both a bird and, of course, a magazine) by having a knight “of Corage
trewe” address the milkmaid and declare, “Parde I vowe/Erewhiles
I never sawe a purpil Cowe!”—thus toying even more directly with
Burgess’s well-known contribution to his periodical’s first number.15 Her
irreverent imitation of medieval language was, moreover, also a subtle hit
at the worship of the Middle Ages that had spread, by way of the British
socialist poet and designer William Morris (1834–1896), throughout the
American versions of the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements and
had inspired the residents of Camp Ha-Ha.
A multiple layering of targets—with laughter, in this case, at the
expense of pastoral conventions, as well as at the cultural sacred cows
(whether purple or not) of the British Aesthetes, which had been taken
up by artistic circles in the USA—would prove a hallmark of Wells’s
practice in general as a parodist. In the Introduction to her A Parody
Anthology (1904), she would later attempt to draw a clear distinction

between parody and such corrective forms of humor-writing as satire:
“The defenders of parody have sometimes endeavored to prove that it
has an instructive value, and that it has acted as a reforming influence
against mannerisms and other glaring defects.” She went on to dismiss
what she called “this ethical air-castle,” which is “shattered by facts,
for what established writer ever changed his characteristic effects as a
result of the parodies upon his works[?]”16 All that parody could expect
to accomplish, she concluded, was the amusement of the reader, but
such an “aim is quite high enough, and is in no way strengthened or
improved by the bolstering up qualities of avowed virtuous influences.”17
When it came, nonetheless, to writing parodies of her own, Wells some-
times chose to break her own rules about the genre and to combine
amusement with a critical commentary directed at larger cultural phe-
nomena, beyond the immediate style or diction of the given text that
she was imitating for comic effect. To do so moved her work across the
boundaries of parody and into the equally well-guarded masculine pre-
serve of literary satire.
One remarkably pointed example of this layering of targets occurred
in her 1900 collection, Idle Idyls, which also featured illustrations by
her British-born friend and fellow humorist, Oliver Herford, whose
wit in both visual and verbal comic forms Wells dubbed “exquisite.”18
However, Herford did not supply an image to accompany her poem
“The Vampire of the Hour,” perhaps because such a drawing was
unnecessary. The poem’s title was followed by a parenthetical phrase
“(WITH APOLOGIES TO MR. KIPLING AND MR. BURNE-
JONES),”19 indicating the two works referenced: the 1897 poem “The
Vampire” by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) and the identically titled
1897 painting by Philip Burne-Jones (1861–1926)—son of the British
Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)—that was
reputed to have inspired Kipling to compose his work. Kipling’s unre-
lievedly misogynistic poem decried the devotion of a male “fool” to a
cruel and heartless woman, whom the speaker reduced scornfully to “a
rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”20 Burne-Jones’s painting, which cre-
ated a minor sensation when it was first exhibited at the New Gallery in
London, depicted a woman—allegedly based on the painter’s lover, the
West End theatrical star Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865–1940)—crouched
in a predatory attitude over the prostrate body of an unconscious man. It
24 M.D. Stetz
was reproduced widely on both sides of the Atlantic; even in 1900, Wells
and Herford could take for granted the ability of the readers of Idle Idyls
to summon it up from memory.
When parodying Kipling’s popular attack on Woman as eternally
indifferent to masculine suffering and as unworthy of men’s self-sacrifi-
cial acts, Carolyn Wells began by flipping the gender of the object under
scrutiny. No longer did the “hank of hair” represent a female victimizer,
but instead a male celebrity—one allegedly undeserving of the worship
that he received from other men, as well as from women, who consti-
tuted his adoring public. But the man in question was no generic figure,
as Kipling’s Vampire had been; instead, he bore the name of an actual
person, with a very specific identity and transatlantic literary fame:
A FOOL there was, and he paid his fare

(Even as you and I)
To see Le Gallienne’s hank of hair
(We said he was only a fake affair),
But the fool he called him a genius rare,
(Even as you and I!)21
The “Le Gallienne” in question here was none other than Richard Le
Gallienne (1866–1947), the writer from Liverpool who, in emulation of
his hero Oscar Wilde, had forged his reputation in the early 1890s as
much through the self-conscious wearing of Aesthetic dress as through
his dazzling criticism, prose fiction, and poetry. Most of all, he was
known, thanks to countless photographs that circulated in the popular
press on both sides of the Atlantic, for his delicate beauty, with a pale
face encircled by clouds of wavy, dark hair. As Wilde had done in 1882
when embarking on an American lecture tour, Le Gallienne crossed
the ocean repeatedly to earn money by delivering public talks, begin-
ning with a series in the spring of 1895 in New York City (where it is
likely that Carolyn Wells, who traveled frequently from her home in New
Jersey to attend events there, heard him speak).
Wells’s aim in “The Vampire of the Hour” was only incidentally to
accomplish what she would later describe as the usual objective of the
writer of parody: to imitate the “manner and matter” of the original work
and its author by functioning as “a master of style, a student of language
… possessed of a power of mimicry with an instant appreciation of

opportunities” and, in doing so, to entertain the reader.22 While it was
true that, on one level, she was out to make fun both of Rudyard Kipling’s
stylistic quirks and of his angry dismissal of women as ungrateful, unfeel-
ing wretches, she also had a broader target than Kipling’s poem in her
sights. The “American critical response” to British Aestheticism, which
had, according to Jonathan Freedman “changed from suspicion to wary
respect” in the early 1890s,23 was in the process of shifting once again by
the end of the decade, especially in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s conviction
on the charge of gross indecency with men. As a figure not only affili-
ated with Wildean literary ideals, but as one positioned at the epicenter of
the Yellow Book and its circle of Decadent creators, Richard Le Gallienne
served for Carolyn Wells as the embodiment of all that was specious,
fraudulent, and corrupt about the contemporary literary scene. Her attack
on Le Gallienne’s popularity with American audiences continued:
Oh, the fads we make, and the freaks we take,

And the glories we all believe
Belong to the jaundiced degenerate,
Or the mystical mattoid at any rate,
With his handkerchief up his sleeve.
A critic there was, and he had his whack

(Even as you and I!)
He wrote of a wondrous symposiac,
(And it wasn’t the least like Le Gallienne’s clack),
But a critic must follow the beaten track,
(Even as you and I!)

Oh, the lies we write and the lies we cite
And the excellent things we say
About whatever may happen to be
The idol to which we bend the knee,
The fetish of the day.24
26 M.D. Stetz
That the supposedly “degenerate” Le Gallienne was described as

“jaundiced” had little to do with any desire on Wells’s part to echo
Kipling’s “The Vampire”; rather, it reflected her confidence that the
audience would catch the reference to yellowness and understand it to be
an allusion to the Yellow Book, which here stood for an absence of sound-
ness, sanity, or true literary value. Coming just three years after her asso-
ciation with the bohemian men of the Lark, “The Vampire of the Hour”
would have seemed, in 1900, a surprisingly conservative statement about
the Aesthetic and Decadent “fetish of the day.” It acted, therefore, as a
declaration of her literary independence, even from her friends at Camp
Ha-Ha. Simultaneously, it displayed her increasing assurance as a writer
of parodies, who felt able to overstep the ordinary boundaries of the
genre and, at least occasionally, to use it as a vehicle for broader kinds
of criticism, taking on what she saw as contemporary cultural fads. Wells
ended her poem with a scathing assessment of Le Gallienne’s public per-
formance and, even more, of the audiences who had flocked to hear it
(of which, by invoking Kipling’s inclusive “you and I,” she numbered
herself an equally guilty member):
And it isn’t the vice and it isn’t the price

That causes our gloom profound;
It’s coming to know that we all are fools,
And we’re just as foolish as other fools
Who follow the treadmill round.25
With “The Vampire of the Hour,” Wells successfully redirected the

unjust attack by Kipling (and by Philip Burne-Jones) upon women as
femmes fatales, turning it instead into what she saw as a deserved critique
of American gullibility, especially when it came to the reception of new
British movements in literature and art.
At the end of the nineteenth century, as Alice Sheppard has noted,
“Masculine aspects of humor … were deemed inappropriate for the
world of women, which was properly oriented toward social etiquette,
true womanhood, and sentimentality.”26 Carolyn Wells, however, had
no intention of letting herself be boxed in by such strictures. When
she tried her hand at parody, she took as her models the most cel-
ebrated male practitioners, especially Bayard Taylor (1825–1878). His
major accomplishment in humor had come in the early 1870s, with a

series called “Diversions of the Echo Club” that he published first in the
Atlantic Monthly and then as a separate volume. In her Introduction to
A Parody Anthology, Wells openly paid homage to Taylor, calling his par-
odies “among the best”: “Aside from their cleverness they are marked
by good taste, fairness, justice, and a true poetic instinct.”27 She also
selected thirteen examples of his art to reprint in her 1904 collection.
After the turn of the twentieth century, Wells began a different
sort of tribute to Taylor, as she inaugurated her own series of parodies
organized around a given premise, written in the voices of an array of
living and dead poets, and titled variously “Diversions of the Re-Echo
Club” or just “The Re-Echo Club,” for journals ranging from Harper’s
Monthly Magazine, to the Lotus Magazine, to the Bookman. She then
assembled a number of these in book form as The Re-Echo Club, a vol-
ume published by Franklin Bigelow in 1913. This, however, did not
end her attempts to emulate—or, in fact, to surpass—Bayard Taylor. In
1916, for the Bookman, she continued to issue further efforts inspired
by Taylor, but tied to such contemporary works as the British music
hall song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” (which had become a favorite
of soldiers in the First World War), with comic versions of the lyrics as
Swinburne, Stevenson, Browning, Rossetti, Wilde, Tennyson, Kipling,
Poe, and others might have written them.28 Here, the source of humor
was fairly straightforward and monodirectional, focused on the poets
themselves and achieved through burlesque—that is, through the appli-
cation of high-flown language, based on exaggeration of each writer’s
own recognizable stylistic peculiarities, to a low-status object. Thus,
Robert Browning’s 1855 poem “Fra Lippo Lippi,” with its characteristic
exclamations, colloquialisms, linguistic anachronisms, broken lines, and
rhetorical questions, became in the hands of Carolyn Wells a dramatic
monologue on the location of Tipperary and opened with the following:
Is Tipperary far? Egregious sir!

That same justificative query might
Be put to twenty clericates! Gadzooks!
Far! far! Ods bodikins! ‘Tis far and far—
A long, long way,—add a long way to
that,—
28 M.D. Stetz
And all too short the scanty span you

splash!29
If Wells’s irreverent laughter at the expense of individual poems from

the canon constituted a form of transgression, so too did her handling
of the borrowed frame of each “Re-Echo Club” installment. In Bayard
Taylor’s original series from the 1870s, the members of the all-male
Echo Club were a fictional set of types—called pseudonymously “The
Ancient,” “The Gannet,” and so on—who gathered to exchange opin-
ions about literature and to offer their critiques of various writers by cre-
ating parodies of their styles. But Carolyn Wells populated her “Re-Echo
Club” instead with representations of the writers themselves, whom she
brought back from the dead and subjected to the further indignity of
diminutives of their names, as well as to dialogue that made them sound,
in some cases, vain and pompous and in others none too swift of mind.
Thus, her description of a meeting of the “Club” for the July 1917 issue
of Harper’s Monthly Magazine began,
The Re-Echo Club, at its semi-periodical meeting, mulled ale and the New
Poetry.
‘What is it, anyway?’ asked Alf Tennyson, mildly curious.
‘It says it aims at the concrete intensitivity of life,’ explained Bob

Browning, ‘which is, of course, what I’ve always done. But you can tell it
always, by the fact that it won’t use’neath, o’er, or forsooth. It says our stuff
is “over-appareled,” our apples too fruity.’
‘Ah, I see,’ mused Dan Rossetti; ‘we must take off our fatty degen-
eration and sit in our veins, eh?’
‘Yes, that’s it. And the subjects must be concrete—that’s the idea,
concrete. No more sunset and evening star of Freedom on a mountain
height, but stick to tomato-cans or a bent hairpin or a little dog who
doesn’t feel very well. And keep him concrete.’
‘Sounds easy enough,’ observed Ed Poe, ‘once you get the trick of
it. Bet I could do it. I’m the man who put the Poe in Poetry.’30
As should be plain from this extract, however, the pantheon of nine-

teenth-century poets was only one of the targets of Wells’s mockery;
“Bob” Browning and “Ed” Poe were, if anything, stalking horses for
her more immediate concern—that is, the contemporary rage for the so-
called “New Poetry” being issued by British and American modernists.
Once again, multidirectional parody offered Wells a medium through
which to register her disapproval of literary and cultural trends that
offended her aesthetic sensibility, while enabling her to make her own
contrarian statements about what did and did not deserve the title of
“Art.” This was clear, for instance, in the set of verses from the 1917
“The Re-Echo Club” attributed to “Harry Longfellow,” which was at
once a gentle poke at Longfellow’s 1838 “A Psalm of Life” (“Tell me
not in mournful numbers …”) and an unsparing send-up of Imagism, as
practiced by modernists such as Ezra Pound, for its rejection of formal
discipline and embrace of ugly or vulgar subject matter:
Tell me not in measured numbers

That this life is but a dream;
’Tis the Cosmic Urge
And surge,
And spirit splurge,
Vitally vibrant with symbolic art,
Freed from meticulous bonds of basic rigor,
A thaumaturgic intercalation
Expressed—ha—in elemental rhythms.
A stunning, swooning measure,
Like a cat eating carrots,
Carrots edged with fur!
Ha!
Isn’t it gay?
Down go the carrots
Zigzagging down the cat’s throat!
Flapping and swooping down the cat’s throat!
Ah, this is life!
30 M.D. Stetz
Whee—ee!
Bumpti—ling—bing!
Bang!
Boo!31
With her “The Styx River Anthology” the previous year for the
Bookman’s September 1916 number, Wells had engaged in a related
form of parodic mash-up, in order to protest another development of
the “New Poetry.” In this case, her literary bête noire was the deliber-
ate eschewal of beauty in favor of an idiom based on unadorned, con-
versational speech patterns and contemporary American slang, which she
found so unsatisfying in works such as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River
Anthology (1915). For the voices of the dead townsfolk who, in Masters’s
celebrated volume, narrate the outlines of their mundane lives and fates,
Wells substituted a group of beyond-the-grave monologues by literary
characters from the past—Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Poe’s Annabel Lee,
the suicidal victim of Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and so on.
In each case, the source of humor lay not in any faults belonging to the
earlier works themselves, but in the act of translating these classics into a
modern vernacular that Wells considered antipathetic to dignity, mystery,
or emotion. Thus, the previously silent subject of William Wordsworth’s
“Lucy” poems, for instance, began her very unlyrical ballad by declaim-
ing, flatly,
Yes, I am in my grave,
And you bet it makes a difference to
him!
For we were to be married,—at least, I
think we were,
And he’d made me promise to deed him
the house.
But I had to go and get appendicitis,
And they took me to the hospital.32
Wells’s most ambitious attempt, however, to weigh in through literary

parody on avant-garde cultural developments had appeared three years
earlier. Her 1913 collection, The Re-Echo Club, included an unusually
lengthy installment devoted to the subject of Cubism, in which writ-
ers from Ben Jonson to Shelley offered their own brand of meditations
on this new mode of visual art. The immediate occasion for this comic
skewering was, of course, the International Exhibition of Modern Art,
held in February through March 2013 at the Armory in New York City.
This was a turning point in the history of art, renowned in particular
for having showcased Marcel Duchamp’s notorious 1912 painting,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which became a lightning rod for
both positive and negative judgments about abstractionism as a method.
Even before her 1918 marriage to Hadwin Houghton brought her from
Rahway, New Jersey, to live permanently in Manhattan, Wells was a fre-
quent visitor to the city and a regular attendee at important events such
as this; indeed, as she explained in The Rest of My Life, she had joined
“the Town and Country Club, which was exclusively for women” in the
1890s specifically to maintain a room there, as “my social life was largely
in New York.”33 For her, the dehumanizing effects of the art displayed
in the Armory represented the thin end of a wedge that would, she pre-
dicted, soon force its way into literature—or, as she had the fictional
President of the Re-Echo Club put it, “‘Of course … this movement will
strike the poets next.’”34 The remainder of this installment of her series
of parodies demonstrated humorously how the great poets of the past
might have responded to the image on Duchamp’s canvas.
In keeping with the emphasis on the dynamics of machinery
that she sensed (and deplored) in modernism, Wells had a narra-
tive voice provide a general introduction to the individual parodies,
saying, “Then the Poets opened the aspiration valves, ignited the
divine spark plugs, and whiz! went their motor-meters in a whir-
ring, buzzing melody. Soon their Cubist emotions were splashed
upon paper, and the Poets read with justifiable pride these sym-
bolic results.”35 Among the writers called upon to describe what he
saw in Duchamp’s work was “Ally” (Algernon Charles) Swinburne,
the late-Victorian disciple of the Pre-Raphaelites and forerunner of
Decadence. Wells used the recognizable meter and form of Swinburne’s
1866 poem “Dolores” (“Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel …”)
as her weapon, employing it not merely to attack Nude Descending
32 M.D. Stetz
a Staircase or the Cubist School, but to express in more general terms

her dismay at the absence of grace or charm in the new art movements,
even as they took Woman as their subject:
Square eyelids that hide like a jewel;

Ten heads,—though I sometimes count more;
Six mouths that are cubic and cruel;
Of mixed arms and legs, twenty-four;
Descending in Symbolic glories
Of lissome triangles and squares;
Oh, mystic and subtle Dolores,
Our Lady of Stairs.
You descend like an army with banners,

In a cyclone of wrecked parasols.
You look like a mob with mad manners
Or a roystering row of Dutch dolls.
Oh, Priestess of Cubical passion,
Oh, Deification of Whim,
You seem to walk down in the fashion
That lame lobsters swim.36
To Wells, the reduction of the female subject to an array of planes and

angles as body parts was offensive on multiple levels, as was the arro-
gance of the masculine artist who proffered such a deliberately confused
and impersonal jumble as his view of a woman. In writing this chapter of
the “Re-Echo Club” and its doings, Wells created no fewer than eight-
een separate parodies, all of them directed at making the point, again and
again, that the new artistic idiom unveiled at the Armory Show of 1913
represented a loss, rather than a gain. She proved herself unable to imag-
ine that the “isms” of modernity would ever lead to anything that could
stand with the achievements of the past—or indeed that women artists,
whether painters or poets, might choose to embrace them and to express
their own consciousness through them. To Wells, the new fashions in art
seemed merely wrongheaded and, like many other conventions devised

and deployed by men, more likely to subjugate and demean women than
to offer them an escape from what, in “To a Milkmaid” (1900), she had
called their traditional “inferiorness.”
Satire, as Barry Sanders has suggested in Sudden Glory: Laughter as
Subversive History (1995), “is really a restrained, polite brand of vitupera-
tion—criticism held under very careful check.”37 In the hands of Carolyn
Wells, so too was parody. While asserting, with an air of innocence, that
the primary aim of this genre was merely to amuse, she refused, when
writing it herself, to keep her critical impulses wholly in such careful check.
In the late nineteenth century, moreover, when women humorists still
struggled for a place at the table with their male peers—when, as Simon
Dentith notes in Parody (2000), “it was the mark of a gentleman …
[and] a badge of accomplishment among certain groups of lawyers, jour-
nalists, and, naturally, literary people … to write a parody,”38—Wells not
only pushed her way to the head of that table, but then used her posi-
tion as a platform from which to broadcast her opinions about poetry,
about culture in general, and about the status of women within the liter-
ary world. Hers was a bold voice, as well as a brilliantly funny one, and it
should be lost no more.
Notes
1. Simon Brett, “Introduction,” The Faber Book of Parodies (London: Faber
and Faber, 1984), 17–18.
2. Carolyn Wells, “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art” A Parody Anthology
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), xxi.
3. See Steven H. Gale, ed., Encyclopedia of American Humorists (New York:
Garland, 1988); Kenneth Baker, ed., Unauthorized Versions: Poems and
Their Parodies (London: Faber and Faber, 1990); John Gross, ed., The
Oxford Book of Comic Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Parodies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010); Russell Baker, ed. Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); William Zaranka, ed., The Brand-X
Anthology of Poetry: A Parody Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Apple-Wood,
1981).
4. Carolyn Wells, “To a Milkmaid,” The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor,
ed. by Regina Barreca (New York: Penguin, 1996), 592.
5. Regina Barreca, “Introduction,” The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, ed.
by Regina Barreca (New York: Penguin, 1996), 1–2.
34 M.D. Stetz
6. Carolyn Wells, The Rest of My Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937),

171.
7. Beth Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture:
Sensational Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165.
8. Jean Marie Lutes. Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American
Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2006), 9.
9. Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution
in Print (Sunderland, UK: Bibelot Press, 2013), 5.
10. MacLeod, 75.
11. David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature
Against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008), 131.
12. Wells, The Rest of My Life, 146.
14. Carolyn Wells, “From Vivette’s ‘Milkmaid,’” Lark, 1 October 1896, n.p.
15. Wells, “From Vivette’s ‘Milkmaid,’” [n.p.].
16. Wells, “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art,” xxii.
17. Wells, “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art,” xxiii.
19. Carolyn Wells, “The Vampire of the Hour,” Idle Idyls (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1900), 78.
20. Rudyard Kipling, “The Vampire,” The Works of Rudyard Kipling, ed. by
R. T. Jones (Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1994), 220–221.
21. Wells, “The Vampire of the Hour,” 78.
22. Wells, “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art,” xxvi–xxvii.
23. Jonathan Freedman. “An Aestheticism of Our Own: American Writers
and the Aesthetic Movement,” In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the
Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986),
391.
24. Wells, “The Vampire of the Hour,” 78–79.
25. Wells, “The Vampire of the Hour,” 79.
26. Alice Sheppard, “From Kate Sanborn to Feminist Psychology: The
Social Context of Women’s Humor, 1885–1985,” Psychology of Women
Quarterly, 10 (June 1986), 167.
27. Wells, “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art,” xxvi.
28. See Carolyn Wells, “Diversions of the Re-Echo Club,” Bookman, July
1916, 472–474.
29. Carolyn Wells, “By Mr. R. Browning,” “Diversions of the Re-Echo
Club,” 473.
30. Carolyn Wells, “The Re-Echo Club,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, July
1917, 297.
31. Carolyn Wells, “The Re-Echo Club,” 298–299.

32. Carolyn Wells, “The Styx River Anthology,” Bookman, September 1916,
53.
33. Wells, The Rest of My Life, 126–127.
34. Carolyn Wells, The Re-Echo Club (New York: Franklin Bigelow, 1913),
41.
35. Wells, The Re-Echo Club, 42.
36. Wells, The Re-Echo Club, 42.
37. Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (Boston:
Beacon, 1995), 235.
38. Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), 117.
Bibliography
Baker, Kenneth, ed. Unauthorized Versions: Poems and Their Parodies. London:
Faber and Faber, 1990.
Baker, Russell, ed. Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1993.
Barreca, Regina. “Introduction.” In The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor.
Edited by Regina Barreca, 1–10. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Brett, Simon. “Introduction.” In The Faber Book of Parodies. Edited by Simon
Brett, 17–26. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
Dentith, Simon. Parody. London: Routledge, 2000.
Freedman, Jonathan. “An Aestheticism of Our Own: American Writers and the
Aesthetic Movement.” In In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic
Movement. Edited by Metropolitan Museum of Art, 384–399. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.
Gale, Steven H., ed. Encyclopedia of American Humorists. New York: Garland,
1988.
Gross, John, ed. The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
———. The Oxford Book of Parodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Vampire.” The Works of Rudyard Kipling. Edited by R.
T. Jones, 220–221. Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1994.
Lutes, Jean Marie. Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and
Fiction, 1880–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
MacLeod, Kirsten. American Little Magazines of the 1890s: A Revolution in
Print. Sunderland, UK: Bibelot Press, 2013.
Palmer, Beth. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture:
Sensational Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Sanders, Barry. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon,
1995.
36 M.D. Stetz
Sheppard, Alice. “From Kate Sanborn to Feminist Psychology: The Social

Context of Women’s Humor, 1885–1985.” Psychology of Women Quarterly,
10 (June 1986): 155–169.
Weir, David. Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against
the American Grain, 1890–1926. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2008.
Wells, Carolyn. “Diversions of the Re-Echo Club.” Bookman (July 1916):
472–474.
———. “From Vivette’s ‘Milkmaid,’” Lark (1 October 1896) [n.p.].
———. Idle Idyls. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900.
———. “Introduction: Parody as a Fine Art.” In A Parody Anthology. Edited by
Carolyn Wells, xxi–xxx. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904.
———. The Re-Echo Club. New York: Franklin Bigelow, 1913.
———. “The Re-Echo Club,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (July 1917):
297–300.
———. The Rest of My Life. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937.
———. “The Styx River Anthology,” Bookman (September 1916): 53–57.
———. “To a Milkmaid.” In. The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor. Edited by
Regina Barreca, 592. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Zaranka, William, ed. The Brand-X Anthology of Poetry: A Parody Anthology.
Cambridge, MA: Apple-Wood, 1981.
Author Biography
Margaret D. Stetz is Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and
Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA. She is author of
British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990: Not Drowning, But Laughing; “The
‘Transatlantic’ and Late Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Humor” in
Studies in American Humor (2015); and numerous articles on Victorian British
women writers and feminist theory.
From Headlines to Punchlines: Suffragist
Humor in the Popular Press
Amanda T. Smith
Derided as the “shrieking sisterhood,” suffragists were more likely to be

depicted as the butt of the joke than purveyors of wit, a mischaracteri-
zation used to discredit their cause and, until recently, limit thorough
investigation of early feminist political humor.1 Critics rendered them
shrill spinsters, masculine monstrosities, or hysterical nitwits:2 images
resurfacing in click-bait articles such as “Absurd Early 1900s Propaganda
Postcards Warn Men of the Dangers of Women’s Rights” (see Fig. 1).
It is not surprising that the media revisited anti-suffrage propaganda
during a historical election in which, for the first time, a woman was
named a presidential nominee. What is surprising is that feminists’ clever
responses remain neglected despite attempts to recover suffragist con-
tributions.3 We “like” anti-suffrage propaganda ironically, scoffing at
what we now recognize as specious logic, reflecting how far America
has come; however, the absence of suffragist humor from our media and
scholarship reveals the prevailing perception that feminists are too mili-
tant to be artful and that their shrieks could not possibly be shrieks of
laughter.
A.T. Smith (*) 
Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Weatherford, OK, USA

38 A.T. Smith
As objects of relentless scru-

tiny, suffragists sought creative
ways of talking back.4 Angela
Mills and Mary Chapman
address the “archival obscu-
rity” of suffragist documents
by cataloguing these strategies
in their anthology, Treacherous
Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature,
1846–1947. They note
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call
for pro-suffrage popular fiction
as an invaluable tool because
it “could move people to con-
sider a new, more public role
for women.”5 These writers
understood that having a good
argument for suffrage was
insufficient; they had to inspire
shifts in the dominant under-
standing of gender by show-
casing their mental prowess in Fig. 1 Palczewski, Catherine H.
public. As Mills and Chapman Postcard Archive. University of
explain, these popular suffragist Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA
texts “demonstrate women’s
fitness for the franchise by dis-
playing the incontrovertible logic, brilliant rhetorical strategizing, and
calculated tactics.”6 Savvy suffragists published in mainstream outlets
including The Crisis, Harper’s Weekly, and Life to engage with their
critics instead of preaching to the converted in dedicated women’s
journals alone.7 Keeping the campaign in the public consciousness
with headline-snagging demonstrations had been a consistent strat-
egy; however, entering the 1900s, suffragist humorists took com-
mand of the narrative in the popular press to convey the pro-suffrage
message and redefine the public perception of women. Spinning their
retorts in satire and parody, these writers shifted suffragists from
entertainment to entertainers, from stories to storytellers.
FROM HEADLINES TO PUNCHLINES: SUFFRAGIST HUMOR … 39
By writing political humor in the popular press, these writ-

ers defied the cult of true womanhood twice over. In “A Republic
of Laughter: Marietta Holley and the Production of Women’s Public
Humour in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States,” Michael
H. Epp explains, “Implicitly, women’s writing itself was a threat to
these hierarchies that worked to establish a position of dominance
for men in relation to forms of economic, social, intellectual, and
political power. Specifically, women’s humour writing worked to situ-
ate women as contributors to forms of power that were newly form-
ing with the emergence of mass culture.”8 Through the burgeoning
popular press, suffragists accessed the gender-restricted public mar-
ket and found currency in humor. Theorists such as Thomas Hobbes
and Mikhail Bakhtin9 have noted humor’s potential for reestablish-
ing or shifting power dynamics. In A Very Serious Thing: Women’s
Humor and American Culture, Nancy Walker applies these theories
to American women’s humor. She claims that “[b]ecause the humor-
ist adopts at least the stance of superiority, claiming the freedom to
point out incongruity or absurdity in a world that others are accus-
tomed to accepting on its own terms, he or she works from a position
of privileged insight.”10 Suffragists seized this privileged position as a
means to radical ends. In Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women
and Humor in British Literature, Regina Barreca describes feminist
humor’s goal as “challenging the most formidable structures because
they keep women from positions of power.”11 Unlike the caricaturists
who sought to discredit the movement by mocking its marginalized
participants, suffragists took aim at the oppressive framework.
Suffrage humor created alliances while destroying the means of
disenfranchisement. Even the most rousing polemic cannot rival
humor’s capacity to engage the opposition. Nancy Walker and Zita
Dresner note this social aspect of women’s humor in Redressing the
Balance. Building on Henri Bergson’s theories, they claim: “If the
humor expressed in one group (the ingroup) disparages another
group (the outgroup), it boosts the morale of and solidifies the
ingroup as well as promoting hostility against the outgroup.”12 This
establishment of ingroup dominance often earns humor a conserva-
tive reputation; however, when the marginalized initiate humor,
the traditional ingroup’s grounds for dominance become shaky. As
40 A.T. Smith
Barreca puts it, “When women’s laughter is directed towards author-

ity, it can bring down the house.”13
Marietta Holley, Alice Duer Miller, and Florence Guy Seabury provide
examples of suffrage humor across genres and phases from the begin-
ning of the campaign to its height in the decade preceding the vote and
its aftermath in the early 1920s. Despite distinctions, in their points of
intersection we find the beginnings of an American tradition of suffrage
humor. American humor, as cleverly articulated by Agnes Repplier, “con-
sists in speaking of hideous things with levity.”14 Suffragists distinguish
themselves by exposing unexamined “hideous things” like the incongrui-
ties of patriarchal ideologies. Walker and Dresner describe early feminist
humor’s primary “concern with the incongruities between the realities
of women’s lives and the sentimental or idealized images fostered by the
culture.”15 By exposing these cultural flaws, suffragists ironically partic-
ipate in the same American frontier spirit that seems to exclude them;
however, the territory they seek to claim is ideological ground in the
public sphere.
Perhaps the most distinguishing quality of suffrage humor is its
aggressive reflexivity. Suffragists engaged mass readerships by publishing
prolifically and responding immediately to headlines. They merged fact
with fiction, talking back to critics in literary forums over which they had
complete control. Much of their humor derives from the ironic refram-
ing of anti-suffrage rhetoric juxtaposed with their own rebuttals, a gutsy
act that exposes inherent hypocrisies. There is hardly a need to reduce to
absurdity that which proves itself absurd, so these humorists often use
critics’ quotations as a means of their own destruction, providing alterna-
tive narratives in their wake.
Despite conduct books warning that femininity and humor were
mutually exclusive, suffrage humorists enjoyed success. However, as
Walker explains: “The central irony … is that women have been officially
denied the possession of—hence the practice of—the sense of humor,
and yet for more than 150 years in America they have written and pub-
lished large amounts of it, often to enthusiastic public reception.”16
Feminist theorists address this irony; however, with few exceptions,17
current analyses of women’s humor tend to focus on covert forms while
suffragists’ overt humor—humor that protests specific injustices and pro-
claims political agendas—remains less examined.18 We now give suffra-
gists credit for having a sense of humor, but we see this humor as too
locked in its historical moment to remain relevant, too timely to be time-

less. Not only does this failure render our understanding of suffragist
contributions to the American humor tradition incomplete, it also pre-
vents us from appreciating the continuation of this heritage in current
feminist humorists reshaping cultural attitudes about gender. To truly
appreciate these new iterations of feminist humor, we must first acknowl-
edge the contributions of suffrage humorists.
Marietta Holley, one of the first suffrage humorists, enjoyed a 41-year
career during which she published over twenty novels.19 She rose to
prominence with her folksy “Samantha” novels, which the American
Publishing Company sold by subscription and featured in the newly
formed Publisher’s Weekly.20 She attracted a wide readership with con-
ventional dialect humor, a style that earned her comparisons with the
popular humorists of her day including Literary Comedians, Down
Easters, and, notably, Mark Twain. Holley’s homespun style was conven-
tional, but her content was radical.21 In “Nineteenth-Century American
Feminist Humor: Marietta Holley’s ‘Samantha Novels,’” Cheri L. Ross
claims that not only did Holley break with tradition by casting her pro-
tagonist Samantha Allen, a pragmatic farm wife, in the typically mascu-
line “crackerbox philosopher role,”22 but she also embraced her own
role as “the first widely popular American woman writer whose work
was openly feminist.”23 Holley addressed women’s issues throughout
her Samantha series, concluding with Samantha on the Woman Question
(1913), which confronts the suffrage debate.
Though Holley buffers her critique in affable, stylized Samantha, she
rips anti-suffrage rhetoric from headlines and political speeches. Holley’s
caricatured men are emblematic of systemic failures. This radical target is
characteristic of suffrage humor, distinguishing it from the anti-suffrage
caricatures. Regenia Gagnier draws this distinction: “what women per-
ceive as humorous is not Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory arising from a concep-
tion of eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others’
but rather the very terms of their confinement.”24 The ultimate goal in
claiming superiority over these terms of confinement is revolutionary.
Holley equates the suffrage battle with the American Revolution, claim-
ing it “wuz sunthin’ like what [the] old revolutionary forbears went
through for the same reasons, bein’ taxed without representation, and
bein’ burdened and punished by the law they had no voice in making.”25
The comparison seems surprising given the crux of the anti-suffrage
argument that suffrage flies in the face of traditional American values.
42 A.T. Smith
In Women and Laughter, Frances Gray describes humor as “a way of

seeing” that “may shatter our view of accepted reality, suddenly de-
familiarizing a political or social system (such as patriarchy) and allow-
ing us to perceive flaws and incongruities.”26 If readers saw the campaign
as akin to the Revolution, they might reconsider intrinsic presumptions
about women’s socio-political position.
To achieve these revolutionary ends, Samantha confronts President
Taft and Congressmen. Holley depicts these men as, at best, politically
impotent27 and, at worst, convinced of their own spurious claims. The
arguments against suffrage converged into four central categories: “(1)
the sociological argument that giving women the right to vote would
… lead to the destruction of the family; (2) the biological argument
that women were not physically capable of participating in the elec-
toral process; (3) the theological argument that God had meant …
for women to stay at home; and (4) the sentimental argument that
Home and Family were sacred.”28 Holley satirizes each argument via
Samantha’s conversations with men at the helm of American politics.
Like many anti-suffrage commentators, “Senator A.,” as she calls him,
indicating the interchangeability of legislators, voices the theological
argument. After asserting that “The Bible teaches man’s supremacy,
man’s absolute power and might and authority,” Senator A. reveals his
ignorance: “He had always meant to read it, but he had entered politi-
cal life at an early age where the Bible wuzn’t popular, and he believed
that he had never read further than the Epistles of Gulliver to the
Liliputians.”29 Bergson’s description of caricature illuminates Holley’s
attack on this character and the institution he represents: “[W]hat is
essentially laughable is what is done automatically. In a vice, even in
a virtue, the comic is that element by which the person unwittingly
betrays himself—the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark.”30
By unwittingly exposing his ignorance of the Bible, Senator A. reveals
the theological talking points to be as fake as his smile, “a boughten
one that didn’t fit him.”31
Taking the sentimental stance, Senator A. claims that denying women
the vote is for their own protection because “these angelic angels of
our homes are too ethereal, too dainty to mingle with rude crowds.”32
Samantha counters his fictionalized femininity with fact, reminding him,
“You and I know that these angelic tender bein’s, half-clothed, fill our
streets on icy midnights, huntin’ up drunken husbands and fathers and
sons.”33 Characteristic of suffrage rhetoric, Samantha’s retort shifts focus
from women’s nature to the mythos of the ideal home in which capable
men protect virtuous wives. Women seek the vote not to compete with
men, but because they are left vulnerable by the law as well as by hus-
bands and fathers. Holley’s engagement in political debate, meeting the
opposition’s rigidity with Samantha’s agile wit, reframes the dominant
discourse on the suffragists’ terms.
Holley’s satire necessitates little exaggeration. As Barreca suggests:
“By simply repeating the sometimes mild, sometimes grave, atrocities
directed toward women in everyday life, the woman writer assumes the
tasks of the satirist.”34 Senator A.’s sentiments permeate columns and
cartoons from the era. The Atlantic recently reprinted Lyman Abbott’s
1903 article, “Why Women Do Not Wish the Suffrage,” in which he
deigns to interpret the “unspoken thought and feeling” of this “silent
opposition.”35 Abbott proclaims‚ “From such an encounter of wills
woman instinctively shrinks … as she shrinks from the encounter of
opposing wills on a battlefield … she is glad to counsel [but] loath to
command.”36 He states, without irony, that government should not be
divided between the sexes and that “it is inconceivable that [law] should
be decreed by one sex and enforced by another.”37 Samantha could easily
be responding to Abbott himself when she reminds Philander Dagget,
head of the anti-suffrage society, that the government is already divided
along gender lines in that a woman is “only a citizen just enough to
be taxed equally with man, or more exorbitantly, and be punished and
executed by the law she has no hand in makin’.”38 The relocation of
anti-suffrage arguments in Holley’s satire shifts the perception of these
arguments. Andrew Stott refers to this technique as “reframing” and
details its revisionist impact: “[Satire] takes its subject matter from the
heart of political life or cultural anxiety, reframing issues at an ironic dis-
tance that enables us to revisit fundamental questions that have been
obscured by rhetoric, personal interests, or realpolitick.”39 In his article,
Abbott presents himself as an authority on women. When these ideas
are spoken by Philander or Senator A. and juxtaposed with Samantha’s
incontrovertible logic, the self-righteous mask is stripped away.
Holley’s satire culminates in a meeting of the “Creation Searchin’
Society,” the anti-suffrage equivalent of today’s “men’s rights” activists.
As the men contemplate how to tame their suffragists, Cornelius Snyder,
whose “wife has to support him, wash and dress him, and take on him
like a baby,”40 suggests, “How would it do to tie females up when they
got to thinkin’ they wuz equal to men, halter ’em, rope ’em, and let ’em
44 A.T. Smith
see if they wuz?”41 This feeble man, utterly dependent on the woman
he suggests confining, embodies anti-suffrage hypocrisy. Ross notes that,
throughout the Samantha series, Holley places “the arguments against
women realizing their potential as human beings” into “the mouths of
characters who have already been portrayed as lacking in common sense
[and] good judgment.”42 Holley ultimately suggests that this skewed
worldview is itself corrupt or imbecilic. Hovering in the background of
her satire is the grim reality that these men control women’s lives, within
the home and beyond.
Holley’s satire is as creative as it is destructive. Stott explains, “the
comic can be thought of as a means of opening up the possibility of
multiple perspectives, as each concept culturally established as ortho-
dox simultaneously presents itself for the possibility of comic subver-
sion, like a silent but parallel conversation that could audibly erupt at any
moment.”43 In a final ironic juxtaposition, Holley provides an alternative
narrative. When asked why suffragists protest, Hank Yerden, a sympa-
thizer, responds:
Oh, they wanted the lawmakers to read their petitions asking for the rights
of ordinary citizens. They said as long as their property wuz taxed they
had the right of representation. And as long as the law punished wimmen
equally with men, they had a right to help make that law, and as long as
men claimed wimmen’s place wuz home, they wanted the right to guard
that home. And as long as they brought children into the world they
wanted the right to protect ’em.44
This speech rings like a chord struck true after enduring so many false
notes. Holley leaves the reader with an inversion of the anti-suffrage
worldview, establishing what will become signatures of suffrage humor:
it creates new alliances and, as Carlson explains, provides “clear alterna-
tives to the unacceptable practices of the hierarchy.”45 As Barreca puts it,
this humor is used “not as a safety valve but as an inflammatory device,
seeking, ultimately‚ not to purge desire and frustration but to transform
it into action.”46 By novel’s end, anti-suffrage ideals are the fodder for
laughter, and suffragists claim a superior public voice.
Like Holley, Alice Duer Miller took advantage of an expanding pop-
ular press to debate anti-suffrage viewpoints,47 publishing regularly in
the Saturday Evening Post, touring as a lecturer, and participating in the
Algonquin Round Table and the Heterodoxy club, while writing her
own column for the New York Tribune from 1914–1917.48 In her arti-
cle “Taking Comedy Seriously: American Literary Humor and the British
Woman Writer,” Sophie Blanch specifies, “it was through her satiric arti-
cles for the New York Tribune that Miller ensured a far wider audience
for her suffragist agenda.”49 Miller, like Holley, understood the efficacy
of engaging this new audience through humor.
Published just before the Nineteenth Amendment, Miller’s poetry
represents a shift in suffrage humor due to ground broken by Holley and
rapid changes in audience and media.50 Dresner explains, “Like many
humorists of the period, Miller was able to take advantage of the shift in
humor that began to appear by the turn of the century as urban popula-
tions grew, rural populations declined, and new humor publications were
introduced to speak to the values and concerns of a more cosmopolitan
middle-class culture, as well as to a ‘New Woman.’”51 Miller broke with
conventions, trading dialect for free verse and domesticity for urbanity.
Miller builds upon Holley’s tactic of talking back to suffrage criticism,
but whereas Holley crafted characters as amalgamations of anti-suffrage
rhetoric, Miller responded directly to critics’ quotations.
One of their shared targets is the domestic angel paradigm. Miller
prefaces “On Not Believing All You Hear” with a line from Congressman
Charles D. Carter’s anti-suffrage speech: “Women are angels, they are
jewels, they are queens and princesses of our hearts.”52 Using this senti-
ment as a springboard, Miller proceeds with mock dialogue:
“Angel, or jewel, or princess, or queen,

Tell me immediately, where have you been?”
“I’ve been to ask all my slaves so devoted
Why they against my enfranchisement voted.”
“Angel and princess, that action was wrong
Back to the kitchen, where angels belong.”53
By using his words in her opening line, Miller ventriloquizes Carter,

exposing in her punchline his inherent contradiction: men cast women
as angels worthy of protection when it suits their cause, but, in prac-
tice, they confine women to protect themselves from feminist ambitions.
Dresner notes this exposure is “typical of Miller’s method of mocking
male-constructed feminine ‘ideals’ by revealing the insulting and self-
serving assumptions upon which they rest.”54 The joke hinges on the
46 A.T. Smith
incongruity between ideals of woman’s nature and the reality of their

treatment. Dresner sees a punchline like this, which “point[s] up the
incongruity between images and realities,” as “a penetrating perception
of the ways in which gender stereotypes were (and have continued to be)
manipulated to keep women in a subordinate place and men in positions
of status and power.”55 Many of Miller’s poems begin with anti-suffrage
quotations, functioning as ironic epigraphs reframed in her satirical
playground.56
“The Logic of the Law” expands this reframing technique. Instead of
citing an anti-suffrage epigraph, a quotation from the 1875 Wisconsin
Supreme Court decision to deny Rhoda Lavinia Goodell admission to
the bar comprises the majority of the poem:
In 1875 the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in denying the petition of

women to practise before it said:
“It would be shocking to man’s reverence for womanhood and faith in

woman … that woman should be permitted to mix professionally in all the
nastiness which finds its way into courts of justice.”
It then names thirteen subjects as unfit for the attention of Women—three

of them are crimes committed against women.
There is no exaggeration, only the words used to justify this court’s

decision followed by a simple clarification. Blanch refers to this tac-
tic as “proof ad absurdum,” in which the poet lets the quotation speak
for itself, bookended between her own preface and conclusion.57 This
reframing does not alter meaning; it exposes implicit meanings. Read
on their own, the court’s lines seem reasonable; however, the deadpan
delivery of Miller’s subsequent lines alert the reader to “legally enforced
contradictions” concerning gender.58 For “light verse,” Miller’s lines are
heavy with the irony that, in the eyes of the court, women are unfit to
consider the abuses they endure let alone advocate for themselves.
Miller attacks contradictory anti-suffrage arguments in “Our Own
Twelve Anti-Suffragist Reasons.” The poem reads like a summary of
Senator A.’s mechanized rebuttals as Miller plays the typical antisuf-
fragist, coupling claims such as “1. Because no woman will leave her
domestic duties to vote. / 2. Because no woman who may vote will
attend to her domestic duties” and “5. Because bad women will corrupt
politics. / 6. Because bad politics will corrupt women.”59 The chias-

mus exaggerates the contradiction, but we have seen these arguments
throughout anti-suffrage propaganda. The ironic reframing of these
arguments into self-contradictory compilations is iconic to suffrage
humor as a means of discrediting the opposition.60 Suffrage humor-
ists allowed their opposition to argue against itself in well-crafted texts,
which serve as exhibits of the mental agility they were accused of lacking.
Playful though they are, her poems are striking arguments. Bakhtin
claims that through parody, “the author introduces into that discourse a
semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one. The sec-
ond voice, once having made its home in the other’s discourse, clashes
hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing
aims.”61 Miller’s parodies act as
an autoimmune disease, altering
the vessel they inhabit by co-opt-
ing the anti-suffragists’ defenses
into attacks against themselves.
Despite progress toward the
vote, the perpetual “separate
sphere” ideology at the root of
disenfranchisement remained a
concern. As we now know, the
passage of the Nineteenth Amend
ment hardly resolved the “war
between the genders,” one of the
nation’s marrow-deep divisions.62
Florence Guy Seabury tackled
these deeper anxieties in her post-
suffrage satirical essays, which
originally appeared in Harper’s,
McCall’s, and The New Republic
before being collected in The
Delicatessen Husband (1926).63
The anti-suffrage propaganda post
card, “I Want to Vote, But My
Wife Won’t Let Me” (Fig. 2), vis Fig. 2 Palczewski, Catherine H.
ually summarizes these anxieties: Postcard Archive. University of
granted the vote, women will Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA
48 A.T. Smith
abandon their “rightful place,” leaving husbands feminized and children

neglected. Seabury’s essays, mock-anthropological case studies, target these
concerns. Uprooting conventional gender ideals was troubling to men but
welcome to women, who had been confined by fairy-tale versions of femi-
ninity with limited options—the “delicate, somewhat wayward” heroine or
hag (who is “generally killed, either by being burned, boiled alive, or smoth-
ered”).64 With mock lamentation, Seabury imagines the “horrors” of this
post-suffrage world “if the cleverness and wit accorded only to witches had
been bestowed on a good woman, a gentle and feminine princess. Think
what it would be like if she decided to take a hand in managing her father’s
kingdom, using her talents to direct affairs of state and outshining the hero
as he invariably outshines her in the old stories.”65 Like Miller and Holley,
Seabury’s satire exposes incongruity; however, post-suffrage fallout is her
target. As Dresner observes, “Seabury’s recognition of … the clash between
the realities of people’s lives and their illusions about their roles as men and
women, marriage, and the opposite sex not only inform and unify the col-
lection of articles but also establish the structure in which the humor oper-
ates.”66 Just as Miller and Holley talked back to the critics of suffrage,
Seabury’s case studies critique nostalgia for an idyllic time that never was.
Perry Winship, “The Delicatessen Husband,” is that nostalgia
brought to life. Winship laments his arrangement with his career-
driven wife by fixating on his lack of home-cooked meals. He rants
against delicatessens, calling them, “emblems of a declining civiliza-
tion, the source of all our ills, the promoter of equal suffrage, the
permitter of the business and professional woman, the destroyer of
the home.”67 Despite longing for the days when a woman fulfilled her
“natural” role, he displays more emotion and less logic than his wife.
Perry “was frankly mystified by the exhibition of Ethel’s incompe-
tence in domestic matters. He had always supposed that any woman
could keep house and would regard it as a supreme joy to be mistress
of a home of her own.”68 Ethel, a successful chemist, would rather
pay a cook than endure the “warfare” of housework. Perry’s inability
to adapt his vision of what a wife should be with who his wife actu-
ally is invokes Bergson’s notion of comic automation. Bergson says,
“At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its
victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut
their ears and refuse to listen.”69 Embodying the post-suffrage “Little
Man,” Perry equates the “injustice” of making his own sandwich with
women’s disenfranchisement.70 Framed this way, the joke is on the
insecure men fearing change rather than the women embracing it.
Seabury adds role reversal to the reframing strategy to dismantle this
separate spheres imperative. At first glance, “The Sheltered Sex” could
be a Victorian conduct book for proper ladies. Seabury instead sur-
prises us with her thesis that men have long required the protection of
women in both spheres. At home, “big, robust” Arnold demands his
wife’s full-time care: “Ann had a talent for music and was hoping for a
modest career even after marriage, but the job of shielding Arnold from
the disturbing contacts of life has occupied all her time and effort in the
last twenty years.”71 At work, men are buffered by tiers of women who
“carry on the drab routine, while ‘he’ sits majestically in an inner cham-
ber”—an “uncrowning” image if ever there was one.72 This boss seems
impressive; however, noting his reliance on legions of women doing the
actual work reduces him to a stuffed suit.73 Moreover, Seabury claims
that these “wobbly” men could not endure what women have faced from
preparing daily meals (“he stands appalled before the intricacies of a gas
range”) to campaigning for suffrage.74 Suffrage was a legal acknowledg-
ment of equality; however, Seabury’s role reversal reveals how much
deeper the issue runs.
She offers an alternative in “In a Minor Key,” which describes a
husband supporting his wife’s political campaign. While several of her
essays reenact propaganda to explode the myth from within, this essay
contradicts the caricature. Of Mr. Smithers, Seabury remarks, “He
had none of the timidity usually attributed to unknown husbands of
well-known women. To the cartoonists they always seem small and
hungry-looking, lineal descendants of Punch’s pictures of the weak-
minded men of the early period of active womanhood.”75 Just as he
defies the expectation, his wife successfully balances her roles as a
homemaker and politician.76 In a satire collection, this essay stands
out as decidedly unfunny. Mr. Smithers notes, “It was queer, when
you came to think of it—this new position of women in the world.
Here was a great convention and women were just as important as
men and some men were just as unimportant as women used to be …
Queer—once it would have seemed a great joke.”77 Seabury’s most
significant role reversal in the collection is alluded to here: in this
50 A.T. Smith
post-suffrage world, the essays featuring characters rigidly adhering

to traditional gender ideals are the most rife with satire, whereas the
one featuring a successful, politically active wife and her supportive
husband—the punchline of critics only a decade before—is free of all
irony.
Though it must have seemed impossible then, in less than a century,
America moved from resistance to women in the public sphere to nom-
inating the first woman presidential candidate. Given this trajectory, it
might be tempting to lock suffragist humor away as another quaint rem-
nant of a bygone era. However, the 2016 election has ignited misogynist
vitriol not seen since the height of the suffrage battle, and feminist politi-
cal humorists have responded, using their new positions as prominent
voices in popular media. These humorists use updated versions of suf-
fragist strategies to address the gender-based attacks on Hillary Clinton
and other socio-political issues preventing women from achieving true
equality.
Whereas Holley is obscured by Mark Twain’s large shadow,
Samantha Bee has distinguished herself as more than a “female Jon
Stewart” during her tenure on The Daily Show and, now, breaking
ground as the writer, producer, and host of her Emmy-nominated,
political comedy series, Full Frontal.78 When her show aired in
February 2016, viewers for the first time saw a woman standing on
her own satirizing some of the most powerful political figures of
her time. Bee brings to the small screen what the suffrage humor-
ists brought to the page, calling out the logical fallacies and gender
biases still at play in politics. An updated Miller, Bee enlists multime-
dia graphics instead of light verse to use these critics’ words against
themselves. During the episode, “Turn On, Tune In, Feel Good,”
Bee acknowledged the historical moment in which Clinton accepted
her party’s nomination, exclaiming, “We have waited our whole lives
for a woman to say these words … and then immediately get criti-
cized for the voice she said them in.”79 During that pause, an image
appeared on the screen with the faces and derogatory quotations of
Clinton’s critics describing her voice as “shrill,” “not-so-attractive,”
and “nail file in ear.” While in their original context, these quota-
tions served to discredit Clinton, Bee reframes them as her punch-
line. Lit up on the split screen next to Clinton triumphantly waving
in a moment Bee has rightfully acknowledged as “historic,” these
criticisms of Clinton’s unwomanly mannerisms appear as discredited
rhetoric of anti-suffrage propaganda revivified. Bee contrasts this criti-

cal rhetoric with an exhaustive list of speakers ranging from the presi-
dent to the Pentagon, all of whom endorsed Clinton based on her
experience and skill. She concludes, as many suffrage humorists did,
by pointing to the serious stakes just beyond the joke: “That is how
good you have to be if you’re a woman running for president, and
she still might lose to this, the least qualified candidate ever to lurch
into the public spotlight.” She reduces the gender-biased criticism to
absurdity, stating in a tone of mock seriousness, “Let’s hope Hillary
doesn’t get lipstick on her teeth between now and November or it’s
all over.”80 Like suffrage humorists, Bee incites laughter at misogy-
nistic rhetoric to raise awareness about the real consequences not just
for women but for the nation as a whole, consequences later realized
when Clinton lost to Trump (Fig. 3).
Bee’s successors on The Daily Show, Kristen Schaal and Jessica Williams,
also performed updated versions of suffrage humor adapted to address cur-
rent issues affecting women. During her time as “Senior Women’s Issues
Correspondent,” Schaal perfected the ventriloquizing technique used
by suffrage humorists to play out the opposition’s logical fallacies, often
adopting a hyper-feminine persona.81 Williams extends feminist political
Fig. 3 “Tune In, Turn On, Tune Out,” Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. 2016
52 A.T. Smith
humor to a variety of topics ranging from women’s health and safety to

racist and sexist criticism of Beyoncé, using a combination of parody and
reductio ad absurdum to talk back directly to her opposition.82 Bee, Schaal,
and Williams reiterate that, despite gaining suffrage, women still find them-
selves ironically mischaracterized in the media and unprotected by the law.
All three women have moved beyond their role as correspondents to
develop successful careers in comedy. Their successes prove our progress
in chipping away at the humorless feminist stereotype just as suffrage
humorists revised their own caricatured image (see Fig. 4). They are only
a few of the many examples proving that suffrage humor, born out of
necessity in a time of duress, remains a relevant strategy for responding
to persistent threats on women’s rights and revising presumptions about
what a woman can or should be. Thanks to the transformative impact of
their resilient humor, their shrieks of outrage and laughter, “a woman’s
place” is no longer in the home but at the voting booth, on the title
page, in the credits, and, eventually, in the Oval Office.
Fig. 4 Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern

Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA
Notes
1. Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage, 3.
2. Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 139.
3. See Nancy Walkers’ A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American
Culture, Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner’s Redressing the Balance:
American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s,
Angela Mills and Mary Chapman’s Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage
Literature, 1846–1947, Regina Barreca’s The Penguin Book of Women’s
Humor and Alice Sheppard’s Cartooning for Suffrage.
4. Mills and Chapman, Treacherous Texts, 3. Martyris “How Suffragists Used
Cookbooks as a Recipe for Subversion.”
5. Mills and Chapman, Treacherous Texts, 3.
8. Epp, “A Republic of Laughter‚” 1.
9. Hobbes, Leviathan, 36. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23.
11. Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed, 32.
12. Walker and Dresner, Redressing the Balance, xxii. Bergson, Laughter, 8.
14. Repplier, “The Mission of Humor,” 178.
15. Walker and Dresner, Redressing the Balance, xxvii.
17. Michael H. Epp and Jane Curry’s work on Marietta Holley, Sophie
Blanch’s “Taking Comedy Seriously: American Literary Humor and the
British Woman Writer” (2007), and Rebecca Krefting’s All Joking Aside:
American Humor and Its Discontents (2014) are notable exceptions in
addition to the work of suffrage historians and feminist scholars such as
Zita Dresner, Shelley Armitage, Cheri Ross, and Cheree A. Carlson.
18. Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 147–49. Unlike covert feminist humor,
“The more overt feminist humor speaks directly to such issues as eco-
nomic dependency, lack of political power, and open discrimination”
(148-49).
19. Armitage, “Marietta Holley: The Humorist as Propagandist,” 193.
20. Armitage, “Marietta Holley: The Humorist as Propagandist,” 193–94.
Samantha is distinct from other “wise fools” because “she is also the
‘hero’ of the Samantha books.”
23. Ross, “Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Humor,” 13, 16. Curry,
Samantha Rastles the Woman Question, 1.
54 A.T. Smith
24. Gagnier, “Between Women,” 144.

25. Holley, Samantha on the Woman Question, 63–64.
26. Gray, Women in Laughter, 32. See also Gagnier, “Between Women,”
135–36.
27. Taft claims, “The laws of the United States are such that I can’t do them
errands, I can’t interfere” (74).
28. Ross, “Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Humor,” 17.
29. Holley, Samantha on the Woman Question, 109.
30. Bergson, Laughter, 146.
35. Abbott, “Why Women Do Not Wish the Suffrage.”
39. Stott, Comedy, 109.
43. Stott, Comedy, 8.
44. Holley, Samantha on the Woman Question, 189–90.
45. Carlson, “Limitations on the Comic Frame,” 319.
48. Walker and Dresner, Redressing the Balance, 202.
49. Blanch, “Taking Comedy Seriously,” 7.
50. Armitage argues, “Holley’s success is one reason why humorous writing
became a legitimate method by which women writers could explore per-
sonal, social, and political absurdities” (201).
51. Dresner, “Heterodite Humor,” 33.
52. Miller, “On Not Believing All You Hear‚” Are Women People?
53. Miller, “On Not Believing All You Hear,” Are Women People?
55. Dresner, “Heterodite Humor,” 33–34.
56. See, for instance, “Lines to Mr. Bowdle of Ohio,” “Our Idea of Nothing
at All,” and “A Consistent Anti to Her Son.”
57. Blanch, “Taking Comedy Seriously,” 8.
58. Blanch, “Taking Humor Seriously,” 8.
59. Miller, “Our Own Twelve Anti-suffragist Reasons.”
60. See, for example, Marie Jenney Howe’s “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue.”
61. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 106.

62. Mill and Chapman state the suffrage amendment was “a success whose
magnitude was questioned all too quickly as women’s limited presence
at the polls in 1920 and 1924 presidential elections and the continued
disenfranchisement of southern black women and other people of color
raised doubts about what, exactly, the Nineteenth Amendment had
accomplished for women and for American democracy” (7).
63. Walker and Dresner, Redressing the Balance, 234.
64. Seabury, “The Cave Manikin,” The Delicatessen Husband, 16–17.
65. Seabury, “The Cave Manikin,” The Delicatessen Husband, 18.
67. Seabury, “The Delicatessen Husband,” The Delicatessen Husband, 28–29.
68. Seabury, “The Delicatessen Husband,” The Delicatessen Husband, 33.
69. Bergson, Laughter, 111.
71. Seabury, “The Sheltered Sex,” The Delicatessen Husband, 44–45.
72. Seabury, “The Sheltered Sex,” The Delicatessen Husband, 49, and Bakhtin,
The Dialogic Imagination, 23. Bakhtin claims that laughter performs an
“uncrowning” or “the removal of an object from the distanced plane, the
destruction of epic distance, and assault on and destruction of the dis-
tanced plane in general.”
73. Dresner explains, “In addition to revealing the incongruity between men’s
traditional notions of women’s domestic roles and the non-domestic,
career-oriented lives many women were leading, Seabury also points out
the incongruity between the masculine images promoted by society and
the realities of many men’s lives” (37).
74. Seabury, “The Sheltered Sex,” The Delicatessen Husband, 49, 69.
75. Seabury, “In a Minor Key,” The Delicatessen Husband, 100.
78. See Emma Gray Ellis, “Samantha Bee is the Political Commentator You
Need Right Now,” and Emily Nussbaum, “Hivemind: The Stinging
Comedy of Samantha Bee’s ‘Full Frontal.’”
79. Samantha Bee, “Tune In, Turn On, Tune Out,” Full Frontal with
Samantha Bee.
80. Samantha Bee, “Tune In, Turn On, Tune Out,” Full Frontal with
Samantha Bee.
81. See, for instance, Schaal “Winning the Lady Vote.”
82. See, for instance, Williams and Klepper, “The Fault in Our Schools.”
56 A.T. Smith
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September, 1903.
Armitage, Shelley. “Marietta Holley: The Humorist as Propagandist.” Rocky
Mountain Review of Language and Literature 34, no. 4 (1980): 193–201.
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———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963. Ed. Pam Morris. Trans. C.
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Blanch, Sophie. “Taking Comedy Seriously: American Literary Humor and the
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Carlson, Cheree A. “Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty American
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Curry, Jane. Samantha Rastles the Woman Question. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1983.
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Gender and Comedy, Ed. Gail Finney, 1–13. Langhorne: Gordon and Breach,
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Gagnier, Regenia. “Between Women: A Cross-Class Analysis of Status and
Anarchic Humor.” In Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy.
Ed. Regina Barreca, 135–48. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.
Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994.

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Howe, Marie Jenney. “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue.” In The Penguin Book of
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for-subversion.
Mills, Angela and Mary Chapman. Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature,
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Author Biography
Amanda T. Smith is an Associate Professor of English at Southwestern
Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma, USA, and editor of Westview. She
has published on British and transatlantic humor at the turn of the nineteenth
century.
The Scholarly Transgressions of Constance
Rourke
Sean Zwagerman
She was an advocate for American folk culture before such scholarship
became mainstream. She was a confident woman among men of letters,
whose best-known work—American Humor: A Study of the National
Character (1931)—directly challenged the claims of her male colleagues,
Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard DeVoto. She was an idiosyncratic stylist
committed to bringing scholarly research to a popular audience. But in
the seventy-five years since her death, though she has been the subject
of two biographies and periodic mention elsewhere, Constance Rourke
(1885–1941) has for the most part become, quite literally, a footnote.
Why is she not a more prominent figure in the history of American
women intellectuals and the study of American humor? The answer is
found both in Rourke’s content and in her style; given her Progressive
ideal of the critic as the bestower of culture to the masses, these textual
qualities unite in an unorthodox, participatory form of scholarship I call
“proverbial criticism.” When read as such, Rourke’s work does not neglect
S. Zwagerman (*) 
Department of English, Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, BC, Canada

60 S. Zwagerman
the role of women in the history of American humor as Nancy Walker has
argued,1 but rather participates in the American humorous tradition.
Surveying the American literary scene of 1918, Van Wyck Brooks
wrote: “The present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void
because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a
past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need
another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one,
that we might even invent one?”2 Rourke devoted six books and doz-
ens of essays to discovering an American past she believed would nourish
American literature. Against Brooks’s claim that “we have no myths,”3
Rourke presented America as a society of myth-makers. Persuaded,
Brooks would later edit The Roots of American Culture, a posthumous
collection of Rourke’s essays, sketches, and fragments. Brooks’s dismissal
of American culture was just the sort of opinion that Rourke, steeped in
Progressive education and the “social criticism” of her mentor at Vassar,
Gertrude Buck, would feel compelled to refute. Rourke embraced Buck’s
conviction that literature “is an agent of social progress,” and thus “the
function of the critic is no empty honor, but a genuine utility, serving the
sole end of the reader’s limitless progress.”4
In response to Brooks’s call for discovery or invention, Rourke also
did plenty of the latter: her biographies amplify to fabulous propor-
tions compelling American characters including John James Audubon,
Henry Ward Beecher, Lotta Crabtree, and Davy Crockett. Here is
a sample of Rourke’s distinctive prose from American Humor, which
begins as follows:
Toward evening of a midsummer day at the latter end of the eighteenth

century a traveler was seen descending a steep red road into a fertile
Carolina valley. He carried a staff and walked with a wide, fast, sprawling
gait, his tall shadow cutting across the lengthening shadows of the trees.
His head was crouched, his back long; a heavy pack lay across his shoulders.
A close view of his figure brought consternation to the men and women
lounging at the tavern or near the sheds that clustered around the planter’s
gate. “I’ll be shot if it ain’t a Yankee!” cried one.5
In writing about early American humor, Rourke is drawn into its narra-
tive style; Gene Bluestein states that Rourke “employed folklore deco-
ratively to enliven the basic outlines of her story.”6 But Rourke’s active
participation in the style and substance of American folk humor is not
THE SCHOLARLY TRANSGRESSIONS OF CONSTANCE ROURKE 61
merely decorative but deeply purposive, the textual realization of her

motive. As Joan Shelley Rubin argues, Rourke’s blending of scholarship
and storytelling, “which one might misunderstand as merely picturesque,
needs to be considered as functional.”7 It is, agrees Greil Marcus “a style
that matched her ambition,”8 specifically her Progressive motive; as Buck
envisions that motive: “From poet to critic, from critic to readers, from
readers to new poets, passes the divine afflatus.”9 Rourke often referred
to her materials as “myth,” perhaps because she wanted to refute Brooks
in his own terms, and/or because the word “myth” bestows upon folk
culture the primal importance Rourke believed it to have. Following
Rourke’s lead, Rubin and others have described Rourke’s participatory
prose as “myth-making.” But when it comes to determining the charac-
ter, the purpose, and the legacy of Rourke’s work, the lens of myth has
resulted in some misguided critiques and some outright misreadings.
First, it is important to understand that Rourke’s materials are not
myths but fables, legends, tales, and so on—“secular, fictional narratives”
rather than “sacred narratives.”10 Rather than myth-making, Rourke
alters and retells American folktales and folk humor—through both
embellishment and, as we’ll see, censorship—toward the didactic ends of
Progressive social criticism. To call Rourke’s project proverbial criticism
is not merely an exercise in rebranding, for it invites into the analysis of
Rourke’s works and motives a useful theoretical vocabulary: Kenneth
Burke’s conception of literature as “proverbs writ large,” as “equipment
for living.”11 Also it helps clarify, and at times eliminate, certain disputes
involving Rourke’s works, of which I will focus on three in particular:
American Humor, Davy Crockett, and “Voltaire Combe.”
Paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder defines a proverb as “a short, gener-
ally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals,
and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorizable form and
which is handed down from generation to generation.”12 In “Literature
as Equipment for Living,” Burke describes proverbs as “strategies for
dealing with situations. Insofar as situations are typical and recurrent in
a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies
for handling them.”13 Within Burke’s overall conception of language as
“symbolic action,” proverbs are the strategies of action crafted from eve-
ryday words, and those words themselves—Burke singles out slang for
consideration—are “simply proverbs not so named, a kind of ‘folk criti-
cism.’”14 Burke goes on to “extend such analysis of proverbs to encom-
pass the whole field of literature,” suggesting a definition of literature
62 S. Zwagerman
as “proverbs writ large.” While myths present truths and explanations,

proverbs (and literature) offer adaptable, “active,” “realistic” strategies—
and “another name for strategies might be attitudes.”15 By this dialectic,
myths are philosophy, and proverbs (and literature) are rhetoric. Myths
construct the context for, and justify the limits of, human action; prov-
erbs (and their literary long forms) offer insights on, and choices for,
human action. We can sum up proverbs and the rest as non-literal sto-
ries with a real-world utility, ranging from brief and bluntly didactic reci-
pes for dealing with a situation—“waste not, want not”—to articulations
of the complexities and dilemmas of the situation itself: something like
Faust.
Now, people can agree that literature is “useful” without agreeing
on much else—or even on what “useful” means. Rourke shared Buck’s
vision that “literature regarded from the social point of view is a pri-
mary means by which the race advances.”16 Burke suggests more prag-
matically that literature can be a primary means by which we understand
and respond to an exigence. Burke would likely be skeptical of the neo-
Romantic vitalism of Buck’s social criticism, and of Rourke’s faith in her
own works’ ability to inspire future artists: if the critic “diffus[es] the
materials of the American tradition,” Rourke believed, then “the artist
will steep himself in the gathered light.”17 (And given Burke’s fondness
for rude wordplay, he would probably note the resemblance between
“afflatus” and “flatulence.”) Further, Burke’s call for the deprofession-
alization of literary appreciation is one Buck and Rourke wished to heed
but could not. For at the heart of Progressive social criticism is an irre-
solvable conflict between the desire for the democratization of art and
the conviction that the learned critic has the special power to bring that
democratization about. As Buck describes it:
The critic’s function is to further [society’s] advance by facilitating the

interaction of literature with society. … Having read a book, in the full
meaning of the term, … [the critic] communicates his experience to them,
in order that the writer’s thinking may more completely interpenetrate
their minds, and thus raise them to the writer’s level.18
Jennifer Schlueter celebrates Rourke’s rejection of the “literary fal-

lacy”19—the belief that literature represents the height of culture. But
although Rourke found the distinction between highbrow and low-
brow culture objectionable, the mission of the Progressive critic made
it impossible for her to escape it: Rourke took on the dubious task of
bestowing folk culture back upon the folk. Her conflicted position—that
America has the “native” materials needed to produce high art to rival
Europe’s, and that American folk art represents a unique aesthetic for
which European comparisons are irrelevant—is mirrored in her writing,
which aims both to celebrate popular culture and elevate it into some-
thing more refined. The results of Rourke’s conflict are not instances of
myth-making but of a didactic, proverbial criticism. What we gain from
Burke as it relates to Rourke is an understanding of her work analogous
to her own understanding of folklore: Rourke sought to re-present folk-
tales and folk humor according to a particular attitude, to make them
equipment for Progressivism.
Published in 1931, American Humor: A Study of the National
Character is widely regarded as Rourke’s most important book, and is
the only one to remain—at least sporadically—in print. While humor
“sustains its own appeal,” Rourke writes in the foreword, “its vigor-
ous power invites absorption in that character of which it is a part.”20
This hint that her study at times merges with its subject is critical for
understanding Rourke’s project, and indeed some have read American
Humor as itself a work of humor: Samuel Bellman goes so far as to call
Rourke “an American comic poet.”21 “There is scarcely an aspect of the
American character,” Rourke writes, “to which humor is not related, few
which in some sense it has not governed.”22 But since Rourke’s project
is to collect, and more importantly reshape, folk culture in the hope that
it will be “handed down from generation to generation,”23 American
Humor is not itself a work of humor (or of poetry), but a proverb about
humor, presenting humor as usable in two contexts, one historical and
one contemporary; humor afforded Rourke’s iconic American folk
characters—the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the Negro—a verbal
mask of play and deception while they sized up a new situation, and the
humorous stories featuring these characters represent a usable past for
the contemporary “creative writer.”24
Focusing less on literature than on the elemental folk materials them-
selves, American Humor nevertheless does the work Rourke believes
literature should do, that of synthesizing, advancing, and propagating.
But since Rourke, in spite of her lyrical style, is writing as a critic and
not a poet, her work exposes the problems of a critical text function-
ing as a “proverb writ large:” criticism, like literature, slides into didac-
ticism when it shifts from articulating the complexities of a recurring
64 S. Zwagerman
human/social exigence to telling us what to do about it. Though a

defender of American culture, Rourke “was not blind to our shortcom-
ings; in fact, one of her tasks was to point them out in order to spur
improvement.”25 To this end, Rourke acted not only as a gatherer but
also as a reviser of “native” materials, altering them to better suit her
proverbial motive: namely, to have folk materials serve the modern art-
ist toward the improvement of society. With that improvement in mind,
Rourke smooths off the rough edges of dialect and obscenity which
characterize much American humor. She mentions—as any study of
early American humor must—the unlettered, sadistic, lascivious charac-
ters Sut Lovingood and Simon Suggs, but, as Joan Shelley Rubin notes,
“Rourke’s language so outweighs the language of her subject mat-
ter … that the reader never glimpses for more than a moment the raw
exuberant style of much American comic material.”26 Proverbs, Burke
says, “imply a command;”27 since Rourke commands her materials
toward the goal of social improvement—and against Brooks’s charge
that America is Europe’s unlettered stepchild—there is no way that
Sut Lovingood can be the poster boy for such a goal. Rourke says that
humor’s “objective—the unconscious objective of a disunited people—
has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the sem-
blance of a society, and the rounded completion of an American type.”28
Whether or not this is the objective of American humor, it is certainly
the objective of American Humor.
Both the book and that objective have received some criticism (far
outweighed by praise, to be sure) from the beginning. Rourke’s con-
temporary Bernard DeVoto cautioned that, in her effort to prove that
humor is a unifying force in American culture, Rourke was “in danger
of finding too much unity.”29 Specifically, DeVoto argued that American
frontier humor was rooted not in fantasy but in realism, and he felt that
Rourke’s commitment to her three “abstracted” and “conventionalized”
comic types discounted realism and the individuation among comic char-
acters.30 In response, Rourke defended both the validity and the original-
ity of her thesis. She insisted that “the transition into fantasy was typically
made,” and declared that “the outlining of the element of fantasy as con-
tinuous in American humor is something specially my own. … I believe
that even the use of the word ‘fantasy’ in relation to American humor is
entirely my own.”31
Rubin is correct that this dispute between realism and fantasy “is hard
to arbitrate.”32 However, we can avoid arbitration entirely by seeing
resolution not as a matter of determining who is right but as a matter

of accepting that DeVoto and Rourke are focusing different termino-
logical lenses upon the realities of American frontier humor,33 DeVoto’s
focused on realism and accuracy, Rourke’s focused on reframing humor
as proverb. Seen this way, the wording of the disagreement between
DeVoto and Rourke becomes significant. DeVoto’s description of
Rourke’s comic figures as “abstracted” and “conventionalized” implies
that Rourke is doing the abstracting and conventionalizing. Rourke too,
as she so often does, uses the passive voice when she writes that “the
transition into fantasy was typically made.” We might well ask, “Made
by whom?” Rourke asserts that she herself effected this transition into
fantasy. When Rourke claims the element of fantasy in American humor
as specially her own—and “even the use of the word ‘fantasy’” as entirely
her own—she is referring to what she believes she, as scholarly author-
ity, has discovered. But by declaring that she herself originated the con-
struction of American humor as fantasy, she is in fact speaking of what
she, as author, has invented. Her words can thus be taken as not only
a response to Brooks’s call but, ironically, an affirmation of DeVoto’s
criticism. Proverbs “aim to ‘discern the general behind the particular,’”34
and so too does American Humor. If we read American Humor as pro-
verbial criticism, then Rourke’s generalized characters are neither correct
nor incorrect, but rather are appropriate to her Progressive purpose of
constructing a usable past. Of course, we can debate the correctness of
taking such an active hand in altering one’s source materials, in blurring
scholarship and proverb. But such is Rourke’s project, and on such terms
is it best understood. Writing in 1942, Joseph Krutch praises Rourke for
giving us “a picture of American cultural life so much livelier than the
one to be got from conventional historians.”35 In one sense this is true:
Rourke’s style is narrative and literary. But though Rourke describes
humor as “a lawless element, full of surprises,”36 when put to use in her
proverbial criticism, humor must be crafted and civilized. As a result,
Rourke’s “proverbial” Sut Lovingood is far less lively than the “real” one,
since Rourke subsumes the folk criticism of Sut’s slang to her own folk
criticism aimed at elevating the culture.
The Progressive paradox thus affects Rourke’s representation of
humor as it does all of her work, and the tensions of that paradox inter-
sect with gender in ways themselves paradoxical—or at least confusing.
On the one hand, Rourke acts as a domesticating force, which in the case
of humor casts her as that most unfortunate stereotype, the feminine
66 S. Zwagerman
corrective to masculine hilarity. On the other hand, American Humor is

truly, in Rourke’s own words, “a pioneering, first hand effort,”37 chal-
lenging the work of her male contemporaries and the masculine associa-
tions of the word “pioneer.” But despite her disputes with Brooks and
DeVoto, and complicating the contemporary impulse to present some-
one like Rourke as a forgotten pioneer of feminist scholarship, is the
fact that her purpose was not to challenge the male-dominated tradition
of American folk humor, but to propagate it. As a result, some readers
today find American Humor a proverb that’s no longer relevant, as our
critical endeavors are motivated less by a desire to pass the divine afflatus
than by a desire to interrogate, subvert, and transgress. Nancy Walker,
for instance, takes issue with Rourke’s claim that “women had played
no essential part in the long sequence of the comic spirit in America,”38
faulting Rourke for ignoring woman humorists like Frances Whitcher. As
Walker reads it, American Humor “describes the emergence and devel-
opment of an essentially white male tradition of American humor.”39 But
while “male” is accurate, “white” is not: “the Negro” is a key figure in
Rourke’s “comic trio,” alongside the Yankee and the backwoodsman.
Granted, Rourke’s discussion of blackface minstrelsy and its relation to
black culture is at times, as Eric Lott describes it, overly “genial” and
“unhistorical.”40 “Negro humor,” Rourke writes, “was always abun-
dant, and from it early minstrelsy drew as from a primal source, keeping
the tradition for direct and ample portraiture. Burlesque appeared, but
burlesque was natural to the Negro.”41 But as much as these words
date, and some would surely say invalidate, American Humor, Rourke’s
portrait according to Lott “has the virtue of acknowledging both the
extensive effect of black cultural practices on blackface performance
and the public effects of blackface itself.”42 Rourke’s proverbial minstrel
arises from a motive and an attitude toward race and culture—an attitude
which sees racial difference as less important than race as an ingredient
in a “national character”—far removed from our current critical scene.
On the other hand, the permeability of the barrier between the real and
the theatrical is central to Rourke’s characterization of American culture,
and in that regard her analysis of minstrelsy, as Lott recognizes, offers an
alternative to the impacted dichotomy of authenticity versus caricature,
realism versus fantasy.
Other books by Rourke would not fare so well against this dichot-
omy. Three years after the publication of the highly regarded American
Humor, Rourke published Davy Crockett. Kenneth Lynn writes, “Davy
Crockett (1934) and Audubon (1936) show signs of haste and are
deservedly forgotten.”43 Stanley Edgar Hyman, like Lynn generally an
advocate of Rourke’s critical importance, calls Crockett “Rourke’s only
thorough failure. … [T]he book is a jumble of the real Crockett and the
legend. … [It] is unscholarly, unanalytic, ‘folksy’ in the worst sense of
the word, and generally an unreadable and poor book.”44 Bellman dis-
misses Crockett as “a juvenile biography”45 written in a “quasi-fictional”
style.46 The reviews which greeted Crockett upon its publication are far
more favorable, praising the book for the very quality later reviewers find
unacceptable: Rourke’s blurring of history and legend. V.L.O. Chittick
“justifies” Rourke’s integration of “the fact and fiction that have gath-
ered together around the name of Crockett” and defends the book’s
“meticulous scholarship.” He calls Crockett “a gratifying work of art,”
but also insists that Rourke “need never fear that her results will be seri-
ously invalidated by anyone else’s study.”47 Another contemporaneous
reviewer, Mark Van Doren, says that “the things [Crockett] might have
said and done are so little different from the things he did say and do,
and the whole body of lingo is so interesting and typical in itself, that
Miss Rourke rightly enough represents it all.”48 But the anxious need
to defend Rourke’s work which marks Chittick’s review appears in Van
Doren’s as well: “no reader should quarrel with such a method when it is
employed by so able and intelligent a writer as Miss Rourke.”49 In words
of praise that today read as gendered condescension Van Doren con-
tinues, “the privilege of idealization is one again that no rational reader
will deny so charming a writer as Miss Rourke.”50 But writing fifteen
years after Van Doren, Hyman makes it clear that the critical scene has
changed; though Crockett “made available to American writers aspects of
American frontier tradition,” it “unfortunately made them available in a
form any serious writer could be pardoned for ignoring.”51
But Rourke had demonstrated her critical, scholarly ability in
American Humor, and there’s no reason to think that she would sud-
denly lose this ability in the writing of subsequent books. Instead, what
if the “serious writer” were not Rourke’s intended audience, and “seri-
ous” scholarship not her intended purpose? Might the movement from
American Humor to Davy Crockett be not a decline but a progression?
Reviewers’ disagreements about Crockett can be understood as the con-
sequence of Rourke’s proverbializing motive. In American Humor, there
are three voices: the voice of Rourke the scholar talking about humor,
the voice of Rourke the fictionalist (as in the “Toward evening of a
68 S. Zwagerman
midsummer day” excerpt, above), and the voices of the comic charac-
ters themselves. But in Crockett, the scholarly voice is rarely heard, and
is instead cordoned off in a thirty-page bibliographical essay at the end
of the book. “I know that the scholarship in Davy Crockett and Audubon
can be invisible to those who do not know the field,” Rourke com-
plained.52 But that invisibility is her own doing, a result of her stylistic
choice and her authorial motive. That is, Crockett, as an effort to diffuse
folk materials not to other scholars but right to the folk, is an even more
direct attempt than American Humor to put Rourke’s Progressive ide-
als into action. So rather than reading Crockett as a sudden, inexplicable
decline in Rourke’s abilities in the three years since American Humor,
reading it as a work of proverbial criticism positions it as part of a pur-
poseful progression. In making Davy Crockett, a frequent example in
American Humor of the comedic backwoodsman character, the subject
of his own book, Rourke employs to an even greater degree than she
did in American Humor a style which participates in the humorous tales
she relates, a transgressive style which often confounds or displeases her
(mostly male) critics. So against such criticisms, we can see Rourke as
participating in the American comic tradition, specifically in a type of sto-
rytelling which willfully plays with the distinction between fact and fic-
tion. That is, Rourke does with Crockett what she had done with Sut
Lovingood. Brooks is correct in his opinion that Rourke’s books “were
outgrowths of a single conception and a governing idea:”53 the idea that
America’s folk heritage is sufficient to nurture the nation’s artistic pro-
duction, and the conception that the critic is an essential participant in
bringing about that artistic and social evolution. With Crockett, Rourke
slides the scale of criticism/participation further into participation and
thus, as Rubin notes, the book’s style “needs to be considered as func-
tional.”54 Functional too is Rourke’s bowdlerizing of the Crockett lore.
In folklore, the “layers of truth and fiction become one, indistinguish-
able from each other.”55 The function of Crockett is not to distinguish
truth from fiction, but to transmit the Crockett folklore in the interest
of Rourke’s didactic Progressive purpose, making proverbial criticism.
Rubin, DeVoto, and others are certainly justified in criticizing Rourke’s
censorship of American humor. But the attendant representation of
Rourke as a conservative force occludes recognition of the transgressive
character of her scholarship. Though Hyman does recognize Crockett
as an attempt at “diffusing” American folk materials, he takes Rourke’s
freedom of movement between fact and fiction as a sign of “gullibility,”
as if she didn’t know where the real Crockett ended and the legendary
Crockett began.56 Certainly, if we read Crockett as historical scholar-
ship, we can legitimately criticize its failure to stick to the facts. But if
we read it as participatory, proverbial scholarship, then it is a text which
willfully plays—as invited by her material—with the distinction between
fact and fiction. The transgressive scholarship of American Humor and
Davy Crockett is not itself humor per se, but a scholarly writing absorbed
“in that [humorous] character of which it is a part,” and written against
a predominantly male tradition of academic seriousness.
So if we place Rourke’s work in the context of her ideology
(Progressivism) and her motive (proverbial criticism), it makes sense.
If we don’t, we may find ourselves—as many of Rourke’s critics did—
not “getting it.” Perhaps the starkest example of this—the punchline, as
it were, to my argument—is Samuel Bellman’s response to an essay in
The Roots of American Culture. It is a minor sketch of an equally minor
figure: the American artist Voltaire Combe, whom Rourke herself admits
“seems to have had no influence at all.”57 Rourke’s interest in Combe’s
work is precisely its marginality:
Perhaps the history of American art or its major directions cannot be

understood until these minor, even personal works are taken into account.
They have arisen in all periods, and they may have something to say as to
the American character. … In a broadly compassed social study [Combe]
and others like him would have an essential place.58
In a consideration of Rourke’s work as proverbial criticism, the essay

“Voltaire Combe” has an essential place. Most of Rourke’s critics, if
they mention the sketch at all, do so in passing, seeming to know about
this “obscure naturalistic artist”59 only what Rourke herself has written.
Rubin gives the piece two sentences, Hyman one. But Bellman devotes
more than three pages to Rourke’s “imaginative essay,” her “fictional-
ized biographical sketch” of Combe which “Hyman mistook for a fac-
tual account.”60 Recall Van Wyck Brooks’s question: “If we need another
past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we
might even invent one?”61 Bellman suggests that, from the “quasi-
fictional” Crockett to the “illustrative fable” “Voltaire Combe,” Rourke
has moved from proverbial criticism all the way into proverbial inven-
tion.62 Since Rourke had always tended toward fictionalizing, it is not
surprising that Hyman “took Rourke’s hypothetical village-artist as a real
70 S. Zwagerman
person”63—a mistake Bellman seems pleased to correct, mentioning it

three times.
But it is Bellman who is mistaken: Voltaire Combe (1837–1916) was
a real person, who in his later years lived about six blocks from Rourke in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although Rourke, as usual, does not cite her
sources in “Voltaire Combe,” the biographical details she provides cor-
respond with other information published about the obscure artist.64 For
example, Combe’s obituary in the Grand Rapids Herald mentions an
essay entitled “Art in America,” in which Combe denounced modern art
in all its varieties.65 Rourke quotes from “a long article” in which Combe
declares:
Is art retrograding in America? Yes, when compared with the art of sev-
enty years ago, for then the nearest approach to nature was the artist’s aim.
What is art? Is it the capacity to depict undefined departures of eccentric
pencils and technical exaggerations? The latest in art is not the highest.
Pupils, learn to draw at home—not in Paris!66
Rourke does not name the source of this quotation, but it likely
came from “Art in America.” Yet despite the first sentence of Rourke’s
essay—“The queer name is not an invention”67—and despite the fact
that Rourke had written five book-length biographies of historical fig-
ures, Bellman took Voltaire Combe to be not like them but like the
Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the Negro: archetypal, proverbial inven-
tions. For Bellman to assume that Combe is fictional and that Hyman
was wrong seems counterintuitive: we would not expect the author of
previous historical biographies to suddenly begin making up her sub-
jects. Rather Bellman, as author of one of the two full-length studies of
Rourke and her work, should have expected Rourke’s research to turn
up forgotten eccentrics like Voltaire Combe.
But familiarity with Rourke’s work, with her style and motives, could
actually make one more likely rather than less likely to assume that
Voltaire Combe is fictional. Imagine reading Rourke’s major works in
chronological order, beginning with Trumpets of Jubilee, of which this
vivid description of Henry Ward Beecher is typical:
He seemed intent upon giving himself, his many selves, the full range
of his emotions, his thoughts, his purposes, his motives; his large
themes uprose out of an amplitude of self-portrayal. … He was called a
mountebank; edification in his pulpit was said to give way to entertain-

ment; Beecher himself admitted that people came to his church as they
went to Barnum’s Museum. … Beecher achieved his largest fame in the
realm of violence, as he plunged into the tumultuous undertow of the
anti-slavery agitation. Almost insensibly he had moved into a blind and
gross opposition to slavery, lifted to drastic avowals by the intoxication of
his own fervor, it seems, as he improvised a slave auction at a public meet-
ing held to raise money for the freedom of two slaves whose case obtained
a special sympathy. In Plymouth, he continued the crude and terrible
drama, selling women and children by public subscription.68
Here is the extensive use of passive verbs and the proliferation of adjec-
tives and adverbs so characteristic of Rourke’s style, a style “somewhat
fatiguing”69 and often frustrating, as we find in this excerpt the absence
of citation for which Rourke is so often criticized. But as Rubin states,
Rourke’s style, however fatiguing or frustrating, is functional, is in
accord with her authorial motives. Note Rourke’s portrayal of Beecher
as self-consciously theatrical, as making himself larger-than-life through
“an amplitude of self-portrayal.” In the Foreword to Trumpets of Jubilee
Rourke writes:
As the new century rolled into amplitude a chosen people moved forward.
… [M]any shrill or stentorian voices were lifted; orators appeared on every
platform; with their babel arose an equal babel of print; perhaps there
never was such a noisy chorus or so fervid a response. Words—the pub-
lic mind was intoxicated by words; speech might have provided liberation;
sheer articulation apparently became a boon. A public which was not yet a
civilization, which much less composed a society, might have been seeking
a common legend or sign manual.70 (emphasis added)
A subtle but significant echo sounds several years later in Audubon’s

bibliographical essay: “The following works have been highly use-
ful in amplifying the circumstances of Audubon’s life.”71 Once again,
in discussing her sources for Davy Crockett, Rourke uses almost the
same words: “The following books have been used to amplify or cor-
roborate known facts as to Crockett’s life.”72 From Trumpets of Jubilee
to “Voltaire Combe,” Rourke’s oeuvre can be read as evolving from
an attraction to amplified, larger-than-life characters like Beecher and
Barnum to the amplification of no-larger-than-life people like Voltaire
Combe who, by Rourke’s own admission, is important not as a public
72 S. Zwagerman
figure but as a proverbial figure, an anthropomorphized counterstate-

ment to the highbrow dismissal of lowbrow culture. Hyman, who was
so dismissive of Crockett and Audubon and who finds even American
Humor marred by distortion, admits that “sometimes the distortion is
a brilliant restoration.”73 So to engage with Rourke’s writing on its own
terms—and to take pleasure in the process—one must accept it as didac-
tic narrative and set aside questions of authenticity, and one must accept
it as proverbial criticism and as an act of participation in the exaggerated
comic character of American folk culture. Having done so, the cumu-
lative effect of Rourke’s style of amplification and motive of proverbi-
alization may have led Bellman to assume that, given her liberties with
historical figures, Rourke may well have invented outright the unlikely
American artist with the improbable name.
At its best, Rourke’s work achieves the critical insights of what Burke
calls “the comic frame,” through which we identify and try to transcend
the opposition of “antithetical over-emphas[e]s.”74 The comic frame
“considers human life as a project in ‘composition,’ where the poet
works with the materials of social relationships. Composition, translation,
also ‘revision,’ hence offering maximum opportunity for the resources of
criticism.”75 “In the humorous frame of mind,” John Morreall writes,
“we can challenge any standard belief, value, or convention.”76 In the
same way that Rourke presents not just Beecher but American society
as a whole as the theatrical product of its own composition, Rourke’s
proverbial criticism composes, translates, and revises its subjects. In the
process, her work transcends the distinction between fiction and his-
tory, proverb and criticism. But if these distinctions are so troubled in
Rourke’s work that Bellman thinks she invented Voltaire Combe, then
perhaps Rourke took her project of “living history” a step too far.
Questions about factual accuracy may not apply to proverbs or jokes, but
they certainly apply to scholarly writing.
If, as Dundes says, “Proverbs fit certain situations [and] are not
always true for all time,”77 do Rourke’s works still serve as useful “equip-
ment for living,” or are they proverbs for exigencies which no longer
exist? After all, as Walker writes, “The concept of a ‘national character’
was abandoned, and with good reason, several decades after Constance
Rourke’s study of American humor [and the national character] was
published in 1931.”78 American critics no longer publish impassioned
objections to the claimed superiority of European literature. And it
would be hard to make the case that American artists need the stories
of Davy Crockett. Dundes claims, “I have come to believe that no piece
of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something.”79
If Crockett’s stories are no longer broadly and publically “meaning-
ful”—that is, no longer convey relevant attitudes and strategies—then
neither is Rourke’s Crockett. So when Hyman80 and Victor Greene81
lament that no one has adequately advanced or built upon Rourke’s
particular form of criticism, it could be that the work no longer gives
us a proverb, an attitude, that we need. American Humor goes in and
out of print, and Rourke’s work is periodically admired in passing (see
Boskin, Denning, Lhamon, and Susman), criticized for its historical blin-
ders (Walker and gender, Lott and race) or revived and reclaimed by the
advocates of a new theoretical turn (Schlueter and performance studies).
Burke stresses that the strategies and attitudes presented in proverbs and
literature are active and adaptable; Rourke’s error, comparatively minor
in American Humor but substantial in Davy Crockett, was presuming to
know which proverbs people needed, presuming that she had correctly
sized up the American exigence. As Buck cautions:
The critic’s reading … will continually arrive at valuations of particular

books and authors, but must never regard these valuations as having, even
for the critic himself, more than a present validity and a relative truth. His
childish estimate of The Swiss Family Robinson probably differs widely from
his grown-up verdict upon it. But his second judgment is not necessarily a
truer judgment than the first, nor the first than the second.82
So in this respect at least, Rourke’s works are indeed living prov-

erbs, equipment for living not for their content but for their sta-
tus as cautionary tales for academics, lest the joke be on us. After all,
Rourke’s Progressive vision is still very much with us. Recall Gertrude
Buck’s starry-eyed description of the critic’s role as “serving the sole
end of the reader’s limitless progress.”83 The words recall a T-shirt
from twenty-five years ago, worn by some of my classmates in a teach-
ing credential program: “I touch the future: I teach.” White and well
intentioned, eager to introduce our students to their own culture, we
arrived at our internships in bankrupt urban high schools clutching
copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X or lessons on the poetry of
hip-hop. Midway through the semester, as I introduced a new unit on
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an African American student raised
74 S. Zwagerman
his hand: “I’m sick of all this black shit. Why are all the people we read
about pimps and drug dealers and poor people? I want something like
Little House on the Prairie with black people in it.” The moral of this
proverb—my error, Rourke’s error, perhaps the error of any criticism
which plays its politics with too heavy a hand—is that one should not
presume to know which proverbs people need. Although a final irony
must be noted: what this student wanted—sort of a black Swiss Family
Robinson—is just the sort of thing Rourke sought to offer in Davy
Crockett: a domesticated, middle-class version of American folk culture.
Notes
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988): 22.
2. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial 64 (1918): 339.
3. Van Wyck Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day
America (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969): 91.
4. Gertrude Buck, “The Social Criticism of Literature,” in Toward a
Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck, edited by JoAnn
Campbell (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996): 87.
5. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character
(New York: Harcourt, 1931): 3.
6. Gene Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary
Theory (University of Massachusetts Press, 1972): 67.
7. Joan Shelley Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980): 170.
8. Greil Marcus, Introduction, American Humor by Constance Rourke
(New York: New York Review Books, 2004): vii.
9. Buck, “The Social Criticism of Literature,” 78.
10. Alan Dundes, Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984): 1.
11. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973): 296.
12. Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in
the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 24.
13. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 296–7.
14. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 301.
17. Rourke, American Humor, 302.

19. Jennifer Schlueter, “‘A Theatrical Race’: American Identity and Popular
Performance in the Writings of Constance M. Rourke,” Theatre Journal
60 (2008): 534.
20. Rourke, American Humor, ix.
21. Samuel Bellman, Constance M. Rourke (Boston: Twayne, 1981): 137.
23. Mieder, Proverbs Are Never Out of Season, 24.
25. Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture, 85.
33. See Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” in Language as Symbolic
Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966): 44–62.
35. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Constance Rourke: Explorer of Our Folk Arts,”
New York Herald Tribune Books, August 9, 1942: 3.
40. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 7.
42. Lott, Love and Theft, 7.
43.
Kenneth Lynn, “Rourke, Constance Mayfield,” in Notable American
Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971): 200.
44.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of
Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948): 117–18.
45. Bellman, Constance M. Rourke, 49.
47. V.L.O. Chittick, review of Davy Crockett by Constance Rourke, American
Literature 6 (1934): 368–370.
48.
Mark Van Doren, “A Coonskin Classic,” review of Davy Crockett,
by Constance Rourke, Nation, February 28, 1934. In “Constance
76 S. Zwagerman
(Mayfield) Rourke (1885–1941).” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,

edited by Dennis Poupard (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984): 316.
49. Mark Van Doren, “A Coonskin Classic,” 317.
50. Mark Van Doren, “A Coonskin Classic,” 317.
51. Hyman, The Armed Vision, 118.
53. Van Wyck Brooks, Preface, The Roots of American Culture by Constance
Rourke (New York: Harcourt, 1942): v.
55. Gene Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary
Theory (University of Massachusetts Press, 1972): 71.
56. Hyman, The Armed Vision, 117, 118.
57. Constance Rourke, “Voltaire Combe,” in The Roots of American Culture
and Other Essays, edited by Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Harcourt,
1942): 260. “Voltaire Combe” originally published in Nation Oct. 7,
1939: 379–81.
58. Rourke, The Roots of American Culture, 260–1.
61. Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 339.
62. Bellman, Constance M. Rourke, 84, 132.
64. See Mary T. Earle, “By the Grace of Terpsichore and Bacchus,” illustrated
by Voltaire Combe, in The Monthly Illustrator 3.10 (1895): 189–190;
“History Highlights,” Onondaga Historical Association 21.8 (2010):
13; and “Voltaire Combe, An Old School Artist, Expires Suddenly.”
Grand Rapids Herald, Dec. 24, 1916: 3. The collection of the Onondaga
Historical Association Museum includes some of Combe’s works
(http://www.cnyhistory.org/index.html).
65. “Voltaire Combe, An Old School Artist,” 3.
66. Rourke, The Roots of American Culture, 259.
67. Rourke, The Roots of American Culture, 251.
68. Constance Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (New York: Harcourt, 1927):
177–180.
69. Leonard Woolf, “The Big Drummers,” Nation August 6, 1927: 609. In
“Constance (Mayfield) Rourke (1885–1941).” Twentieth-Century Literary
Criticism, edited by Dennis Poupard (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984): 316.
70. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee, vii.
71. Constance Rourke, Audubon (New York: Harcourt, 1936): 322.
72. Rourke, Davy Crockett, 271.
74. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1984): 170.
75. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 173.
76. John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (West
Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2009): 57.
77. Alan Dundes, “Proverbs,” in The New Book of Knowledge Children’s
Encyclopedia (New York: Grolier, 1966): 487.
79. Alan Dundes, Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes
(Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1987): vii.
81. Victor Greene, “Ethnic Comedy In American Culture,” review of Let
There Be Laughter! Jewish Humor in America, edited by Esther Romeyn
and Jack Kugelmass, American Quarterly 51.1(1999): 144.
Bibliography
Bellman, Samuel. Constance M. Rourke. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Bluestein, Gene. The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory.
University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.
Boskin, Joseph. Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture.
Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Brooks, Van Wyck. Preface. The Roots of American Culture by Constance
Rourke. New York: Harcourt, 1942, v–xii.
———. “On Creating a Usable Past.” Dial 64 (1918): 337–41.
———. The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America. Folcroft, PA:
Folcroft Press, 1969.
Buck, Gertrude. “The Social Criticism of Literature.” In Toward a Feminist
Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck, edited by JoAnn Campbell, 56–87.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
———. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966.
———. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973.
Chittick, V.L.O. Review of Davy Crockett by Constance Rourke. American
Literature 6 (1934): 368–370.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 2011.
78 S. Zwagerman
Dundes, Alan. Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes.
Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1987.
——— . “Proverbs.” The New Book of Knowledge Children’s Encyclopedia. New
York: Grolier, 1966.
———. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Earle, Mary T. “By the Grace of Terpsichore and Bacchus,” illustrated by
Voltaire Combe. The Monthly Illustrator 3.10 (1895): 189–190.
Greene, Victor. “Ethnic Comedy In American Culture.” Review of Let There
Be Laughter! Jewish Humor in America, edited by Esther Romeyn and Jack
Kugelmass. American Quarterly 51.1(1999): 144–159. http://muse.jhu.edu.
proxy.lib.sfu.ca/article/2376. “History Highlights.” Onondaga Historical
Association. 21.8 (2010): 13.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern
Literary Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. “Constance Rourke: Explorer of Our Folk Arts.” New
York Herald Tribune Books, August 9, 1942: 3.
Lhamon, W. T. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American
1950s. Washington: Smithsonian, 1990.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lynn, Kenneth. “Rourke, Constance Mayfield.” In Notable American Women,
1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 199–200. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971.
Marcus, Greil. Introduction. American Humor by Constance Rourke, vii–xxiv.
New York: New York Review Books, 2004.
Mieder, Wolfgang. Proverbs are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the
Modern Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. West Sussex:
John Wiley and Sons, 2009.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New
York: Harcourt, 1931.
———. Audubon. New York: Harcourt, 1936.
———. Davy Crockett. New York: Harcourt, 1934.
———. The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays. Edited by Van Wyck
Brooks. New York: Harcourt, 1942.
———. Trumpets of Jubilee. New York: Harcourt, 1927.
Rubin. Joan Shelley. Constance Rourke and American Culture. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Schlueter, Jennifer. “‘A Theatrical Race’: American Identity and Popular
Performance in the Writings of Constance M. Rourke.” Theatre Journal 60
(2008): 529–543.
Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in

the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Van Doren, Mark. “A Coonskin Classic.” Review of Davy Crockett, by Constance
Rourke. Nation, February 28, 1934. In “Constance (Mayfield) Rourke
(1885-1941).” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, 315–332. Edited by
Dennis Poupard. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984.
“Voltaire Combe, An Old School Artist, Expires Suddenly.” Grand Rapids
Herald, Dec. 24, 1916: 3.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Woolf, Leonard. “The Big Drummers.” Nation August 6, 1927: 609. In
“Constance (Mayfield) Rourke (1885-1941).” Twentieth-Century Literary
Criticism, 315–332. Edited by Dennis Poupard. Detroit: Gale Research,
1984.
Author Biography
Sean Zwagerman is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University,
British Columbia, Canada. He is co-editor of Women and Comedy: History,
Theory, Practice in which his essay, “A Cautionary Tale: Ann Coulter and the
Failure of Humor,” appears. He is author of Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as
Rhetorical and Performative Strategy and is interested in the intersections of rhe-
torical theory and speech-act theory, the rhetoric of humor, and public anxiety
about plagiarism and literacy.
Embattled Embodiment: The Sexual/
Intellectual Politics of Humor in Mary
McCarthy’s Writing
“Satire is usually written by powerless people; it is an act of revenge.”1

So wrote Mary McCarthy, a woman intellectual and female satirist
associated with the anti-Stalinist liberal magazine, Partisan Review, in
the 1930s and 40s. Subscribing to the Juvenalian view of satire as an
expression of malice or anger intended to expose human vice and folly,2
McCarthy here makes an assumption about the role of the satirist as
an outsider, who is necessitated by one’s marginalized identity to mask
one’s anger and social protest through the indirect form of humor. The
satirist is often an outsider, marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, reli-
gion, or class. Satire, says Gilbert Highet, is often motivated by a “sense
of personal inferiority, of social injustice, of exclusion from a privileged
group’s humor.”3 This marginalized identity offers a perspective from
which to critique the society to which one partially belongs. The female
satirist is in a unique position as somewhat of an outsider operating
within mainstream society; this dual perspective shapes the often ironic,
double-voiced, or dialogical nature of much of women’s humor.
S. Fuchs Abrams (*) 
School for Graduate Studies, SUNY Empire State College,
New York, NY, USA

82 S. Fuchs Abrams
Of the forms of humor, satire is particularly well suited to female

humorists in that it allows for an indirect form of social critique through
the use of irony, exaggeration, understatement, and at times parody and
invective. Satire is often divided between Horatian satire, a more benign
form of amusement with the intent to reform human vice and folly, and
Juvenalian satire, an attack motivated by malice or anger intended to
ridicule or malign.4 Though Mary McCarthy questioned her own status
as a satirist, she endorsed the Juvenalian view of satire: “The best sat-
ire seems to spring from hatred and repugnance: Swift, Juvenal, Martial,
Pope. I resist the notion that there can be such a thing as ‘gentle sat-
ire’—Addison and Steele, Horace.”5 Paraphrasing Juvenal and looking at
the social injustice and hypocrisy of intellectuals in the interwar period,
McCarthy says: “It is difficult not to write satire.”6 In Modern Satire,
Alvin Kernan similarly notes that the folly of the modern world, that is
the belief in progress, optimistic assumptions about human nature, faith
in machines versus the hypocrisy of nuclear war, mechanized war, the
holocaust, the fallacy of advertising, necessitates the writing of satire and
the exposure of hypocrisy.7
Female satirists like Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker, and Dawn
Powell have developed a more urban and urbane form of humor that
reflects the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated time and place
in which they lived. The rise of modernism, the women’s suffrage move-
ment and emergence of the “New Woman,” the growth of urban cent-
ers, and the increasing sexual and intellectual freedom of women in the
1920s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once
defiant and conflicted in defining female identity within the underlying
assumptions about gender roles in society. These women writers also
defy many assumptions about gender identity and humor in taking on
subjects outside the domestic sphere and assuming a more aggressive,
“unfeminine” stance through techniques of satire, irony, and wit as a way
of masking their social critique of the world around them.
McCarthy bridges the false dichotomy between male/female, sexual-
ity/purity, intellect/emotion, and aggression/subordination and as such
was at once a source of inspiration and an object of contempt. Fellow
writer Alison Lurie praises McCarthy as offering new possibilities for the
smart, passionate woman:
Before McCarthy, if [she] did not become a ‘happy housewife,’ the intel-
ligent woman had two roles: the Wise Virgin and the Romantic Victim,
EMBATTLED EMBODIMENT: THE SEXUAL/INTELLECTUAL POLITICS ··· 83
Athena or Psyche … most of us couldn’t imagine any alternative until

Mary McCarthy appeared on the scene. Her achievement was to invent
herself as a totally new type of woman who stood for both sense and sensi-
bility; who was both coolly and professionally intellectual, and frankly pas-
sionate. When we learned that she had also managed to combine a lively
and varied erotic life with marriage and motherhood, we were amazed.
Maybe, as the editor of Cosmo was to put it much later, we could have it
all.8
Mostly male reviewers were less sympathetic, labeling her as “our lead-
ing bitch-intellectual”9 and the “dark lady of American letters,”10 while
at the same time dismissing her as a “trivial lady’s book writer”11; hav-
ing a sharp wit and a sharp tongue to match was perceived as a threat to
male writers and to the very foundation of female identity. McCarthy was
further criticized by some feminists for her equivocal stance on women’s
issues and her identification with the traditionally “feminine” domestic
arts of cooking, gardening, and fashion.12
How, then, does the smart, sexy woman of wit find a voice in a largely
male-dominated, intellectual landscape? The sharp-witted woman has
had to conceal her aggressive and critical nature both through female
self-fashioning and through the indirection of irony and satire. Like fel-
low wit, Dorothy Parker, who assumed a lady-like guise with hats and
suits and by insisting on being addressed as Mrs. Parker long after her
divorce from Mr. Parker, McCarthy was known for her fashion flare, her
collection of Chanel suits, and even admits to taking several suitcases of
clothing on her trip to cover the Vietnam War for The New York Review
of Books. For McCarthy, this attention to outward appearance was per-
haps an authentic expression of self, and perhaps also a necessary form of
female self-fashioning in male-dominated intellectual circles. In a 1970s
interview she states: “I like the so-called domestic arts, cooking and gar-
dening. I like clothes very, very much … I am interested in beauty, let’s
say … I also like the social gifts that women develop … gifts of obser-
vation and analysis.”13 But such attention to appearance, while render-
ing her less threatening and even seductive, may have undermined her
intellectual seriousness. She describes her first meeting with reputed liter-
ary and cultural critic Edmund Wilson, where she was wearing a black
silk dress with a silver fox fur hanging from her neck, “more suited to a
wedding reception than to a business meeting in the offices of a radical
magazine”—she was soon after courted by Wilson and later married him.
84 S. Fuchs Abrams
McCarthy notes that, while she was accepted into New York intellectual
circles, it was in part through her male relationships, and she maintained
a kind of peripheral status: “I was a source of uneasiness and potential
embarrassment to the magazine,” recalls McCarthy in the preface to her
collected Theatre Chronicles “which had accepted me, unwillingly, as an
editor because I had a minute ‘name’ and was the girlfriend of one of
the boy’s, who had issued a ukase on my behalf.”14 McCarthy is here
referring to Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, with whom she had a
relationship until she moved on to Edmund Wilson. “They let me write
about theatre because they thought the theatre was of absolutely no con-
sequence,” says McCarthy. The Partisan Review boys considered her
to be “absolutely bourgeois throughout. They always said to me very
sternly, ‘You’re really a throwback. You’re really a twenties figure’ …
I was a sort of gay, good-time girl, from their point of view. And they
were men of the thirties. Very serious.”15 The use of concealment, in
dress and through the mask of humor, was either a brilliant strategy or a
form of self-defeat, but it was one necessitated by the times.
The juxtaposition of sharp wit and feminine charm has led male crit-
ics in particular to characterize McCarthy as a kind of femme fatale, at
once threatening and beguiling. In his essay aptly titled, “The Dark
Lady of American Letters,” New York intellectual Norman Podhoretz
describes Susan Sontag as carrying the sexual/intellectual mantle
from Mary McCarthy: “the next Dark Lady would have to be, like her
[McCarthy], clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing … criti-
cism with a strong trace of naughtiness.”16 He then goes on to describe
the physical resemblance between McCarthy and Sontag, as temptresses,
with their attractive figures and black hair. Would any male intellec-
tual be characterized as “naughty” and described or judged in terms of
physical appearance? Other male reviewers describe McCarthy in simi-
larly beguiling and menacing terms. Norman Mailer brands McCarthy
“a modern American bitch”17 while Brock Brower says she has “one
of the most knifelike female intelligences” and a “devastating female
scorn.”18 Fellow Partisan Review editors William Barrett and Dwight
Macdonald describe her as “brandishing her whips” and having a “shark-
ish smile.” MacDonald, who was the object of her satire in the depic-
tion of Macdougal Macdermott in The Oasis elaborates: “when most
pretty girls smiled at you, you felt great. When Mary smiled at you,
you checked to see if your fly was undone.”19 So many of these images
revolve around violence and aggression (knives, whips, sharks) and serve
as threats of emasculation. For a woman, assuming an aggressive and

intellectually/sexually dominant position is seen not as a sign of strength
but as a form of transgression deserving of negative judgment, hence the
label “bitch.” In her essay “Our Leading Bitch Intellectual,” a phrase
appropriated by Beverly Gross from a review by Hilton Kramer, Gross
explores the misogynistic implications of the word “bitch” tradition-
ally used by men to describe “a lewd woman, an unfaithful woman, a
frigid woman, a malicious woman, a powerful woman”20 to which one
might add a smart, funny, and outspoken woman. About McCarthy she
states: “Above all, she was a woman who had a mind and spoke it. In a
man, power, assertiveness, and contentiousness are laudable. A woman
with the same traits is domineering, threatening, castrating—in a word,
a bitch.”21 For McCarthy and other female wits, there was a necessity to
mask their social critique through humor and feminine charm. As fellow
female intellectual Elizabeth Hardwick observed: “A career of candor
and dissent is not an easy one for a woman.”22
While many male critics saw McCarthy as too smart and sassy, or
not “feminine” enough, some female critics considered her not to be
enough of a feminist.23 In addition to her embrace of what she describes
(in somewhat sexist terms) as the more “womanly” or domestic arts of
fashion, cooking, and gardening in her personal life, she resists classifica-
tion of herself professionally as a “woman writer” and is not drawn to
or even shuns what she considers the shrillness and defensiveness of cer-
tain feminists. McCarthy takes a more universalist perspective (and, some
might argue, in this regard she anticipates more recent “post-feminist”
views): “I don’t have much suffragette side. I think of myself as a per-
son, not as a woman; belonging, you know, to the world, not to a lot
of other women. I can’t stand people who hold themselves together, in
pressure groups and interest groups, and are motivated usually by envy
of other people … I’m sure envy and self-pity are the great sins of our
particular period, and are companion sins to each other,” says McCarthy
in a 1963 interview.24 She clarifies her stand on feminism in later inter-
views, explaining that she supports legal rights for equality—“I believe
in equal pay and equality before the law and so on”25—but that she does
not see it as a gendered issue. “As for public issues, like the right to legal
abortion? I’m for that. But that has nothing to do with feminism …
To me it’s just a question of freedom. If men could have abortions I’d
be for that.”26 But reproductive rights in particular is certainly a gen-
dered issue; to deny it as such is perhaps more idealistic than practical.
86 S. Fuchs Abrams
What McCarthy objects to is the tone of some feminists, which she

considers to be “the self-pity, the shrillness, and the greed” or “covet-
ousness” of what men have.27 Particularly in the domestic sphere of mar-
riage, McCarthy sees equality not as a question of gender but as a matter
of practicality: “in marriage, or for that matter between a woman and her
lover or between two lesbians or any other couple, an equal division of
tasks is impossible—it’s a judgment of Solomon. You really would have
to slice the baby down the middle.”28 But, one must ask, why is it more
often the woman who is put in a subordinate position in marriage, often
financially dependent and assuming the primary responsibilities of care-
taker and homemaker, regardless of her educational accomplishment or
potential professional status? Further, how has McCarthy benefited in
her domestic relationships from having hired help (she admits that she
had a nurse for her son as well as a cook at times) that other less privi-
leged women might not enjoy? Though McCarthy may not see herself as
“burdened” or persecuted for her gender, her female characters illustrate
the conflicted identity of the intellectually superior and socially subordi-
nated “New Woman,” a subject she confronts with wit and irony.
While McCarthy resists the category of “woman writer,” she says
she identifies more with the “women writers of sense” than with the
“women writers of sensibility.” The “sense women [Jane Austen, George
Eliot, Edith Wharton] are strong with a kind of robust mind, with com-
mon sense, a certain knowledge of the world and the way things work,
and with humour.”29 Women sense writers, says McCarthy, are not
very good at creating male heroes; their men tend to be “cads” or “rot-
ters,” “charming, weak men.” And the heroines tend to be highly self-
conscious and self-doubting. “She’s always thinking about herself, and
doubting herself, she’s partly observing and partly doubting herself, and
this is rather the conventional heroine of the woman novelist.”30 As with
the comedic turn in her writing, which seems to take over her writing
unintentionally, the portrayal of the self-doubting, hyper-conscious hero-
ine seems to come naturally to McCarthy. “I always try to make [the her-
oine] different from myself … but as soon as she begins questioning her
motives and representing, let’s say, the conscience, at that moment she’s
too close to me and I don’t like her.”31 While McCarthy writes more far-
reaching political and social satire—including The Oasis, a conte philosophe
or philosophical tale satirizing attempts by intellectuals in the 1940s to
form libertarian social utopias, and The Groves of Academe, a satire on
fellow-traveling liberal faculty at a small, liberal arts college (read Bard)
during the 1950s—some of her most powerful writing addresses the

issues of gender identity and the conflicted role of the woman intellec-
tual in more autobiographical works like The Company She Keeps and in
her best-selling novel about the Vassar class of 1933, The Group.
This essay will focus on the gender politics of humor and on how
McCarthy exposes the conflicted identity of the sexual intellectual in
The Company She Keeps (1942) and in her autobiographical writing.
The protagonist of The Company She Keeps, Margaret Sargeant, is a
Trotskyist and writer for the leftist magazine, The Liberal (read Partisan
Review), who is engaged in a string of unsatisfying sexual relationships
with men in a quest to find her “self” or true identity. This combina-
tion of moral and intellectual superiority and feminine self-doubt typi-
fies the McCarthy heroine and is exacerbated by her relationship with
men. As a kind of truth seer and bringer of knowledge who is at once
valued for her insight and resented for critical judgment, Margaret finds
herself at once in a position of intellectual superiority and physical sub-
ordination to the men around her in what can only be described as a
sadomasochistic posture. In the opening story, aptly named “Cruel and
Barbarous Treatment,” Margaret gets a kind of sadomasochistic pleas-
ure in playing her soon-to-be estranged husband against her soon-to-be
rejected lover. The operative word is play, since Margaret describes her
actions in the language of performance, separating her mind from her
body, with a kind of third-person power of observation over her own
actions. The extramarital affair is viewed by Margaret as “a momentous
game whose rules and whose risks only she herself knew.”32 She sees
herself as a “stage manager” and the affair as an occasion “for exercis-
ing superiority over others”; that is, she plays the devoted wife to make
her lover jealous, she discloses details about her affair to evoke reactions
from her female friends, and she orchestrates the “reveal” about the
affair to her husband to maximize the emotional impact in a sadomaso-
chistic emotional tour de force. “This was, she knew, the most profound,
the most subtle, the most idyllic experience of her life. All the strings of
her nature were, at last, vibrant. She was both doer and sufferer—she
inflicted pain and participated in it.”33 Though Margaret indulges in
the pathos of the moment, she is left feeling empty when her husband
doesn’t fight for the marriage and leaves her to confront the prospect of
marriage to “the Young Man,” a vapid ingénu. Margaret goes on to have
a string of unsatisfying affairs from the bourgeois businessman in “The
Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” to the liberal intellectual in “Portrait
88 S. Fuchs Abrams
of the Intellectual as a Yale Man” in a vain quest for self-validation and

self-knowledge through sexual and intellectual conquests.
McCarthy’s heroine here resembles herself, and in her autobiogra-
phy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938, McCarthy describes
her sexual promiscuity and separation of thought and feeling as a not
so gay divorcee living on the ironically named Gay Street in New York’s
Greenwich Village after her divorce from first husband, actor Harold
Johnsrud: “It was getting rather alarming,” confesses McCarthy. “I real-
ized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different
men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head
I talked on the telephone with somebody else. Though slightly scared by
what things were coming to, I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no one
does.”34 But, as cultural critic Diana Trilling observed, there was some-
thing desperate and even pathological in McCarthy’s promiscuity and
emotional disengagement, a sense of compensating for some perceived
lack or form of self-punishment, perhaps.35 Her protagonist, Margaret
Sargeant, couches her actions in terms of social and intellectual if not
moral superiority:
The men she had known during these last four years had been, when you
faced it, too easily pleased—her success had been gratifying but hollow. It
was not difficult, after all, to be the prettiest girl at a party for the share-
croppers … And if she had felt safe with the different men who had been
in love with her it was because—she saw it now—in one way or another
they were all of them lame ducks … Somehow each of them was handi-
capped for American life and therefore humble in love. And was she, too,
disqualified; did she really belong to this fraternity of cripples, or was she
not a sound and normal woman who had been spending her life in self-
imposed exile, a princess among the trolls?36
McCarthy was criticized for this condescending, superior attitude in her

fiction. Fellow Partisan Review intellectual Dwight Macdonald says:
“Why does she have to be so goddamned snooty, is she god or some-
thing? You begin to feel sorry for her poor characters, who are always so
absurd or rascally or just inferior and damned—she’s always telling them
their slip’s showing … The trouble is she is so damned SUPERIOR to
her characters, sneers at most of them and patronizes the rest.”37 But if
McCarthy casts a cold eye on her male characters, she is similarly critical
of female characters (note her satire of the educated elite Vassar grad-
uates of The Group) and in particular of her autobiographical heroines
like Margaret Sargeant. She is further indicted by male critics for her
critical outlook and seeming lack of empathy in her depiction of char-
acter. In his autobiographical study, The Truants: Adventures Among the
Intellectuals, William Barrett says McCarthy’s work lacked “the simple
virtue of feeling.”38 In a more recent review of McCarthy entitled “A
Glint of Malice,” Morris Dickstein says that “she has the essayist’s gift
for describing a world but not the novelist’s power to make it move, or
make it moving.”39 McCarthy categorizes herself among the so-called
“writers of sense” rather than the “writers of sensibility” and is gener-
ally more interested in the novel of ideas than in portraying psychologi-
cal characterization, and she concedes that, writing comic characters
and satire in particular “does tend to dry one’s feelings out a little.” But
why is this superior and critical stance, which is at the heart of the male
humorist or satirist’s project, considered inappropriate or an inadequacy
in a female humorist, as if being female and superior or intellectual were
incompatible?
Behind this intellectually superior and sexually liberated posture is an
underlying sense of self-doubt as expressed by the conflicted role of her-
oines such as Margaret Sargeant. In “The Man in the Brooks Brothers
Shirt,” Margaret plays the bohemian intellectual to Mr. Breen’s bour-
geois businessman. On a train trip to Reno to get a divorce before her
marriage to her fiancé, the “Young lover,” Margaret indulges in a one-
night stand with this conventional business type, but it is not without
moral or physical consequence. While she assumes a superior posture and
helps the businessman gain a degree of self-awareness regarding his life
and marriage, her physical encounter is described in masochistic terms
as a kind of self-sacrifice using Christian imagery of martyrdom: “This,
she thought decidedly, is going to be the only real act of charity I have
ever performed in my life; it will be the only time I have ever given any-
thing when it honestly hurt me to do so.”40 McCarthy uses italics to
separate her inner thoughts from her physical actions. She extends the
Christian metaphor, describing the sexual act as “the mortification of the
flesh achieved [ironically] through the performance of the act of pleas-
ure.” She “stretched herself out on the berth like a slab of white lamb on
an altar. While she waited with some impatience for the man to exhaust
himself, for the indignity to be over, she contemplated with burning nos-
talgia the image of herself, fully dressed with the novel, in her Pullman
seat, and knew with the firmest conviction, that for once she was really
and truly good, not hard or heartless at all.”41 Her sexual encounter is
90 S. Fuchs Abrams
at once an act of self-abnegation and moral ascendency, with Margaret

achieving a kind of spiritual goodness in helping others while being a
“bad” girl in the eyes of society. Like McCarthy, Margaret is conflicted
by a Christian sense of morality, where extramarital sexuality is associated
with sin and punishment, a feeling that is exacerbated by her ambiva-
lent relation to paternal authority by the austere patrician morality of her
father (read grandfather), the denial and deprivation associated with her
Catholic aunt, and the loss of her mother. (McCarthy was orphaned at
the age of six when both her parents died in the flu epidemic of 1918,
had a Romantic, idealized image of her rebellious Irish Catholic father,
and was raised in part by her Protestant grandfather, an established
attorney in the West, and for a period by her austere Catholic aunt in
Minnesota). Margaret further sheds light on Mr. Breen’s life at her own
expense: “At the sign of his life, waiting to be understood, she had rolled
up her sleeves with all the vigor of a first-class cook confronting a brand-
new kitchen,” an oddly domestic metaphor for this worldly woman.
Margaret once again assumes the role of the intellectually superior and
physically subordinate woman in the story “Portrait of the Intellectual
as a Yale Man.” Jim Barnett, based loosely on critic John Chamberlain
with resemblances to Dwight Macdonald,42 is a Yale graduate and
assumes the role of “the average thinking man” who remains cautiously
committed in all aspects of his life, from his relationships to his politi-
cal affiliation. His wife, Nancy, is “the Average Intelligent Woman, the
Mate”; he is well liked and appropriately non-committal in his job at
The Liberal, and he takes a moderate stand during the Trotsky hearings,
a touchstone for liberal and radical intellectuals. By contrast, Margaret
Sargeant is passionately engaged and enjoys the public display both in
her personal and political life. When she joins the staff of The Liberal she
is outspoken and contentious in speech and provocative and beguiling in
her actions. Margaret again assumes the role of the temptress or femme
fatale, who brings knowledge, both sexual and intellectual, to this aver-
age Adam, and is similarly cast out for her sacrifice. Jim is attracted to
her and has a brief affair with her while his wife is pregnant in the hos-
pital, but he continues to be haunted (and tempted) by her presence.
Even when he is no longer sleeping with her‚ Jim wrestles with her in
his conscience before going to bed, feeling a sense of moral judgment
in her voice: “Only she had the power to make him feel honestly, unsen-
timentally, that his life was a failure … Through her he had lost his pri-
meval innocence, and he would hate her forever as Adam hates Eve.”43
So Margaret, the temptress and bringer of knowledge, continues to bear

the burden of womanhood. While he moves on (or sells out) to a secure
job at a commercial magazine appropriately entitled Destiny (as Dwight
Macdonald went on to Fortune magazine), Margaret loses her job at
The Liberal for her outspoken support of Leon Trotsky and is sabotaged
by Jim from getting a job at Destiny (as retribution from her ultimate
rejection of him and final refusal to sleep with him). When he thanks her
some years later for helping him find his professional (and personal) self,
she sarcastically replies: “I’ll have a brass plaque made to hang around
my neck saying, ‘Jim Barnett slept here.’”44 Sex has been a stepping stone
for Jim Barnett to better things, while it only leaves Margaret as the one
who was stepped on. This witty, self-deprecatory remark typifies the
McCarthy heroine, who has the knowledge but is unable to realize the
power of her own potential.
In the final story of The Company She Keeps, “Ghostly Father, I
Confess,” McCarthy explores the underlying origin of the conflicted sex-
ual/intellectual or self-doubting woman of wit. As the title implies, this
vignette explores Margaret’s ambivalent relation to paternal authority
and how it affects her ability to find self-fulfillment and satisfaction in her
relations with others. The father of the title refers at once to the Catholic
Church father, her fictional Protestant father, and the secular authority
of the psychologist. When her second husband, an architect (part artist/
part businessman), expresses discontent with the marriage, he urges her
to see a psychologist to “cure” her of her brooding introspection and
self-doubt, or, as Margaret sees it, to obliterate her conscience and her
personality. (McCarthy expressed similar aversion to psychology and its
normalizing tendency when husband Edmund Wilson had her tempo-
rarily institutionalized for her unstable behavior). Her analyst, himself
a representative of bourgeois mediocrity, claims that her marriage to
Frederick, the architect, is, in fact, more daring than her string of escapist
affairs, for in returning to the confinement and protection of her house-
hold, she is replicating the conditions of her childhood, and in confront-
ing the past she might overcome it. But Margaret realizes that the analyst
is just another male authority figure from whom she seeks validation,
and that true self-knowledge lies in self-acceptance: “Now for the first
time she saw her own extremity, saw that it was some failure in self-love
that obliged her to snatch blindly at the love of others, hoping to love
herself through them, borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed
the light. She herself was a dead planet.”45 But she realizes that she is
92 S. Fuchs Abrams
not a dead planet, that “her inner eye had remained alert,” and this self-
conscious, critical inner eye, this insight, is the key to self-acceptance and
happiness. Rather than seeking to let others define her or to find some
external definition of her being, she comes to accept her own conflicted
self: “Oh my God, do not take this away from me. If the flesh must be
blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity.”46 Margaret paradoxi-
cally looks to God, the Holy Father, in her declaration of self-hood. She
further continues to separate mind and body, with the mind in control
and the body in submission. But for Margaret, and for McCarthy, this
valuation of individual insight is a step toward self-knowledge and female
self-assertion. While McCarthy’s acerbic wit and sexual freedom may be
seen in part as a defense, a sublimation, and even, at times, a form of
self-punishment, it is also a positive assertion of female identity in a male-
dominated society that helped forge the path for future generations of
smart, sexy, funny women.
While works like The Company She Keeps and her best-selling novel,
The Group (1963), enjoyed commercial success, as much for their sala-
cious content as for their literary merit, the backlash against Mary
McCarthy for her sexually explicit subject matter and brazen, satiric tone
branded her as “contrary Mary,” a “modern American bitch,” and a
“dark lady of American letters.” But, one must ask, would McCarthy and
her work have been the subject of as much scrutiny and criticism had she
not been a woman? And why is the critique directed as much against the
writer as her work? Is there a place for a smart, sassy, sexy woman of let-
ters at the comedic table? Thanks to writers like McCarthy, who helped
to break the taboo on sexually explicit and aggressive content through
humor, the answer is increasingly yes. But even contemporary female
comedians like Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and Lena Dunham con-
tinue to struggle with issues of female sexuality, intellect, self-doubt, and
self-assertion, in finding their voice. Following a line of bold, female sati-
rists like McCarthy, the next generation of female humorists can laugh a
little louder.
Notes
1. Quoted in Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept (New York: Coward-
McCann, 1967), 147.
2. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (United States:
Heinle & Heinle, 1999), 276.
3. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1962).
4. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 276–277.
5. Mary McCarthy quoted in Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept: A
Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy (New York: Coward-McCann,
1967), 147.
6. Ibid., 146.
7. Alvin Kernan, Introduction, Modern Satire, ed. Alvin Kernan (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).
8. Alison Lurie, “True Confessions,” New York Review of Books 11 June
1987: 19–20.
9. Hilton Kramer, “Mary McCarthy’s Valentine to Fanny Farmer.” Rev. of
Birds of America. Book Word, Washington Post 23 May 1971: 1.
10. Norman Podhoretz, Making It. New York: Random House, 1967: 154.
11. Norman Mailer, “The Mary McCarthy Case.” Rev. of The Group. New
York Review of Books 17 Oct. 1963: 1–3.
12. Elaine Showalter, “Killing the Angel in the House: Autonomy of Women
Writers,” Antioch Review 32.3 (June 1973): 339–353; Wendy Martin,
“The Satire and Moral Vision of Mary McCarthy,” Comic Relief: Humor
in Contemporary American Literature, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1978).
13. Carol Brightman, “Mary, Still Contrary,” The Nation 19 May 1984:
611–618, rpt. In Gelderman, Conversations 245.
14. Mary McCarthy, “Introduction,” Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles:
1937–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), ix.
15. Elizabeth Niebuhr, “The Art of Fiction XXVII: Mary McCarthy-
An Interview,” Paris Review 27 (Winter-Spring 1962): 59–94, rpt.
Gelderman, Conversations, 14.
16. Podhoretz, Making It, 154.
17. Mailer, “The Mary McCarthy Case,” 1–3.
18. Brock Brower, “Mary McCarthyism,” Esquire 58 (July 1962): 60–65.
19. Carol Gelderman. Mary McCarthy: A Life. (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988), 184.
20. Beverly Gross, “Our Leading Bitch Intellectual,” in Twenty-Four Ways
of Looking at Mary McCarthy, ed. Eve Stewrtka and Margo Viscusi
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 27.
21. Ibid., 28.
22. Elizabeth Hardwick, A View of My Own (NY: Farrar, 1962).
23. See Elaine Showalter, “Killing the Angel in the House,” 339–353; Wendy
Martin, “The Satire and Moral Vision of Mary McCarthy.”
24. Peter Duval Smith, “Mary McCarthy Said: ‘Men Have More Feeling,
Women Have More Intelligence.” Vogue Oct. 1963. Rpt. In Gelderman,
Conversations, 60.
94 S. Fuchs Abrams
25. Miriam Gross, “A World Out of Joint,” The Observer 14 Oct. 1979: 35.
Rpt in Gelderman, Conversations, 176.
26. Carol Brightman, “Mary, Still Contrary,” 245.
27. Ibid., 244.
28. Miriam Gross, “A World Out of Joint,” 176.
29. Peter Duval Smith, “Mary McCarthy Said,” 53.
30. Ibid., 56.
31. Ibid., 56.
32. The Company She Keeps. (New York: Dell, 1942), 10.
33. Ibid., 15.
34. Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 62.
35. Francis Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
2000), 116.
36. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps, 86.
37. Carol Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988), 170.
38. William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Garden
City, New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1982), 65.
39. Morris Dickstein, “A Glint of Malice,” in Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at
Mary McCarthy, 19.
41. Ibid., 88.
42. Niebuhr, p. 8. Though McCarthy says the “Yale man” was based loosely
on John Chamberlain, she clarifies that she never had an affair with him.
44. Ibid., 153.
45. Ibid., 222.
46. Ibid., 222.
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. United States: Heinle &
Heinle, 1999.
Barrett, William. The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. Garden City,
New York:Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1982.
Brightman, Carol. “Mary, Still Contrary.” The Nation 19, May 1984: 611–618,
rpt. in Gelderman, Conversations 245.
Brower, Brock. “Mary McCarthyism.” Esquire 58, July 1962: 60–65.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American
Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Dickstein, Morris. “A Glint of Malice.” Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary

McCarthy. Ed. Eve Stewrtka and Margo Viscusi. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1996.
Gelderman, Carol. Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Jackson: University of
Mississippi, 1991.
Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988.
Gross, Beverly. “Our Leading Bitch Intellectual.” Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at
Mary McCarthy‚ 27.
Gross, Miriam. “A World Out of Joint.” The Observer 14 Oct. 1979: 35. Rpt. in
Gelderman, Conversations, 176.
Grumbach, Doris. The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary
McCarthy. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967.
Hardwick, Elizabeth. A View of My Own. New York: Farrar, 1962.
Highet, Gilbert. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1962.
Kernan, Alvin. Introduction. Modern Satire. Ed. Alvin Kernan. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.
Kiernan, Francis. Seeing Mary Plain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
Kramer, Hilton. “Mary McCarthy’s Valentine to Fanny Farmer.” Rev. of Birds of
America. Book World, Washington Post 23, May 1971: 1.
Lurie, Alison. “True Confessions.” New York Review of Books 11 June 1987:
19–20.
Mailer, Norman. “The Mary McCarthy Case.” Rev. of The Group. New York
Review of Books 17 Oct. 1963: 1–3.
Martin, Wendy. “The Satire and Moral Vision of Mary McCarthy.” Comic Relief:
Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
McCarthy, Mary. The Company She Keeps. New York: Dell, 1942.
———. The Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.
———. Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992.
———. Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles: 1937–1962. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Company, 1963.
Niebuhr, Elizabeth. “The Art of Fiction XXVII: Mary McCarthy- An
Interview.” Paris Review 27. Winter-Spring 1962: 59–94. Rpt. in Gelderman,
Conversations, 14.
Podhoretz, Norman. Making It. New York: Random House, 1967: 154.
Showalter, Elaine. “Killing the Angel in the House: Autonomy of Women
Writers.” Antioch Review 32.3. June 1973: 339–353.
Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics.” The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985.
96 S. Fuchs Abrams
Smith, Peter Duval. “Mary McCarthy Said: ‘Men Have More Feeling,
Women Have More Intelligence.’” Vogue Oct. 1963. Rpt. in Gelderman,
Conversations, 60.
Stewrtka, Eve and Margo Viscusi, ed. Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary
McCarthy. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Author Biography
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Associate Professor of English in the School for
Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State College,
USA. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar
Intellectual and editor of Literature of New York, in which her essay on “Dorothy
Parker’s New York Satire” appears. She is currently working on a book, The
Politics of Humor: New York Women of Wit, is founder and chair of the Mary
McCarthy Society, and is Book Review Editor of Studies in American Humor.
Humor as Clap Back in Lucille Clifton’s
Poetry
Mary Catherine Loving
While I have read and reread the work of Lucille Sayles Clifton
(1936–2010) since the mid-1990s, and although I am black, a woman,
and a poet, I initially did not view myself as her target audience. Trained
by literary theorists from the Chicago school and by still other literary the-
orists vested in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes (1915–1980),
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), I was
initially taken aback by Clifton’s idiosyncratic style, particularly by her
penchant for omitting titles, and her persistent use of the lowercase per-
sonal pronoun (which visits frustration on a writer attempting to copy her
poetry exactly as it is written). What is more, the confessional tone of
her work gave me pause; I was caught off guard, thoroughly confused, by
her merging of genres: poetry, memoir, prose, confession—a condition that
was mitigated only after I read Sylvia Plath’s (1932–1963) poetry and Jean
Toomer’s Cane (1923) some years later. I finally learned that marrying the
academic to the personal was not a bad thing and that my engagement
with a writer’s work might actually be enhanced through such marriage.
M.C. Loving (*) 
Department of Library, Paul Quinn College,
Dallas, TX, USA

98 M.C. Loving
Since my initial reading of Clifton’s work, I have read every book of

poetry she has penned beginning with Good Woman (1987) and continu-
ing to Voices (2010). Rather than continuing to be put off by her idi-
osyncrasies, I began to pay due attention to the quirky items Clifton uses
to create poetry. Blessing the Boats (2000) is my favorite read of Clifton’s
poetry collections, perhaps because at the time of its publication, I had
begun a personal journey that took me some distance from the famil-
iar and deep into the wildly unfamiliar. Or it may be that Blessing the
Boats speaks particularly to me because when it was published, I had read
enough, learned enough, to appreciate Clifton’s genius: her persnickety
attention to language and construction transforms ordinary language;
the simplest prose becomes extraordinary via the poet’s accomplished use
of metaphor, imagery, and nuance. And while Clifton often eschews tra-
ditional forms, her free-verse poetry is no less finely structured than the
Shakespearean, Spenserian, or Petrarchan sonnet forms I pored over in
graduate school.
Notwithstanding my late arrival to her work, Clifton is a prolific
and widely read poet who garnered several awards and honors during
her life. In addition to serving as distinguished professor of Humanities
at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, she also served as Maryland’s poet
laureate from 1974 until 1985. In 1984, Clifton received the Coretta
Scott King Award from the American Library Association for Everett
Anderson’s Goodbye, one of several children’s books that she penned. In
1987, two of her books, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir and Next:
New Poems, were both named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Thus far,
she is the only American poet to have achieved such recognition from
the Pulitzer committee. A 1980 collection, Two-Headed Woman, was
a Pulitzer nominee, and subsequently won the Juniper Prize awarded
by the University of Massachusetts. In 2000, Clifton won the pres-
tigious National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Also included
among her many awards are the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Charity
Randle Citation, and an Emmy Award from the American Academy
of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Clifton was the first African
American woman writer to receive the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly
Poetry Prize, an award which honors a US poet’s lifetime accomplish-
ment. In addition, the Poetry Society of America posthumously awarded
Clifton the Robert Frost Medal, also for lifetime achievement.1 The poet
continues to be recognized for a canon that includes eleven books of
poetry and eighteen children’s books.
HUMOR AS CLAP BACK IN LUCILLE CLIFTON’S POETRY 99
In an attempt to note fully the breadth of Clifton’s poetic reach,

Clifton biographer, Mary Jane Lupton, cites a personal email she
received from Maryland laureate Michael Glaser that explains Clifton’s
enormous appeal. Glaser states, in part:
Readers value Clifton’s poetry for many reasons. Some see her as an
African-American poet documenting the struggles of her people.Others see
her as a feminist who speaks out for women’s rights. Some see in her a
woman who has been abused and who has the courage to write about it
[…]. Many readers treasure her poetry for its spirituality and its struggle to
salvage what grace we can.2
Clearly, Clifton’s poetry appeals to readers from all facets of life. Lupton
suggests that Clifton’s ability with language was inherited from no less
than the poet’s own mother, Thelma Sayles. Sayles was herself a poet, a
“capable, imaginative woman [and] a practitioner of ‘traditional iambic
verse.’”3 Still other Clifton readers have posited the poet in the literary
company of writers Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), May Sarton (1912–1995),
Anne Sexton (1928–1974), Marge Percy (1936–), Ellen Bass (1947–),
Ai (1947–2010), and Sharon Olds (1942–), poets who share a “will-
ingness to write about [a woman’s] sexuality,”4 a woman’s world. The
poetry read here reveals Clifton’s movement in that woman’s world, a
world marked both by artful design and that encourages a reader’s return
again, and once again. Within that world, readers witness firsthand
Clifton’s clap back,5 a type of mordant humor and a lens through which
she explores assaults against and celebrations of a woman’s body.6
Audrey T. McCluskey maintains that it is “[the woman’s] voice in
Clifton’s poetry [that] is her most sustained and her most introspec-
tive.”7 Still, readers will note as well the authority indigenous to that
voice as the poet threads together knowledge(s) from black grandmoth-
ers, mothers, aunts, and big sisters. Clifton is herself a northern child,
but with “southern and African roots.”8 She deftly displays a southern,
womanist voice in the poem “admonitions.”
An admonition, in its simplest sense, is an authoritative caution. In
the poem, Clifton issues caution first to her “boys,” to whom she
“promise(s) nothing / but this / what you pawn / i will redeem / what
you steal / i will conceal / my private silence to / your public guilt / is
all i got.”9 Instead of chastising her offspring, Clifton ignores the actions
of sons who may suffer public ridicule or imprisonment resulting from
100 M.C. Loving
poor life choices: she chooses silence, that is, she chooses not to broad-
cast their failings to the world at large, rather she will keep their dirty
little secrets. In choosing silence, Clifton does not lift up her boys, rather
she turns her back to them; she effectively denies her boys a defense; she
effectively denies their right to laughter. In this way, Clifton cuts her
boys off from their family; they become a “truncated part of a whole
community and kin network”10 which includes the poet and her girls.
In contrast to the lackluster defense offered her sons, the poet’s
admonition to daughters teaches them to fend for themselves in a most
cavalier fashion. In “admonitions,” Clifton urges daughters to use laugh-
ter as a weapon against unwanted sexual advances. The poet affirms
laughter as a defense mechanism in her pointed instruction: “girls / first
time a white man / opens his fly / like a good thing / we’ll just laugh
/ laugh real loud my / black women.”11 Although the daughters begin
as girls in this second stanza, by the beginning of stanza three, their
childhood laughter has been replaced with a biting sarcasm. The newly
formed women are taught to throw back their heads and issue forth
full-throated laughter should they cross paths with a would-be rapist.
Laughter, as a defense mechanism may lack weight; however, laughter
undercuts the assumed control and power of one who would assert his
authority over another’s body. The girls in stanza two become women
by stanza three because the poet has validated their voices, affirmed their
authority over their own bodies, and shown them the strength of their
laughter.
Still, “admonitions” does much more than prepare young black
girls to use laughter as a defense against potential rape. Southern girls
are cautioned always to remember their place; however, should the
situation in which they find themselves call for a rebuke of an adult or
other authority figure, black girls, as young as seven or eight, are taught
the code of nicesty, itself a kind of clap back. The word is an aberration,
formed by combining the words nice and nasty, and is but one example
of code switching that young, southern black girls learn either through
observation or by direct instruction. In the second stanza of “admoni-
tions,” Clifton exhibits her understanding of the code; by the third
stanza, she passes that code to a second generation, “Children,” who
clap back in defense of their parent:
Children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny

say, she is a poet
she don’t have no sense12
Many southern children, especially girls, are encouraged to become prac-

ticed in moving between childhood and adulthood, albeit politely and
without ruffling feathers. Without being accused of disrespectful behav-
ior toward their elders. The “Children” addressed in the poem are put
in a position of authority over the “they” (presumably adults) who ask
indecorous questions about the children’s mother. Notice as well that
the “Children” are posited as an authority over “mama.” In “admoni-
tions,” Clifton accomplishes nicesty’s polite, unobtrusive movement with
capitalization and with its lack—note the lowercase “they,” the lowercase
“mama,” and the capitalization of “Children.” As the children assume
the mantel of adulthood, the sensible participants in the conversation,
the adults become children who lack authority and power. In addition,
having declared herself senseless, Clifton is free to clap back by abandon-
ing behaviors ascribed to sensible people. What is more, laughter teaches
adolescent girls in “admonitions” to worry the line.13 Their collective
movement from adulthood to childhood and from sense to insensibil-
ity and back again “signal[s] moments in which [they] close the gap”
between their own narratives and the narratives spoken by others about
their black bodies.14 Certainly, the text of the black woman’s body
“begin[s] with a compromised relationship to privacy [which renders
those bodies] particularly vulnerable to public unveiling.”15 Laughter
mitigates the girls’ vulnerability, and removes the girls’ bodies from
impolitic public viewing.
While Clifton denies her sons the protection of laughter in “admoni-
tions,” in subsequent poems she attempts to reconnect them to the com-
munity of women and girls, but only if they can master the same tests as
have her girls. The boys must earn their stripes; they must learn to bear
witness to the strength of girls they may have been inclined to ridicule
as weak, or ineffective. Clifton’s poem, “admonitions,” is both ritual and
prayer. The successful completion of this ritual, the end goal of the prayer,
is to return the boys to the familial fold. Clifton’s clap back in “wishes
for sons” visits the so-called curse of menstruation onto her boys.16 Her
phrasing and structuring of the poem reveal the tension and turmoil the
speaker witnesses and are clear throughout the work; her sly laughter at
the poem’s end acts as a valve that releases the tension and turmoil.
102 M.C. Loving
The construction of “wishes for sons” differs from previous poems

read here; the poet uses punctuation and spacing more so than previ-
ously. In “wishes for sons,” the poet uses a double space between the
stanzas. Periods are used particularly to slow down the work, and to
emphasize the poem’s intent. The only comma in the work appears in
stanza four, indicating a pause rather than a complete stop. Clifton uses
punctuation in this way to control the movement of the poem, which is
slow and steady at some points, but quicker near the poem’s end.
“wishes for sons” consists of four stanzas. In the first stanza, the poem
begins its litany of wishes: “i wish them cramps. / i wish them a strange
town / and the last tampon. / i wish them no 7–11.” Here Clifton
offers a wry smile, for certainly she is mocking her sons. Still, the poet’s
wishes for sons go beyond mere mocking, and slight inconvenience. She
also wishes them embarrassment and the trepidation of not knowing if
they may or may not wear white on any particular day:
i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.
All too quickly, Clifton’s wishes for her sons turn from minor incon-
veniences to a reality in which all of their senses may be forced open:
Clifton locates her sons inside women’s bodies. At the second stanza her
boys are not only “consciously inhabiting [a woman’s] body,” they are
also learning the importance of being able to “decode its symptoms.”17
The symptoms the boys must hasten to decode are outlined in the third
stanza of the poem, as the poet wishes her sons: “hot flashes / and clots
like you / wouldn’t believe. let the / flashes come when with they /
meet someone special. / let the clots come / when they want to.” Also
in this third stanza, Clifton nods to the chronic nature of the ritual she
imposes on her sons. Her sly laughter is evinced in the final two lines
of the fourth stanza as she trusts their problems with a body that insists
on shedding its uterus lining every twenty-eight or so days will finally
“bring them to gynecologists / not unlike themselves”—arrogant,
uninformed men.
“wishes for sons” has been read as “an ironic poem about menstrua-
tion [in which] Clifton turns the sexual worldview upside down [in an
effort to] reverse the biology is destiny cliché.”18 Clifton’s boys cross-
dress; however, the poet wants more than a mere change in outward
appearance from her sons: she wants her sons’ hearts to break from car-
rying the weight of a woman’s normalcy. Still, it is important to note
that Clifton’s wish is not for her sons to “break down,” rather she wishes
them to “break open.”19 In this breaking, the sons “shape shift” thereby
gaining firsthand experience of a woman’s reality. Clifton’s wishes for her
sons to recreate them: their dismembered lives become reconstituted as
they recognize the connection they have always had with women.20 In
“wishes for sons,” Clifton again worries the line; however, this time she
worries the line between genders.
Returning her attention to the topic of men as sexual predators,
Clifton presents readers with “An American Story.” The poet’s ironic
laughter is clear beginning with the title of this work. This poet, who
often omits titles altogether and who rarely uses capitalization, is tickled
pink over the idea of an American story writ large. Readers must make
no mistake: this is not a story of stars and stripes forever, or even a story
about the greatness of American citizenship. This narrative digs at the
dark underbelly of American narratives to tell a young girl’s particular
story of sexual violation.
The poet’s movement in the work is readily observed through her use
of capitalization and minimal spacing. She uses capitalization twice: once
in the title, and a second time to identify the interloper who appears in
the poem. Capitalization links “The Nude Dude” and “An American
Story.” “The Nude Dude” is a fixture in this narrative; he is a dues-
paying member of a rape culture that permeates our society to this day.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the routine violation of the bodies
of girls and women in our society ensures that rape is a part of our col-
lective narratives. The movement and spacing allows a reader to compre-
hend better the clap back at the poem’s closing stanza.
“An American Story” consists of nineteen lines and has no discern-
ible spacing with the exception of line fourteen which is indented. At
the site of the indentation, the “little girl” worries the line between
adulthood and childhood as she exhibits an adult knowledge. This adult
nature of the child’s response battles against the girl’s childhood inno-
cence, which she tries to sustain by being a dutiful daughter, one who
is “on the honor roll” until “one year / a naked white guy / parked his
car / by our elementary school / kids called him The Nude Dude and
laughed / when they told the story.” The first few lines describe both
the scene and the characters involved. The interloper, “The Nude Dude”
was unabashedly forward: he sat naked outside an elementary school,
104 M.C. Loving
an action that telegraphs his propensity to harm young children. The

presence of the “naked white guy” has become consistent enough that
youngsters not only laugh at him, they name him. To be clear: that chil-
dren laugh at “The Nude Dude” is critically important. Their laughter
undermines his power, and posits him as a fool who dares to think he has
some kind of superpower, perhaps invisibility, as he meanders naked at a
public school’s parking lot. The children name him as a warning to their
classmates.
At lines eight and nine, the poem begins to move rather quickly as the
child who finds herself the subject of “The Nude Dude’s” gaze explains
her place in this whole affair: “i didn’t believe it / because i was on the
honor roll.” The event is related without the use of punctuation, sug-
gesting an out-of-breath young girl recalling the day she was almost
raped. The event that causes the girl in “An American Story” to worry
the line is the implied threat of violence against her body and the disrup-
tion of her childhood innocence. This threat occurs over the course of a
year before the child’s actual movement.21 The onset of violence occurs
in lines ten through thirteen in which the poet reports that “he hopped
at me / all pink and sweaty” and posed an improper sexual question. At
line fourteen the “honor roll student,” who at first did not believe her
classmates’ story about a naked white guy who lurked about their school,
sheds her childhood innocence and responds as a worldly adult, for in
the final five lines, the young girl unapologetically claps back against
“The Nude Dude’s” sexual aggression with laughter. In these final lines,
the poet suggests that for young black girls to witness a naked white man
exposing his genitals, his “pride,” is no big deal. Such sighting is neither
a rare nor a superlative event; rather, it is commonplace as this young
girl confesses to having seen it “many times/many times.” Put another
way, the threat of sexual violation by white men is a repeated occur-
rence in this child’s American story. The poem’s tone negates the impor-
tance of the interloper’s sexual prowess, and undermines that prowess as
a source of pride. “The Nude Dude” is thus reduced to foil for a lit-
tle girl. His dishonor and inappropriate behavior are highlighted by the
child’s laughter. In “An American Story,” Clifton corrects the myth of
black women’s aggressive sexuality and reclaims both the innocence of
the young girls who populate her poetry and the innocence of black girls
and women caught up in the vicious slave trade.
The girl in “An American Story” and “The Nude Dude” of that
same story no doubt recall the incident differently. Such difference is
to be expected. Our stories, the fabric of our life experiences, are influ-
enced by our own perception of events as much as by the actuality of
those events. Clifton is well aware that black girls’ perceptions, as well as
black girls’ memories, must be validated if black women’s narratives are
to survive.
In “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” Clifton refuses to
accept another’s perception of her life’s story. The poet makes sharp dis-
tinctions between the memories of others and memories of the self, and
she underscores the importance of her storied connections to her past
as well as her intention to keep those connections alive, enduring. The
poem is short, consisting of a single five-line stanza, cited in its entirety
here:
they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.22
Clifton’s clap back in this quick poem is just as quick, just as direct. She
rebuts negative assertions about the value of her memories and of her
black body thereby “destabiliz[ing] … notions of black womanhood”
that are situated only in servitude or slavery. Clifton traces her ances-
try to the “Dahomey women [who gather] in my bones” through her
great-great-grandmother Caroline23; thus she speaks from a private,
historical place about the “interconnective relationship[s] [of] race and
gender,”24 and she will not permit others to recast her memories as a
source of shame rather than recognizing those memories as a source
of pride in self and family. Indeed, in “why some people be mad at me
sometimes,” Clifton claps back to situate both herself, and her memo-
ries, in a time far removed from the period in which she is called upon
to teach young black girls to laugh at the threat of rape. Clifton’s body,
and her memories, exist in a hierarchy of communities. Even as Clifton
counts herself and young black girls among a community of women who
must fend for themselves against the specter of sexual assault, against
loss of identity, she recalls as well her membership in another commu-
nity, a soul community, and an ancestral community. Regular readers of
Clifton’s work will recognize her insistence on her own memories, as she
is wont to remind others that she is a descendant of the famed women
106 M.C. Loving
of Dahomey in West Africa. Clifton’s paternal great-great-grandmother,

Caroline Donald Sale, was an enslaved Dahomey woman “born free in
Afrika in 1822 / died free in America in 1910.”25 Indeed, Clifton is a
descendant of the slave system that she traces to Caroline Sale; however,
the poet no less notes her membership among a “rookery of women”26
and thereby “convey[s] the sense of being part of a black sisterhood like
the Dahomey Amazons.”27
Still other examples of Clifton’s clap back as an acknowledgment of
her community ties are found in the series of poems that represent the
speaker’s conversation with Superman and his alter ego, Clark Kent.
Included in that series is the poem “if i should”28 in which the speaker
laughingly claps back at every narrative that has encouraged young girls
to look outside the self for a hero. The poet has arrived at the point
where she no longer trusts in the myth of the super hero; thus, she puts
the super hero on blast and details his every failing. She expresses her
newfound knowledge regarding the reality of superheroes in a tongue-
in-cheek fashion: the poet prods the incognito hero about his ability to
rescue her should she “enter the darkest room / … and speak / with my
own voice” about the dangers which maim the body and spirit of young
black girls. About the accomplishments and longings of young black
girls. Indeed, Clifton’s disbelief in the super hero is the answer to the
very question she poses and is evinced from the first line of this fourteen-
line work. Despite previous poems in which Clifton laughs in the face of
danger, in “if i should” the poet begins with the premise that while her
laughter may no longer be sufficient to save her, equally insufficient to
the task is a masked warrior from another planet, indeed a masked war-
rior from any planet. In important ways, “if i should” similarly relates a
narrative of identity, which coheres when the poet begins to reject the
censorship of imposed silence. Laughter becomes speech and thereby
reveals both her strength and her vulnerability. The poet was once herself
a “small imploding girl” who was forced into a [spider’s] web of awful-
ness: her father’s sexual abuse of her frail young body and her mother’s
indifference to her plight or her inability to protect the child due to her
own incapacitating illness.
Clifton’s clap back recognizes superman’s disingenuity: he is not
a savior; he cannot rescue her—not from the father/rapist, not from
implosion. Clifton knows that her silence will not protect her. At this
point, the poet has come to an important lesson. She recognizes that
“what is most important to [her] must be spoken, made verbal and
shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the

speaking profits [the self], beyond any other effect.”29 Only her quick,
sure laughter will expose the horrific nature of her childhood existence;
only her quick, sure laughter can commemorate her survival.
A second poem in the series, “final note to clark,” explores further the
poet’s humorous contemplation of both superman’s powers, and a more
serious contemplation of the power of the poet’s voice. In “final note to
clark,” Clifton continues to unravel the narratives of a super power who
watches out for poor black girls; she points out that black girls are the
heroes of their own narratives and they must believe so and begin to act
so. There is no superhero coming to save their lives or change their con-
ditions: they must do this themselves. The sixteen-line poem uses punc-
tuation more frequently—the poet intentionally slows down the narrative
so that the story’s full import may be understood. The speaker in “final
note to clark” has finally come to grips with the falsity of a hero’s exist-
ence. Clifton asks a series of rhetorical questions that effectively explain
her understanding of superman’s inability, her understanding of her own
abuse, her understanding that no one could save her: “what did i expect?
what / did i hope for?” At the poem’s end her humorous but sad obser-
vation finds the speaker accepting both superman and herself as “two
faithful readers” of each other’s narratives—one believing in the other,
who believes as well in the other: “we are who we are, / two faithful
readers, / not wonder woman and not superman.”30
Perhaps the more telling poem in the series is “note passed to super-
man.” In this work, the girl child who trusted in a hero who might save
her has rewritten the narrative of a damsel in distress. The poem consists
of eighteen lines. The poet uses periods to divide the poem into three
stanzas. In the first stanza, lines one through four, the speaker acknowl-
edges her recognition of superman even though he dresses as his alter
ego. In this way, the poet points slyly to her own alter ego.
The poet begins by removing both her mask and that of superman:
“sweet jesus, superman, / if i had seen you / dressed in your blue suit /
i would have known you.” Here, the poet acknowledges the connection
between the superhero and herself. However, in the second stanza, lines
five through eleven, the poet contrasts superman against “that choirboy
clark / who stand[s] around / listening to stories” to suggest a devious
quality to superman’s voice and by extension, to her own. In the third
and final stanza, the poet puts superman on blast: “lord, man of steel,
/ i understand the cape, / the leggings, the whole/ball of wax. / you
108 M.C. Loving
can trust me, / there is no planet stranger / than the one i’m from.”31
The speaker understands the need for disguise, the need to protect one’s
self through trickery, thus she is neither shocked nor amazed at anoth-
er’s attempts to conceal his own identity, trapped as he is in a foreign,
and often unfriendly, environment. She, too, has donned masks in order
to survive on her planet as a stranger. The tone of this piece is hushed,
almost reverent. The final lines reestablish the speaker as the authority, as
one in whom a superman might place his trust.
Clifton claps back against violent aggression in the blank verse son-
net “cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty.” The cruelty to which she
refers might be a global calamity—as in war—or in a familiar sense—as in
the aggressive, predatory actions taken in efforts to violate small, vulner-
able bodies. The beginning of the poem, lines one through the first half
of line four, set up a dilemma: “cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
/ or what i am capable of. / when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted
them dead / and I killed them.” The dilemma is, clearly, the death and
destruction of those deemed unworthy of life, the broken and destitute
ones who live among us, who look like us, but are somehow different.
The middle lines, the last half of line four through line ten, elaborate
upon the dilemma in excruciating detail. Here the poet explains, gradu-
ally, her actions to eliminate the unworthy ones among us. She writes:
i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.
it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.
i didn’t ask their names,
they had no names worth knowing.
The details in the middle section of the poem speak of the harm done
to young bodies, particularly to the harm Clifton suffered as a child, and
to the harm suffered by young girls whose bodies, minds, and futures are
disposable. This poem begs the question: has Clifton’s laughter helped
her to face her monsters? Does “cruelty” reveal her efforts to right the
wrongs against her young body?
Clifton has penned other poetry which exemplifies a “yearning
toward the … sonnet form,” particularly in the work “to thelma who
worried because i couldn’t cook,” noted for its use of alliteration and
repetition.32 Similarly, “cruelty” employs alliteration and repetition to

underscore the sexual abuse Clifton experienced at her father’s hand. For
a person coming to grips with the actuality of sexual assault one “of the
most profound issues” that must be unraveled and examined is a way of
retaining the ability to survive. Such survival is made real by the recol-
lection and awareness of “loss and mortality.”33 “cruelty” might be mis-
taken for a silly poem. Seriously, a poem about killing roaches? However,
the closing lines of this blank verse sonnet depict the victim as having
moved away from wallowing in hurtful memory and having moved
toward uncontrolled aggression as a way to ensure survival:
now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.

i never know what i might do.34
Clifton connects the speaker’s acts of aggression to past similar acts both
through use of the word “holocaust” and through the imagery that
directly follows the word. The poet humorously, frightfully, describes
aggression against small, vulnerable bodies.
The final poems read here point to Clifton’s use of clap back both to
celebrate a woman’s body and to put critics on notice of her sui generis
existence. Thus, the poet moves from putting superman’s failings on
blast to an appreciation of her own strength, and pens an ode that claps
back against every imaginable insult levied against women and their
bodies. “what the mirror said”35 begins by extolling women to “listen.”
What the woman who listens will hear are words describing her as
“wonder” as “a city.” She is no longer some “anonymous girl” who
might be approached by a “Nude Dude” bent on her violation; rather
she is a masterpiece, a complex and singular individual.
you a wonder.
you a city of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
The poem is call and response: a woman stands before her mirror and
responds to the reflection she sees there. Each stanza begins by extol-
ling the woman to “listen” and what follows afterward is a detailed,
humorous rendering of the woman’s extraordinary traits: “somebody
need a map / to understand you. / somebody need directions / to move
around you.” “what the mirror said” consists of three stanzas in which
110 M.C. Loving
the poet uses periods to note the end of each and to ensure the slow
deliberate praise the woman is, in fact, bestowing upon herself. “what
the mirror said” is a woman’s praise song—a praise song created by the
woman who finally learns to accept herself.
“won’t you celebrate with me”36 is the last poem read here. This thir-
teen-line piece again approaches the blank verse sonnet form. The first
stanza, lines one through five, describes the dilemma, which happens
to be the fact that the poet has given birth to herself in an unfriendly,
unsafe environment. She asks if readers will celebrate “what i have
shaped into / a kind of life?” In the second stanza, lines six through the
first half of ten, the poet describes steps she has taken in an effort to cor-
rect the mishaps and mistakes laid at her door. She informs readers that
she “had no model. / born in Babylon / both nonwhite and woman /
what did i see to be except myself?” Thus, lacking models, lacking inspi-
ration, lacking a foundation from which to build, the poet “made it up
/ here on this bridge between / sunshine and clay.” In the final lines
of this glorious, celebratory, but sadly humorous poem, Lucille Clifton
claps back—hard—at the diseases that have ravaged her body, the mis-
fortunes of her life, and advises them all that they have failed to take her
out. She lives despite their attempts to destroy her:
… come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
This reading of Clifton’s work has left me with the realization that much
more needs to be said about Clifton’s poetry. That I have much more
to say about Clifton’s poetry. In this reading of her work, I began to
get past my training, which in many ways placed itself in the middle of
the bridge I needed to span to reach Clifton. With this reading, I got
into the poet’s head—despite my training that tells me the work is all
that matters. Inside the poet’s head, inside the poet’s world is not the
reader’s milieu. I have avoided getting inside a writer’s head in every sin-
gle reading of every single poem I have every engaged. No more. Still,
getting back into Clifton’s head, back into her poetry will have to wait: I
feel my own poetic voice beckoning.
Notes
1. Lucille Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, edited
by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser. (NY: BOA Editions, 2012). n.p.
2. Mary Jane Lupton, Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters. (CT: Praeger,
2006), 115–116.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. (LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 83.
5. In popular culture, to clap back is to respond to criticism, or aggression
toward one’s self in any number of ways, which may include humor,
snark, nicesty (discussed later in this chapter), or in some instances a side-
long glance. Clap back may also put an aggressor on blast, which is a
public telling of that aggressor’s worst sins and omissions. The genesis of
the term is difficult to pin down. American rapper Ja Rule (nee: Jeffrey
Atkins) titled a song “Clap Back” on his 2003 album, Blood in My Eye
(The album was produced by Def Jam Recordings). The aggressiveness
and vulgarity originally associated with the term has diminished as the
term has become popularized by Black Twitter and by members of the
Crunk Feminist Collective.
6. I avoid using the term female because I find the biological term limiting.
I do not view women in such a limiting way, thus I prefer not to sug-
gest that limitation in my choice of words. When I cite writers who dis-
cuss Clifton and who use the word female in that discussion, I substitute
woman and use brackets to indicate my substitution.
7. Audrey T. McCluskey, “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of
Lucille Clifton.” Black Women Writers 1950–1980, A Critical Evaluation.
Ed. Mari Evans. (NY: Doubleday Books, 1984). 143.
8. Lupton, Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters, 9.
9. Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 71.
10. Katharine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and
Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. (NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999). 37.
13. I borrow the term worry the line from Cheryl A. Wall’s work examining
black women writers. My intent here is to increase my own apprecia-
tion and understanding of Clifton’s work through a reading that relies as
much on cultural theory and on popular culture as it does on formalist
theory.
14. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in
Early African American Women’s Writing, 19.
112 M.C. Loving
15. Karla F.C. Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts. (NC: Duke University
Press, 2011). 9.
16. Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010.
17. Gloria Anzaldua, AnaLouise Keating. Light in the Dark/Luz in la Oscura:
Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. [NC: Duke University Press,
2015], 120.
18. Lupton, Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters, 6.
19. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories
of the Wild Woman Archetype. [NY: Ballantine Books, 1996], 155.
20. Anzaldua, Light in the Dark/Luz in la Oscura: Rewriting Identity,
Spirituality, Reality, 189.
21. It is not an easy task for this reader, even after more than twenty years of
reading Clifton’s work, and despite the training in formalism, to deter-
mine who is speaking in Clifton’s poetry. Clifton’s use of the so-called
confessional trope in much of her poetry makes difficult the task of deter-
mining whether the speaker is the poet herself or a character created by
the poet, or both. Or more. Clifton effectively shapes shift throughout
much of her work: she is at once poet, the child putting a rapist in his
place, as well as a clinical observer of the actions taking place within the
four corners of the page.
22. Clifton, Collected Poems, 262.
23. Lupton, Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters. (CT: Praeger, 2006), 33, 42.
24. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in
Early African American Women’s Writing, 19.
25. These lines are from the Clifton poem, “epigraphs,” included in Clifton’s
Collected Poems, 9.
26. This line is from the Clifton poem, “amazons,” included in Clifton’s
Collected Poems, 489.
27. Lupton, Lucille Clifton. 109.
29. Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and
Action.” Sister Outsider. [NY: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007], 41.
31. Ibid., 449.
32. Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton, 148, 149.
33. Ibid., 149.
35. Ibid., 199.
36. Ibid., 427.
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Outsider. NY: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007.
Lupton, Mary Jane. Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters. CT: Praeger, 2006.
McCluskey, Audrey T. “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille
Clifton.” Black Women Writers 1950–1980, A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari
Evans. (NY: Doubleday Books, 1984). 143.
Author Biography
Dr. Mary Catherine Loving was Associate Professor of English at New Jersey
City University, New Jersey, USA. She has written a book, Poets for Young
Adults, and chapters on Phillis Wheatley, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua
among others.
Fidel and Gummy Bears?: Transgressive
Humor in Contemporary Latina Fiction
Sonia Alvarez Wilson
I do like to go right to the edge of acute absurdity where it’s both traumatic and kind
of outrageous. In this sense, it can be both appalling and provide a crazed relief.
—Cristina García.1
Cristina García’s thoughts on the use of humor in her texts point out the
intimate relationship between trauma and humor, particularly when one
considers the inspiration for much Latina writing that exposes and resists
multiple societal and political injustices. This essay explores the variety
of ways Latina authors utilize humor, specifically transgressive humor,
in their texts. In what ways might women’s writing be considered trans-
gressive? Latina authors traverse a myriad of socially constructed fron-
tiers. The church, sex, and traditionally prescribed gender roles are just a
few of the dangerous borders women may cross at their own risk. Latina
authors challenge cultural confines with wit, humor, and—I would
suggest—a pioneering spirit. Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and
S. Alvarez Wilson (*) 
Catawba College, Salisbury, NC, USA

116 S. Alvarez Wilson
Cristina García confront the church and traditional social mores through
taboo sexual liaison, caricature, and explicit descriptions of the body.
Much has been written about these canonical American authors, but
there is very little reference to the incorporation of humor in their works.
Indeed, it seems very little attention is paid to women’s humorous writ-
ing in general. In her book Humoring Resistance, Dianna Niebylski
asserts that “while the last few decades have witnessed a growing inter-
est in certain types of humor in works by canonical and newly canon-
ized male writers … less easily identifiable modalities of humor present in
the literary production of so many contemporary Latin American women
writers have been all but ignored.”2 While here she is speaking of Latin
American authors, it is apparent in my investigation that the same can be
said of US Latina authors. Critics of women’s comedy in the US such
as Linda Mizejewski bemoan the fact that society is slow to accept that
women are funny at all, citing such authors as Christopher Hitchens,
who published an article in Vanity Fair in 2007 entitled “Why Women
Aren’t Funny.”3 On the contrary, this study demonstrates that Latina
authors’ incorporation of humor is indeed a powerful element in their
works. I assert that these Latina authors utilize humor as a cultural cri-
tique that simultaneously gives voice to the marginalized and resists cul-
tural hegemonic norms.
Gummy Bears and Space Invasions

In “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” Sandra Cisneros explicitly reveals the
oppressive nature of her upbringing—she had “never seen [her] mother
nude” or had the privacy to inspect her own body—which resulted in
her not knowing she had a vagina until she was an adult. She considered
herself “locked in a double chastity belt of ignorance and vergüenza,
shame.”4 This revelatory essay highlights the autobiographical nature of
Cisneros’s writing as well as the powerful political inspirations and pur-
poses for her writing. Cisneros explains that for her:
Discovering sex was like discovering writing. It was powerful in a way

I couldn’t explain. Like writing, you had to go beyond the guilt and shame
to get to anything good. Like writing, it could take you to deep and mys-
terious subterranean levels. With each new depth I found out things about
myself I didn’t know I knew. And, like writing, for a slip of a moment it
could be spiritual, the cosmos pivoting on a pin, could empty and fill you
FIDEL AND GUMMY BEARS?: TRANSGRESSIVE HUMOR … 117
all at once like a Ganges, a Piazzolla tango, a tulip bending in the wind.
I was no one, I was nothing, and I was everything in the universe little and
large—twig, cloud, sky. How had this incredible energy been denied me!5
Of course, what these words reveal about what writing means to

Cisneros is significant for this study as we consider the intimate connec-
tion between her consideration of cultural practices in light of traditional
beliefs concerning the female figures and their representation in Woman
Hollering Creek, specifically the story “Never Marry a Mexican.”6 For
her, and consequently her reader, writing breaks the barriers of shame
and brings understanding about the world.
Intimately connected to and knowledgeable about the cultural
beliefs of Mexico—Cisneros’s grandparents even having lived in the
town believed to be the birthplace of the appearance of the Virgen
de Guadalupe, Tepeyac—she rewrites the popular notions about the
patron she believes was “desexed” by the colonizing Catholic Church.
She explains that her research about La Virgen reveals her origins as
Tonantzin and Tlazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and sex. She refers to
La Virgen de Guadalupe as Lupe, whose history she rewrites or rather
reimagines as Lupe, symbolic of sexual passion, maternity, and sexual-
ity.7 Cisneros’s stories affirm this uncovering not only of La Virgen de
Guadalupe and her pre-Columbian indigenous origins, but also of her
own freedom as a woman that she promotes to her readers and her
community.
Cisneros’s revision/reworking of what Jean Wyatt refers to as the
“Mexican icons of sexuality and motherhood that, internalized, seem to
impose on them a limited and even negative definition of their own iden-
tities as women”8 in her short story collection Woman Hollering Creek is
well documented.9 The short story collection is a bildungsroman of sorts
that portrays the complex, primarily female, borderland experience. La
Malinche is of particular interest here as many critics consider Clemencia,
independent protagonist of “Never Marry a Mexican,” to represent a
problematic reenvisioning of this cultural figure. Wyatt explains that
“after independence Mexican storytellers pinned the blame for the con-
quest on her complicity with Cortez … and blame[d] her entire sex for
the ‘transgression.’”10
Some argue that Cisneros’s protagonist does not successfully redefine
the female role through her apparently transgressive actions. For exam-
ple, Wyatt asserts that “[w]hile Clemencia thus evades the stereotype of
sexual victim, [by] leaving the gender dynamic of violence in place …

that dynamic imprisons her in a rigid sex role as surely as if the rever-
sal had not taken place.”11 Similarly, Alexandra Fitts argues that “La
Malinche did not fare exceptionally well in Cisneros’s retelling of her
story. While she does modernize La Malinche and provide some shading
to her villainy, ultimately, she is still a traitor … In the end, Clemencia is
not so terribly far from the La Malinche described by Paz.”12
While both Wyatt and Fitts make compelling arguments as to what
they consider to be Clemencia’s ultimate lack of agency, my reading of
“Never Marry a Mexican” takes Clemencia’s explicit stance concerning
marriage, her art through which she disrupts notions of class, espe-
cially in light of the autobiographical nature of Cisneros’s work, as well
as her use of transgressive humor into account. From the beginning
of the story Clemencia distances herself from those things considered
part of the traditional female role of being a mother and wife—she
doesn’t even like children!13 Clemencia explicitly states at the onset
that she will “never marry. Not any man”14 and does not intend to,
not that the option has not been available to her. Through her cul-
turally transgressive acts of veering off the traditionally prescribed
feminine role, I assert Clemencia’s agency and Cisneros’s (what some
might consider to be) radical reimagining of the female role in con-
temporary society. Furthermore, she successfully breaks the cycle of
failed marriages, experienced by her sister, and othering, experienced
by her mother.
Clemencia’s mother instructs her daughter to never marry a
Mexican “[having] had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family
can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado.”15 Her mother’s
exclusion was all the more heightened due to the fact that she was
not a white woman but rather a Mexican “who couldn’t even speak
Spanish.”16 Her family’s ways of being were “American style,” infor-
mal. This informality is aligned with a kind of sexual freedom quite
foreign to Clemencia’s Mexican father: “My father must’ve found the
US Mexicans very strange, so foreign from what he knew at home in
Mexico City where the servant served watermelon on a plate with sil-
verware and a cloth napkin, or mangos with their own special prongs.
Not like this, eating with your legs wide open in the yard, or in the
kitchen hunkered over newspapers.”17 “Eating with your legs wide
open” evokes the sexual freedoms associated with life in the US to
which Clemencia subscribes.
Clemencia endorses the lessons of sexual freedom and pleasure

learned in the 1960s. She claims: “Borrowed. That’s how I’ve had my
men. Just the cream skimmed off the top. Just the sweetest part of the
fruit, without the bitter skin that daily living with a spouse can rend.”18
This quote is evocative of Cisneros’s comparison of sex and writing:
“Like writing, you had to go beyond the guilt and shame to get to any-
thing good.”19 Similarly, Clemencia goes beyond any feelings of guilt
about being with a married man, or his son, to get to the “cream” or the
good stuff.
Another empowering and culturally transgressive move that
Clemencia makes is her devotion to her art. Being an artist is the most
important thing to her, and she explains that she would “do anything
in the day just so [she] can keep on painting.”20 Her status as an artist
allows her to not only break from the rigidity of traditional female roles,
but also blurs class lines: “I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t
belong to any class. The rich like to have me around because they envy
my creativity, they know they can’t buy that. The poor don’t mind if I
live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are,
even if my education and the way I dress keeps us worlds apart. I don’t
belong to any class.”21
Through her art she interprets and creates the world. Sexuality and
her creativity are conflated when Clemencia explains, to Drew: “You’re
nothing without me. I created you from spit and red dust … You’re just
a smudge of paint I chose to birth on canvas … The landscape of your
body taut as a drum … I paint and repaint you the way I see fit, even
now. After all these years.”22 She asserts that ending the relationship did
not leave her “whimpering and whining” but rather that she has been
“[m]aking the world look at you from my eyes. And if that’s not power,
what is?”23 Not only is Clemencia not destroyed by the end of her rela-
tionship with Drew, but she also recreates him and represents him to the
world. Thus, her devotion to art empowers her to break free of gender
roles, blur class lines, and continue to remake her lover as she envisions
him; her art is yet another aspect of what might be considered a cultur-
ally transgressive stance.
In my reading, Clemencia’s culturally transgressive moves such as
rejecting marriage and asserting her passion for art culminate with her
biting sense of humor expressed by the gummy bear episode. The last
time she is with Drew, she finds herself distributing gummy bears in a
variety of places in the home where his wife Megan would find them:
I don’t know how to explain what I did next. While your father was busy
in the kitchen, I went over to where I’d left my backpack, and took out a
bag of gummy bears I’d bought. And while he was banging pots, I went
around the house and left a trail of them in places I was sure she would find
them. One in her lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle
of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and
smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy
bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber
moon.24
The irony and humor in her use of this colorful childhood candy to
express herself is undeniable. One can almost picture the smile on her
face as she tiptoes about—an adult game of hide-and-seek—placing the
gummy bears in Megan’s most intimate places. As Clemencia splashes
the colorful candy about the previously sterile environment—“cotton
balls,” “blond hairpins,” “bone-colored sheepskin slippers,” “white
robe,” “pearl button”—the image is seared into the reader’s memory.25
Wyatt posits that this episode “demonstrates her ambivalence toward
Megan.”26 She argues that “penetrating into all of Megan’s most private
places … carries a maternal subtext.”27 Dora Ramirez-Dhoore considers
Clemencia’s placement of the gummy bears in the most intimate spaces a
way of her “controlling Megan’s sexuality and the items related to it.”28
Yet her reading, like Wyatt’s, continues to impose the Malinche/Virgen
dichotomy: “Because Clemencia clearly adopts the mother and whore
roles through her actions, she sees Megan, a white woman, as a virgin
… These ideas make themselves known through the placement of the
gummy bears since she [Clemencia] focuses her attentions on feminine
products”29 However, I would argue that Clemencia’s jubilant distribu-
tion of the candies, instead, is an empowering move. Her placement of
the gummy bear in Megan’s diaphragm is the ultimate domination of her
sexual space and, according to Ramirez-Dhoore, “points to the unspeak-
able, the taboo.”30
Clemencia’s parting shot continues with items associated with child’s
play—a Russian babushka doll: “I just did what I did, uncapped the
doll inside a doll inside a doll, until I got to the very center, the tini-
est baby inside all the others, and this I replaced with a gummy bear.”31
She kept the tiny wooden doll in her pocket where she explains that
“[w]hen I touched it, it made me feel good.”32 Feeling the doll in her
pocket reminds her of her space invasion, and she is empowered by it.
Ramirez-Dhoore considers this action “a reminder that her actions can-

not be suppressed like her voice. She feels empowered…”33
With this final act her conquest is complete. Yes, Cisneros reimagines
the archetypes, but I think she does even more than that. Her protago-
nist breaks free through these transgressive acts. In “The Importance of
Being Sandra,” Eva Paulino Bueno asserts that the episode “emphasizes
this desire to hurt the wife, humiliate her in her most intimate space, rep-
resented by the smallest of the Russian Babushka dolls, which she sub-
stitutes for a gummy bear.”34 However, the playful way that Clemencia
asserts her agency points to her breaking free of the rigid whore/virgin
dichotomy often seen in the criticism.35 Clemencia throws the baby out
with the restrictive mythology on her way home: “on the bridge over the
arroyo on Guadalupe Street … [I] got out … and dropped the wooden
toy into that muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim … It gave me
a feeling like nothing before and since.”36 She goes on to say she has no
feelings of guilt, and in fact “slept like the dead.”37 Clemencia is explicit
about her point of view, her departure from cultural norms, her refusal
to comply with rigid expectations, and finally adds her own humorous
flair that is unforgettable for the reader. Furthermore, she enjoys her
transgressions of the most guarded social taboos by sleeping with Drew
the night Megan is in the hospital having the son with whom she will
also eventually sleep.
Ladies of the Holy Rosary Society Meet Their Match

While Tey Diana Rebolledo is discussing Chicana writing when she
explains that “[a]s do most complex symbols, the curandera/bruja
encodes both positive and negative attributes … Although the healer
represents the virginal attributes approved of by the Spanish Catholic
culture, the bruja has the characteristics that are seen by traditional cul-
ture as negative,”38 a similar dichotomy is apparent in Ortiz Cofer’s
depiction of Rosa in The Line of the Sun, a portrayal of a family’s migra-
tion from Puerto Rico to New Jersey through the eyes of the young
female narrator, Marisol.39 For her Uncle Guzmán, the “wild” son, and
others in the community who seek her healing powers, Rosa represents
an angelic healer, at times referred to as “Pura Rosa,” exemplified by
the description of her the first time Guzmán sees her when his mother
and her friend, Julia, take him to Rosa. Her purity and goodness are also
highlighted by her Edenic home place:
The clearing where La Cabra’s house stood was bathed in noonday sunlight
when the three of them emerged from the woods … At the top of the cement
stairs, standing on the pedestal, stood a woman in a white dress … Even her
sandals were white, so that her paleness was accentuated. She seemed almost a
spirit, her substance lost in the folds of her nunlike dress.40
In this passage, infused with references denoting purity, Rosa is pre-

sented as an angelic figure: a “white dress,” wearing white sandals, “her
paleness,” “a spirit,” and a “nunlike dress.” The description goes on to
suggest that she seems to be “floating above them.”41 Guzmán beholds
the angelic healer whom his mother Cielo hopes will “cure” him of the
evil spirit she believes is within him.
In contrast, the community views Rosa as the witch or as the narrator
reveals “the evil tongues of Salud rechristened her La Cabra”42 or She-
goat suggesting that she is a whore. One sees when Rosa is in town the
contrasting image of her “in a tight red dress, with high heel shoes and
her hair piled high.”43 In considering the nature of transgressive humor,
it is important to note these contrasting images that highlight the social
boundaries being crossed as therein lies the source of the humor as well
as its power to create social change.
In Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature, Maya Socolovsky
explains that “when characters transgress, they highlight the boundaries
that they cross and make them more, rather than less, visible, destabiliz-
ing the cultural and national identity on which such limits depend.”44
Furthermore, she notes that “the act of violation and crossing, therefore,
draws our eye to the limit and beyond it, implicitly critiquing the norm
that is being disrupted.”45 I argue that in The Line of the Sun, Ortiz
Cofer uses humor to critique “evil” small mindedness as exhibited by
the small town of Salud and the inordinate power of the well-to-do, the
church, and ultimately colonialism.
Ortiz Cofer’s critique is quite evident in the episode in which the presi-
dent of the Holy Rosary Society, Doña Tina, and Cielo’s “friend” Doña
Julia unite to evict Rosa from the town. Tina had always longed to do this,
considering Rosa to be a “whore masquerading as a spiritist healer.”46 In a
meeting with the priest, Julia convinces him and Tina that Rosa has taken
Guzmán from his home to live with her. Ortiz Cofer also highlights here
what is traditionally considered the sexual taboo of people living together,
unmarried, and even worse Guzmán is with an older woman. Before the
women get to Rosa’s she convinces him to go back home.
Rosa determines to bring all the power of spiritism to bear. Although

at times in Line of the Sun Santería (a fusion of African and Catholic reli-
gious beliefs and practices) is presented with skepticism, its rituals prove
to be efficacious. Rosa begins with a ritual bath in which “[m]erely inhal-
ing the aromas of all this she had produced, created, and grown with
her own hands gave her a feeling of strength.”47 She sets out a candle
she made herself “treated with a harmless but intoxicating formula made
from weeds she grew herself.”48 John Waldron similarly points out that
“[w]hether we are willing to accept what she does as a religion or not, it
has to be admitted from what happens in the novel that she has created
a belief system or an alternative narrative structure that allows people to
work out their problems through consultation with her.”49
From the start of this comic episode, Ortiz Cofer employs humor-
ous descriptions that highlight the ridiculous nature of the witch hunt
by depicting Doña Tina and her “second in command” Doña Corina as
comic figures, describing them as “bouncing, bright balloons, so incon-
gruous in the rural landscape of her valley.”50 Of course, the reality of
the scene is a serious one that is characterized as “the last [great] witch
hunt.”51 By presenting the scene in a humorous tone, Ortiz Cofer high-
lights the absurdity of the churchwomen’s self-aggrandizement. They see
themselves as threatening and powerful, but instead enter and leave the
scene as ridiculous subjects completely under Rosa’s control. Thus here
Ortiz Cofer reimagines the outcast or marginalized as having agency.
Furthermore, by stating that they are “incongruous” in the “rural land-
scape of her valley” (emphasis mine) Ortiz Cofer points out the church’s
misappropriation of the island. John Waldron points out that “[t]he
struggle between Doña Tina and those she silences and excludes is in
reality a struggle over signification. Tina wishes to contain discourse
within the patterns that agree with the cultural modes and tropes she is
comfortable with and which allow her to remain in power. Rosa and the
other characters Tina marginalizes present the possibility of ‘an other’
narrative.”52 Socolovsky posits that “Rosa clearly resists preserving the
boundaries that the community lives by” and that “the narrative of her
story … actually validates her transgressions and recognizes them as part
of a collective resistance to the remnants of Spanish colonialism on which
the town’s social normativity rests.”53 Thus, the conflict between Rosa
and Tina represents the struggle of the societal ‘other’ to obtain agency
and disrupt societal norms imposed by the wealthy and the church, while
those in power—the bearers of the accepted social norm—attempt to

uphold the status quo.
Ortiz Cofer depicts a comic scene as Rosa watches the pair—described
almost as figures of caricature—approach her home:
She watched Doña Tina lean heavily on her companion while she removed
her white sandals. She did not return the favor, and Doña Corina with
her short left leg had a time taking off her shoes. She hopped like a lit-
tle brown monkey and even fell on the muddy dirt once, but Doña Tina
did not look back. She waded into the river water, lifting the skirt of her
fine dress high over her substantial thighs. Rosa could see the pale skin
where the sun had never visited. And the shadowy region beyond the lace-
encased fortress the old lawyer had paid so dearly for.54
Ortiz Cofer even describes the comic sounds that might be heard: “Their
feet were sucked down by the mud, and a distinct little plop could be
heard each time they took a step.”55 These lines reveal the hypocrisy of
the church as Tina does not bother to help her fallen companion. Not
only is her lack of passion highlighted by the description of “pale skin”
where the sun has never shone that also was an impenetrable “fortress,”
but also what might be considered her hypocritical morality as it is
implied the she merely married the “old lawyer” for his money.
When Doña Tina and Doña Corina arrive, Rosa has thoroughly pre-
pared her home to subdue her adversaries. The smoked-filled room diso-
rients the two, and consequently they have little recourse but to drink
“the dark liquid” Rosa offers them.56 Tina and Corina are unable to con-
tain their laughter or control themselves: “Doña Tina held her stomach
and tried desperately to control her quivering face … she could not con-
tinue. The incongruous laughter of the two women filled the room with
ominous echoes.”57 Ortiz Cofer seemingly creates a carnivalesque fun
house of sorts with the “incongruous” laughter of the truly threatening
ladies of the Holy Rosary Society out of place for their mission at hand.
They are disoriented as one would be in a fun house surrounded by a
darkened environment, rippling mirrors, unexpected noises, and gro-
tesque laughter. It is a Bakhtinian moment, if you will, that “celebrate[s]
temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the estab-
lished order; it mark[s] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,
norms, and prohibitions.”58 The “ominous echoes” reinforce this image
of doomed uncontrolled laughter. The narration of the scene contrasts
the hilarity of the two proper churchwomen of the Holy Rosary Society
completely losing control of themselves and their bodies with the con-
demnation of the church. In this moment, Rosa is in control and the
almighty churchwomen are under her spell. However, after Tina claims
that if Rosa leaves she will take care of Sarita (Rosa’s child) herself if Rosa
agrees to leave the town forever, Rosa’s defeat is assured. The end of the
scene is punctuated by Tina’s fleeting defeat after pulling herself together
to explain the ultimatums to Rosa: “[t]his was too much of an effort and
Doña Tina slid heavily down from her chair into a heap on the floor.”59
Rosa’s victory proves short-lived: “Rosa looked upon her vanquished
enemies strewn upon the floor, but she felt only the sharp edge of a
blade cutting her heart out. She was the one defeated.”60 They extort
Rosa by threatening to tell her daughter of her reputation in the town
or have the church take custody of her. As Waldron explains, “Tina and
the discursive network of authority supporting the disciplinary institu-
tions in the town easily control or exile the marginal characters in the
novel.”61 Just as we have seen the autobiographical nature of Cisneros’s
work, one can recognize Ortiz Cofer’s personal observation of the inor-
dinate power of the church. Edna Acosta-Bélen points out in her inter-
view with Ortiz Cofer that she was born in a small town, Hormigueros,
“in which the religious fervor of being the custodians of the sanctuary of
the famous Virgen de Monserrate, visited by thousands of devoted pil-
grims every year, is mixed with the spontaneous, irreverent, passionate,
and contradictory moralities of a small town.”62 Ortiz Cofer chooses to
show how “you have the ladies of the Holy Rosary who stand in judge-
ment of others and drive the independent woman out of town … when
I was growing up there was a distinct feeling that as a woman, if you did
not stay on the straight and narrow you had two choices: to live as an
outcast in the pueblo or leave the Island.”63 In fact, the narrator affirms
that “in another era, in a different place, Rosa might have become a stu-
dent of psychology, a physician, a healer.”64
Penis Envy
In her novel King of Cuba, Cristina García is able to do what so many
others, including the US government, have tried and failed to do: top-
ple the dictator who was the cause of so many thousands losing their
homelands with her wit, breaching customary lines of protocol.65
The book focuses on an elderly Fidel Castro stand-in, El Comandante,

and a Cuban exile Goyo Herrera, a Florida resident, bent on avenging
the losses in his life caused by the takeover of the communist regime.
Keeping in mind the framework of transgressive acts being those that
challenge authority, García’s deployment of scatological humor in King
of Cuba demystifies “El Comandante’s” world-wide stature and reveals
his insecurities. But while it is easy to see his role as stand-in for Fidel
Castro, one should also note the broader indications of the disintegra-
tion of the bodies in the novel that point to the disintegration of Cuba’s
infrastructure, as recent news reports of the state of things in Cuba con-
firm. In one of many notes interwoven into the novel, García’s own
assessment of the state of Cuba is revealed through her description of
the rental car—useless dashboard, gas gauge, and speedometer—as well
as the condition of the surroundings—potholes, “aggressive hitchhik-
ers,” Russian tractors.66 As Andrew Sean Greer points out in his review
of the novel, “In the end, her subject isn’t the dictator or his nemesis.
It is Cuba.”67 However, to be sure, plenty is said about Castro and his
regime, characterized as “un fracaso” [failure/disaster] by Zaida del
Pino, one of the many voices interwoven throughout the novel in the
form of notes and brief narratives.68
García begins and ends the book with El Comandante’s need for
assurances of his greatness—even down to the size of his penis. At the
start of the novel the narrator details one of his first memories of see-
ing his father’s “prodigious pinga, steaming like a locomotive after a hot
bath and flanked by grapefruit size balls (or so they seemed to him) that
hung confidently, hirsutely, where his thick thighs flared.”69 After his
mother bathes and powders “the little despot-to-be, taking care to wash
the pink bud of his manhood and dust it with enough talcum powder to
make it look like a lump of sugared dough”70 he asks if his will grow:
‘Mami, will all of me grow?’ … ‘Ay, mijito, your pinga will be the greatest
in the land, in all the Americas, perhaps in all the world!’ The boy was cau-
tiously pleased. ‘Okay, the greatest. But will it also be the biggest?’
His mother grinned, eyes shining, and brought her lips so close to his that
he inhaled the garlic from that night’s ajiaco stew. ‘Don’t you doubt that
for a second.’ The pint-size tyrant’s chest filled with pride, and he strutted
off to bed with big dreams, the biggest of all. He imagined his pinguita
growing and growing until it floated high in the skies, a massive flesh-
toned dirigible draped with parachute huevones and a proud snout that
served as the control room for the whole impressive operation and that
nobody—not even the Yankees, with their warships and gun batteries—
would ever dare shoot down.71
The undeniable hilarity of this passage sets the tone for the volume to
come, with its unabashed references to penises and the body. Here one
sees the obvious conflation of machismo and military prowess. The rev-
elation of the future despot’s imagined physical superiority, particularly
of his organ, will signify his military power and superiority as well. Of
course, García’s humor reveals the tragicomic nature of the man’s inse-
curities and desire for greatness, as Castro’s assertion in the world was the
cause of the experience of traumatic exile for so many. This is humorously
depicted by Cuban exile Goyo Herrera’s obsession with the dictator as he
awaits an opportunity to avenge all he lost due to the dictator’s reign.
García’s humorous reference to the male organ, with its moments
of exaggeration, is evident throughout the novel and at times speaks to
the need, as Sara E. Cooper in “Irreverent Humor in Postrevolutionary
Cuban Fiction” points out, to “laugh so we don’t cry.”72 This is the case
when El Comandante calls for the prisoners staging a hunger strike to be
brought before him to a banquet intended to snap them out of their per-
severance. While the episode is presented with humor, the narration also
reminds the reader of the very real instances of human rights violations
in Cuba: “Each dissident displayed the usual marks of torture—cigarette
burns, broken ribs, gouges and wounds of varying shapes and depths—
on his bare torso.”73 For El Comandante, the prisoners’ “bodies had
become contentious political terrain and a public relations debacle for
the revolution.”74 One sees here the explicit conflation of the body and
the body politic as the political oppression is charted and written on
their bodies. However, García provides the comic relief that will engage
the reader and make her laugh and cry. When one of the prisoners is
being carted out of the dinner, El Comandante tells him: “‘You’re too
weak to even jerk off.’”75 His reply was to expose his “huge and purplish
hard” penis.76 As he was being taken away “his penis bouncing off their
thighs, his insults echoing against the ancient stone walls: Este país es
una mierdaaaaaa” [This country is shiiiiit].77 If the size of the penis is an
indication of power for the dictator, then it seems he is outmatched by
his prisoner. I can imagine that García is poking a bit of fun at the male
obsession with penis size while also providing comic relief in light of the
tragic circumstances.
Ironically, humor brings knowledge of the dark realities of the

world—dictatorship, loss of homeland, torture—into our everyday
lives. As García says when clarifying her distinction between student and
reader for her interviewer, Jorge Santos, “my hope is to seduce them
into my story and keep them immersed in what I hope is its substance,
humor, and beauty.”78
García bookends the novel with a comic dirigible vision. As El
Comandante is dying “a dirigible floated on the horizon, its flesh-toned
snout tilted toward the sun. An inexplicable joy overcame him. The
tyrant imagined flying high over the Sierra Maestra, over Pico Turquino,
which he’d scaled as a young man. Then he felt himself rapidly sinking, a
leaky dinghy, deep into the Caribbean Sea without the prerogatives due
him at death.”79 Clearly, this harkens back to his dreams as a young boy
of his “pinguita growing and growing,”80 to become an enormous float-
ing dirigible. But in this hallucination the dirigible—and El Comandante
for that matter—end as a sinking, leaky dinghy—deflated.
Standing Ovation
In All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents, Rebecca
Krefting elegantly elucidates comedy’s role in cultural critique.81 She
defines “charged humor”:
[C]harged humor hinges on the practice of enacting cultural citizenship.

Charged humor illumines flaws and disparities between the promises of
citizenship and the fulfillment of those promises. The term ‘cultural citi-
zenship’ emerged from oppositional cultural practices seeking to empower
communities, raise cultural awareness, celebrate a common history, and
promote belonging.82
I would argue that Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Cristina
García incorporate this charged humor in their texts. Cisneros’s trans-
gressive humor that ruptures socially adhered to sexual and gender
boundaries brings closer the promise of full citizenship in which women
can make choices about the lives they wish to live and the way they wish
to live them.
Through her humorous presentation of the Ladies of the Holy
Rosary, Ortiz Cofer highlights the ways that communities marginalize
those who do not, as she says, “stay on the straight and narrow”83 and
the inordinate power of those who, under the guise of religion, wield
control. Cristina García’s humor not only delights readers, but also
reveals the human flesh and blood beneath the dictatorial mask, deflating
the larger-than-life image of the oppressor and providing comic relief to
a community with the common history of which Krefting speaks.
Notes
1. Jorge Santos, 2016. “‘Multi-hyphenated identities on the road’: An
Interview with Cristina García,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
United States 41, no. 2 (2016): 202-212.
2. Dianna C. Niebylski, Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive
Body in Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2004) 3, Accessed July 15, 2016, http://
site.ebrary.com/id/10594696.
3. Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body
Politics(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 1.
4. Sandra Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” in Goddess of the
Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo (New
York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1996), 46.
5. Ibid., 48–49.
6. Sandra Cisneros, “Never Marry a Mexican.” In Woman Hollering Creek
and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
7. Cisneros, “Sex Goddess,” 49–50.
8. Jean Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender
in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering
Creek,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14, no. 2 (1995): 243.
9. Tey Diana Rebolledo,“From Coatlicue to La Llorona: Literary Myths
and Archetypes,” in Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural analysis of
Chicana Literature (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995). In
this chapter, Rebolledo offers a comprehensive discussion of the three
female figures so significant in Mexican and Chicana literature and cul-
ture: La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona.
10. Cherríe Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and
Feminism,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 175 quoted in Jean
Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender
Creek,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14, no. 2 (1995) 248.
11. Jean Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender
Creek,’” 14, no. 2 (1995): 249.
12. Alexandra Fitts, “Sandra Cisneros’s Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration

of Feminine Archetypes in ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” The International
Fiction Review 29, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 21. Fitts explains that in The
Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz defines what is meant by the Malinche
figure in Mexican culture. He considers that her legacy is not only one
of traitor and whore as translator and partner to Cortés, but also as vic-
tim due to his subsequent abandonment of her. Therefore, as “the figura-
tive mother of all post-Conquest Mexicans … Her sin, like Eve’s, must be
born by her sons and, more pointedly, by her daughters.” 13.
13. Cisneros, “Never Marry a Mexican,” 71.
14. Ibid., 68.
15. Ibid., 69.
16. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 69.
19. Cisneros, “Sex Goddess,” 49.
20. Cisneros, “Never Marry a Mexican.” 71.
21. Ibid., 71–2.
22. Ibid., 75.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 81.
25. Ibid.
26. Wyatt, “La Malinche,” 251.
27. Ibid.
28. Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, “Let the Gummy Bears Speak: Articulating
Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican,’” in Sandra
Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek, ed. Cecilia Donohue (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2010), 100.
29. Ibid., 101.
30. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 82.
33. Ramirez-Dhoore, “Gummy Bears,” 102.
34. Eva Paulino Bueno, “The Importance of Being Sandra (Cisneros),” in A
Companion to U.S. Latino Literatures, ed. Carlota Caulfield and Darién
J. Davis (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007), 44.
35. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, 83. Rebolledo explains the signifi-
cant presence of the curandera or healer figure in Chicana writing and the
inherent duality of this figure. On the one hand she reflects the virginal
qualities approved of by the Catholic Church and on the other hand the
wicked or negative characteristics of a bruja or witch.
37. Ibid.
38. Rebolledo, Women Singing, 83.
39. Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Line of the Sun. (Athens: The University of
Georgia Press, 1989).
40. Ibid., 23.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 20.
43. Ibid., 50.
44. Maya Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature:
Explorations of Place and Belonging (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2013), 98.
45. Ibid., 98–99.
46. Ortiz Cofer, Line of the Sun, 79.
47. Ibid., 96.
48. Ibid.
49. John V. Waldron, “Solving Guzmán’s Problem: ‘An Other’ Narrative of
‘La Gran Familia Puertorriquena’ in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the
Sun,” Bilingual Review 29, no. 1 (2008): 44.
51. Ibid., 75.
52. Waldron, “Guzmán’s Problem,” 41.
53. Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood, 108.
55. Ibid., 99.
56. Ibid., 101.
57. Ibid.
58. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.
60. Ibid., 104.
61. Waldron, “Guzmán’s Problem,” 45.
62. Edna Acosta-Bélen, “A Melus Interview: Judith Ortiz Cofer,” MELUS:
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 18, no. 3 (1993): 84. In
the interview, Ortiz Cofer also points out that she wants to portray the
contrast between the idyllic homeland in the minds of those who leave,
including her own mother, and the problematic realities for women inter-
ested in pursuing non-traditional lives.
63. Ibid., 5.
65. Cristina García, King of Cuba: a novel (New York: Scribner, 2013).
66. Ibid., 163–4. Ada Ortúzar-Young, review of King of Cuba by Cristina
García, Hispania 98, no. 2 (2015) 378. In her review, Ortúzar-Young
points out that these interwoven notes and commentary offer resistance
to official representations of the state of Cuba, and that in fact the note
written by the author herself references her own daughter, Pilar, and a
friend, Linda.
67. A.S. Greer, review of King of Cuba by Cristina García, New York Times
Book Review, June 30, 2013.
68. García, King of Cuba, 39.
69. Ibid., 8.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 8–9.
72. Sara Cooper, “Irreverent Humor in Post-revolutionary Cuban Fiction:
The Case of Mirta Yáñez,” abstract, Cuban Studies 37, no. 1 (2006): 33.
74. Ibid., 132.
75. Ibid., 133.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Jorge Santos, “‘Multi-hyphenated identities on the road’: An Interview
with Cristina García,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States 41, no. 2 (2016): 211.
80. Ibid., 8.
81. Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor and its Discontents
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 18.
82. Ibid.
83. Acosta-Bélen, “Ortiz Cofer Interview,” 88.
Bibliography
Acosta-Bélen, Edna, and Judith Ortiz Cofer. “A MELUS Interview: Judith Ortiz
Cofer.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (1993): 83–97.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage
Books, 1991.
———. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” In Goddess of the Americas: Writings
on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo, 46–51. New York: The
Berkley Publishing Group, 1996.
Cooper, Sara E. 2006. “Irreverent Humor in Postrevolutionary Cuban Fiction:
The Case of Mirta Yáñez.” Cuban Studies 37, no. 1 (2006): 33–55.
Fitts, Alexandra. “Sandra Cisneros’s Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration of

Feminine Archetypes in ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” The International Fiction
Review 29, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 11–22.
García, Cristina. King of Cuba: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2013.
Greer, A.S. 2013. “King of Cuba by Cristina García.” New York Times Book
Review 118, no. 26 (2013): 9.
Krefting, Rebecca. All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Mizejewski, Linda. Pretty/funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2014.
Moraga, Cherríe. “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism.”
In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis, 173–190.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Niebylski, Dianna C. Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in
Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2004. Accessed July 15, 2016. http://site.ebrary.com/
id/10594696.
Ortúzar-Young, Ada. Review of King of Cuba by Cristina García. Hispania 98,
no. 2 (2015): 376-378.
Ortiz Cofer, Judith. The Line of the Sun. Athens: The University of Georgia
Press, 1989.
Paulino Bueno, Eva. “The Importance of Being Sandra (Cisneros).” In A
Companion to US Latino Literatures, edited by Carlota Caulfield and Darién
J. Davis, pp. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007.
Ramirez-Dhoore, Dora. “Let the Gummy Bears Speak: Articulating Identity in
Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican.’” In Sandra Cisneros’s Woman
Hollering Creek, edited by Cecilia Donohue, 89–106. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2010.
Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of
Chicana Literature. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995.
Santos, Jorge. “‘Multi-hyphenated identities on the road’: An Interview with
Cristina García.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41,
no. 2 (2016): 202–212.
Socolovsky, Maya. Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations
of Place and Belonging. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Waldron, John V. “Solving Guzmán’s Problem: ‘An Other’ Narrative of ‘La
Gran Familia Puertorriqueña’ in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun.”
Bilingual Review 29, no. 1: (2008): 39–48.
Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in
Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’”
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14, no. 2 (1995): 243–271.
Author Biography
Sonia Alvarez Wilson received her doctoral degree in post-1900

American Literature from University of North Carolina, Greensboro,
where she wrote on exile, immigration, and migration in U.S. women’s
writing. Her research and teaching interests include Latina/o and Multi-
ethnic literatures. She currently teaches Latino/a literature and culture
and composition at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Humor, Gentrification, and the
Conservation of Downtown New York
in Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life
Diarmuid Hester
American writers have long sought to respond to the mutability of the

modern city in poetry and prose, using the written word to briefly stem
the flow of change and preserve the flotsam of a passing moment. New
York in particular has inspired countless writers from Walt Whitman to
John Dos Passos to Djuna Barnes to pursue and transcribe the elusive
“New York minute.” In this essay I explore Lynne Tillman’s particular
attempt to conserve a part of her Manhattan neighborhood in the area
south of Fourteenth Street known as Downtown. In the final decades of
the twentieth century, the increased attentions of New York City author-
ities and a concomitant ramping-up of urban revitalization prompted a
swift and irreversible alteration of the fabric of the inner city: in what
follows I show that No Lease on Life (1998), a fictional account of a day
in the life of Downtown, and the numerous shocking, abrasive jokes that
intrude upon its narrative attest to Tillman’s resistance to the inexora-
ble march of gentrification. This novel and its transgressive humor retain
D. Hester (*) 
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

136 D. Hester
a part of the rapidly fading culture of fin de siècle Downtown, preserv-

ing for posterity the imprint of a vibrant, multicultural community in the
years before gentrification changed the area forever.1
No Lease on Life is an account of twenty-four hours in Downtown
New York, narrated largely from the perspective of Elizabeth Hall, a
resident of the Lower East Side. Mrs Dalloway through a glass darkly
(or a Downtown twist on James Joyce’s Ulysses), in this work an irasci-
ble protagonist meanders through what seems like a typical day for her:
waking up early, meeting her neighbors, going to work, c ontemplating
murder, and so on. The work is divided cleanly into two sections,
“Night and Day” and “Day and Night”. In the first part, set in “the
middle of the night or the morning” of a sweltering June 17, 1994, we
find Elizabeth gazing from the window of her fifth-floor apartment off
Avenue A, watching the goings-on on the street below with increasing
irritation.2 Drunks hurl garbage cans at parked cars and smash bottles
on the sidewalk. Prostitutes ply their trade in doorways and taxicabs.
Drug dealers and runners conduct their business in increasing daylight.
The homeless panhandle. Elizabeth surveys it all with contempt and
declares it “pathetic.”3 From her tenement garret, she pours scorn on
the “degraded neighborhood”4 and even considers executing the loud,
obnoxious “morons” on the church steps below with little fear for the
consequences:
Everyone would know what it was about. She’d make sure of that. It was
about being able to sleep through the night. Being able to turn down your
covers and get into bed and not have to wake every hour and run to the
window because someone was screaming, sitting on a stoop, screaming
and laughing or blasting music and yelling. About nothing. It was always
stupid stuff. But even if it was smart, she’d hate it, hate them. Who cares
then.5
The novel’s narrative is carried away from the street by Elizabeth’s anger,
seguing into long, furious digressions about her enemies. She thinks
darkly about Hector, her building’s super, “a courtly man, part French,
Greek, and Spanish” and a compulsive hoarder who seems constitution-
ally unable to keep the building clean or the hallways free from human
excrement and junkies’ drug works.6 She rages silently against the young
super from the building across the street—the one who revs his engine at
HUMOR, GENTRIFICATION, AND THE CONSERVATION OF DOWNTOWN … 137
5 a.m. and has “no understanding of quiet in the morning. No respect

for other people who needed their sleep.”7 She curses her landlord’s wife
Gloria, a “blustery and bad-tempered” woman who delights in “deceiv-
ing tenants, renting and not renting, evicting or threatening eviction,
delaying work on broken-down apartments, stalling tenants about the
boiler in the basement being fixed or replaced.”8
Her thoughts are not all so black: she recalls, for instance, success-
fully resisting the landlord’s rent-hike with the help of her neighbors and
remembers a long, kitchen-table conversation with Jeanine, a local pros-
titute whom Elizabeth had invited to use her shower. The text is also
strewn with jokes, recounted by Elizabeth or more likely overheard and
transcribed by her.
How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

None of your fucking business.9
Why are there so few black serial killers?
Why?
No ambition.10
How do you know when your dad is fucking your sister in the ass?
His dick tastes of shit.11
These jokes are symptomatic of what one reviewer called the work’s
“darkly humorous view of a part of daily living in New York that one
does not see on Seinfeld”—yet such are their largely crude, racist sub-
jects that they only appear to alleviate the novel’s oppressive atmosphere
and, ultimately, they come to exacerbate its effect.12 In the narrative as
in Elizabeth’s apartment, there seems to be no ventilation; here as there,
the air does not circulate—it is “stolid and stale.”13
Although most of the work’s second section takes place outdoors,
in the streets surrounding the apartment, at first the air does not seem
much better. It begins a couple of hours after the close of the first
section, when Elizabeth is awoken from a brief, fitful sleep by the shriek
of a car alarm outside: “the alarm screeched, wailed, pulsated, pounded.
It demanded and sounded like inevitability. It was torture.”14 The news-
paper is delivered by her boyfriend Roy—a vague presence in the tale
that only occasionally surfaces to offer his sardonic remarks—and she
peruses its grim contents.
138 D. Hester
New York, Friday, June 17, 1994. Late edition. Today, early clouds then
hazy, warm, humid. High 86. Tonight muggy, coastal fog. Low 75.
Tomorrow sultry. High 92. Yesterday, high 82, low 67. G.O.P. IN THE
HOUSE IS TRYING TO BLOCK HEALTH CARE BILL. GENERALS
OPPOSE COMBAT BY WOMEN. NEW YORK DEBATES ITS
RULES FOR COMMITTING THE MENTALLY ILL. U.S. JURIES
GROW TOUGHER TOGETHER ON THOSE SEEKING DAMAGES.
QUEST FOR SAFE CIGARETTE NEVER REACHED GOAL.
L.I.R.R. WORKERS GO ON STRIKE; COMMUNITIES BRACE
FOR GRIDLOCK. CLINTON MAY ADD G.I.’S IN KOREA WHILE
REMAINING OPEN TO TALKS.15
The second part of the novel takes on something of the newspa-

per’s chronicle of daily life, albeit with mostly local concerns. Once
Elizabeth exits the apartment and wanders through the neighborhood
on the way to her Uptown job as a copyrighter, her interactions with
Downtown’s residents are diligently reported in the text. Thus we find
the transcript of a lengthy conversation she has with Gisela, a limping,
paranoid older neighbor, who dismisses Elizabeth’s complaints about the
neighborhood: “Here, you see, I’m happy,” she declares; “I keep my dis-
tance because I cannot tell my story. I get along. They leave me alone.
They respect me. I respect them. I have no problem. I have my peace
of mind.”16 Later, Elizabeth has a beer with sometime-homeless Paulie
and his long testimony is also dutifully inscribed in her narrative: with
compassion and equanimity, for instance, he responds to Elizabeth’s con-
tempt for the homeless “crusties” that keep her awake. “They’re interest-
ing to me,” he says:
They’re like gypsies. They’re being persecuted. They’re constantly moving

from block to block to find a place where they can squat and not be told
to move … I want to have faith in them, and I think they’re important to
the community because they’re a minority which I think should be part of
the community and not shunned, pushed aside. Maybe they’re sick. I was
sick on the street at first.17
Elizabeth’s narrative also documents the day’s key events, including the
New York Knicks’s seven-point win over the Houston Rockets in the
National Basketball Association Finals and, most remarkably, the media
event known as the “Bronco Chase” that followed the flight and rearrest
of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles. The record of these incidents, combined
with transcripts of conversations with her neighbors, form a street-level

snapshot of the neighborhood of the Lower East Side on June 17,
1994.18
Yet the text also alludes to certain key events from Downtown’s
recent past, which allow the reader to infer a broader historical context
for Elizabeth’s observations. The most noteworthy of these—allusions to
the tenure of Ed Koch as Mayor of New York and remarks about the
riots in Tompkins Square Park—both concern New York City authori-
ties’ increased attentions in Downtown from the mid-1980s. Elizabeth
reflects that “the pooper scooper law was enacted under Mayor Koch.
It was his legacy to the city, what he’d be remembered for, New Yorkers
picking up dog shit. Along with an impartial review board and handing
over the city, opening it up like a high-class brothel, to the real estate
clowns. That was years ago.”19 Later, regarding a “leafy and green”
Tompkins Square Park in which “mothers, fathers, and assorted child-
care workers” now watch children play, “fanning themselves” in the mid-
day heat, she remembers that the park was once a very different place:
After the cops’ attack on the park squatters one summer night, which was
like living in Salvador for that night, with a helicopter whirring overhead
and tear gas and hundreds of people running and hundreds of police chas-
ing them, and after the cleanup of the park, which was closed for a year, its
entrances transformed into Checkpoint Charlies, the sandbox was free of
dog and human shit. No one argued about that.20
As implied by a caustic reference to real estate developers’ connections

to the corridors of City power and the juxtaposition of a pastoral, mid-
dle-class park scene with the noise and terror of the earlier riots, these
remarks also address the spread of gentrification in Manhattan that by
1994 was rampant in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. Yet in No
Lease on Life, Tillman’s treatment of gentrification is not limited to sug-
gestive comments such as these—it exerts a much more profound and
pervasive influence on the text. I contend that, in fact, the entirety of the
novel may be considered as a rejoinder to the rapid and intensive gentri-
fication Tillman witnessed in her neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s
and that the jokes collected in her text in particular are principally moti-
vated by an impulse to collect and preserve the Geist of a disappearing
Downtown. In the following sections, I offer a brief history of the Lower
East Side in the preceding decades and an introduction to the principal
140 D. Hester
issues in gentrification research, which will then allow us to trace the ori-
gins of Tillman’s conservational impulse and ultimately gauge the signifi-
cance of her efforts.
In the 1970s New York City was broke. A massive falloff in manu-
facturing and the flight of the middle classes to the suburbs since the
1960s resulted in greatly reduced tax receipts, large current-account bor-
rowing, and increasingly wary lenders.21 These factors combined to leave
the city particularly exposed during the economic recession that hit the
United States in the early 1970s and by 1975 it was poised on the brink
of bankruptcy. The city’s leaders, Mayor Abraham Beame and Governor
Hugh Carey, begged President Gerald Ford’s White House to back their
pleas for federal assistance, but on October 29, Ford announced that the
city would receive no federal funding and would have to fend for itself.
The New York Daily News summarized the situation the following day,
its front page famously declaring “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”22
Although the federal government eventually bowed to pressure
from the likes of the president of the Bank of America and reluctantly
offered the city the help it needed to narrowly avoid defaulting on its
loans, the fiscal crisis was to fundamentally alter the way that New York
City was run. The city’s financial failure in the 1970s was regarded by
many as the failure of a socially democratic ethos that emphasized the
importance of the welfare state—in the midst of crippling debt, calls for
expenditure on public services found little support amongst the city’s
debtors and policy-makers.23 Subsequent decades witnessed a precipitous
decline in funding available for the welfare programs and robust social
services New York City was known for in the years before the crisis: con-
servative budgets slashed the number of police, teachers, and fire by the
thousands, mass transit fares were raised by almost 50%, and the City
University of New York brought in tuition fees for the first time in its
129-year history as New York entered an era of devastating austerity.
On the Lower East Side, where Lynne Tillman has lived since the
mid-1970s and where the scaling back of public services by the city’s
government during the 1970s and 1980s was tantamount to negli-
gence, the effects of this austerity were most immediately legible. The
all but abandonment of the area by municipal authorities was followed
by “a contagion of abandonment,” as landlords disinvested their tene-
ment buildings or simply walked away from them, “leaving uninhabitable
and often burned-out shells that soon transformed the landscape into a
haunting and scarred urban war zone.”24 As the City and large numbers
of landlords turned their backs and quit the neighborhood, poverty and
crime settled in, accompanied by prostitution and widespread drug use.
Luc Sante, who moved to the Lower East Side in 1978, paints an eerie
picture of the scene at the time:
The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would

give you a month’s free rent just for signing a lease, many buildings being
less than half-full, but it was far from tranquil … By 1980 Avenue C was a
lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells. Over there,
commerce—in food or clothing, say—was often conducted out of car
trunks, but the most thriving industry was junk, and it alone made use of
marginally viable specimens of the building stock.25
Nonetheless, in spite of the City’s neglect and private investors’ disre-

gard, Downtown did not drop dead. While the lack of amenities and the
persistent threat to public safety forced many longtime residents to leave
the area, some remained and more joined them to build the foundations
of what No Lease on Life’s Elizabeth calls a “mongrel neighborhood.”26
In her semi-autobiographical Blood and Guts in High School (1978) the
experimental writer Kathy Acker, a close friend of Tillman and a regu-
lar resident of the Lower East Side, gives some sense of the population’s
diversity at the time and attests to the “racially mixed group of people”
resident in the area’s “slums”:
Welfare and lower-middle class Puerto Ricans, mainly families, a few white
students, a few white artists who haven’t made it and are still struggling,
and those semi-artists who, due to their professions, will never make it:
poets and musicians, black and white musicians who’re into all kinds
of music, mainly jazz and punk rock. In the nicer parts of the slums:
Ukrainian and Polish families. Down by the river that borders on the east-
ern edge of these slums: Chinese and middle-middle class Puerto Rican
families. Avenues of junkies, pimps, and hookers form the northern bor-
der; the southern border drifts off into even poorer sections, sections too
burnt out to be anything but war zones; and the western border is the
Avenue of Bums.27
Throughout the 1970s and early-1980s, therefore, a radically hetero-

geneous, low- or no-income community drawn from a variety of social
and cultural backgrounds came to inhabit the area in and around what
Puerto Rican immigrants called Loisaida—living side-by-side in relative
142 D. Hester
poverty and persisting in the face of the City’s desertion and blindness to
their plight.
On February 2, 1984, however, the New York City authorities
returned to the Lower East Side in force. Operation Pressure Point, a
major drug cleanup initiative, flooded the area with more than 200
uniformed police officers, crippling street-level trade and resulting in
numerous arrests.28 A large police presence was maintained in the area in
the following years as Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward declared that
his goal was “to give the streets back to the community.”29 Under the
stewardship of Ward and Ed Koch, from 1984 onwards the Lower East
Side witnessed a massive increase in such community policing. Largely
underwritten by George L. Kelling’s “Broken Windows” theory, which
posited that an impression of lawfulness could be fostered in an area by
authorities attending closely to minor infractions, New York law and
order focused their energies on prosecuting graffiti artists, fare dodgers,
and—as No Lease on Life reminds us—those who failed to “scoop” their
dog’s “poop.”30 Under Mayors Dinkins and Giuliani and with the par-
ticular support of New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, in
subsequent years such an approach quickly morphed into a rather more
severe and expansive “zero tolerance” policy, which came to include New
York Police Department’s controversial practice of “stop-and-frisk.”31
This renewed focus on law and order in Downtown was accompanied
by a concomitant drive towards urban revitalization in the area and the
“mongrel community” of the Lower East Side faced its greatest chal-
lenge in a decade, in the slow, creeping effect of gentrification.
Coined in 1964 by sociologist Ruth Glass, the term “gentrification”
was originally used to describe the “upgrading” of London’s nineteenth-
century houses by the middle classes: “shabby, modest mews and cot-
tages,” Glass observed, “have been taken over, when their leases have
expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences.”32 An apparent
solution to urban abandonment and an alternative to the costly urban
redevelopment that had ravaged inner-city neighborhoods since the
1950s and installed in their place vast concrete housing projects, gentri-
fication was very attractive to municipal authorities: private capital was
reinvested in deteriorating housing and tax revenue filled the city’s cof-
fers. It also satisfied urbanists like William H. Whyte who were hostile to
the brutalist architecture of urban renewal and lauded the middle-class
“rehabilitation” of historic buildings such as those in New York’s Park
Slope where, Whyte wrote, the brownstone’s “parquet floors and stained
glass” once again became “objects of veneration.”33 However, if the

influx of capital into areas of the inner city allowed for their rehabilita-
tion or revitalization—resulting in what Whyte calls “some very attractive
neighborhoods”—the cost of gentrification for the communities living in
these areas has long been a contentious issue.34
Its critics agree that the most deleterious effects of gentrification on
neighborhood communities arise through the phenomenon of displace-
ment: in a gentrifying area middle-class households move in; due to
direct or indirect pressures low-income households move out; and the
area’s social fabric is fundamentally altered as a result. As early as 1964,
in the study cited above Ruth Glass found that “once this process of
‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of
the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social
character is changed.”35 Later studies of gentrification have elaborated
upon Glass’s claim, seeking to investigate the causes and explore the
extent of displacement in gentrifying areas. Thus Peter Marcuse influen-
tially argues that displacement is not just a consequence of gentrification
but its necessary condition. Contrary to the assertions of enthusiasts like
Whyte, who posited that “the poor are not being hurt by middle class
investment” and that revitalization programs were proceeding “without
displacement,”36 Marcuse contends that:
Residential must give way to business, and in the residential areas that
remain (or are built) higher income is demanded and lower income is not
… The poor end up displaced by each of these developments. They are
displaced where business wants to move in, because the land is too valu-
able to house them further. They are displaced where gentrification takes
place, because the buildings and the neighborhoods are too good (read:
too expensive) for them.37
Marcuse also suggests that as gentrification moves through neigh-

borhoods, displacing poor residents, “the well-to-do continuously seek
to wall themselves in” and contemporary research has shown that local
communities and social networks fall apart under the twin hammer blows
of gentrification and displacement, giving rise to an atomized and cul-
turally uniform urban environment.38 Sharon Zukin, for one, has argued
that “a fairly homogeneous group of in-movers reduces residential den-
sity and replaces an existing population. The out-movers, however,
are a relatively heterogeneous group”: thus a certain neighborhood’s
144 D. Hester
mixed or “mongrel” make-up gives way to a more uniform pedigree.39

More recently, Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly have built upon Chester
Hartman’s impassioned argument for residential stability and “the right
to stay put,” by showing that “those who avoid direct displacement pres-
sures may benefit from neighborhood improvements but may suffer as
critical community networks and culture are displaced”40: in effect, peo-
ple that manage to “stay put” in gentrifying areas may quickly find them-
selves strangers in their own neighborhoods.41
However, when it comes to grappling with the issue of displacement
the major problem facing those who would attempt to quantify it or
investigate its effects is that they are trying to study a population, which
to a certain extent no longer exists—at least not in the same form or
in the same place. As Newman and Wyly point out, “by definition, dis-
placed residents have disappeared from the very places where research-
ers or census-takers go to look for them.”42 Displaced low-income
residents are a spectral demographic, known only by the negative spaces
they occupy in surveys of college degrees or household income from one
census year to the next. Although researchers have attempted to address
such a conundrum by including qualitative data in their analysis, urban
activist Tom Slater has nonetheless lamented the continued dearth of
eyewitness testimony in gentrification research, stating that “in a huge
literature on gentrification, there are almost no qualitative accounts of
displacement.”43 According to Slater, such accounts could refute the
continued claims of a dominant, moneyed majority that displacement
from gentrification is “trivial”44 or “relatively rare.”45
During the 1980s the neighborhoods of Downtown New York City
experienced a particularly virulent wave of gentrification, which threat-
ened to displace many of its residents and carry away any social networks
that had cleaved to the area in the preceding decades. In the wake of
Operation Pressure Point and similar initiatives intended to clear the
way for safe, middle-class resettlement, private capital flooded the Lower
East Side as banks became less squeamish about lending for redevelop-
ment and predominantly white, educated in-movers took up apartments
situated between the city’s two central business districts in Midtown and
the Financial District. If, in the words of Kathy Acker, the Lower East
Side in the 1970s was a “war zone,” in the 1980s, as the urban sociolo-
gist Neil Smith pointed out, it was imagined as a “frontier,” with myriad
forces of gentrification intent on pushing east in order to pursue a mani-
fest destiny regardless of the human cost.
Insofar as gentrification infects working-class communities, displaces poor

households, and converts whole neighborhoods into bourgeois enclaves,
the frontier ideology rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion
as natural, inevitable. The poor and the working class are all too easily
defined as “uncivil,” on the wrong side of a heroic divide, as savages and
communists.46
By June 1994, therefore, the gentrification of Downtown had been

underway for more than a decade. As a long-term resident of the Lower
East Side, Tillman would have watched as her neighborhood went the
way of other gentrifying areas—its interpersonal networks, its local land-
marks, its racial diversity, attitude, and diction slowly displaced by some-
thing much stranger, more sanitized, and significantly more middle
class. It is within this context, I would argue, that we may understand
No Lease on Life as a literary riposte to the rise of gentrification in the
Lower East Side: in this work Tillman attempts to hold back momentar-
ily the onslaught of urban revitalization and, faced with the daily threat
of its dissolution, to hold onto a part of her community. As I demon-
strate in the section that follows, No Lease on Life’s jokes contain the key
to understanding Tillman’s endeavor, encoding a minor but essential fea-
ture of Downtown’s history and preserving an imprint of its disappearing
community.
A man was fucking a girl in the ass. He comes and says, Wasn’t that amaz-
ing? She says, Actually I found it humiliating. He says, That’s a pretty big
word for a ten-year-old.47
What were Kurt Cobain’s last words?

Hole’s gonna be big.48
Viewed as a psychological study of its protagonist, No Lease on Life is

particularly amenable to the application of Freudian theories of humor.
In Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud influentially
argues that jokes provoke a discharge of energy in laughter and he writes
that, “laughter arises when the sum total of psychic energy formerly used
for the occupation of certain psychic channels has become unutilisable so
that it can experience absolute discharge.”49 This formulation allows us
to see Tillman’s jokes as a liberation of Elizabeth Hall’s frustrated psy-
chic energy: jokes like those above attest to an aggressive and pleasurable
(if temporary) release from the same psychic and societal inhibitions that
146 D. Hester
leave Elizabeth’s dreams of murder and vigilantism unrealized. However,

Freudian psychoanalysis is rather less effective if we consider Tillman’s
novel as a social rather than psychological study. Necessarily concen-
trated on the individual, Freud’s work on jokes primarily concerns their
engagement with psychoanalytic strata (e.g., the ego and super-ego) and
ideas such as the pleasure principle: although he notes that “every wit-
ticism demands its own public and to laugh over the same witticism is
proof of a psychic agreement,” the social function of jokes and their cir-
culation within a culture is incidental to his interests.50
Henri Bergson’s work might be more useful if we wish to conceive
of the novel as an attempt by Tillman to sketch the life of the Lower
East Side community and to explore the part jokes play in that attempt.
His essay on laughter, for example, finds that comic effects “refer to the
customs and ideas of a certain social group” and he is much more con-
cerned than Freud is with the social import of humor.51 According to
Bergson, laughter is a “social gesture” that polices eccentric behavior
and “separatist tendencies” in society. “By the fear which it inspires,” he
writes, “[laughter] restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in
mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire
into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever
the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity.”52 In
this sense, laughter is a kind of social corrective that reinforces the limits
of the socially acceptable. This may be at work to some degree in No
Lease on Life, whose jokes implicate social norms even as they flagrantly
transgress them. Take the joke quoted above for instance—“How do you
know when your dad is fucking your sister in the ass? His dick tastes of
shit”: this joke is predicated upon an understanding of the social taboo
on incest and the laughter it provokes in the listener affirms their partici-
pation in a society in which this is not permissible.53
While Bergson’s philosophy affords an excellent vantage point from
which to conceptualize the transgressive effects of some of the jokes that
appear in the novel, his ideas cannot be applied consistently to the text.
It is simply impossible to support the claim that the purpose of No Lease
on Life’s jokes is to regulate normativity and buttress a homogenous
social vision: these jokes are too transgressive, too crude, too xenophobic,
innocuous, and inane. There is something of Groucho Marx in the nihil-
istic territory staked out by them—whatever it is, they are against it.
A doctor said to his patient: I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that you have two weeks left to live. The good news is
that I fucked my secretary this morning.54
Why do WASPs like taking planes?

For the food.55
What do you call one white guy with two black guys?
A victim.
What do you call one white guy with twenty black guys?
Coach.
What do you call one white guy with two thousand black guys?
Warden.
What do you call one white guy with 200,000 black guys?
Postmaster General.56
Mary Douglas’s identification of joking within what she calls a “total

social situation” appears to me to offer the most productive framework
through which to explore the role of jokes in Tillman’s work.57 Whereas
Freud and Bergson both try to produce broad, trans-historical theories
for the understanding of jokes and laughter, Douglas the anthropolo-
gist is much more concerned than they are with the particularity of jokes
and their emergence and circulation within certain cultural milieus. In
her pivotal 1968 tract, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors
in Joke Perception,” she writes that “a joke form relates to a particular
kind of social experience and could not be perceived by those who have
not been exposed to a thoroughgoing relativising of moral values”—and
to understand the social function of a joke, Douglas maintains that “we
must ask what are the social conditions for [it] to be both perceived and
permitted.”58
According to Douglas, therefore, “all jokes are expressive of the
social situations in which they occur”: viewed in this way, each of the
jokes that perforate the narrative of No Lease on Life carries within it
the coordinates of a very specific social situation—its time, place, and
culture are encoded in the joke form.59 This is especially evident in the
case of jokes whose referents are clearly drawn from the early 1990s, like
the one quoted above about Kurt Cobain’s suicide (which took place in
April 1994) or the one about Bill and Hillary Clinton (which, admit-
tedly, is once again topical in 2016).60 The combined effect of these
148 D. Hester
jokes and others like them, which explicitly draw upon then-current
affairs, is to situate the narrative at a point in time when such jokes were
current. Meanwhile, other jokes enable the reader to infer a relatively
precise geographic location: with a frame of reference that is incontro-
vertibly New York, jokes like the one about the dead woman found on
Fourteenth Street in a bathtub full of milk (“The cops are looking for a
cereal killer”)61 or the one about the St Patrick’s Day parade62 are taken
to emanate from a location Downtown.
Finally and most significantly, Tillman’s jokes limn in negative a very
particular culture that understands these jokes and gets their references—
that, in Douglas’s terms, “perceives” and “permits” them. Taken as a
whole, No Lease on Life’s jokes allow us to glean important information
about the features of this culture and, to a certain extent, reconstruct it
through its impressions. Irreverence is, for instance, a principal feature:
it is not easily offended by jokes about the Pope, pedophilia, or life-
threatening illnesses. If not itself multicultural it also seems to emerge
from an exceptionally diverse context: the jokes’ myriad of religious and
racial targets implies their audience’s familiarity with an immense range
of different cultures and ethnicities—Jewish, Puerto Rican, African
American, Polish American, Greek American, Chinese American, and
so on. Jaundiced appraisals of life outside the city indicate that this cul-
ture is metropolitan based63 and references to performance art and lousy
musicians denote its acquaintance with the arts64; meanwhile a sly pop at
deconstruction suggests that it may be college educated or at least has an
interest in the Derridean theory which dominated the study of literature
in the academy in the 1990s.65
Viewed anthropologically then, No Lease on Life’s jokes attempt to
conserve Downtown’s vibrant, multicultural, and artistic community in
prose—or rather they conserve an impression of Downtown, spectral by
dint of its absence. Having its narrator inscribe the discourse that circu-
lated in the community on one day in 1994, Tillman’s novel attempts to
shore up against its ruin the discursive effluent of a community that, as
indicated by its neglect in the post-crash years, was itself considered by
New York’s authorities to be little more than (an) urban waste and an
inconvenient obstruction to the sanitizing operations of City-sponsored
gentrification. As we have seen in this essay, it is primarily through
the network of transgressive jokes that litter the text like garbage that
Tillman seeks to preserve an impression of the soon-to-be-displaced
Downtown community—effectively relocating it into the text and cast-

ing in prose, in perpetuity, a part of its diversity and uniqueness, its
squalor and singular irreverence.
Notes
1. This piece has benefitted greatly from conversations with Lynne Tillman
and with Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library and Special
Collections at New York University, and it is offered here as part of that
ongoing dialogue. My thought is also indebted to Thomas Heise and his
pioneering work on the intersections of urban space, crime writing, and
gentrification (see for instance, “Richard Price’s Lower East Side: Cops,
culture, and gentrification”).
2. No Lease on Life, 2.
3. Ibid., 1, 2.
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Ibid., 69.
8. Ibid., 12.
9. Ibid., 35.
10. Ibid., 73.
11. Ibid., 121.
12. Havens, “Urban Rage,” 164.
14. Ibid., 89.
15. Ibid., 95.
16. Ibid., 109.
17. Ibid., 130–131. These conversations turn parts of this section of the novel
into a patchwork of voices from the street that recalls Tillman’s 1999
work Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanette Watson and Books & Co.,
a history of the famous New York institution composed largely of its
patrons’ reminiscences.
18. The accuracy of this snapshot is evidently vital to the work: speaking
with Lisa Dierbeck, Tillman describes the lengths she went to in order
to ensure a precise representation of the day’s events and recalls: I took
a tape recorder with me and walked around the neighborhood, noting
what the signs were in the window. And I mention Brownie’s, a bar on
Avenue A, I went into Brownie’s and asked them what bands were play-
ing on the night of June 17, 1994. And they remembered because it was
150 D. Hester
the night of OJ’s Bronco ride. (Tillman and Dierbeck, “Interview with
Lynne Tillman for Rain Taxi.”)
20. Ibid., 103–104.
21. Gramlich, “The New York City Fiscal Crisis,” 416.
22. “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” 1.
23. Philips-Fein, “The Legacy of the 1970s Fiscal Crisis.”
24. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 181.
25. “My Lost City.”
27. “Blood and Guts in High School,” 54.
28. It seems that like Kathy Acker and Christopher Mele, the authorities
too considered the area to be a war zone—a reporter from The Villager
referred to the hundreds of police that spilled out of transports to take
up position on street corners as an “army of occupation” (O’Donaghue,
“Flashback: Operation Pressure Point”).
29. Qtd., ibid.
30. See Brandow, New York’s Poop Scoop Law.
31. Bartosiewicz, “Beyond the Broken Window: William Bratton and the
New Police State,” 51–52.
32. London, xviii.
33. City, 327.
34. Ibid., 326.
35. London, xviii.
36. City, 329.
37. “Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: The Linkages in New
York City,” 263.
38. Ibid., 261.
39. “Gentrification,” 135.
40. “The Right to Stay Put, Revisited,” 27.
41. According to Hartman, “residential stability engenders a host of personal
and social benefits,” including “safety of person and property (‘eyes on
the street,’ people looking out for each other and each other’s homes),
helpful and satisfying social ties to neighbors and local commercial estab-
lishments, greater care for public and private space, and lower housing
costs” (“The Right to Stay Put,” 531). However, such benefits are lost
with the displacement that follows gentrification. Consequently, Hartman
counters landlords’ and owners’ legally enshrined “right to displace” with
the proposal for residents’ “right to stay put,” which would maintain
social cohesion and stable communities within gentrifying areas, which he
argues is “likely to produce greater care of property and a lower incidence
of crime. There will be fewer antisocial acts related to the anger and
impotence experienced by those who are forcibly displaced. The rate at

which housing costs are inflating will be reduced. Individual misery will
decrease” (Ibid., 535).
42. “The Right to Stay Put, Revisited,” 27.
43. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research,” 749.
44. US House of Representatives Subcomittee of the City 1977 qtd. in
Marcuse, “Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: The
Linkages in New York City,” 260.
45. Freeman, “Displacement or Succession?,” 488.
46. The New Urban Frontier, 17.
48. Ibid., 176.
49. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 226.
50. Ibid., 233.
51. Bergson, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.”
52. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 11.
55. Ibid., 81.
56. Ibid., 141.
57. “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception,”
363.
58. Ibid., 366.
59. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 73.
62. Ibid., 125.
63. Ibid., e.g., 153.
64. Ibid., 35, 151.
65. Ibid., 25.
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Peter Williams, 260–97. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2013.
Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and
Resistance in New York City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000.
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Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City.” Urban
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doi:10.1080/00420980500388710.
O’Donaghue, Brian. “Flashback: Operation Pressure Point.” The Villager,
February 28, 2009. Accessed Jan 31, 2016. http://thevillager.com/vil-
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Author Biography
Diarmuid Hester holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Sussex. His
research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American culture, espe-
cially the art and writing of Downtown New York. His work is published or
forthcoming in American Literature, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
Studies in the Literary Imagination, and French Forum. He is a Leverhulme Early
Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Funny Women: Political Transgressions
and Celebrity Autobiography
Anne-Marie Evans
In 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote an article for Vanity Fair
entitled “Why Women Aren’t Funny” where he claimed that women had
no need to be funny, as women are usually attractive, so men already find
them appealing. He suggested that the male ego is threatened by funny
women: “They want them as an audience, not as rivals.”1 Although
Hitchens lists some funny women in the article (ranging from Dorothy
Parker to Ellen DeGeneres) he is uncompromising in reviving this age-
old debate. The essay is deliberately provocative, and produced a pre-
dictable outcry in defense of female comedians. The idea that women
are not funny is clearly ridiculous. The multitudes of talented women
who have won numerous awards and public accolades for their come-
dic writing and performances offer distinct evidence to the contrary.
Women like Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Sarah Silverman, Amy
Schumer, Sofia Vergara, Aidy Bryant, Margaret Cho, Leslie Jones, Jenny
Slate, Kate McKinnon, Wanda Sykes, Maya Rudolph, Aubrey Plaza, Julia
Louis-Dreyfus, and Tig Notaro (I could go on) are all highly success-
ful comedians and performers. This argument about women not being
A.-M. Evans (*) 
York St. John University, York, UK

156 A.-M. EVANS
funny is old and inaccurate, yet publications like Vanity Fair are confi-
dent enough to revive it through publishing blatantly misogynist writing.
Women comedians must be exhausted from having to repeatedly account
for their success to the media, something that their male counterparts
are rarely asked to do. Writing a memoir therefore becomes a useful way
of “explaining” the phenomenon of the successful, funny woman. In
each of the celebrity memoirs discussed, the women writers use humor
to transgress socio-political concepts of women, to challenge patriarchal
assumptions about female success, and to entertain the reader, as these
memoirs are all well written and sharply observed. In these women writ-
ers’ hands, comedy is a powerful weapon for feminist commentary, and
the act of writing itself is inherently political.
This article will explore the relationship between transgressive humor
and popular feminism in the autobiographical writings of four contem-
porary American comedians: Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling,
and Amy Poehler. Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl: A Young
Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” (2014), Tina Fey’s Bossypants
(2011), Amy Poehler’s Yes Please (2014), and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone
Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011) and Why Not
Me? (2015) have all been received with varying degrees of critical suc-
cess. Dunham is the creator, writer, star, and sometimes director of
the hit HBO series Girls (2012–present) which has received a range of
Emmy awards and nominations; she was also awarded a Golden Globe in
2013 for Best Actress in a Television Series. In the same year, Dunham
was also the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award
for Outstanding Directing. Fey was the first woman to be appointed as
head writer for the long-running and hugely popular Saturday Night
Live (1975–present), known as SNL. She wrote the screenplay for the
cult hit film Mean Girls (2004) and was the creator, writer, and star of
the critically acclaimed 30 Rock (2006–2013) which was based on her
real-life experiences at SNL. She is the creator of the Netflix hit series
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–present) and has starred in vari-
ous films including Date Night (2010) and Sisters (2015). She has won
and been nominated for a range of awards for her writing and perform-
ing. Fey became the youngest recipient ever to receive the Mark Twain
Prize for American Humor in 2010. A long-time collaborator with Fey,
Poehler is also a veteran cast member of SNL. She starred in the criti-
cally acclaimed Parks and Recreation (2009–2015) for which she won a
Critic’s Choice Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in
FUNNY WOMEN: POLITICAL TRANSGRESSIONS … 157
2012 and 2014, respectively. Fey and Poehler hosted the Golden Globes
ceremony together from 2013–2015 to great critical acclaim. Poehler
is the executive producer of comedy shows such as Difficult People
(2015–present) and has starred in numerous films including Blades of
Glory (2007) and Inside Out (2015). Kaling—who also lent her voice to
Inside Out—began as a writer for The Office (2005–2013) for which she
received a series of Emmy nominations. As a performer, she acted in The
Office and later went on to create, write, star, and produce her sitcom
The Mindy Project (2012–present). Defying Hitchens’s construction of
the unfunny woman, Dunham, Fey, Poehler, and Kaling are all highly
successful writers, comedians, and performers who have used their com-
edy to explore a range of contemporary feminist issues.
For each of these women, creativity and the act of writing is identi-
fied as key to their on-screen success, and they have all been lauded
(especially Dunham and Kaling) for their writing as much as their per-
formances. Much of their humor stems from questioning the double
standard, and all of them have championed women’s causes in their
roles as public figures. Their books have been read predominantly as
entertaining memoir: The New York Times reviews, for example, noted
that Poehler’s work has “a lot of filler”2 and that Dartmouth educated
Kaling’s Why Not Me? is “breezy” and “chirpy.”3 Dunham’s writing is
“familiar fare” but “often hilarious”4 and only Fey’s is considered “dag-
ger-sharp, extremely funny.”5 The reviews are mostly fair, and often
appreciative, but rarely do they acknowledge the political potential of
this type of writing (autobiographical) by this type of woman (successful,
intelligent, famous) as being worthy of note. Dunham and co. have writ-
ten themselves into the public record through their scripts, screenplays,
essays, and memoirs. Their concerns with contemporary women’s issues
(body shaming; negative representations of feminism; attitudes to female
sexuality) all deliberately spill over into their on-screen comedy personas.
Writing the “Femoir”

In 2012, Kaitlin Fontana wrote about the genre of the “femoir” as a
way of describing the new wave of memoirs penned by female comedi-
ans. The rise of the femoir has become more and more noticeable in the
last few years. Fontana dates the start of the genre to Chelsea Handler’s
My Horizontal Life (2005) in which the comedian revealed a series of
stories about her one night stands. Sex sells, and Handler’s book went
158 A.-M. EVANS
on to be a bestseller and pave the way for other female comedians to

tell their stories. In the past few years, the genre has moved on, and has
become less about revealing sexual prowess or comedic sexual disaster,
and more about promoting an “everywoman” image. Fontana argues
that “Memoirs are particularly essential for female comedians, for whom
awkward, soul-bearing confessions have become a currency.”6 Writing a
book has now become part of a contemporary female comedian’s brand,
and all of the women writers discussed here have their own television
show and/or are in the process of breaking into film. Their written self,
their assembly of a textual “I” is an extension of their public personas.
This form of popular feminist autobiography can be understood in the
way that other feminist life-writing has been read, as a form of oral his-
tory and as an important form of feminist storytelling.
As a genre, the femoir is easy to critique. Hadley Freeman notes that
with the recent increase in publications, “with repetition the format has
calcified.”7 There are certainly lots of similarities: all the texts contain
stories about childhood, a few anecdotes about disastrous dates, and the
eventual journey to professional success, critical recognition, and celeb-
rity status. Suzanne Ferriss identifies the femoir as a type of “non-chick
fic,” suggesting that this creative non-fiction actually shares many of the
bestselling tropes of chick lit. “As contemporary fiction featuring identifi-
able, young heroines facing a series of romantic, professional, and cul-
tural hurdles specific to their generation, chick lit has attracted readers
who find pleasure in seeing their own experiences mirrored in its char-
acters and plots.”8 The femoir occupies a liminal narrative space some-
where between fiction and autobiography, drawing on both genres to
forge something new. Ferriss argues that the narrative voices of the fem-
oir “adopt the first-person point of view characteristic of chick-lit nov-
els and create nonfiction personas of themselves as identifiably flawed,
accessible young women—despite their professional successes. Their
works invoke the same post-feminist or third-wave feminist concerns of
chick fiction, such as the pursuit of sexual independence and pleasure.
They also highlight the tensions of contemporary women’s existence,
including their struggles to balance professional success and personal
relationships, and to simultaneously resist and conform to gendered
expectations for appearance.” There is certainly some evidence that the
femoir functions as a form of bildungsroman interwoven with elements
of the contemporary romance genre. All the narrators understand them-
selves as flawed in some way, and they all address problems relating to
professional pressures and body image. However, in the examples exam-

ined in this analysis, the writers are very careful about revealing too
much information about their real-life partners. This is a crucial point
of departure from the fictional chick-lit genre. Dunham frequently men-
tions her partner, Jack Antonoff, but gives out few details about their
daily lives, and does not offer the story of how they met. Instead she
states that she has written their story but “surveying those words I real-
ized they are mine. He is mine to protect.”9 Fey jokingly offers a range
of pseudonyms for her husband, Jeff Richmond, and relates a story
about their disastrous cruise ship honeymoon, but does not pitch her
text in any way as romantic comedy. Kaling is single, and offers some
anecdotes about former partners, but does not “end up” with anyone as
the chick-lit genre might seem to demand. Poehler talks briefly about her
divorce from fellow actor Will Arnett, but focuses mainly on the support
she received from female friends during this time. Part of what makes
these particular femoirs interesting is the focus each author places on
their career. There is certainly some overlap with the chick-lit genre, and
there is clearly a shared readership with the femoir market, but Dunham,
Poehler, Kaling, and Fey are significant in the focus they place on profes-
sional success and the importance of female community. Their unwilling-
ness to turn their life stories into romantic fairy tales demonstrates how
the genre can be used for more political purposes.
This article seeks to challenge some of these assumptions about popu-
lar female autobiography by suggesting that these femoirs actually ful-
fill an important function in terms of women’s writing that goes beyond
simply adding more examples to the celebrity autobiography genre.
Dunham, Fey, Poehler, and Kaling each use autobiography and life-writ-
ing as a source of humor, but their engagement with feminism as both
writers and public figures offers an alternative narrative to the male-dom-
inated Hollywood environment in which they exist. Focusing on their
successful self-fashioning, this article will seek to argue that women’s
autobiography offers an essential space for transgressive forms of humor.
Marketing the Brand

The marketing of these texts is crucial to their commercial success, and
considering the extratextual materials of these books helps to under-
stand what each text and author is attempting to achieve. Dunham’s Not
That Kind of Girl has a front cover that references both the bestselling
160 A.-M. EVANS
status of the literary product, and Dunham’s media status as “crea-

tor and star of HBO’s Girls.” The cover is carefully staged and shows
Dunham, who is to the far right of the page and has half of her body
obscured by the edge of the page, dressed in a paisley two piece in soft
pinks and greens. She is positioned, rather awkwardly, leaning against a
table with a white cup and saucer and pile of coffee table books, and
the creams and browns of the surrounding furniture lends a retro vibe
to the scene. Dunham, looking polished and poised, is a world away
from her Girls character, Hannah Horvath, and the femoir’s title seems
to seek to position its author as separate from her most famous literary
creation. The cover’s message is clearly designed to convey the idea that
this is a serious book of essays. In contrast, Fey’s Bossypants, goes for the
obvious visual joke. She is dressed in man’s shirt and tie, and a pair of
hairy male arms has taken the place of her own. On her book cover, Fey
deliberately usurps the male role, dressing as a stereotypical businessman,
whilst implicitly identifying herself as the “bossypants” of the title in a
neat undermining of the patriarchal power embodied in a business suit.
Poehler’s Yes Please is the simplest cover, with the author wearing a plain
white vest and black trousers in front of the title of her text, which is lit
up in pink neon. Poehler is looking directly at the camera and has her
hand in the air as if she is attempting to answer a question. The pose
is performative and effective, inviting the reader to know more. This is
Poehler paring back her image so that the reader thinks she has a chance
to get to know the “real” Amy behind the award-winning performances
and famous celebrity impersonations. Both of Kaling’s texts, Is Everyone
Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Why Not Me? are
fairly conservative in comparison. In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without
Me? Kaling is pictured wearing a pink dress and looking sweetly puz-
zled in front of a pale green floral backdrop. In Why Not Me? her pose
is considerably more confident, and she is looking straight at the reader
and smiling as she emerges from behind a pale green door. Both covers
announce her success as the “creator of The Mindy Project.” The details
of these book covers are important as they reveal the marketing behind
the texts’ success. The celebrity status of the women authors is central to
selling the books, and their appearance on the covers helps to generate
crucial sales. Fey dedicates her book to her mother, Poehler to her two
sons. Kaling has a photo dedication to her parents in her first book, and
a photo of her mother (who died before Kaling’s career accelerated) in
her second. Dunham dedicates her book to her family, to the (late, great)
Nora Ephron who mentored Dunham, and to her partner Jack. Dunham
includes an epigraph that juxtaposes a quotation from Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (1856) with a line from her father “admonishing” her.
Cleverly, she places herself alongside the literary greats by referencing
Flaubert’s tale of a woman who yearns for more than her provincial life
(albeit with disastrous consequences) whilst concurrently placing herself
within the subject position of daughter.
The narrative structure of each text is largely similar. Each femoir is
composed of chapters made up of essays, lists, and emails. The narrative
tone of all these texts is designed to be confessional and intimate, fol-
lowing the established style of the female essayist. Dunham’s book fea-
tures illustrative line drawings by Joana Avillez; Fey and Kaling’s texts
contain black and white photographs of themselves. Poehler’s Yes Please
has the most dynamic structure, with the sections illustrated by color
photographs, slogans, collages, and even poetry. Seth Meyers contrib-
utes a chapter, and there are interactive sections where the reader can
write notes. All five books offer themed sections and chapters on issues
such as body image, love and relationships, and the media. All authors
dispense some wisdom to the reader whilst being self-deprecating about
their abilities to dispense said wisdom. Dunham states at the end of her
introduction that “I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and
what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that strug-
gle.”10 She positions herself as a “girl” as opposed to a “woman” and
implies that she is well placed through her life experience to author
these “hopeful dispatches.” Fontana is cynical about the well-established
format of the femoir: “These books being psychoanalytic by their very
nature, there will be at least one essay about a father or father figure, one
about a terrible relationship that went on far too long, and one about a
lover that was too ideal and was therefore set aside in order to continue
to succeed at failing.”11 This is a fair criticism; Fey has a whole chapter
devoted to her father, and nearly all the other texts offer the story of
at least one “bad” relationship. These confessions allow the writers to
establish their credentials as “real” women with experience drawn from
the “frontlines” as suggested by Dunham. This first-person voice is care-
fully crafted in each text to appeal to the reader and convince her that
these famous women are, in fact, just like her. Freeman notes: “Whereas
a memoir will underline its subject’s uniqueness, the femoir intimates
that the author is just like the reader. It will include anecdotes about
how the writer is insecure but also, like, really strong, and there will be a
162 A.-M. EVANS
continual emphasis on how the writer is fallible but simultaneously inspi-

rational.”12 Unsurprisingly, this puts pressure on a narrative voice that
must be conversant in celebrity gossip whilst also maintaining a sense of
normality. The writer of the femoir must be unique yet still relatable, or
she will not be able to sell any books.
In Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? she deliberately
pokes fun at the femoir genre. Her “Introduction” offers a set of ques-
tions and answers that are designed to place her book within the realms
of other similar fare. One of the questions is “Why isn’t this more like
Tina Fey’s book?” to which Kaling offers the answer: “Unfortunately, I
can’t be Tina, because it’s very difficult to lure her into a Freaky Friday-
type situation where we could switch bodies, even though in the movies
they make it look so easy. Believe me, I’ve tried.”13 She deftly acknowl-
edges Fey’s bestseller status and reassures the reader that she fully under-
stands the genre. In the next chapter, Kaling offers a list of alternative
titles for her book, including So You’ve Just Finished Chelsea Handler’s
Book, Now What?14 By offering tongue-in-cheek intertextual references
to other texts that she clearly knows well, Kaling cleverly sets her text
apart from other examples. Just like Fey, she opens the book by address-
ing the reader directly: “Thank you for buying this book. Or, if my pub-
lisher’s research analytics are correct, thank you, Aunts of America, for
buying this for your niece you don’t know that well but really want to
connect with more. There are many teenage vampire books you could
have purchased instead. I’m grateful you made this choice.”15 Fey,
Poehler, and Kaling all noticeably “thank” the reader for reading the
book. The purchase of the text is implied, drawing attention to each
text’s dual status as both literary product and brand commodity.
“I’m an unreliable narrator” states Dunham, going on to suggest
that she fabricates stories, particularly those about her mother and sis-
ter.16 Even the narrative voice of the text becomes part of her wider
performance of the Dunham brand. Shari Benstock notes that what is
not detailed in autobiographical writing is just as important as what is:
“Autobiography reveals gaps, and not only gaps in time and space or
between the individual and the social, but also a widening divergence
between the manner and matter of its discourse. That is, autobiogra-
phy reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the pre-
sumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers
over the premises of its construction.”17 Reviewing Amy Schumer’s
recent contribution to the femoir oeuvre, The Girl With the Lower Back
Tattoo—for which Schumer allegedly received a nine million dollar

advance—Freeman notes that most of the material from the book fea-
tured as part of Schumer’s most recent stand-up tour.18 Benstock’s point
that autobiography is an intentioned act of truth-telling that inevitably
becomes fiction is proved in Schumer’s case, where the narrative voice of
her written text is revealed to be, quite literally, a performance.
At the start of Yes Please, the longest book in this selection, Poehler
repeatedly addresses her status as a writer and the inescapable fact that
writing is hard work: “No one tells the truth about writing a book.
Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just
waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and
occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing.”19
Poehler’s demystifying of the creative process works to establish her as
a serious literary voice who understands how narrative is constructed.
This is also a narrative with gaps and silences because as Poehler states:
“I don’t like people knowing my shit.”20 She sets the boundaries of her
own authorial voice, reinforcing the sense of performativity. Like Kaling,
Poehler is clearly aware that she is contributing to a genre that has been
steadily growing for the past few years. She references all the recent
books by Dunham, Fey, and Kaling as “superb and infuriating.”21 The
sense of a working community of female comedians is therefore rein-
forced through repeated acknowledgment and mutual respect of each
other’s work.
Unruly Bodies
Dunham opens her text with a paragraph of self-analysis:
I am twenty years old and I hate myself. My hair, my face, the curve of my
stomach. The way my voice comes out waveringly and my poems come
out maudlin. The way my parents talk to me in a slightly higher register
than they talk to my sister, as if I’m a government worker that’s snapped
and, if pushed hard enough, might blow up the hostages I’ve got tied up
in my basement.22
This is a classic autobiographical trope, the reconstruction of the

younger self by the older authorial self. Dunham constructs the twenty-
year-old Lena as in a state of post-teenage confusion and self-loathing.
She hates her body and the way she sounds. Importantly, by the second
164 A.-M. EVANS
sentence of her memoir, Dunham has situated herself as a writer. She is

producing poetry, even if she has decided that it is “maudlin.” Dunham
does not like the sound of her own voice—a lovely irony with which to
start an autobiography—and imagines that her parents use a special vocal
register to address her. She constructs herself here as sensitive, imagina-
tive, and performative. The formation of the split subject and the writ-
ten construction of the younger self is an essential strategy in memoir
writing. In these femoirs, the construction of self is more complicated,
as the writer is creating a version of herself which the reader—her poten-
tial audience for future projects—must be able to relate to and recog-
nize. As an actress, Dunham has been both praised and harangued for
her decision to appear nude in several episodes of Girls. Her body is
not that of a supermodel, and Dunham understands that her on-screen
nudity can unsettle her audience. Stefania Marghitu and Conrad Ng read
Dunham’s naked body as an important part of the feminist discourse of
the program, pointing out that her body does not “make her undesirable
in the eyes of attractive men.”23 Moreover, they underline the fact that
Dunham “has not posed naked in other mediums not created by her,
demonstrating controlled authorship of her body.”24 As the “author” of
her body, Dunham utilizes it to great effect to help establish the authen-
ticity of her creative voice.
In Not That King of Girl she relates a disturbing story about a vio-
lent sexual encounter with a student named Barry. Dunham did not real-
ize at first that she had been assaulted. She makes a serious point about
the complexities of rape and how there needs to be more education
about consent. Relating the event by phone to her partner Jack when
he is away on tour offers her a way to narrate her trauma to him, and
by extension to the reader. Like many victims of sexual assault, Dunham
confesses to feeling guilt about how her own actions might have impli-
cated her, but is quick to reorientate herself for the reader’s benefit: “But
I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way,
I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me with-
out a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self
I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking.”25 This
revelation of sexual assault was overshadowed upon the book’s release
after Dunham was accused in the media of being a sexual molester, after
she wrote about the time she realized her younger sister had inserted
several pebbles into her own vagina. Dunham was forced to apologize
and had to cancel several appearances on her book tour.26 Dunham is
aware that her body can be read and understood as a political space; she
“reveals” it on screen and on paper as part of a wider social criticism.
Fey’s approach to the split subject is to address the reader directly
when writing about her body. In the introduction she states: “Perhaps
you’re a parent and you bought this book to learn how to raise an
achievement-orientated, drug-free, adult virgin. You’ll find that, too.
The essential ingredients, I can tell you up front, are a strong father fig-
ure, bad skin, and a child-sized colonial-lady outfit.”27 Fey continuously
constructs herself as someone uneasy with her own body. Relating the
tale of how her mother prepared the young Tina for the start of men-
struation by giving her a “my first period” kit containing a leaflet enti-
tled “How Shall I Tell My Daughter?” Fey, yet to start menstruating,
“shoved the box in my closet, where it haunted me daily.”28 She recalls
going for her first gynecological appointment at the age of twenty-three
even though: “My whole setup was still factory-new. But I had never
been and I had some insurance, so why not be proactive about my health
like the educated young feminist that I was?”29 Here, Fey’s understand-
ing of herself as a feminist is part of the joke; she enjoys this image of her
younger inexperienced self, going to a Planned Parenthood office wear-
ing a “Sojourner Truth button.”30 Attempting to take an intellectual
control of a body she does not fully understand does not go well. Once
the nurse inserts the speculum, Fey promptly faints, coming around to
be bluntly told she has a “short vagina” at which point she faints again.31
The account of the gynecological appointment makes light of what must
have been a genuinely distressing episode for Fey. She is disinterested in
her own discomfort, however, offering a well-observed and endearingly
candid analysis.
Fey is appealingly forthright and self-effacing when describing the
faults she perceives with her body, and even includes a list of twenty-
five “deficiencies” that women commonly recognize in their own bodies
including “big pores,” “cankles,” and “muffin top.”32 To balance this,
she lists all the body parts she is grateful for, in typically self-deprecating
fashion: “Droopy brown eyes designed to confuse predators into think-
ing I’m just on the verge of sleep and they should come back tomorrow
and eat me.”33 When addressing the issue of body image Fey ends her
chapter on “The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty” with the advice to ‘always
remember the most important Rule of Beauty. “Who cares?”’34 Fey
spends several pages describing her experience at various photo shoots
where the emphasis is placed on the artificiality of the whole process:
166 A.-M. EVANS
“Once your hair is straightened, it will be curled, then shown to the pho-
tographer, who will stare at it with his or her head cocked to one side.
Then it will be restraightened.”35 She discusses Photoshopping cover pic-
tures of actresses—one of the biggest debates of recent years surrounding
women in the media—and acerbically states that “only people over seventy
are fooled by Photoshop.”36 Ferriss suggests that by using humor to discuss
a relevant issue for contemporary women, Fey effectively sidesteps the
real issue: “Her humor deflates her proclaimed feminist agency, inject-
ing the characteristic paradox of post-feminism: critique exists simultane-
ously with recognition, if not acceptance, of contemporary consumerist
and cultural pressures to conform.”37 Fey may be unconvinced about
the evils of Photoshop but she is scathing when discussing the poses that
actresses are asked to adopt for the cover of men’s magazines: “(That
‘thumbs in the panties’ move is the worst. Really? It’s not enough that
they got greased up and in their panties for you, Maxim?)”38 It is the
implied message of the photographs that disturbs Fey, the implication
that a woman is available for male consumption, not the fact that the
model has been edited into a slimmer, neater version of herself.
Kaling’s approach to writing about bodies and specifically her body is
to be both confident and accepting. When her show The Mindy Project
debuted in 2012, it made Kaling the first Indian American woman to
both star in and produce her own show. Kaling has noted in many inter-
views that she is not supermodel slim, and in Is Everyone Hanging Out
Without Me? she addresses this explicitly. Relating a story of when she
was much younger and lost weight to impress a boy, the adult narrator of
the split subject authorial position is reassuringly confident and body pos-
itive: “Being called fat is not like being called stupid or unfunny, which is
the worst thing you could say to me.”39 Rather less earnest in narrative
tone than Dunham, Kaling’s approach to dieting is refreshingly upbeat:
“whenever I lose, like, five pounds, I basically start considering if I
should ‘try out’ modeling.”40 This endearing self-belief is a definite shift
from the Bridget Jones style self-loathing that permeates much of the
chick-lit genre. Dahlia Schweitzer notes how Kaling has explored body
image through her show The Mindy Project, where she stars as Dr Mindy
Lahiri. Comparing Lahiri to Liz Lemon, Fey’s character from 30 Rock,
Schweitzer suggests “there is not a preoccupation with Mindy’s failures
in life. Jokes are not made about her bad hygiene or poor fashion sense.
Mindy does not apologize for being young, hot, and funny. She simply is.
And that fact is one of the most radical aspects of The Mindy Project.”41
Feminist Laughs
Gina Barreca argues that comedy and feminism are not natural enemies,
and cites Poehler, Fey, and Kaling alongside other female comics such
as Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman as expert in the use of humor
to make a feminist political point. Describing Silverman’s willingness to
address rape during her stand-up routine as a way of highlighting the
“authentically taboo” subject that rape victims are often too traumatized
to report the crime, Barreca suggests: “The funny woman wields humor
in such a way as to remove one gag (through her refusal of silence), even
as she makes another—a joke.”42 In the same way, the act of writing the
femoir can be understood as a “refusal of silence.”
The sense of a female community is at the core of all these narratives.
Kaling got her big break playing Ben Affleck in a short play about the
friendship between Affleck and Matt Damon that Kaling wrote with one
of her best friends from college, Brenda. They wrote the play and per-
formed the play and Kaling remembers: “It was a special kind of fun to
be two best friends playing two other best friends.”43 As well as writing
their memoirs, Dunham, Fey, Kaling, and Poehler have all been responsi-
ble for writing the material that has launched their careers as performers.
Dunham created Girls, Fey wrote 30 Rock, Kaling authored The Mindy
Project, and Poehler penned several episodes of Parks and Recreation.
They all recognized that writing their own material was crucial to their
critical and commercial success. In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Kaling wrote an essay on female archetypes in romantic comedies that
was printed in the New Yorker. She skillfully deconstructs the popular
female characters that typically feature in rom-coms. Focusing on a type
that she identifies as “The Woman Who Is Obsessed With Her Career
And Is No Fun At All” she notes that being a professional woman does
not mean that she is unattractive or boring company: “I didn’t com-
pletely forget how to be nice or feminine because I have a career.”44 By
tackling the way that professional women are presented as problematic
in Hollywood she inadvertently offers another rationale for writing her
book. Kaling’s confident narrative voice challenges the movie persona
of the lonely, professional woman who is secretly sad because she has
“chosen” her career over a personal life, offering a persuasive alternative
narrative that has a basis in fact as opposed to fiction. Through creative
non-fiction she seeks to reimagine the fictional portrayal of women in
other media. As Schweitzer argues with regards to The Mindy Project,
168 A.-M. EVANS
“the show self-reflexively both repurposes and comments upon cine-

matic conventions from the romantic comedy genre to show the useful-
ness (or lack thereof) of these tropes to the modern woman and modern
romance.”45 All Kaling’s writing, whether for the screen or for the page,
can then be understood to be part of a wider revisionist project.
At the core of most of these narratives lies a clear appreciation and
gratitude for female friendship. Dunham offers a list of things that one
cannot say to one’s best friend. Kaling discusses why female best friends
share beds, and why this is important. Fey offers several “love letters” to
her fellow SNL alumna, Poehler. In return, Poehler stresses Fey’s sup-
port and her ability to write brilliant sketches for other women. She is
fulsome in her praise for Fey: “People think of us as a ‘comedy team’
and I am not quick to correct them. Why wouldn’t I want to connect
myself to the fiercest and most talented voice in the comedy world?”46
Dunham thanks Kaling in her acknowledgments. Kaling discusses her
inauspicious time at SNL but notes the kindness of Poehler in coming
to talk to her—“Everyone has a moment when they discover they love
Amy Poehler”47—and cites Fey’s performance in 30 Rock as one of her
favorite moments in comedy.48 Each women writer places female com-
munity and friendship as part of her public and professional success.
Professional success is the real story of all these femoirs. Kaling
advises hard work is the only real route to success, suggesting that
young women who want to work in television should do as she did and
“stay in school and be a respectful and hardworking wallflower, and
go to an accredited non-online university.”49 Focusing on the impor-
tance of work, Fey recounts a moment from the writers’ room at SNL
when Poehler had just joined the cast. Pitching ideas with Seth Meyers,
Poehler made a vulgar comment and Jimmy Fallon, then one of the big
stars of SNL, turned to Poehler “and in a faux-squeamish voice said,
‘Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it!’” Fey states that Poehler then
“dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and
wheeled around on him. ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’” Fallon was
“visibly startled” by Poehler’s response.50 Fey tells this story because
Poehler’s reaction was important. Male approval is not necessary for
her professional development. Women do not need to be validated by
men, especially in the male-dominated world of comedy. Fey references
Hitchens’s article on why women are not funny in her analysis of this
scene and notes that she was delighted to have the support of Poehler
in the male-dominated writers’ room. Martha Lauzen highlights: “When

addressing questions regarding women’s status in comedy, Fey’s humor
becomes more aggressive, explicitly pointing out double standards based
on gender. The resulting persona simultaneously positions Fey as every-
woman and superwoman.”51 Detailing her journey from a cast member
on SNL to writing and running her own show, Fey is typically self-depre-
cating about why 30 Rock was picked up by the network: “NBC execu-
tives must have seen something of value in my quirky and unique pilot
(Alec Baldwin) because they decided for some reason (Alec Baldwin) to
‘pick it up.’”52 It is Fey’s writing and performing talent that has trans-
formed 30 Rock from an idea to a script to a pilot but she ironically notes
it is the presence of film star Baldwin that actually translates it into a via-
ble creative project. Fey downplays her stress when juggling being the
creator of 30 Rock and being a mother, suggesting (quite understanda-
bly) that coal mining and military service are far more stressful.53 Having
to publicly account for her professional success whilst acknowledging her
private roles of wife and mother is clearly something that Fey has had to
do again and again: “My standard answer is that I have the same strug-
gles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at
my dream job.”54
Lynn C. Miller and Jacqueline Taylor argue: “The story of women’s
autobiography is the story of resistance to the disembodied, tradition-
ally masculine ‘universal subject,’ whose implicit denial of skin color,
gender, sexual orientation (other than the heterosexual), an economic
disparity constrained many women as ‘others’ with no voices or physi-
cality.”55 The femoir offers a potential counter-narrative of female
embodiment, empowerment, and self-expression. The format of this
kind of text is problematic, as is the concept that women comedi-
ans now have to produce a book to validate their brand. There is the
worry that feminism is simply in fashion at the moment, and that is
why these books are being produced. For Dunham, Fey, Kaling, and
Poehler, however, writing their stories is just another medium for them
to explore. Much of the issues they interrogate—such as body sham-
ing, and the importance of a supportive female professional commu-
nity—they have addressed repeatedly through interviews, other writing,
and in their on-screen characters. It is not difficult to criticize the celeb-
rity autobiography, but the femoir offers a fascinating space for feminist
commentary and transgressive humor.
170 A.-M. EVANS
Notes
1. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair, January
2007, accessed September 1, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/
2007/01/hitchens200701.
2. Dwight Garner, “‘S.N.L.’ Memories and Getting-Some-Rest Dreams,”
review of Yes Please! by Amy Poehler, New York Times, November 4, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/books/book-review-amy-
poehlers-yes-please.html?_r=0.
3. Carina Chocano, “Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?” New York Times,
October 9, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/
review/mindy-kalings-why-not-me.html.
4. Sloane Crossley, “A Voice of a Generation: Lena Dunham’s Not That
Kind of Girl”, New York Times, November 16, 2015, https://www.
nytimes.com/2014/10/12/books/review/lena-dunham-memoir-not-
that-kind-of-girl-review.html?_r=0.
5. Janet Maslin, “Tina Fey Is Greek and Also Teutonic, but She Isn’t
a Troll”, New York Times, April 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/04/04/books/bossypants-by-tina-fey-review.html.
6. Kaitlin Fontana, “The Rise of the Femoir,” Hazlitt, August 23, 2012,
accessed 1 September 2016, http://hazlitt.net/longreads/rise-femoir.
7. Hadley Freeman, “The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy
Schumer review—the problem with ‘femoirs’”, Guardian, September
9, 2016, accessed September 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2016/sep/09/the-girl-with-the-lower-back-tattoo-review-amy-
schumer-autobiography-memoir-femoir.
8. Suzanne Ferriss, “Chick Non-Fic: The Comedic Memoir,” Feminist
Media Studies. 14.2 (2014): 208, accessed February 10, 2016, doi.org/
10.1080/14680777.2014.887811.
9. Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What
She’s “Learned” (London: Fourth Estate, 2015), 77.
10. Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl, xxi.
11. Fontana, “The Rise of the Femoir.”
12. Hadley Freeman, “The problem with ‘femoirs.’”
13. Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other
Concerns) (New York: Random House, 2011), 5.
14. Ibid., 7.
15. Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out, 3.
16. Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl, 51.
17. Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical” in The Private Self:
Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari
Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 11.
18. Hadley Freeman, “The problem with ‘femoirs.’”

19. Amy Poehler, Yes Please (London: Harper Collins, 2014), x.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Ibid., xiii.
22. Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl, xv–xvi.
23. Stefania Marghitu and Conrad Ng, “Body Talk: Reconsidering the Post-
Feminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls,”
Gender Forum, 45 (2013): 2, accessed 24 January 2016. http://www.
genderforum.org/issues/special-issue-early-career-researchers-i/body-
talk-reconsidering-the-post-feminist-discourse-and-critical-reception-
of-lena-dunhams-girls/.
24. Ibid., 2.
25. Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl, 65.
26. Alison Flood, “Lena Dunham apologises after critics accuse her of sexually
molesting sister,” The Guardian, November 5, 2014, accessed September
27, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/05/lena-
dunham-statement-abuse-claims.
27. Tina Fey, Bossypants (London: Sphere, 2011), 3.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Ibid., 17.
30. Ibid., 17.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. Fey, Bossypants, 20.
33. Ibid., 24.
34. Ibid., 114.
35. Ibid., 151.
36. Ibid., 151.
37. Suzanne Ferriss, “Chick Non-Fic: The Comedic Memoir,” 220.
39. Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me? (New York: Random House, 2015), 20.
40. Ibid., 20.
41. Dahlia Schweitzer, “The Mindy Project: Or Why ‘I’m the Mary, You’re the
Rhoda’ Is the RomComSitCom’s Most Revealing Accusation,” Journal of
Popular Film and Television 43:2 (2015): 67, accessed 3 February 2016,
doi:10.1080/01956051.2015.1027648.
42. Gina Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White … But I Drifted: Women’s
Strategic Use of Humor (Hanover and London: University Press of New
England, 2013), xxx.
44. Kaling, Why Not Me?, 101.
45. Dahlia Schweitzer, “The Mindy Project, 64.”
46. Poehler, Yes Please, 229.
172 A.-M. EVANS

48. Ibid., 136.
49. Kaling, Why Not Me?, 31.
51. Martha Lauzen, “The Funny Business of Being Tina Fey: Constructing
a (feminist) comedy icon” Feminist Media Studies 14.1 (2012): 117,
accessed 4 February 2016, doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.740060.
54. Ibid., 256.
55. L ynn C. Miller and Jacqueline Taylor, “Introduction,” in Voices Made
Flesh, Performing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Lynn Miller, Jacqueline
Taylor, and M. Heather Carver. (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 2003), 3.
Bibliography
Barreca, Gina. They Used to Call Me Snow White…But I Drifted: Women’s
Strategic Use of Humor. Hanover and London: University Press of New
England, 2013.
Benstock, Shari. “Authorizing the Autobiographical.” In The Private Self: Theory
and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock,
10-34. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Chocano, Carina. “Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?” New York Times, October 9,
2014. Accessed January 27, 2016.
Crossley, Sloane. “A Voice of a Generation: Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of
Girl.” New York Times, November 16, 2015. Accessed January 27, 2016.
Dunham, Lena. Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s
“Learned”. London: Fourth Estate, 2015.
Ferriss, Suzanne. “Chick Non-Fic: The Comedic Memoir.” Feminist Media
Studies. 14.2 (2014): 206-221. Accessed February 10, 2016. Fey, Tina.
Bossypants. London: Sphere: 2011.
Flood, Alison. “Lena Dunham apologises after critics accuse her of sexually
molesting sister.” The Guardian, November 5, 2014.
Fontana, Kaitlin. “The Rise of the Femoir.” Hazlitt, August 23, 2012.
Freeman, Hadley. “The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer review
—the problem with ‘femoirs.’” The Guardian, September 9, 2016.
Garner, Dwight. “‘S.N.L.’ Memories and Getting-Some-Rest Dreams. Book
Review: Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please.” New York Times., November 4, 2014.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Vanity Fair, January 2007.
Kaling, Mindy. “Flick Chicks: A Guide to Women in the Movies.” New Yorker,
October 3, 2011.
Kaling, Mindy. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).
New York: Random House: 2011.
Kaling, Mindy.Why Not Me? New York: Random House: 2015.
Lauzen, Martha. “The Funny Business of Being Tina Fey: Constructing a
(feminist) comedy icon.” Feminist Media Studies. 14.1: (2012) 106–117.
Mabry, A. Rochelle. “About a Girl: Female Subjectivity and Sexuality in
Contemporary ‘Chick’ Culture.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction,
edited by Suzanne Ferriss, and Mallory Young, 191–206. New York:
Routledge: 2006.
Marghitu, Stefania, and Conrad Ng. “Body Talk: Reconsidering the Post-
Feminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls.” Gender
Forum, 45 (2013): 1–8.
Maslin, Janet. “Tina Fey Is Greek and Also Teutonic, but She Isn’t a Troll.” New
York Times, April 3, 2011. Accessed 27 January, 2016.
Miller, Lynn. C, and Jacqueline Taylor. “Introduction.” In Voices Made Flesh,
Performing Women’s Autobiography, edited by Lynn Miller, Jacqueline Taylor,
and M. Heather Carver, 3–15. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press:
2003.
Poehler, Amy. Yes Please. London: Harper Collins: 2014.
Schumer, Amy. The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo. New York: Simon and
Schuster: 2016.
Schweitzer, Dahlia. “The Mindy Project: Or Why “I’m the Mary, You’re the
Rhoda” Is the RomComSitCom’s Most Revealing Accusation.” Journal of
Popular Film and Television 43: 2 (2015): 63–69.
Author Biography
Anne-Marie Evans is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at York St. John
University, York, UK. Her main area of interest is early twentieth-century
American Literature, and she is particularly interested in how models of con-
sumerism are interrogated in women’s writing. She has published articles on the
work of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Mae West and Anita Loos, and has also
edited two collections of essays on the contemporary American novel.
Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression
Linda A. Morris
Roz Chast’s cartoons are readily recognizable to anyone who reads The
New Yorker magazine. Her scribbly lines, freakish-looking wild-eyed
characters, and her gentle, often wacky, sense of humor mark her work
as distinctive and whimsical. There are in fact many apt ways to describe
Chast’s cartoons: quirky, scribbly, subversive, neurotic, crumbly, silly,
mocking, surreal, irreverent, dark—all accurate. Now we must add to
that list “transgressive” in keeping with the theme of this book and to do
honor to the depth of her work. In both word and image she makes gen-
tle fun of topics and events that are not supposed to be funny and that
one is not supposed to laugh at, up to and including the final illnesses
and deaths of her parents. As she said in a 2011 interview, “anything to
do with death is funny.”1 She also pokes fun at difficult mother-daugh-
ter relationships, “mixed marriages,” suburban life, infirmity, and “bad
moms,” to name only a few subjects to be found in her work.
What Chast offers throughout her work, in fact, is a unique contri-
bution to a long tradition of women’s domestic humor in America.
Reaching back to the work of writers from the 19th century, such as
Frances Whitcher, through the 20th century with writers such as Betty
McDonald, Mary Lasswell, and Erma Bombeck and into the 21st
L.A. Morris (*) 
University of California, Davis, USA

176 L.A. Morris
century with Gina Barreca, to name but a few, American women humor-
ists have long made their quotidian lives the subject of their humor.2
They have done so without regard for what is “proper” or acceptable for
a woman to say or write. In the 1840s, for instance, Frances Whitcher as
The Widow Bedott made fun of her husband’s parishioners in upstate
New York, while Betty McDonald took on the tedium and isolation of
being a chicken farmer in the post-WWII back-to-the-land movement.
Erma Bombeck exploded the notion that there was anything noble
about the triviality confronting a housewife, and Mary Lasswell turned
on its head the notion that old women were supposed to be subdued
and genteel. Barreca, for her part, challenges any notion that women
should remain silent and compliant. Viewed in relationship to earlier
humorists, Roz Chast emerges as the unexpected inheritor of the whole
tradition through her unique combination of the written word and her
zany, irreverent cartoon images. For Chast, there seems to be no area of
modern urban domestic and personal life that does not find its way into
her cartoons. David Remnick observed:
All of Roz Chast’s anxieties, fears, superstitions, failures, furies, insecurities,

and dark imaginings—all of it, the entire kit and caboodle of her psyche, is
here, and you feel you are meeting a vivid deep, funny, peculiar, and par-
ticular human being.3
Part of the effect of her cartoons resides in her choice of subject matter
and the words she uses to express her unique perspective, but equally
important and inseparable from her words are the distinctive, exagger-
ated physical representations of people who inhabit her world, and the
soft squiggly lines she often uses to depict her characters and their sur-
roundings. There is nothing realistic about her drawing, yet every person
and object is readily recognizable, from the teenage girl arguing with her
mother, the middle-aged housewife, the overstuffed chairs and couches,
pork-pie hats, “relaxed fit” trousers, flowered housedresses, and Roz her-
self. Everything about these cartoons is homely in the best sense of the
word, including the hand-written scripts that make up the extended texts
of Chast’s cartoons.
Remarkably, the style and presentation of the cartoons do not change
appreciably when Chast moves beyond (but never abandons) her most
whimsical subjects and perspective, that is, when her humor becomes
fully transgressive. This move happens most dramatically in her 2014
memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? that chronicles
ROZ CHAST: FROM WHIMSY TO TRANSGRESSION 177
through her narrative and her characteristic cartoon form the aging,
declining health and ultimate deaths of her parents.4 It is important to
acknowledge from the outset that such subjects for a memoir, however
revealing in their details, are not in themselves transgressive; even Chast’s
uncanny candor about her own relationship with her parents does not
cross that line. But when the words are vividly illustrated by her cartoon
drawings something startlingly new emerges. Put another way, if Chast’s
memoir were a straightforward literary memoir, it would be poignant
and moving in her depiction of her parents who do everything they can
to avoid the subject and reality of their coming deaths, and as their only
daughter struggles to assist them in their final years. But when all this is
accompanied by cartoons that visually make light of physical and emo-
tional decline, and of the persons themselves, her memoir moves into
uncharted and unexpected territory, remarkable for its startling honesty.
This essay will explore the multiple ways Chast combines whimsy with
transgression in a cross section of cartoons. It will explore a range of sub-
jects that have attracted her attention. While “anxieties” and “insecuri-
ties” do indeed surface again and again in her humor, just as Remnick
suggests, it’s the unique way Chast pokes fun at familial relationships
that will occupy the lion’s share of our attention. Looking first at a few
representative categories of cartoons that skirt on the edge of transgres-
sion, we’ll conclude with an in-depth look at the darker, more painful
revelations at the core of her memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something
More Pleasant?
Fortunately for current readers and fans of Chast, hundreds of her
cartoons are collected in Theories of Everything, spanning the years 1978–
2006.5 In 1978 Chast published her first cartoon in The New Yorker,
and by the time of the publication of Theories of Everything she had con-
tributed nearly a thousand cartoons to the magazine.6 To date she has
published an additional twelve books, with the most notable being The
Party After You Left, and What I Hate: From A to Z,7 as well as two chil-
dren’s books. She has received no fewer than four major national awards,
including The National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) for
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Chast was born in Brooklyn, New York‚ in 1954, the only child of
George and Elizabeth Chast, who were in their forties when she was
born. Both children of Russian Jewish immigrants, George was a high
school language teacher and Elizabeth was an assistant principal at vari-
ous Brooklyn grade schools. The family lived in the same apartment
the entire time Chast was growing up, and the parents remained there
178 L.A. Morris
until they were forced by advanced age and ill health to move into an
assisted living facility. Chast attended Kirkland College in Clinton, New
York, then transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design. When she
graduated she returned to New York City and worked as a cartoonist and
illustrator and became a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She is mar-
ried to the humor writer Bill Franzen; they have two children and live in
Connecticut.
The Modern Family, as Chast Sees It

Even Chast’s ancestors come in for their share of ridicule in a cartoon
entitled “Regrets Only.”8 The first frame of the cartoon shows the upper
torso and head of a woman with steam coming out of both ears, accompa-
nied by these words: “Sometimes, when one thinks about one’s ancestors,
one can become sort of incredibly furious.” The cartoon goes on to show
a beachfront house worth $5.5 million, but “where were one’s ancestors
when land was still affordable?” The answer “probably sitting around in
some backwater country, twiddling their lazy thumbs.” A peasant-look-
ing female ancestor is quoted as saying, “Can’t come to the U.S. and buy
property. I have to finish Scrubbing This Teakettle.” The woman seen in
the first frame of the cartoon appears again in the final frame, arms folded
and her face filled with anger over such “appalling self-centeredness,”
while her mother tries to pass on to her the very teakettle the ancestor was
polishing. So in the end is the cartoon genuinely aimed at the unimagina-
tive, unambitious naïve ancestor, or at the angry woman, deprived of the
inheritance she assumes she is owed? Who, after all, is the selfish one? As
with most good humor, it cuts both ways, and as with so much of Chast’s
humor, it situates its protagonists firmly within a family unit.
A “bad mom” theme runs through many of Chast’s cartoons.
Sometimes she seems to identify with the bad mom herself, thinking pre-
sumably of her relationships with her own children, while at other times
“the mom” seems to be of the generation older than Chast—her moth-
er’s generation. As Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? makes
explicit, Chast’s relationship with her own mother was anything but easy.
One of her most delightful indictments of moms seems aimed at her own
generation of moms. In a full-page cartoon entitled “Bad Mom Cards:
Collect the Entire Set!” Chast identifies nine different moms, each given
a mom-number and a name, and her “badness” identified in her frame
(see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Bad mom cards

180 L.A. Morris
Most of the “sins” the moms have committed are inane at worst, but
the last one has a zing to it: Becky O—“while on phone told child to
Shut The Hell Up or she would brain her.” All the other moms look
relatively normal and banal, but Becky’s eyes are bulging out, her hair is
flying in all directions, and her arm is flapping in obvious frustration. The
teaser in the cartoon is that from the beginning Chast promises there is
an “entire set,” but these appear to be the only “bad mom” cards Chast
has produced, at least so far.
Chast specializes in making various faux greeting cards. One cartoon
features Mother’s Day cards, billed as “Healing Truths: Mother’s Day
Cards.” On the left side are fairly standard-looking cards (given that
they all are rendered in Chast’s distinctive style of drawing), addressed
innocuously to “Mother, On this very special day,” “To a dear person
on Mother’s Day,” and “With good wishes on this day to Mom.” The
fun is in the messages inside and the tag lines (in bold type), presumably
penned by each of the would-be senders. “You knew I wanted Barbies
/The world’s most perfect teen. /Instead you chose to buy me /A
generic figurine. Thanks for saving three dollars.” She keeps the best
for last, much as a stand-up comedian sets up a punchline: “Your house
is always clean and neat. /Your lemon poundcake can’t be beat. /Self-
negating mom and wife. /It’s not too late to get a life.Only trying to
help.”
Strained parent-child relationships are a favorite target for Chast.
“True Confessions” features a series of different moms making confes-
sions to their children, all in retrospect, as one would expect a confession
to be (see Fig. 2). The children depicted in the cartoon are both boys
and girls, sometimes present in the frames, sometimes not. Once again
the final frame is the most dramatic, with the mother sitting with a halo
over her head and the child spitting out food across the table. There’s a
certain silliness, a whimsy, in the cartoon and in the nature of what the
mothers feel they must confess. There is also a decided glee underlying
the mothers’ minor triumphs over their children in the past.
In “Mom-O-Grams,” a cartoon of only three frames, a rather chunky
older mom, in an ugly dress and hat, sings her message to her daughter.
There is no doubt that it is a daughter who is to receive the singing mes-
sages, which in turn is signaled by musical notes accompanying the texts:
“You look too thin, /Your face is pale. /This is the path /That leads to
jail.” “Ask anyone who knows about science/You don’t use wet hands
Fig. 2 True confessions
to unplug an appliance,” and finally, “You live in a hovel. /It’s really

quite bleak. /You might try to vacuum /At least once a week.” That’s
it. Short and sweet, taunting in tone and making fun both of the mom
182 L.A. Morris
who would taunt in this musical, sing-song way, and the daughter who is
clearly not living up to her mother’s standards.
In another cartoon, both parents deliver their messages to their
daughter, (always a daughter) but this time through signs they put in
the window of their “Mom & Pop Grocerette,” while a middle-aged
woman, presumably the daughter, stands on the sidewalk, dressed in her
winter coat, her back to the grocery store. The signs read: “We never
see you anymore”! “What’s the matter? Maybe we don’t carry enough
of your fancy ‘Gourmet Items’?” Then there are the two messages meant
especially to induce guilt in the daughter: “Guess you’re all grown up
and have Your Own Life now.” Postioned above a representation of
mom and pop waving out at the daughter is the admonition “Don’t
Worry About Us!”
As should be clear by now, guilt between children and parents is an
ongoing theme is Roz Chast’s humor. Parents feel it, parents induce it,
and children feel it. Guilt for things they have done, both parents and
children, and guilt for things they have not done. One of her cartoons
is entitled “The Big Book of Parent-Child Fights.” As envisioned in
the table of contents, it’s a big book indeed, with the final chapter,
“Miscellaneous Battles” purportedly beginning on page 9505. The
table of contents is centered in the middle of the page and includes
such categories as “School-Related Spats,” “Messy-Room Run-Ins,”
and near the bottom, “General-Ingratitude Quarrels.” It is surrounded
by little vignettes of children saying such things as “But Allison gets
to stay up till 3 A. M on school nights,” “I hate you! You’re Ruining
my Life,” and “Ma, everybody’s wearing pants like these.” The par-
ents, for their part, have very recognizable parent lines: “I want to see
every last bite of that broccoli gone,” “A C+ in English? What is the
meaning of this???” “You don’t appreciate anything! You just sit there
and take it all for granted.” Although she seems to give equal time to
the parents and the children, the fights clearly represent the parents’
perspective.
One final cartoon that sweeps in both parents and children is a series
of “Passive-Aggressive Birthday Gifts ‘For when you don’t like the kid
… or the parents.’” The boxed gifts, five of them, truly are aimed at
both generations. They include a “Li’l Smelter Ore-extracting Kit,”
that reaches 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, “Grandpappy Joe’s Moonshine
Maker,” “Big Bang—for kids who want to make their own fireworks,”
the “Floozy Factory—‘Look like a hardened barfly—even if you’re six!’”

and the final “Klumsy Oaf. Messy Spilly Indelible Art Stuff,” featuring
a demented looking child dropping gallons of “art stuff” all over the
floor.
Suburban Life
Writing always from the perspective of a transplanted New Yorker, Roz
Chast frequently makes suburban life the object of her humor. One of
her best suburban cartoons features the “Police Log from Suburbia
Heights In Haiku Form” (see Fig. 3).
The illustrations that accompany, indeed surround, her seven haiku,
one for each day of the week, are classic drawings of Chast characters,
from teenage boys with their caps on backwards, to middle-aged white
suburban types. The police log, so called, makes it clear how banal and
frankly boring suburban life can be. The neighbors who overhear the
“domestic dispute” on Thursday are gleeful about what they have heard,
no matter that the woman says “one feels so bad!”
A more detailed narrative accompanies her “When in Rome …” car-
toon. It begins with a terribly distressed looking man identified as a
“crack head” in front of a “crack store.” He is clearly meant to represent
an inhabitant of Brooklyn, referred to by the first-person narrator in the
first frame of the cartoon who says “The whole time I lived in Brooklyn
I never once thought about napkin folding.” Lest there be any doubt
who the “I” narrator is, the next frame affirms that it is Roz Chast her-
self: “Connecticut was a different story.” The narrator decides to “check
out the natives” and attends a class in napkin folding. Trying to blend
in, the Chast character begins to look more and more distressed as the
lesson goes on until she is pulling at her hair and looking like a crazed
woman herself, as the background chatter about napkin folding goes on.
“Who were they kidding???” She then pulls herself back, calms down a
bit, and admits “they” were “probably all very nice folks, nice, sensible,
responsible, God fearing, upstanding, solid citizens.” But, she concludes:
“The minute the kids leave for college, we’re moving back to the city.”
She is simply out of place, and the whole gathering is so inane that you
understand perfectly why. Still, you’re really not supposed to make fun of
your peers, or your neighbors; you’re not supposed to imagine that life
among the crack dealers is preferable to the calmness, the ordinariness,
184 L.A. Morris
Fig. 3 Police log from suburbia heights
the banality of suburban living. This is a bold cartoon, and while some of
her Connecticut neighbors may resonate with the sentiments in the car-
toon, it’s not a great way to “try to blend in.”9
Mixed Marriages
Chast has created a series of cartoons under the category “Mixed
Marriages.” While she never identifies what exactly is “mixed” about the
marriage in question, it does not appear to be what one might expect—
racially mixed, ethnically mixed, even religiously mixed—at least not in any
obvious way. The couple represented in all these cartoons look a whole lot
like other familiar male and female middle-aged characters in her cartoons.
In one, she imagines a “food fight,” which begins with the wife reject-
ing a bunch of grapes her husband has just bought because they are “too
big.” The wife takes off in one direction about the grapes, claiming that
the farmer who grew them must have decided to “grow grapes the size
of apples! and that depressed me.” The husband, in exasperation, replies
that her statement “makes me doubt everything you have EVER SAID.”
Clearly both are using the grapes as a way to get at each other for some
previous unknown, pent-up resentment. He keeps going: “What IS it with
you and food?” “These pancakes are granular.” “These green beans taste
like my grandma’s apartment.” “This taffy smells UNFAMILIAR!!!” By
this time, he is bug-eyed and frantic. He concludes: “You and your parents
are ALL NUTS!!!” She replies, understandably: “Don’t drag my folks
into this.” Everything escalates, and in the end the argument has abso-
lutely nothing to do with food, or grapes, or parents, for that matter.
In another iteration of “Mixed Marriage: A Quiet Evening at Home”
the familiar couple is sitting on a couch watching TV, and after one
frame of silence, the wife says to herself, “Oh, I see … we’re not talk-
ing.” She goes on a to have imaginary conversations with her husband,
getting more and more angry and frustrated, taking that conversation
into more and more neurotic directions. Midway through she says, again
to herself as the “thought” balloon makes clear, “O.K. Mr. Nonverbal.
All’s I know is, one day, you’re going to want to start a conversation …”
He, of course, has no idea the whole conversation is going on, and he
calmly watches TV, takes a drink from a bottle, and in the end clicks off
the TV. She, however, has gone through an entire drama and is not likely
to forget the “argument” they have been having.
In a third version of “Mixed Marriage: ‘An Eye for an Eye,’” the wife
once again gets out of control with her anger, this time because they are
sitting in a restaurant and she notices that people who came in after they
did are getting served before them. She gets more and more agitated
and stands up and “squints” and “cranes” and tries to find the waiter.
186 L.A. Morris
This time the husband is not oblivious or passive; instead he says she is
embarrassing him and accuses her of acting “like one of those WHINY,
PUSHY, ANXIOUS, HYPER-COMPETITIVE New Yorkers …,”
who thinks only of herself. He gets more and more agitated, then sits
back and tells her to have a breadstick and to “chill”. It’s her turn next,
becoming furious and proclaiming that if she had “grown up in a place
where all people thought about was WHAT THEY WERE BRINGING
TO THE CHURCH SUPPER I’D BE AS IN THE MOMENT AS
YOU!!!” In the final frame of the cartoon, she is for the first time sitting
calmly, having had the last word, while he looks entirely frazzled.
Death and Dying
Death and dying have appeared intermittently in Chast’s cartoons for
many years. Sometimes it is in the form of the grim reaper, for example
with a pie chart identifying the possible ways of dying, broken down by
percentages (as in “14% quick but excruciating”), here and there it’s a
tombstone or a cemetery. In a full-page cartoon called “For Their Own
Good,” the matron in the first frame announces that “It isn’t that diffi-
cult to shield children from death,” as an adolescent boy asks “Mommy?
Where’s Grandpa?” (see Fig. 4).
One frame after another poses scenarios in response to children’s nat-
ural curiosity about death. In every frame, a child looks freaked out by
some form of encounter with death, but “for their own good” the adults
divert their attention, make up preposterous stories, and refuse to answer
the children’s questions. In the end, it’s obviously the adults who can’t
face the reality of death, whether of humans or animals, which brings us
to Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Chast’s prize-winning graphic memoir features essentially just three peo-
ple: Roz, her father, George, and her mother, Elizabeth. In the prelude
to the memoir, Chast establishes in the very first cartoon that her parents
do not want to “talk about things,” “plans,” and they don’t even want to
know what “things” are (see Fig. 5).
Her drawings of her parents, sitting on their couch, get more and
more bizarre and twisted as their daughter gets more frantic (and indi-
rect) in her question until she finally tells them in frustration to “forget
Fig. 4 For their own good

188 L.A. Morris
Fig. 5 Things
it.” The final frame takes an unexpected turn when “later that day” the
daughter, sitting by herself, says “Whew!” and the parents, now seated
calmly at their table, also each say “Whew!” From the beginning Chast
establishes the discomfort all three of them are going to face over the
course of the memoir, and she makes it clear that none of them is going
to be able to easily or comfortably (or realistically) talk about “things.”
Yet in the boldest and most frank way, this is precisely what the memoir
does, no matter how uncomfortable the situations become.
Chast also brings in earlier details about her parents’ lives, including
the fact that her mother had given birth to a baby girl years before Roz
was born, and that the baby died the next day. That death they have also
been unwilling, or unable, to talk about, and they didn’t like it when
Roz later asked about her “almost sister.” She acknowledges that her
parents’ lives were not easy, that they were both the children of Russian
Jewish immigrants whose life stories were filled with hardship and tur-
moil. The frankness with which she relays and illustrates these family sto-
ries is remarkable—she does nothing to smooth over the rough spots,
and concludes about her parents that “it was amazing they weren’t cra-
zier than they were.”
Chast then begins the first chapter, which she calls “The Beginning
of the End‚” with the stunning revelation that once she married and had
children and moved to Connecticut she never went back to visit her par-
ents in Brooklyn—not for eleven years. With the brutal frankness that
is going to characterize the entire memoir, she elaborates on why she
never went to see them. In doing so, she also establishes the fact that
this memoir, while generously illustrated on every page, has much more
extended text than any of her regular stand-alone cartoons:
In 1990, my husband, our three-year-old son, and I (pregnant with

our soon-to-be-born daughter) moved out of the city to the suburbs of
Connecticut where there was more space, and greenery, and good public
schools. If doing right by our kids meant abandoning my then-78-year-old
parents, so be it. The longer we were there, the more impossible schlep-
ping into Brooklyn seemed. If they wanted to see us so damn much, let
them make the trip!!!!
Also, I loathed Brooklyn, which was where they still lived, in the same
apartment in which I spent my unhappy childhood. The neighborhood
was depressing, their apartment was depressing. Who needed it?10
190 L.A. Morris
If the parents were in denial, so was Chast: “Maybe they’ll both die at
the same time in their sleep … and I’ll never have to ‘deal’! Never, never,
never.”11
Chast does not in any way idealize her parents. Her father she
describes as beset by anxieties; he “chain-worried,” she says. But he was
also smart, and like Roz herself, “loved words and word origins.”12 She
saw him as kind and sensitive, and he had made efforts to be companion-
able with Roz when she was a child. “Even though I knew he couldn’t
really defend me against my mother’s rages, I sense that at least he felt
some sympathy, and that he liked me as a person, not just because I was
his daughter.”13 Her mother was quite another matter. “She was good
at telling people what to do. She was decisive, good in a crisis, and not
afraid of making enemies. Those stupid enough to get her angry got
what she liked to call a blast from Chast” (see Fig. 6).
What follows in the memoir is Chast’s description of the long and
slow decline of both parents, both in their nineties when the memoir
begins. As her mother’s physical health declines, her father’s dementia
increases. Roz increases her visits to her parents in their apartment, and
she comes to the realization that they all three are essentially “stuck”
with each other. She gets them to accept the assistance of an Elder
Lawyer to get all the paperwork in order, but this seems to be an anti-
climax, for there is nothing to do now but wait for the inevitable to hap-
pen, whatever form it takes. It’s a rare moment of stillness in the text
and represents, I believe, how helpless everyone is in such a situation.
No matter how much one might plan (or not) there is no way of know-
ing what will happen, and when. But the inevitable does happen—her
mother falls off a step stool and her father freaks out. Her mother refuses
to see a doctor or receive treatment, although she is bed ridden. Two
weeks later she is hospitalized, and the separation of her father from her
mother reveals how senile he has become.
Chast’s illustration for this unsettling realization is itself unexpected,
even as we have come to know how easily she can slip over the line in
making visual fun of painful and life-altering situations. Her illustration
of her father forgetting what has happened to “Mom” captures the ter-
ror he must have felt upon being told (again) that she is hospitalized (see
Fig. 7). But the next page shows him off in la-la land, living “as if eve-
rything was hunky dory.” It’s a startling moment, one when we might
expect sadness and sympathy.
Fig. 6 A blast from Chast
With her father now living with Chast, at least temporarily, his senil-
ity is not only more apparent but also drives her “bats,” to use a term
she reverts to several times. And who can blame her? His “sundowning”
sets in as he displays increased anxieties toward the end of each day, and
the strain on both father and daughter is highlighted in the text and in
192 L.A. Morris
Fig. 7 Where’s mom
the cartoons. Chast does not hold back in relating how crazy and obses-
sive he became, which is disconcerting for the reader. Nonetheless, hav-
ing fully vented, she finally admits that “mostly it was just sad.”14 This
is a moment we have been waiting for, and when it comes, it is doubly
poignant.
The decline of both parents continues and, as everyone who has ever
faced such a dilemma knows, there is a point when the failing parents
cannot realistically or humanely continue to live on their own—but the
dreaded “assisted living” seems like a one-way trip in the wrong direc-
tion. At this crux, Chast delivers up one of her most delightful cartoons
in the book as she creates a visual image of how assisted living facilities
appear in the imaginations of those facing such a choice (see Fig. 8).
Fig. 8 Assisted living
Assisted living does indeed offer the best, and only choice for the
Chasts, but that doesn’t make that choice an easy one. The first place
they visit is utterly unacceptable: “We didn’t see much of the Place. What
I saw was depressing, torn carpet, dirty, flaking walls, and lots of old,
OLD, OLD, OLD people. Decrepit, hobbledy, sad old oldsters. Yep
OLD.” Chast and her parents clearly are in a dilemma: “Now I felt like it
was just me, my mom, and my dad. And none of us had a clue.”15
194 L.A. Morris
Fig. 9 Something you should know
It’s a stark realization, but two pages later she delivers up one of the
most delightful and transgressive cartoons in the memoir (see Fig. 9).
Ostensibly directed at her readers, the “you” of the cartoon heading, it
brings home its point that once you reach 90 things start to deteriorate
more rapidly as revealed by her male figure becoming increasingly feeble
and grotesque as he collapses right out of the frame of the cartoon. But
it’s the daughter, Roz, who has the last word with a look of absolute
horror on her face. What is finally grotesque here, in spite of the draw-
ing of the crumbling, distorted old man, is the notion that people want
to figure out how to live to be 120. Hard on the heels of the recognition
that Roz and her parents are at the threshold of a life-altering decision, it
is the height of absurdity that anyone would want to prolong their life in
these terms.
Once the Chasts do make The move to “the Place,” (a different one),
which at least “didn’t make you want to kill yourself,” Roz Chast, as the
only child, is left to take care of her parents’ apartment.16 This is a hard
enough task to face in any event, but for Chast it is made so much worse
because her parents were essentially hoarders—they kept everything and,
at least in their declining years, the apartment has become increasingly
messy and crowded. Unexpectedly, as she records the masses of materi-
als she has to sort through, Chast abandons for a time her drawn illus-
trations and includes photos instead—collections of glasses frames of her
mother’s, an old stapler, a “museum” of Schick shavers, and pencils—
drawers and closets full of pencils. A drawer of jar lids, food containers
in the refrigerator, clothes hanging in a closet—are all presented in their
stark photographic realism, and Chast has to decide what to do with
all of it.17 She keeps a few things—very few from the illustrated list she
offers up, and leaves everything else “for the super to deal with. I didn’t
care whether he kept it, sold it, or threw it out the window. I was sick
of the ransacking, the picking over and deciding, the dust, and the not
particularly interesting trips down memory lane.” Ever mindful of her
reader, to whom she offers bits of advice all along, she quotes a friend
whose rule of thumb was “when it comes to cleaning out your parents’
house: if you don’t think your kids are going to want it, don’t take it.”18
End of sentimentality. Period.
Because this is a memoir that is at times brutally frank, Chast records
not only the ins and outs of her parents’ decline but also her own feel-
ings of guilt, her resentment at times, her anger at them and at the situ-
ation they are all in together, and even her own bitterness. Part of that
frankness is captured in a cartoon entitled “Gallant and Goofus, The
Daughter-Caretaker Edition” that pits the sentiments of the presumably
“good” daughter against the daughter caught up in the reality of caring
for her parents (see Fig. 10).
Her father dies first. In one of Chast’s most extended descriptions
of how he deteriorated before his death, she makes much less use of
her comic illustrations, but she returns to it in one of the most poign-
ant moments in their story, as she lay in bed next to him and tells him
that it’s okay to let go and that she loves him. He asks about Chast’s
daughter, whom he adored, then says nothing more. It is their last
196 L.A. Morris
Fig. 10 Gallant and Goofus
conversation.19 The tension between the cartoon illustrations and

the finality of the texts continues. She shows her mother in full denial,
demanding that no one talk about death, and herself leaning over to kiss
her father after he had “slipped away.” An intensely private moment has
become public, not only in word but also in comic form.
Her mother lives on, and in fact lives much longer than anyone imagi-
nes possible. She is in hospice care, but she seems to improve rather than
decline. Remarkably, the mother comes to welcome and trust a Jamaican
caregiver named Goodie, who seems to be kindness itself. What Roz
concentrates on in her mother’s final days are the outrageous stories her
mother begins to tell her. Her mother regales her with wholly invented,
delusional stories about her deceased mother-in- law, about her caretaker
Goodie, and about real estate holdings she never held, yet were real in
her imagination. It is as though she is in a state of suspended animation.
The story Chast liked best featured herself, at age four, attending a play
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the child Roz running up on the stage to yell
at Simon Legree and take away his whip. “Mom” is gleeful in telling the
story, while Chast is depicted as completely disconcerted and disoriented,
her eyes rolling and mouth distorted.20
One of the most poignant, indeed painful, moments, is fully illus-
trated as Chast attempts to have a “final conversation” with her dying
mother. Chast tells her mother that she wishes the two of them could
have been better friends when Chast was growing up, but instead of
saying “me too” her mother replies “does it worry you?” and admits it
doesn’t worry her. Chast then asks: “Do you want me to stay, or should
I go?” and her mother replies: “It doesn’t matter.” The final frame of
the cartoon shows the mother in her bed and the chair next to her bed
empty: “It was time to go.”21
One of Chast’s last actions on her mother’s behalf is to cut the “do
not resuscitate” (DNR) bracelet off her arm and affix it instead to her
medical chart. It had depressed her mother to look at it, and Chast
remarks “it was a little too close to a toe tag.” With her sense of humor
never failing her she capitalizes on the oddity of the DNR bracelet by
creating one final outrageous and highly memorable cartoon illus-
tration—this at a time when her mother’s death was imminent (see
Fig. 11).
In sharp contrast, as her mother literally lay dying, Chast aban-
doned her cartoon illustrations and includes instead a series of sketches
she drew of her dying mother. It was a long death, over many days, yet
Chast sketched on. The final page of the memoir proper, before the
“Epilogue,” depicts her mother on the night she died; it is unclear if she
198 L.A. Morris
Fig. 11 DNR
is alive or already dead in the sketch, but it doesn’t matter, for the words
say it all: “My mother died tonight at 8:28.”22
The final pages of the book feature her parents’ “cremains” as they
occupy a corner in Chast’s closet, “along with shoes, old photo albums,
wrapping paper, a sewing machine, a shelf of sleep t-shirts, an iron, a

cartoon of my kids’ childhood artwork, and some other miscellane-
ous stuff.”23 It is intensely personal, homely, matter of fact, and wholly
lacking in sentimentality. Chast’s parents have come home in the most
homely way possible—no crematorium, cemetery, urn on a mantle for
them, just a place in their daughter’s closet.
Because this is all real life, not fiction or even fictionalized biogra-
phy, there is an unexpected Epilogue that appeared in The New Yorker
three years after the ending of the memoir.24 Continuing her cartoon-
style of storytelling, Chast says that a reader of her memoir had become
curious about where the parents’ first baby was buried, and pursued the
topic via a website called “Findagrave.” It led to Chast receiving an email
message saying: “Dear Roz, I believe you have found your Sister.” The
Chast character depicted in that frame looks as though she is exploding
with the news—eyes popping out of her head, mouth agape in a painful
expression, and hair jutting out in all directions. As it turns out, Chast
found not only the location of the burial of her sister, but the graves
of her mother’s parents. She quickly concludes that her parents’ ashes
are about to have a new home. And indeed they do. She had the ashes
deposited in an appropriate niche in the wall of the cemetery, overlook-
ing her sister’s grave, and Roz Chast concludes: “It was time to say
goodbye.”
Notes
1. Richard Gehr, “Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists: Roz Chast,” The
Comics Journal, June 14, 2001; www.tcj.com/roz-chast.
2. Representative works by these humorists include: Whitcher, The Widow
Bedott Papers; McDonald, The Egg and I; Lasswell, Suds in Your Eye;
Bombeck, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank; Barreca, If
You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?
3. David Remnick, “Introduction,” Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected,
Health-Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast, 1978–2006. (New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2008.) There are no page numbers in this collection.
4. Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
5. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
6. Remnick, “Introduction,” Theories of Everything.
7. The Party After You Left, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2004); What I
Hate: From A to Z (New York, Bloomsbury Press, 2011.)
200 L.A. Morris
8. Theories of Everything. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to

Chast’s cartoons will be to this collection.
9. The cartoon is reminiscent of a time in the 19th century when it was
revealed that, writing as The Widow Bedott, Frances Whitcher was the
author of sketches that satirized the behavior of the churchwomen in her
husband’s parish in Elmira, New York. When her authorship was revealed
he was forced to resign as the minister, and the two of them had to leave
town.
10. Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? 10–11.
11. Ibid., 22.
12. Ibid., 30.
13. Ibid., 32
14. Ibid., 81.
15. Ibid., 100–101.
16. Ibid., 127.
17. Ibid., 109–118.
18. Ibid., 121.
19. Ibid., 157–158.
20. Ibid., 194.
21. Ibid., 201.
22. Ibid., 222.
23. Ibid., 224.
24. “Epilogue,” The New Yorker, July 25, 2016, 44–45.
Bibliography
Barreca, Gina. If You Lean In, Will Men Will Just Look Down Your Blouse? New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
Bombeck, Erma. The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. New York:
Random House, 1972.
Chast, Roz. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2014.
———. “Epilogue.” The New Yorker. July 25, 2016, 44–45.
———. The Party After You Left. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2004.
———. Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected Cartoons by
Roz Chast, 1978–2006. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
———. What I Hate: From A to Z. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.
Gehr, Richard. “Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists: Roz Chast”. The Comics
Journal, July 14, 2011. www.tcj.com/roz-chast.
Lasswell, Mary. Suds in Your Eye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.
MacDonald, Betty. The Egg and I. New York: Harper and Row, 1945.
Remnick, David. “Introduction.” Roz Chast, Theories of Everything. New York:

Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Whitcher, Frances. The Widow Bedott Papers. New York: Derby and Jackson,
1856.
Author Biography
Linda A. Morris is Professor Emerita, Department of English, University
of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of Women’s Humor in the Age of
Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam Whitcher; Ed., American Women
Humorists: Critical Essays; and Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and
Transgression. She has published a number of articles about nineteenth and twen-
tieth century women’s humor and about Mark Twain.
“My Mom’s a Cunt”: New Bawds Ride the
Fourth Wave
Joanne Gilbert
“So … my mom’s a cunt—hear me out.”1 So says Schumer—Amy

Schumer, whose meteoric rise to stardom over the last several years has
made her the unlikely darling of stage, page, and screen—the poster
child for sexually explicit comedy. And although her material, fore-
grounding female sexual agency and desire at every turn, may surprise
audiences even as it titillates, Schumer’s humor does not have the shock
value of Sarah Silverman’s particular brand of comedy. As Schumer’s
multimedia comic predecessor in many ways, Silverman also fea-
tures graphic sexual material, but whereas Schumer feigns innocence/
ignorance in an obviously constructed manner, Silverman’s stage per-
sona appears to be genuinely guileless, unaware of the effect of her con-
troversial material. For example, in a now classic bit from her breakout
performance in the 2005 Jesus is Magic, Silverman muses, “I was lick-
ing jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis. And … all of a sudden, I’m think-
ing, ‘Oh my God—I’m turning into my mother!’”2 Ultimately, these
two highly successful female comics are connected by their enactment
of both the “bawd” and “bitch” personas, rhetorical postures with long
J. Gilbert (*) 
Alma College, Michigan, USA

204 J. Gilbert
and illustrious histories. As the “new bawds,” Schumer and Silverman

simultaneously reject and reinvent notions of female power through
their unique performance of marginality, critiquing hegemonic structures
through strategies of confrontation and celebration.
Like all cultural forms, stand-up comedy can be fruitfully examined
as a reflection of the current zeitgeist. What accounts for the immense
popularity of female comics performing sexually explicit material at this
historical moment? Are they doing something fundamentally differ-
ent than their comedic foremothers, or are audiences simply perceiving
them differently? And what do answers to these questions reveal about
the relationship between humor and power in contemporary culture? To
address these issues, this essay first discusses the bawd and bitch tradi-
tions of female comedy; next, it explores the way comics Amy Schumer
and Sarah Silverman construct rhetorical postures that both contest cul-
tural constraints historically used to contain female agency and reify ste-
reotypical feminine/feminist characterization; and finally, it considers the
impact and implications of this particular comedic discourse in the con-
text of gender, power, and fourth wave feminism.
Bawds, Bitches, and Feminist Humor

As a scholar studying marginal performance and a former stand-up comic
myself, I have long been fascinated by the relationship between humor
and power. My book, Performing Marginality examines nineteenth- and
twentieth-century female comic traditions, developing a taxonomy of
rhetorical postures historically assumed by funny women onstage. Two
of these postures, the bawd and the bitch, are particularly relevant to any
discussion of popular contemporary female comics.3 In order to under-
stand the rhetorical work of Schumer and Silverman, it is essential to
consider the rich history of female comedy within which they operate.
Bawds
Of the five rhetorical postures female comics in the USA have historically
assumed onstage (kid, bawd, bitch, whiner, and reporter), the bawd is the
most overtly sexual persona. Using their sexuality “as a means of pleas-
ure and control,” bawds have been frequently depicted as insatiable, and
“always threatening, especially on the subject of male sexual apparatus
“MY MOM’S A CUNT”: NEW BAWDS RIDE THE FOURTH WAVE 205
and/or technique.”4 Historically, the bawd has been a large woman who
uses her ample and voluptuous body in the service of her salacious dis-
course. Foregrounding their femaleness, bawd comics generally have
worn clothing that emphasized their curves, licked their lips lasciviously,
and employed a repertoire of both verbal and non-verbal communication
geared toward seducing or at least arousing their audience.
Dating back to the early 1900s with Eva Tanguay (who, though
Canadian, was a significant influence on this tradition in the USA), and
Vaudeville stars, Lillian Shaw and Kate Elinore, and spanning the decades
with icons like Sophie Tucker, Mae West, and Jackie “Mom’s” Mabley,
the bawd tradition reached its apex in the sexually liberated 1960s as the
“blue” material featured on comedy albums precipitated soaring sales,
and performers such as Hattie Noel, Lynn Robinson, Pearl Williams, Bea
Bea Benson, Rusty Warren, and Belle Barth became household names.
Indeed, audiences shocked by the graphic nature of Silverman and
Schumer’s material might be interested to learn that these performers are
not saying or doing anything particularly new. Rather, they are simply
contemporary purveyors of an age-old rhetorical gambit—the dick joke.
Referring not merely to “dicks,” but to all jokes that are either explicitly
sexual or scatological,5 dick jokes have long been a mainstay of stand-up
comedy for male and female comics alike. Silverman and Schumer may
shock or even offend contemporary audiences, but they are simply work-
ing within the tradition established by comics like Pearl Williams who
said: “Definition of indecent. If it’s long enough, hard enough, and in
far enough, it’s in decent!”,6 Rusty Warren whose album, Knockers Up
included humorous songs like “Gonna Get Some Poontang,” and the
infamous Belle Barth, known for lines such as “I had my disappoint-
ments in the service; I discovered that a 21-inch Admiral was only a tel-
evision set.”7
Emboldened by second wave—and ultimately, third wave—feminism,
and more aggressive than their precursors, notable bawds of the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s included the “Divine Miss M.,” Bette Midler, La
Wanda Page, Carrie Snow, Angela Scott, Adrienne Tolsch, Caroline
Rhea, Stephanie Hodge, and Thea Vidale—all important voices that
paved the way for contemporary comics like Silverman, Schumer, and
Holly Lorka, who performs bawdy humor from a lesbian perspective.8
Despite differences in individual style and cultural climate, past and
present bawds are united by several defining characteristics. Bawds are:
206 J. Gilbert
(1) blatantly and unabashedly sexual/sensual in their verbal and non-

verbal communication; (2) explicit in details of their lust—generally for
men and, frequently, younger men; and (3) potentially threatening or
intimidating to audiences (although their seductive rhetoric can titillate
and even create a sense of identification). As explained in Performing
Marginality (2004), “The bawd says, in essence, ‘What you see is what
you get—are you sure you can handle it?’”9 Bawds do not seek to con-
front or berate their audiences; that job is left to another prevalent
female comedic posture—the bitch.
Bitches
Like bawds, bitch comics are threatening and intimidating to audiences.
Unlike the bawd, however, the bitch traffics in aggressive confrontation,
attacking targets with both set material predicated on putdowns and
ostensibly spontaneous jokes at the expense of individual audience mem-
bers. As noted in Performing Marginality:
The bitch is the angriest female comedic persona … the bitch is caustic and
sometimes overtly ideological. The bitch evolved out of the bawd tradi-
tion. The two diverge, however, as the bitch focuses solely upon speak-
ing her mind and getting what she wants. This persona is not interested in
pleasing her audience; rather, she frequently insults and offends them or
rails out against social mores and cultural norms.10
The prototype of the bitch posture is, of course, Joan Rivers. Although
she gained national attention in the 1960s largely by performing the
kind of self-deprecatory material associated with the whiner persona,
Rivers made her fortune through the stinging barbs she hurled at celeb-
rities and audience members alike. Referring to herself as the “mean-
est bitch in America,” Rivers was the most highly paid, most popular
comic in the USA throughout the early and mid-1980s,11 and of course,
remained a highly visible and successful bitch performer in a number of
different television ventures until her death in 2014.
The bitch posture continued to prevail throughout the 1980s and
1990s as comics like Marsha Warfield, Judy Carter, Suzy Lowks, Pam
Matteson, Joy Behar, Leah Krinsky, Lea Delaria, Judy Tenuta, and most
notably, the iconic Roseanne wore this mantle proudly, loudly, and to
appreciative audience response. Commonly performing material that
attacked males at both the individual and cultural level, bitch com-
ics were generally those that critics unsurprisingly cited when using the
label “feminist comic.” Indeed, the culturally entrenched stereotype of
the angry feminist is one that bitch comics simultaneously condemn and
embrace as they offer acerbic social critique through their biting humor.
Both the bawd and the bitch postures have long offered female com-
ics a way to discuss their desires—sexual and otherwise—as a means of
reclaiming agency. Whether performing dick jokes, like bawd Adrienne
Tolsch, who confesses, “I always liked younger guys—not seven—I’m not
a total pervert—they weren’t that young—they didn’t have their little
mittens still attached to their little sleeves … certainly not when they’d
leave,”12 or bitch Roseanne, who asks, “How many men here are impo-
tent? Can’t get your arms up either, huh?”13 comics adopting these per-
sonas have a unique license for cultural critique—one that allows them
to wield rhetorical power while articulating a counter-hegemonic dis-
course. For over a century, bawds and bitches have successfully subverted
the status quo with their sometimes controversial material, “using the
‘master’s’ tool to mock the master’s ‘tool.’”14
Sarah Silverman’s “Seem-Less” Shtick

Although at times she fuses several comedic postures, Sarah Silverman
clearly fits within the bawd tradition. All three of the major theoretical
perspectives on humor—superiority, relief/arousal, and incongruity—can
help explain why Silverman’s humor “works” for particular audiences.15
Considering the jelly bit referenced above for example, a relief/arousal
or Freudian theoretical lens would attribute the success of this joke to
the catharsis an audience experiences when engaging with a taboo
topic, releasing repressed libidinal drives and desires through laughter.
Superiority theories, on the other hand, suggest that audiences laugh
at the “jelly” joke because they recognize the inherent power inversion
as Silverman’s mother is cast as the victim, and Silverman comes out
on top, so to speak. Additionally, audiences understand that the true
butt of the joke is the cultural conceit that every woman fears becom-
ing her mother.16 Incongruity theories, however, focus on the way this
joke surprises us—not only with its unexpected punchline, but due to
its use of stereotypes of the Jewish American Princess (JAP), portrayed
by Silverman, and the long-suffering Jewish mother. The incongruity of
208 J. Gilbert
this joke resides in audience knowledge of these types—first because this

joke begins by thwarting the cultural perception that a JAP is ostensi-
bly resistant to taking sexual initiative—especially in performing oral
sex—and second, most importantly because the punchline is predicated
upon familiarity with the Jewish mother persona—one who is controlling
but not sexual—who would never be caught in this position. The image
painted by this joke is incongruous, and consequently, audiences laugh at
the unexpected.17
The jelly joke is a prime instance of Silverman’s enactment of the
bawd persona, and yet unlike traditional bawds, Silverman maintains a
putative cluelessness onstage, appearing unaware that she is crossing
any boundaries. As Anderson notes: “She delivers even the most taboo
punchlines with almost pathological sincerity,” so that from the audi-
ence’s perspective: “It looks like her face isn’t in on her own jokes.”18 In
this way, Silverman combines an element of the kid persona, constructing
an image of innocence. It is precisely the combination of feigned inno-
cence and ignorance that Lowrey, Renegar, and Goehring target as key
to the subversive accomplishment of Silverman’s humor.19 An alternate
interpretation is one offered by Stanley, however: “Sarah Silverman is
as crude and cruelly insensitive as any male comedian, but with a sexy,
coquettish undertone.”20 Whether critics label her posture innocent or
coquettish, there is universal agreement that the paralinguistic features
of Silverman’s discourse (pitch, tone, rate, inflection) coupled with her
wide-eyed facial expressions appear to contradict the verbal content of
her comedy.21
Early in her career, Silverman tended to adopt both the kid and
reporter personas, seeming eager to please with topical jokes about her
family, high school, drugs, films, and various other subjects. In 1992, for
example, her sexual material included the following: “Sex … gives you
that feeling that you’re working together to achieve a common goal—his
orgasm.”22 This seems tame when contrasted with a bit from Jesus is
Magic: “I’m on the birth control pill … ’cause I do a lot of fucking …
I asked my friend Charlie what he and his wife use … for birth control
… He said he just comes all over her face … We’re gonna try that.”23
Describing explicit sexual acts with child-like guilelessness in Jesus is
Magic, Silverman presented a new bawd prototype for the twenty-first
century. Svelte and attractive, she has simultaneously delighted and alien-
ated audiences, at times bewildering the press with a persona that appears
to move seamlessly between onstage performance and lived reality, bliss-

fully unaware of the stark incongruities she presents. As Feldmar con-
tends: “She is seen as a potty-mouthed boy disguised in a hot body.”24
This is ironic because much of her humor hinges upon her biological sex.
Yet, even as Silverman performs the kind of material that shocks audi-
ences “when almost nothing else in contemporary culture still can,” she
“opens possibilities—both for comedy and for gender.”25 As Feldmar
explains:
her comedy relentlessly blurs boundaries around sexuality—by projecting

masculine crassness from a female body, using girlish irony that does not
fall back on postfeminist disavowals, expressing femininity characterized by
neither fragility nor “empowerment.”26
Although Feldmar is referring to both Silverman’s stand-up act and her

series, The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran for three seasons, her
assessment is consistent with other critical reception of Silverman’s com-
edy; as the new bawd, Silverman performs a deft rhetorical feat: “sexy
scatological humor.”27 Asserting that this particular type of comedy
involves female performers “subverting the cultural constructions that
privilege their own bodies by both foregrounding and then undermining
their normative sexiness and ‘correctly’ performed femininity,” Ballou
notes that it is precisely the incongruity of the sexy female body coupled
with comedy that audiences find funny.28
Taking this idea a step further, Mizejewski argues that Silverman’s
work is notable because “its assertion of sexuality and sexiness … radi-
cally challenges the binary of pretty versus funny.”29 Through her
graphic depictions of bodily functions, in the persona of a self-proclaimed
“totally cute white girl,” Mizejewski suggests, Silverman complicates
the very notion of femininity. Adroitly employing the playful rhetori-
cal style of the kid in Jesus is Magic, for instance, Silverman teases her
audience with a self-conscious observation about one of her “best” fea-
tures, ultimately shifting to the bawd persona in service of a standard
dick joke: “I have … a swan-like neck. My neck is actually six inches long
completely flaccid … I’m cheating—I’m measuring from the base of my
balls.”30 Smirking and flirting with her audience, Sarah Silverman seems
to be real—seems less a constructed stage presence and more a self-assured
woman simply sharing her perspective.
210 J. Gilbert
This “seemlessness” is both part of her appeal and the very character-
istic that perplexes some of her detractors. Silverman’s strategic use of
deadpan delivery at critical junctures ensures that her audience is contin-
ually surprised. Silverman revels in using this technique to break taboos
as evident in her rape jokes. One of the most famous lines in Jesus is
Magic is: “I was raped by a doctor—which is so bittersweet for a Jewish
girl.”31 Like the jelly joke, this one lampoons the JAP stereotype (this
time in terms of her desire to “marry money”), but in a far less benign
context.
Even more controversial was the rape joke Silverman told in her
cameo role in the film The Aristocrats. Deveau claims that of all the
comics performing in the film, Silverman is perhaps most subversive
because with the aforementioned deadpan delivery, she actually accuses
Hollywood agent, Joe Franklin of raping her—at once a natural out-
growth of the sick humor detailed in the incestuous and exploitative
joke at the center of the film and a scathing denunciation of the misog-
ynistic humor that has long been a staple of male-dominated stand-up
comedy.32 Taking Silverman’s words at face value, Franklin perceived
them as defamatory and threatened a lawsuit. Although Silverman’s
accusation was part of her comedic performance, she seemed to mean
it, and was consequently perceived as a single seamless persona onstage
and off. A second example of this phenomenon was Silverman’s parodic
video, I’m Fucking Matt Damon, one ostensibly created to taunt her ex,
Jimmy Kimmel. In the tradition of autobiographical comedy established
by Lenny Bruce, Silverman is widely perceived to be her stage persona.
Another significant influence on Silverman’s work is the bitch pos-
ture. Indeed, critics have focused on this aspect of her persona at least as
much as her bawdiness, examining at length some of her most controver-
sial material—jokes about race. An oft-cited example of Silverman’s racial
humor is her notorious “chink” joke, told on Late Night With Conan
O’Brien in 2001:
I was telling a friend that I had to serve jury duty and I wanted to get
out of it. So my friend said ‘Why don’t you write something inappropriate
on the form, like “I hate chinks”?’ But I don’t want people to think I was
racist, so I just filled out the form and I wrote ‘I love chinks.’ And who
doesn’t?33
After her appearance on the show, Asian American activist Guy Aoki
accused Silverman of being racist, and ultimately debated her on Bill
Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Silverman explained that her joke was
simply a different means to the same end as Aoki’s activism—a way to
oppose racism and create awareness.34
In this case, Silverman’s seem/seamlessness was problematic, as view-
ers like Aoki assumed that her joke was her actual belief. As I argue in
Performing Marginality, the inability to distinguish between the vic-
tims and butts of jokes can result in failure to recognize a joke’s sub-
versive potential. Clearly, Aoki and others offended by Silverman’s joke
saw Chinese culture as both victim and butt; Silverman’s acknowledged
intent, however, was to make herself the ignorant victim, and rac-
ism itself the butt.35 Of course, the incident became a source of mate-
rial for Silverman when she asked her audience: “What kind of world do
we live in when a totally cute … white girl can’t say ‘chink’ on network
television?”36 Anderson maintains that Silverman is a “meta-bigot,” not-
ing: “If you’re humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-
conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.”37
Explaining that because her persona—an “incestuous, genital-obsessed,
racist narcissist,” sounds the same onstage as off, Silverman draws fire
from those who take her words seriously, Anderson concludes: “If her
humor does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of
our tolerance; it exposes ambiguities in the discussion that we don’t like
to acknowledge; it taps into our giant unspoken mass of assumptions,
tensions, fears, and hatreds—not to resolve them, but to remind us that
they’re there.”38
In Jesus is Magic, Silverman shifts between bawd and bitch perso-
nas, using the bitch persona to perform jokes about Jesus (“I hope the
Jews did kill Christ. I’d do it again. I’d fuckin’ do it again in a second.
If I hear his Birkenstocks clacking this way”), Martin Luther King Jr.
(“Guess what Martin Luther King? I had a fuckin’ dream too! … So
maybe you’re not so fuckin’ special—Martin Loser King!”), and a host
of other targets.39 When performing this material, Silverman departs
from the bawd and joins the legions of successful bitch comics with
her comedic attacks on sacred cows. Unsurprisingly, Silverman has her
share of haters; YouTube comments on the clips referenced above reveal
a stunning amount of anti-Semitic and misogynistic vitriol, mainly from
males.40 And although other successful contemporary bitch comics like
Cameron Esposito, Chelsea Handler, Mo’nique, Whitney Cummings,
212 J. Gilbert
and Kathy Griffin are sometimes confrontational, none are in Silverman’s

league. Her true comic successor—another blend of bawd and bitch—is
undeniably the most popular female comic working today, enjoying infi-
nitely more mainstream success than Silverman has ever achieved; her
direct descendant, of course, is Amy Schumer.
Amy Schumer’s Cultivated Cluelessness

At a recent performance in Stockholm, Amy Schumer effectively
squelched a male heckler who yelled: “Show us your tits!” Initially, call-
ing him out in her trademark style, Schumer asked the audience to point
to the heckler, and then addressed him, asking what he did for a living.
When he replied that he worked in sales, she asked: “How’s that work-
ing out? Is it going well? Because we’re not buying it.”41 After he was
given a warning and persisted in disrupting, Schumer had security escort
him out as the crowd roared its approval. Adept at publicly shaming sex-
ist hecklers, Schumer routinely gets the last laugh as her audience turns
on the disruptor. Earlier in the year, when 17-year-old Jackson Murphy
tweeted a photo of himself meeting Schumer at the Critics’ Choice
Awards, captioned: “Spent the night with @amyschumer. Certainly not
the first guy to write that,” Schumer tweeted back: “I get it. Cause I’m a
whore? Glad I took a photo with you. Hi to your dad.”42
Undeniably, Schumer leverages the bitch persona when rhetorically
skewering sexist hecklers. A new bawd, like Silverman, she fuses the bitch
and the bawd postures in both her set material and her “spontaneous”
responses. And like Silverman, Schumer performs a type of innocent
ignorance that, combined with her conventionally attractive appearance,
renders her bawdy humor incongruous. Blonde and blue-eyed with a
winning smile, Schumer is the cheerleader-gone-rogue, the sorority sister
with a dark side, the girl next door who can decimate with a well-placed
one-liner. But mainly, Schumer is a bawd—an unadulterated sexual being
who feels no compunction about delighting, arousing, and offending
audiences with lurid details of her countless sexcapades.
Known for lines like “One time, I let a cabdriver finger me”43 and
(when giving her date a condom) “You’re gonna wanna wear this—I’ve
had a busy month! It’s like a petri dish right now—I don’t know what’s
happening,”44 Schumer exults in the minutiae of sexual encounters,
delighting her audience with graphic descriptions of sex with partners
who were uncircumcised, missing testicles, or hesitant to engage in
“ass-play.” In one bit from her Live at the Apollo performance, Schumer
asserts: “I love hearing sex acts … I love hearing new ones—there’s the
Dirty Rochester—didja ever hear that? That is where the guy shits on
your chest while he’s on a business trip to Rochester.” With a quizzical
look, she pauses, and then asks: “Is that maybe not really a thing and
I was perhaps lied to?”45 It is precisely this feigned innocence—a cul-
tivated cluelessness—that enables Schumer to connect with audiences.
Like Silverman, she adopts the kid persona in this context, but whereas
Silverman seems oblivious about the offensive potential of her discourse,
Schumer performs with a wry rhetorical wink, communicating to the
audience that she knows her persona is a construction. Like Silverman,
Schumer cocks her head and gazes at the crowd, but where Silverman
appears unaware of the irony, Schumer plays it. As Goltz notes, when
Schumer cocks her head in a confused manner while uttering acerbic cri-
tique, “in this uncommitted confusion, she references a gendered ‘ditz’
performance, a parodic performance of femininity.”46
Additionally, Schumer’s offstage persona—whether during formal
interviews or morning show chit-chat—is markedly distinct from her act;
she works jokes into her interviews, but does this within the “real Amy”
frame, appearing candid, yet introspective. Perhaps Schumer’s popularity
rests on this distinction; her onstage and offstage personas are different;
she is not her act, and audiences recognize this. Although as Goltz main-
tains “ironic comedy is always drenched in some level of ambiguity,”47
unlike Silverman, whose delivery can easily be construed as authentic,
Schumer’s strategic and transparent use of parody serves to differentiate
her onstage and offstage selves for her audience. Schumer also engages
in occasional meta-commentary, as when she offers: “I was having a lit-
tle … wine and weed and an Ambien … or as I call it, tucking myself
in.”48 The punchline here signals to her audience that Amy-the-person
can observe and assess Amy-the-performer—that they are not, in fact,
one and the same.49
Describing Schumer’s onstage persona as “smart but self-destructive,
the sadder-but-wiser girl, who knows how easily desperation can mas-
querade as freedom,” Nussbaum distinguishes Schumer’s stand-up act
from the character she portrays on Inside Amy Schumer, her highly suc-
cessful Comedy Central show now in its sixth season: “a needy narcis-
sist, all bravado and entitlement. This Amy is the ‘dumb slut’ and the
‘whiny white girl.’”50 Ultimately, Nussbaum suggests, although the hat-
ers “dismiss Schumer’s act as ‘guy humor,’ talking dirty to please men …
214 J. Gilbert
graphic sex talk gets Schumer to uncomfortable places, including rare

candor about the underside of a porn-soaked world.”51 Indeed, Schumer
is first and foremost a bawd, upholding and exemplifying a tradition in
which “talking dirty” is a prime means of leveling incisive cultural cri-
tique. Calling Schumer “an exemplar of feminist comedy,” Tolentino
notes that Inside Amy Schumer transcends the “frequently uneasy rela-
tionship” between feminism and comedy by being a feminist comedy in
which “neither half of that description is sacrificed for the other.”52
What exactly is feminist comedy? Material that female audience mem-
bers find empowering? The act of a feminist comic? As I have discussed
at length in Performing Marginality, ideology is in the mind of the
beholder, and consequently, perceiving humor as feminist is a subjective
judgment on the part of the audience in the same way that any interpre-
tation is highly individuated.53 At present, Schumer is widely hailed as a
feminist comedic triumph. Still, just as bawds have always been maligned
by those who see them simply as purveyors of dick jokes, Schumer is
condemned in some quarters as too graphic, too sexual, too masculine.
As Morris asks: “Do uncouthness, detachment, and promiscuity make
her a slut or a man?”54
Like any woman speaking in the public sphere, Schumer is frequently
compared to males, though this yardstick is not always negative. For
instance, Handy explains that Schumer “made a name for herself as
a stand-up by being every bit as graphic and sexual as any male comic,
while also bringing an anthropologist’s eye to the subject,” and ulti-
mately, performing humor that creates identification in both female and
male audience members as she “kind of transcends gender—ironically,
because a lot of her stuff is about gender. But it’s never alienating. It’s
relatable to men and women simultaneously.”55 This ability—to appeal
to both women and men—is key to Schumer’s success. In her 2015
blockbuster film, Trainwreck, Schumer portrays a character that, like her
stand-up persona, is “loosely based” on herself, “a female counterpart
to the substance-abusing, commitment-phobic, potty-mouthed man-
boys who populate so much of contemporary film comedy.”56 The film’s
popularity along with Schumer’s other prodigious accomplishments—a
Peabody, an Emmy, a $9 million book deal, the first female comic to sell
out Madison Square Garden, listed in both Time’s “100 Most Influential
People” and People’s “100 Most Beautiful”—made her, by all accounts,
“the biggest breakout star of 2015.”57
Nevertheless, Schumer has her detractors. Like Silverman, her

YouTube videos have garnered both anti-Semitic and misogynistic vilifi-
cation. Unlike Silverman, however, Schumer is often the target of insults
regarding her size.58 This is a complex and highly charged issue for
Schumer who functions as a self-styled body-positive crusader, caption
ing an Instagram photo of herself in a one-piece swimsuit, “This is
how I look. I feel happy. I think I look strong and healthy and also like
miss trunchbull [sic] from Matilda, Kisses!”59 yet publicly denouncing
Glamour magazine for including her name on the cover of their “plus-
size” issue. Instead of being consistent with messages of self-love and
body acceptance, Boyd argues, Schumer made a point of saying she is
not plus-size: “I think there’s nothing wrong with being plus-size …
[but] plus-size is considered size 16 in America … I go between a size
6 and an 8.”60 Citing Schumer’s behavior as a colossal and hypocritical
misstep, Boyd concludes: “Rejecting a system of evaluation as harmful,
only to then immediately use that very system to value yourself—placing
yourself on the higher, more prized level of the scale, to boot—is just
that ugly body-shaming of old in a new wrapper.”61
As discussed earlier, intrinsic in the bawd tradition is the association
of sensuality with size. Schumer herself makes jokes about weight, most
notably complaining that Khloe Kardashian’s weight loss had eliminated
her potential to be a role model for young girls.62 In the opening mon-
ologue from her 2015 host appearance on Saturday Night Live (SNL),
Schumer lamented: “We used to have Khloe. Khloe was ours, right?
Whenever there’s a group of women, you identify with one of them…
but then Khloe, she lost half her body weight. She lost a Kendall! We
have nothing.”63 After Kardashian’s response, Schumer extended an
olive branch—but not before the media made much of Schumer’s body-
shaming comment. Clearly, Schumer’s public focus on self-acceptance
has been diluted by the Glamour and SNL incidents—times when her
own self-valuing has become suspect.
Despite the challenges she has faced, however, Amy Schumer remains
the most popular female comic working today. Her material ranges
from jokes about her mother, (“I brought her to a soccer game ’cause
I wanted to show her what boundaries looked like.”64) and about being
Jewish (Asked by a woman on the subway “Have you heard the good
news?” Schumer replies: “My people are Jewish.” When the woman
responds “That’s o.k.—your people just haven’t found Jesus yet,”
Schumer tells the audience: “I was like … no—like, we found him …
216 J. Gilbert
maybe you haven’t heard the bad news.”65), to the explicitly sexual
material for which she is most known (“We need to be nicer about
cum—we really do. Cum gives us life … Gandhi was cum. Oprah—cum.
Oprah could’ve wound up all over somebody’s tits, but no—we got
Oprah. Thank you, cum.”).66 Like Silverman, as a new bawd, Schumer
fuses the bawd and bitch postures through aggressive, overtly sex-
ual material; like Silverman, she traffics in “sexy scatological humor.”
Schumer takes this potent combination a step farther, however, champi-
oning female sexual agency directly, as in the following bit:
It’s crazy that … we get guilted about this. Like, women wanna come—
of course we wanna come! What girls are having sex like, ‘Oh no—I’m
just, I’m just honored to be witnessing your process … No, I don’t want
to feel the one good thing we’re allowed as humans, no … you—plea—
anywhere!’ Make your girls come, guys!67
Although she occasionally exhibits characteristics of the whiner, as when

she intones: “It takes me ninety minutes to look this mediocre,”68
Schumer spends most of her stage time dismantling male privilege
through graphic sexual description, even managing to poke fun at femi-
nism itself with jokes such as: “It’s not … a wonderfully regal moment as
a woman when you take a load … When someone comes in you, you’re
not like, ‘We can do it [imitating iconic Rosie the Riveter image]—I’m
glad I leaned in.’69 By invoking both classic and contemporary feminist
tropes, Schumer not only offers an indictment of androcentric culture,
but also undercuts post-feminist discourse, suggesting that despite any
gains in female empowerment, men are still “on top.”
Perhaps the best illustration of Schumer’s new bawd comic apti-
tude occurs when she plays the crowd. As noted earlier, Schumer eas-
ily quashes hecklers, never ceding power or control. Additionally, she
delights in engaging the audience, asking them questions and expertly
building on their responses. For example, in her 2015 Live at the Apollo
performance, Schumer asks the crowd to generate sex acts she has
not heard about before. When a young man sitting ringside responds,
Schumer repeats what he has said:
When a girl is sucking your dick … wait, I love how your girlfriend looks
right now, she’s like please—you’re his mom? Oh my God! This is totally
your fault Mom! This beautiful boy you raised. Well let’s hear the story of
how you were born—go ahead. Angry dragon … When you’re about to
climax, you push her head … [semen spurts] up through the nose. What’s
your name? … Jordan, I think you’re grounded.70
Talking openly about a taboo topic made more so by the hint at inces-
tuous overtones, Schumer is in her element, subverting the status quo
with her bawdy rhetorical flourish. As Foy explains, Schumer’s responses
to hecklers cause her audiences to “look again” both at her and their
assumptions regarding women, sexuality, and humor.71
Perhaps Schumer takes more risks than most comics, male or female.
In one account of her sexual interaction with a boyfriend uneasy about
“ass-play,” she offers the punchline: “And then I fist him like you
wouldn’t believe. He’s dead.”72 The audience laughter following this
joke can, of course, be explained by superiority, relief/arousal, and
incongruity theories. Clearly, Schumer revels in her bawdry, pushing the
envelope while maintaining broad appeal. Remarkably, she even man-
ages to parlay her likability into the forbidden territory of rape jokes.
Asserting that “I used to sleep with mostly Hispanic guys, but now
I just prefer consensual,” Schumer waits until the slightly uncomfortable
laughter has subsided, and then explains:
We’ve all been a little raped, o.k.—just a skosh—just a hair. Every girl I
know has one night—usually in college—and she’s like, “Huh. I think that
was rape. Not tots consensh … I don’t remember yelling ‘Yes.’” … It’s
not all black and white— there’s a gray area—of rape—like you’ve been
graped, I can tell. Grape happens.73
Critics who lambast Schumer for joking about rape fail to understand
that the above routine accomplishes quite the opposite; Schumer is nei-
ther condoning nor glorifying rape, but offering an indictment of rape
culture and the phenomenon of “gray rape” often used to blame victims
for their own assaults. By perceiving toxic masculinity as the butt rather
than the hapless Valley Girl victim, this joke can be seen as Schumer’s
attempt both to create identification and to engage in subversive social
criticism.74
Her bit about taking Plan B, the so-called “morning after” pill is
similarly controversial. Schumer confides to her audience: “I took Plan
B about ten days ago … It’s the morning after pill. I take it the night
before ’cause I’m smart … I took it. I felt fine. I went to Yoga. I’m like,
218 J. Gilbert
‘Can these people tell I’m like mid-aborsh right now?’ … It’s easy—they
should call it Plan A—that’s how I used it.”75 Although in this bit, she
again lapses into Valley-speak, suggesting a casual and clueless persona,
Schumer is actually critiquing the culture of “slut-shaming,” in the con-
text of a description earlier in the bit about being reviled when asking for
Plan B in her pharmacy. Like rape, abortion is a topic many comics con-
sider off-limits. For Schumer, however, in the tradition of her predeces-
sor, Sarah Silverman, no issue is immune from comedic scrutiny.
Edgy, explicit, and immensely popular, Schumer’s humor provides a
counter-hegemonic narrative—one in which women’s sexual drives and
desires are foregrounded and satisfied. Does this discourse ultimately
contest or reify the status quo? Marx claims that in Schumer’s show,
Inside Amy Schumer, identity politics are featured playfully in order to
court and retain the young, white, straight, able-bodied, tech-savvy male
audience who watches Comedy Central shows on various platforms.
Because of this, Marx suggests that Schumer and other feminist Comedy
Central stars, such as the women of Broad City, reify hegemonic prac-
tices even while critiquing them.76 Schumer’s stand-up, too, can be con-
strued as inherently heteronormative, catering to the taste of men whose
prurient interests are aroused by her sexploits. Deveau maintains that,
like the topsy-turvy, liminal world of carnival, subversive humor always
risks reifying the status quo by acknowledging its pervasiveness, conclud-
ing that the true effect of such humor lies somewhere between amuse-
ment and revolution—that it is, in fact, ambivalent, which is “entirely
fitting for a discourse meant to unsettle rather than to create a coherent
political platform.”77
New Bawds and the Fourth Wave

It is only fitting that as a discourse intended to delight and disrupt,
humor is both a tool of and a context for fourth wave feminism.78
So-called “hashtag feminism,”79 the fourth wave has raised awareness
of sexism through online discussion and activism, gaining strength as
a movement “defined by technology” and one characterized by “prag-
matism, inclusion, and humor.”80 Noting that the fourth wave is prov-
ing capable of confronting structural and systemic problems, Cochrane
explains the reason for this success: “Brought up to know they are equal
to men, fourth-wave feminists are pissed off when they’re not treated
as such, but have more than enough confidence to shout back.”81
As Simpkins attests, powerful and important fourth wave lessons include

“how slut-shaming anybody is absolutely wrong, the importance of
learning about people who identify as women and accepting them, the
need to educate any future children I might have about sexual consent
and therefore help towards ending rape culture.”82 Although some critics
dispute the existence of a fourth wave of feminism, and the relative util-
ity of the wave metaphor to describe feminism in general, Baumgardner
asserts, “The Fourth Wave exists because it says it exists.”83 She points
out that by focusing on reproductive justice and third wave concerns
such as trans rights, tech-savvy fourth wave digital natives engage mul-
tiple platforms and contexts of expression in order to explore and
elaborate their complex and nuanced understanding of sexuality and
gender egalitarianism.84
This exploration often takes the form of acerbic humor aimed at tar-
gets ranging from misogynistic celebrities to corporations marketing sex-
ist products. As Munro contends, “what is certain is that the Internet
has created a ‘call-out’ culture, in which sexism or misogyny can be
‘called out’ and challenged.”85 And although as Martin and Valenti sug-
gest, online/fourth wave feminism is not linked to a broader organi-
zational structure, and is consequently less a single movement than
“many intersectional movements operating in tandem,”86 being online
renders feminism more visible than ever before, and reinvigorates the
movement. Indeed, using humor to engage in “culture jamming,”
making public critique via digital tools like memes, fourth wave femi-
nists have fostered accountability by calling attention to both rhetorical
and material injustice. Despite the challenges posed by its multivocalic
nature—notably, a lack of sustainable infrastructure, coalition-building,
and strategic planning (challenges that have long plagued the Women’s
Movement)—Martin and Valenti maintain that fourth wave feminism is
a formidable force. As Plank exults: “Maybe if editors weren’t so busy
asking if feminism is dead, they’d be able to notice that it’s actually more
alive than ever … Online feminism is not a distraction from the broader
movement, it’s the greatest mutation of it yet.”87
Contemporary feminist activism provides a relevant context within
which to consider the humor of new bawd comics, Schumer and
Silverman. Describing Betty Dodson and the sex-positive strain of
feminism in the context of the fourth wave, Smith notes that includ-
ing women’s pleasure in the feminist movement is a critical means of
empowerment.88 And like bawds have always done, new bawds privilege
220 J. Gilbert
female sexual desire and satisfaction. As discussed earlier, new bawds fuse
the classic bitch and bawd persona, creating a rhetorical posture at once
hyper-sexualized and confrontational. Less interested in titillating her
audience than championing her sexual agency, the new bawd revels in
explicit and graphic detail, trafficking in dick jokes, engaging in the “sexy
scatological humor” that Ballou describes.89
Because like all discursive forms, contemporary comedy is overwhelm-
ingly consumed online, new bawds have more exposure than their pre-
decessors. Additionally, any use of strategic self-deprecation (such as
Schumer’s occasional self-disparagement) is both self-conscious and
transparent, alerting audiences to the obvious confidence undergirding
this tactic. Why and how does the material performed by new bawds
“work” with both female and male audience members, as evident by the
mass appeal of performers like Schumer? All three theoretical schools
of thought explain this phenomenon. First, relief/arousal theories
help us understand that new bawds’ focus on the most taboo subjects
imaginable (e.g., anal sex) enables audiences to achieve the catharsis of
their repressed urges. Next, superiority theories illustrate that celebrat-
ing female sexual agency via a “slut” persona who inevitably ends up on
top enables the new bawds to launch a subversive critique of hegemonic
structures. Finally, incongruity theories account for the laughter gener-
ated both by artfully constructed surprise punchlines and by the pretty/
funny dichotomy contested by conventionally attractive comics such as
Silverman and Schumer.
My earlier work continues to explain the strategies and accomplish-
ments of women’s transgressive comedic performance. By appearing to
flaunt their femininity, new bawd comics actually take to task the cul-
ture that supports this construction, lampooning and lambasting those
who would idealize it. Incorporating elements of the “classic bitch,”
these performers embody fourth wave feminist values, deftly illustrating
that “likability is no longer the heaviest cudgel a woman can wield.”90
By “flexing influence, standing up for their beliefs, not acting accord-
ing to feminine norms and expectations,” Zeisler maintains that bitches
succeed because they “reject the expectations, assumptions and double
standards that have always dogged women.”91 Creating acts that meet
the demands of our current historical moment—female empowerment in
a “hot” body—the new bawds deliver a discourse at once comedic and
incisive.
Ultimately, the “news” here is that there is no news. As new bawds,

Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer are simply contemporary practition-
ers of a robust and enduring female comic tradition. Dick jokes remain
the coin of the realm in stand-up comedy, because of course they gener-
ally guarantee the biggest, hardest, and longest laughs. The difference
between old and new bawds is one of degree rather than kind; like their
comedic foremothers, performers such as Silverman and Schumer fore-
ground sexuality. They may, at times, be a bit more explicitly graphic and
more conventionally attractive than some past bawds, but they employ
the same strategies to accomplish the same rhetorical feat: by offering
trenchant cultural critique cloaked in entertainment, they do what pro-
fessional fools have always done—subvert the dominant discourse with
impunity, ensuring that the master’s tools are used to make the master
laugh, and in so doing, create the possibility of social change.
Notes
1. Amy Schumer, Mostly Sex Stuff, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CxiCgH_skOM.
2. Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic, 2005. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=o4Z5OTPWW5Y.
3. For an extensive discussion of all five female comedic postures, see: Joanne
Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).
4. Ibid., 100.
5. See Gregory J. Pulliam. “Stock Lines, Boat-Acts, and Dickjokes: A Brief
Annotated Glossary of Standup Comedy Jargon,” American Speech 66,
no. 2 (1991): 164–70.
6. Gilbert, Performing Marginality, 103.
7. Linda Martin, Linda, and Kerry Segrave. Women in Comedy. (New York:
Citadel Press, 1986), 142.
8. For more on Lorka and other lesbian comics, see: Joanne Gilbert,
“Lesbian Stand-up Comics and the Politics of Laughter,” in Women in
Comedy: History, Theory, Practice, eds. Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins,
Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon and Sean Zwagerman
(Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 188.
10. Ibid.
11. Martin and Segrave, 344.
222 J. Gilbert
13. Ibid., 111.
14. Ibid.
15. For an incisive discussion of theoretical perspectives on humor, see
Elizabeth Graham, Michael J. Papa, and Gordon P. Brooks. “Functions
of humor in conversation: Conceptualization and measurement,” Western
Journal of Communication 56, no. 2 (1992): 161–83.
16. For further discussion of the distinction between victims and butts, see
Chapter 5 of Performing Marginality.
17. Lowrey et al. discuss this joke at length in the context of Burke’s
Perspective by Inconguity in Lacy Lowrey, Valerie R. Renegar, and
Charles E. Goehring, “When God Gives You AIDS … Make Lemon-
AIDS: Ironic Persona and Perspective by Incongruity in Sarah
Silverman’s Jesus is Magic,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 1
(2014): 58–77.
18. Sam Anderson, “Irony Maiden: How Sarah Silverman is Raping American
Comedy.” Slate, November 10, 2005. http://www.slate.com/articles/
arts/culturebox/2005/11/irony_maiden.html.
19. Lacy Lowrey, Valerie R. Renegar, and Charles E. Goehring. “‘When God
gives you AIDS … makelLemon-AIDS’: Ironic Persona and Perspective
by Incongruity in Sarah Silverman’s Jesus is Magic.” Western Journal of
Communication 78, no. 1 (2014): 58–77.
20. Alessandra Stanley, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair.
March 3, 2008. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/funnygirls
200804.
21. I am grateful to my perceptive colleague, Lauren Woolbright for point-
ing out that an alternative reading of the coquette interpretation is that
Silverman’s ostensible innocence/ignorance of her descriptions’ shock
potential is due to her belief that contemporary US culture has achieved
the feminist ideal—a climate of true gender egalitarianism in which any
consensual sex act (oral or otherwise) is no longer taboo, but an accepted
topic of casual conversation. In this context, sexually enlightened audi-
ences would expect and support such discussion.
22. Sarah Silverman, Early Stand-Up, 1992. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=SEb-sXmcMLE&t=3s.
23. Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic, 2005. https://www.youtube.com/
24. Shawna Feldmar, “Opting-Out of the Have-It-All Discourse: Sarah
Silverman’s Alternative to Contemporary Feminism” (UCLA Center
for the Study of Women, 2009), 4. http://escholarship.org/uc/
item/8w79b43t.
25. Ibid., 6.
26. Ibid.
27. Hannah Ballou, “Pretty funny: Manifesting a normatively sexy female

comic body.” Comedy Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 179–186 (185).
28. Ibid.
29. Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 120.
30. Silverman, 2005.
31. Ibid.
32. The film explores “The Aristocrats,” by all accounts, the most obscene
joke imaginable, exploring the depths of human depravity by featuring
cultural taboos such as incest and graphic scatological acts. A documen-
tary of 105 comics and other performers telling this joke (15 of whom
are female), “these contemporary retellings are not only aimed at the
nuclear family but also the entertainment industry, political correctness,
and the curtailment of freedom of speech” (Danielle Jeanine Deveau,
“The Aristocrats!: Comedy, Grotesqueries and Political Inversions of the
Masculine Code,” Humor 25, no. 4 (2012): 401–415 (404)). The prem-
ise of the joke (a family of entertainers performs unspeakable acts) and its
punchline (“The Aristocrats!”) remains constant, as the specific tellings
vary tremendously. Deveau notes that Silverman’s performance is nota-
ble because it both names an actual person—Joe Franklin—and is at best,
ambiguous regarding the verisimilitude of the event.
33. Nathan Wilson, “Divisive comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience
Power,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8, no.
2 (2011): 276–291 (285).
34. Ibid.
35. Wilson also draws upon my discussion when exploring victims and butts
in Silverman’s joke.
37. Sam Anderson, “Irony Maiden: How Sarah Silverman is Raping American
Comedy,” Slate, November 10, 2005. http://www.slate.com/articles/
arts/culturebox/2005/11/irony_maiden.html.
38. Ibid.
40. For example, Kris Benson comments: “SS is a Zionist piece of shit. Her
and the rest of her clan can go to hell” (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=o4Z5OTPWW5Y) and Hasnah Abdull comments: “you hav3
got to pity her, she is just started washed up slut” (https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=tuz-jQEgEXI&list=PLH7ebtv_syCtdWe5XmGgQQ
QyVaBHPrFGW&index=2).
41. JTA, “Amy Schumer takes down sexist heckler at show in Sweden,” The
Times of Israel, September 3, 2016. http://www.timesofisrael.com/amy-
schumer-takes-down-sexist-heckler-at-show-in-sweden/.
224 J. Gilbert
42. Nadia Khomami, “Amy Schumer throws sexist heckler out of Stockholm

show,” The Guardian, September 2, 2016. https://www.theguardian.
com/culture/2016/sep/02/amy-schumer-throws-sexist-heckler-out-of-
stockholm-show.
43. Schumer, 2012.
44. Amy Schumer, Live at the Apollo, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VJQ-vLiKhpI.
45. Ibid.
46. Dustin Bradley Goltz, “Ironic Performativity: Amy Schumer’s Big (White)
Balls,” Text and Performance Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2015): 266–285
(272).
47. Ibid., 270.
48. Schumer, 2015.
49. Describing this phenomenon, Goltz references Lowrey et al.’s discussion
of Silverman’s irony, noting that her “use of extended stares, overly per-
formed ignorance, and side comments of meta-awareness” (270) serve
as cues to her audience that she is being ironic. Her perceived seem/
seamlessness complicates this process, however; although her meta-
commentary on jokes such as “Martin Loser King” (she muses that she is
“the first comic to shit on Martin Luther King”) is clear, she consciously
chooses not to perform parodically, generally conveying the “almost
pathological sincerity” (Anderson, 2005) discussed earlier.
50. Emily Nussbaum, “The little tramp: The Raucous Feminist Humor of
Inside Amy Schumer,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2015. http://www.new-
yorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/the-little-tramp.
51. Ibid.
52. Jia Tolentino, “Amy Schumer’s New Obligations,” The New Yorker, August
29, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/amy-
schumers-new-obligations.
53. See Performing Marginality, Chapter 2.
54. Wesley Morris, “The year we obsessed over identity,” New York Times.
October 6, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/
the-year-we-obsessed-over-identity.html.
55. Bruce Handy, “Amy Schumer Is Rich, Famous and in Love: Can She
Keep Her Edge?” Vanity Fair, April 25, 2016. http://www.vanityfair.
com/hollywood/2016/04/amy-schumer-cover-story.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. For example, Clinton Scott comments: “Put a bag over her face and bang
her,” Harambe comments: “big fat pig,” Jack Sofalot comments: “God
save us from fat cunts in short skirts.” (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VJQ-vLiKhpI_), and Mike Davis comments: “SCHUMER IS
A FAT UGLY PIECE OF DOGSHIT!” (https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=VJQ-vLiKhpI).
59. Khomami, 2016.
60. Phoebe-Jane Boyd, “Amy Schumer Is Fuelling Plus-Size Prejudice, Not
Fighting It,” The Guardian, April 7, 2016. https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2016/apr/07/amy-schumer-feeding-plus-size-
prejudice-comedian-glamour-magazine.
61. Ibid.
62. Logan discusses Schumer’s candid performance of this issue: “There’s
the routine where she parts her legs ever further until she identifies the
moment her thighs stop touching. There are multiple jokes about wom-
en’s magazines, Hollywood and the pressure on women to be thin. She
is by turns defiant of these pressures, and vulnerable to them.” (https://
www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/sep/05/comedy-oversharers-amy-
schumer-edinburgh-festival).
63. Bonnie Fuller, “Amy Schumer Fires Back at Khloe Kardashian Slamming
Her Over ‘SNL’ Monologue.” Hollywood Life. October 13, 2015.
http://hollywoodlife.com/2015/10/13/amy-schuemer-apologizing-
khloe-kardashian-snl-sorry-tweet/.
64. Schumer, 2012.
65. Amy Schumer, Comedy Central Presents Amy Schumer, 2010. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mzHhZwbjbI.
66. Ibid.
67. Amy Schumer, 2015.
68. Schumer, 2012.
69. Schumer, 2015.
70. Ibid.
71. Jennifer Foy, “Fooling Around: Female Stand‐Ups and Sexual Joking,”
The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 703–713.
72. Schumer, 2012.
73. Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=bpZa1Lxjf-0.
74. Coined by the notorious anti-feminist, Laura Sessions Stepp, the term
“gray rape” has been widely used to discredit victim/survivors (see Jessica
Valenti, The Purity Myth: The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with
Virginity is Hurting Young Women, (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2010):
161–62). For discussion of why and how female comics’ rape jokes can
“work,” see: Joanne Gilbert, “Members of the Tribe: Marginal Identities
and the Female Comedy Fan Community, In Fan Girls and the Media:
Creating Characters, Consuming Culture, ed. Adrienne Trier-Bieniek
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 57–71.
75. Schumer, 2012.
226 J. Gilbert
76. Nick Marx, “Expanding the Brand Race, Gender, and the Post-politics
ofRepresentation on Comedy Central,” Television & New Media, 2015:
1527476415577212.
77. Deveau, 2012.
78. The first to discuss the fourth wave, Peay describes it as political activ-
ism that is “guided and sustained by spirituality,” noting that this type
of “universal spirituality” bonds women across religious and racial/ethnic
boundaries, and that fourth wave feminists explore a new type of femi-
nine power based on “tolerance, mutuality, and reverence for nature.”
According to Peay, this new activism is based on joy rather than anger,
focuses on wider, often global issues, and sees September 11, 2001 as
the tipping point that catalyzed the unification of feminists worldwide,
as suspicion of and aggression/violence toward difference grew rampant.
Ultimately, Peay believes that this “spiritually informed activism” serves
both to imbue women’s lives with meaning and connection and allows
them to collaborate in order to effect positive change worldwide (Pythia
Peay, “Feminism’s Fourth Wave,” UTNE reader 128 (2005)).
79. Nisha Chittal, “How Social Media Is Changing The Feminist
Movement”, MSNBC, April 6, 2015. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/
how-social-media-changing-the-feminist-movement.
80. Kira Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave Of Feminism: Meet The Rebel
Women.” The Guardian December 10, 2013. https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women.
81. Ibid.
82. Simpkins, Jennifer. “You Can’t Sit With Us!”: How Fourth Wave
Feminism Became ‘Mean Girls.’ The Huffington Post (UK). March 21,
2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jennifer-simpkins/feminism-
fourth-wave-became-mean-girls_b_4616597.html.
83. Jessica Valenti is dubious about the usefulness of discussing feminism in
waves, given the amount of generational and ideological crossover. In
an interview, she ultimately concludes that “Maybe the fourth wave is
online.” (Deborah Solomon, “Fourth-wave feminism,” New York Times
13 (2009).
84. Baumgardner, Jennifer. “Is There A Fourth Wave? Does It Matter?”
Feminist.com, 2011. http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/
genwom/baumgardner2011.html.
85. Quoted in Lane: Liz Lane, “Feminist Rhetoric In The Digital Sphere:
Digital Interventions & The Subversion Of Gendered Cultural Scripts.”
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 8 (2015). http://
adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-lane/.
86. Courtney E. Martin and Vanessa Valenti, “#FEMFUTURE: Online rev-
olution” (PDF), Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), 5.
http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/nfs/reports/NFS8-FemFuture-
Online-Revolution-Report-April-15-2013.pdf.
87. Elizabeth Plank, “#FemFuture: The feminist Revolution Will be Online.”
Mic.com. April 9, 2013. https://mic.com/articles/33841/femfuture-
the-feminist-revolution-will-be-online#.FxvVA1Y7g.
88. L ydia Smith, “Betty Dodson And Fourth-Wave Feminism: Masturbation Is
Key To Longer Life,” International Business Times, May 7, 2014. http://
www.ibtimes.co.uk/betty-dodson-fourth-wave-feminism-masturbation-
key-longer-life-1447536.
89. Ballou, 2013.
90. Andi Zeisler, “The Bitch America Needs.” The New York Times.
September 10, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opinion/
campaign-stops/the-bitch-america-needs.html.
91. Ibid.
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issue8-lane/.
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Lowrey, Lacy, Valerie R. Renegar, and Charles E. Goehring. ““When God
Gives You AIDS… Makellemon-AIDS”: Ironic Persona And Perspective
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Communication 78, no. 1 (2014): 58–77.
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(PDF). BCRW. Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). http://bcrw.
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Report-April-15-2013.pdf.
Martin, Linda, and Kerry Segrave. Women in Comedy. Citadel Press, 1986.
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Author Biography
Joanne Gilbert Ph.D. is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Communication
and New Media Studies at Alma College, Michigan, USA. She is the author of
Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Her work
on the discourse of marginalized voices has appeared in Women’s Studies in
Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, and in edited volumes such
as Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice and Fan Girls and the Media:
Creating Characters, Consuming Culture. Her performance background includes
acting, directing, and performing professional stand-up comedy.
Dueling Discourses: The Female Comic’s
Double Bind in the New Media Age
Rebecca Krefting
Introduction
For comics and fans alike there is much to celebrate when it comes to
changes in the comedy industry as a result of the internet and the rise in
shared networking sites. On one hand there is greater access to preferred
comics and information, new connections and exchanges between comic
and fans, more autonomy in creation, and the potential for comics to
control distribution. On the other hand, there are many concerns raised
alongside the advent of new technologies and platforms: ownership of
image and comedic content, unsolicited feedback from fans who charge
comics with being politically incorrect, use of social media (SM) to “out”
sexual predators in improv performance communities, and the increasing
siloing of interests into ideological online tribes. Everything just men-
tioned bears one thing in common—they are all observable claims that
reflect shifts in practices and behaviors in the comedy industry in the new
media age. While this is interesting, I want to focus on the curious per-
sistence of two popular discourses that have proven untrue, in particular
R. Krefting (*) 
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, USA

232 R. Krefting
how such beliefs work to circumscribe women’s professional success in

the comedy industry.
Two popular discourses—one arising in the late nineteenth cen-
tury and the other in the late twentieth century—have (re)emerged
as of late. Together they buttress one another in maintaining women’s
inferiority in the realm of humor production. The first discourse por-
tends that our online revolution has made it possible for anyone to
succeed. In the early years of social networking sites, platforms were
commonly characterized as rising from the bottom with the intent to
connect with communities centered around shared practices, tradi-
tions, and world views.1 Having begun as a grassroots effort to col-
lapse geography and create virtual connection and community, social
networking sites help foster the illusion of democracy online maintain-
ing the popular discourse that the internet levels the playing field in
the comedy industry.2 This supports the notion that anyone can suc-
ceed if they have good material. Invoking all the trappings of the myth
of meritocracy, I call this the “content is king” discourse. Over time,
this belief has gained traction and shows up in popular media and per-
sonal interviews. In one such interview with John Leguizamo, he said:
“Beautiful thing about all this is that it has made content king. This
is a great time for writers and creators … All great writers are going
to cable TV, Amazon, Netflix. And great actors have gone to these
too … where they are doing the most challenging stuff, the most
freedom [sic], the most mature.”3 A few years before, Patton Oswalt
made a similar proclamation during his speech at Montreal’s annual
Just for Laughs Festival—he welcomes the changes afoot in the com-
edy industry and roars: “Content is king!”4 Declaring that “content
is king!” implies a sort of democratic triumph because it promises
reward for the best material regardless of creator. The statement is rife
with assumptions that ignore the effects of social stratification. As the
object of utopian fantasies of virtual parity, discourses of such a nature
obscure the real ways in which gender and other biases continue to
play out in these so-called democratic spaces. An alternate popular dis-
course—one that has been around for over a century and documented
in historical print media—continues to circulate, namely that women
are not funny or not as funny as men. For women comics, belief that
they are not as funny as men informs hiring decisions, online traffic,
income, and more.
DUELING DISCOURSES: THE FEMALE COMIC’S … 233
These dueling (and damning) discourses lock women comics into

double binds, a term feminists have long linked to the conditions of
oppression. Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye likens oppression to
a birdcage, rather, a “network of forces and barriers which are system-
atically related” that impose irresolvable double binds or “situations in
which options are reduced to a very few, and all of them expose one to
penalty, censure or deprivation.”5 This oft-cited metaphor and tool for
identifying marginalization in action continues to be useful in a society
still encumbered by sex stratification in order to identify new double
binds as they morph and shift alongside changing political, social, eco-
nomic, and technological forces. In this case, women’s success is read
as validation of the content is king discourse and when women do not
succeed, you can cite their “content” as inferior because remember:
Content is king! Together these discursive double binds present a para-
dox. The belief that women are not funny contradicts the content is king
discourse because content cannot possibly be king if women are always
already handicapped when entering the same arena to strut their come-
dic stuff. To be clear, new technologies do not create these discursive
double binds. In fact, the internet has proven quite helpful in dispelling
the belief that women are not funny. Enterprising funny ladies like Abbi
Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Issa Rae, Mindy Kaling, and Maria Bamford have
cultivated online followings compelling profitable industry contracts for
television shows. This is not an attempt to discount the value of new
technologies for humor production; rather, that we exercise caution in
uncritically celebrating new media as democratizing. It may have the
potential to be so, but only to the extent that its users are too.
In this chapter, I examine these two discourses circulating, the ways
those discourses circumscribe women’s professional success as comedians
and the various ways comics are challenging such discourses. Employing
ethnography—interviews with digital media scholars, agents, and industry
executives along with comic entertainers and writers—I draw directly from
the experiences of folks in the industry. Using those interviews, along-
side feminist discourse analyses of popular media (from Wired to The Wall
Street Journal to Huffington Post to Slate) and textual analysis of comedy
performances, I closely interrogate these discourses. For both discourses,
I demonstrate their widespread circulation and indoctrination and then
enumerate various challenges posed to dispel these discursive lies—some
of which might surprise you. I conclude by commenting on why certain
popular discourses continue to flourish despite lacking verisimilitude.
234 R. Krefting
Discourse - Internet as Democratizing

From comedians to journalists, a range of folks in the comedy industry
laud the internet as an egalitarian space where anyone, if they have the
talent, has the capacity to succeed. Writer for The Wall Street Journal,
Christopher Farley, notes: “Social media humor is more democratic
and diverse than the trickle-down comedy of the heyday of Leno and
Letterman.”6 In other words, more people get a crack at comedy now-
adays and conventional modes of achieving success are changing. Even
comics with varying degrees of professional success share a sense of fair
play in this increasingly technocratic landscape. Travis Tapleshay, a white
comic from Hesperia, California, barely scraping by on income from
stand-up comedy offers the following advice to fellow comics:
For myself and other performers, the key to success has a lot to do with
hard work but also just getting yourself out there as often as possible
… It’s important to use social media, too. I have gotten quite a few gigs
through online connections and also just by networking with people. It’s a
very competitive business but anyone can be successful if they keep work-
ing at it and stay true to themselves.7
White comedian Liam McEneaney, having successfully used YouTube

to draw a crowd of admirers and eventually an invitation to South by
Southwest Film Festival to screen his documentary Tell Your Friends! The
Concert Film! on alternative comedy, echoes Tapleshay when offering
advice to comedy hopefuls: “There’s such a glut of comedy and come-
dians right now, all of them clamoring for a limited number of oppor-
tunities, that you kind of need to work harder to keep your voice heard
above the noise … It’s definitely no longer a game for people who are
lazy-but-lucky.”8 Two important stories are being told here. One is a
story about who can become successful: anyone. The other tells a story
about what it takes to become successful: hard work. In other words,
this story advances the myth of meritocracy—the tallest American tale
we continue to tell. For comics, in this particular moment in time, hard
work/ambition must be directed towards establishing an online pres-
ence because SM provides potential employers with the metrics they
need to make hiring and firing decisions without having ever met you in
person. When relaying stories from their own lives or from their profes-
sional counterparts comic writers and performers repeatedly confirm the
role that metrics play in capturing the attention of future employers or

producers.9 In the same interviews, there is little mention of the ways
metrics can be compromised or difficult to procure in higher numbers
based on the sex and/or gender of the comic in question. This comes as
no surprise since overt discussion of sex-contingent metrics would force
interrogation of the veracity of the content is king discourse.
Not much changes in this story when the tale turns to lady comics.
Popular media frequently posits that anyone can be successful as long
as they work really hard, and when it comes to addressing how female
comics fare today, journalists celebrate SM as being a potential game
changer for women in the profession, offering them greater visibility
and a wider fan base. “[T]he level playing field of Twitter, Facebook and
Tumblr means no one gets between ambitious talent and a potentially
receptive audience. All it takes is perseverance, ability, skill and infinite
patience,” exults Alex Leo.10 Meredith Lepore makes similar claims,
presenting a narrative of female empowerment and command over new
media. Neither author addresses how issues of gender parity in comedy
are not resolved online, and yet traces of the gender gap seep through
this laudatory veneer. Alex Leo’s title “Lady Comics: Who Needs Late
Night? We’ve got Tumblr” implies that women are not getting coveted
performance slots on late-night television talk shows. Put another way,
it might read: “No worries, ladies, we cannot compete with the boys
on television, but luckily you can find a niche audience for your style of
humor online. If that doesn’t work, you can always pretend to be a man!
See, we do have options.” Lepore concludes her glowing review of new
media, writing: “Thank you internet! You’ve given us kittens in tubas
and an amazing platform for female comedians to reach a wider audi-
ence.”11 It is true, women comics have alternative means of communi-
cating with fans, but this does not disrupt common public perceptions
that are biased, for example that men are funnier than women.
Challenges to This Belief

There are a number of ways to falsify claims that the internet is neutral
territory where all have the capacity to succeed. For one, there’s an eco-
nomic argument that belies its impartiality. The internet became a real
revenue generator around 2005, when larger corporations usurped
popular SM platforms to profit from the creative—but more impor-
tantly, lucrative—explosion. Users who had organically created or joined
236 R. Krefting
online tribes found their platform adopted and modified for the purpose
of solidifying and targeting niche markets. A market-driven ideology
became the internal logic of many SM platforms and user participa-
tion became what it looks like today: consumers volunteering behavio-
ral and profiling data, which in turn allows platforms to continually
reshape their for-profit business models.12 Companies like Facebook
are rendering sociality technical, tracking, and coding users’ activities,
likes, and comments in the effort to seduce users into spending more
time on Facebook and viewing promotions. Facebook came under fire
when the public learned from a published study that it adjusted the algo-
rithm of 700,000 people’s newsfeed, directing them towards either posi-
tive or negative posts to see if the nature of the posts would affect their
own status updates and postings.13 Altering the mood of users’ news-
feed appeared less like academic research and more like market manipu-
lation. Although this research was upsetting to Facebook users, it is a
clear signal to consumers of how much power SM companies hold with
their data. Ideologies that are heavily shared and followed among users
can become technical trends, allowing companies to track these ideologi-
cal currents then manipulate them over time for marketing and adver-
tising purposes.14 Companies do often employ this data-wielding power,
constantly adjusting algorithms, running randomized trials of content
or designs in order to hit the target of the various economic, political,
and cultural “micro-tribes” to which consumers belong.15 In lieu of this,
one wonders just how organically we migrate towards and populate these
tribes when SM platforms manipulate our newsfeed (including advertise-
ments) and distributors have elaborate software that can anticipate our
consumptive proclivities. It is important to consider to what extent tech-
nology engineers our consumption of goods and the company we keep
in virtual worlds and what that means for comics and the industry at
large. Most importantly, we must remain aware of the commercial inter-
ests and economic stakes in the content available to consumers—comedic
or not—and aware of the volume of that content; there are politics in the
management of that content that complicate whether you or I can ever
actually “stumble” across anything online.
In addition to the structural forces that challenge this discourse, there
are a number of folks calling everyone’s bluff on the SM-equates-to-
egalitarianism myth. Interestingly, some such naysayers are white men.
Former regular opener for audiences at The Colbert Report, the short-
lived The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and The Daily Show, stand-up
comic Kevin Bartini uses his own difficulties in the business to illustrate
that SM has not leveled the playing field:
When I was starting out, it was a little bit difficult being, in comedy, being
a straight white dude. You know, where, where there’s a bazillion of us [he
was being interviewed by two white radio hosts] in this industry and have
traditionally over the last thirty years been the vast majority of what you’ve
seen comedy. So, you know, it’s just my luck I start comedy in the late ‘90s
and that’s when they stopped giving out sitcoms and start making reality
shows and stopped just hiring you just because you are straight white guy.
And every show, every other show at every club is some sort of a diver-
sity night. Which is basically: we’ll have a night for everybody but straight
white guys. So, for a long time it was actually a bit of a hindrance. [the hosts
of the radio show follow up with a chorus of: ‘yeah, it’s tough out there’ and
‘they got our backs up against a wall’].16
Precisely as the internet and SM began generating new online venues

for comedy production, Bartini cites a professional squeeze impact-
ing white male comics. Patton Oswalt’s speech in Montreal at Just for
Laughs responded to similar conditions but with an entirely different
reaction—nearly giddy. He wants folks to have to work hard in the busi-
ness. Though Bartini complains in this podcast that white guys can’t get
a break and who you know doesn’t matter anymore, he later shares that
he got the job on The Daily Show because a friend recommended him.
There was no formal posting of a job and no audition. He just showed
up for work. New media may not be the equalizer that some boast it is,
but it does reduce the likelihood that you will get hired for just being in
the right place at the right time. This is the source of Bartini’s laments
and Oswalt’s delight.
White men comprise only a portion of the constituents countering the
belief that everyone has an equal chance for success in this increasingly
technocratic world. For women, it is difficult to accept the axiom “con-
tent is king” when that content requires public endorsement from some-
one of status (usually male). Maria Bamford’s career took off after Patton
Oswalt invited her to tour with him on the Comedians of Comedy Tour.
Before that, she had hit the laugh ceiling in Los Angeles, and was mak-
ing most of her income via voice-over work for animated series and
steeling herself for a life of touring in feature purgatory throughout the
country. If anyone can succeed then why did it take Louis CK to catapult
238 R. Krefting
Tig Notaro to stardom after a performance at Largo where she shared

about the loss of her mother, being diagnosed with breast cancer, and
dumped by her girlfriend? She had been working hard at the craft for
nearly twenty years before CK put her on the national map. Thanks to
the far-reaching powers of the internet and a lot of hard work, over the
next several years Notaro landed comedy roles, churned out specials on
Showtime and HBO, and even a critically acclaimed documentary, titled
Tig (released directly to Netflix). Despite a bevy of successes to add to
her résumé, journalist Gina Vivinetto points out that Tig has been the
subject of more than just public adoration. Vivinetto asks: “We’ve seen
a lot of ‘Tig Notaro: Cancer As A Path To Success’ headlines this year.
How does that sit with you?”17 Lucky for Notaro, she is not too con-
cerned about such argy bargy, but it does illustrate another double
bind for women. If you don’t achieve fame as a comic, it’s because you
weren’t good enough and if you do achieve fame, then your talent is
always suspect; that is, she slept her way to the top, she wouldn’t be here
without the endorsement of her guy comic friends, her success is linked
to a disability or disease, and so on. The reality is that women comics
benefit from being promoted because all the same cultural trappings and
biases that exist in society, exist online as well, affecting chances for job
offers and professional success.
Some women in the comedy industry openly address these false per-
ceptions that women have equal opportunities for success in this techno-
cratic space. Los Angeles improv actress, Lara Zvirbulis, hosts a weekly
improv show: “That’s What She Said Ladies Night” formerly called “The
Lady Jam.” While she makes good use of SM to promote the show, her
own work, and others’ she admires, she points out that if the playing
field were truly equal for men and women, there would be no need for
an all-women’s improv revue.18 A nod of approval from Caroline Hirsh,
owner of the infamous Caroline’s on Broadway, can make a comic’s
career. She prides herself on being able to spot “funny” and for helping
out female comics along the way, knowing all too well that compared to
their male counterparts, women comics struggle to get the same stage
time and bookings. So, when Hirsch finds women funny and puts them
on her stage, she does it so “they can get it out there … It’s not that
this is making somebody funnier. They’d be funny anyway.”19 Women
comics are lucky to have someone like Hirsch going to bat for them; it’s
not often that women occupy positions of power in the comedy industry.
Stand-up comic and educator Micia Mosely, Ph.D., agrees that SM can
make the work of women comics more visible, but asks us to interrogate
which women get to be visible and the kind of women’s humor the pub-
lic consumes.
I think that we see more female comics kind of out front with their own
fan base being able to headline their own shows than we have in the past
but I think that’s true in general and I feel like social media has helped
in general. It still doesn’t deal with intersectionality. I mean I don’t know
if you can name five Black women who, or even one Latina women, or
one, besides Margaret Cho, Asian woman that are really at that, that you
could go across the country and everyone would know their name, or they
could put together a national tour and they could actually, you know, sup-
port themselves … And you’ll see with female comics who are, I think,
edgier and who can also seem more masculine or more patriarchal in their
approach, you see a little bit of a distinction, right? So I’m thinking of
the Chelsea Handlers or the Sarah Silvermans who, they could easily go
on tour with some of the guys who do that type of comedy, and it’s like:
“Woo! We got a woman!” But they’re not necessarily doing anything to
fight misogyny. So yes, I think it has helped as a platform but has it dealt
with the core issues? No.20
New media may offer the potential for more voices, more points of view,
but as Mosely (herself a Black lesbian) points out, it has not yet changed
the material circumstances (i.e., job offers and income) for women of
color comics. Furthermore, public consumption trends seem to support
women comics unlikely to challenge inequities in the industry or larger
society. If we are simply looking for more female voices to rise above the
din, SM can and already has proved useful for broadening a fan base;
however, who gets heard and the substance of their social commentary
has everything to do with consumer interest and demand, which hinges
upon individual belief and valuation of women’s voices as funny.
Discourse - Women Aren’t Funny

I’m reluctant to even talk about the belief that women are not funny
because doing so reifies and validates the discourse once again. However,
to ignore it would also prove insulting to the reality of women’s shared
experiences in the comedy industry. The evolution and recycling of argu-
ments waged in defense of women being funny have been captured by
240 R. Krefting
a number of scholars. In All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its

Discontents, I detail the history of this discourse as follows:
In the 1890s, newspapers printed editorials and articles speculating that

women were born sympathetic, disallowing a fondness for jokes since
humor is often mean-spirited. An editorial published in 1901 in The
Washington Post begins: “The question was an old one: Do women have
a sense of humor? They have long been accused of having a hollow where
that bump ought to be.”21 The early 1900s delivered more of the same
biology-as-destiny argumentation, i.e., women are born lacking the DNA
necessary to appreciate and produce humor. The debate raged on over
the next century: women can exercise wit but not humor; vanity prevents
women from pursuing comedy because women can be funny only by sacri-
ficing their beauty; a woman’s comic appeal requires she be beautiful oth-
erwise she risks losing male patrons; funny women are unnatural; funny
women are manly; women cannot be ladies and comediennes—the two are
antithetical; women cannot be funny and feminine; women can be funny
and feminine; women are too emotional to be humorous … and on.22
The point is that this belief exists and persists. Unfortunately, people
skeptical that women are funny are not likely to seek ways of changing
their beliefs. And just because our mechanisms for delivering informa-
tion have changed does not mean that inequities related to gender, race,
sexuality, or otherwise will cease to occur. Media producers and direc-
tors have played and continue to play powerful parts in what images,
ideas, and representations we have access to. A shift in how information
circulates, at times obviating the power of industry executives, disturb-
ingly reveals the ways consumers are themselves responsible for uphold-
ing social inequalities, assuming there are few commonalities or shared
interests across sexes, races, generations, or sexual orientations. Such
beliefs effect consumption practices and choices: what YouTube channels
you subscribe to, which kinds of comedy you browse or explore further,
which videos you share or are shared with you, and so on.
Given the insularity of our online tribes, chances are that if you don’t
think women are funny, your friends don’t either. Studies of online
behavior show that we belong to multiple tribes with whom we share
common interests, be they ideological, recreational, professional, reli-
gious, political, and so on.23 The increased siloing of interaction with
communities into micro-tribes who think like we do, means that we are
less likely to have our world views challenged. “People aren’t looking
to get their opinions changed or to try and understand a situation they

can’t relate to in another country or another continent or another reli-
gion,” digital scholar Amelia Wong explains.24 In other words, tribalism
has the potential to breed intractability. In a 2012 sampling of college
students that asked whether men or women are funnier, 89% of women
and 94% of men cited men as the funnier of the two sexes.25 With num-
bers like this, the odds are that we all keep company with folks that
sustain and perpetuate the belief that women are not as funny as men,
reducing the likelihood we will be exposed to arguments or evidence
belying these claims.
Challenges to This Belief

There have been a number of challenges posed to the belief that women
are not as funny as men, including studies seeking to explore the verac-
ity of such claims. A recent study reveals that in blind tests rating the
funniness of cartoon captions, in the United States there are no differ-
ences in how we evaluate the funniness of cartoons authored by men
versus women. When asked to guess the sex of the funniest cartoons,
overwhelmingly participants chose men.26 This and similar conclusions
found by research psychologists Laura Mickes et al. debunks the notion
that women are not as funny as men.27 Women are funny and as funny
as men, but proving this does little to diminish the persistence of that
belief. It may not be true, but as a stereotype, it is operable still. Social
psychologist Claude Steele explains “stereotype threat” as a condition
that presents contingencies based on identity that impact performance.28
This particular stereotype has two negative outcomes that are mutually
supporting. One, since the consumption of comedy is seldom dissoci-
ated with the visual/aural, the belief that women aren’t funny impacts
consumption of women’s comedy. Two, as happens in similar trials con-
ducted by Steele, upon activating this stereotype threat, women are likely
to overeffort and underperform. The stereotype threat leads to a self-
fulfilling prophecy—your ability is called into question, creating anxiety
that impedes performance.29 In other words, the belief itself can impact
both the caliber of women’s performances and consumption of women’s
humor. Because we can trace this belief back to when women began per-
forming comedy professionally on vaudeville stages, we have no under-
standing of what it is like not to operate under this stereotype threat.
And, yet, women do.
242 R. Krefting
Examples of successful female comics like Wanda Sykes, Margaret

Cho, Amy Schumer, Kate McKinnon, Ali Wong, Kathleen Madigan, or
Iliza Shlesinger aid in dispelling the belief that women are not funny.
Resistance to these claims emerges in a variety of venues serving up
visual culture: YouTube videos, women’s stand-up comedy, documen-
taries, print media, and television shows. Women’s web series such as
Bamford’s The Maria Bamford Show and Ask My Mom, Ilana Glazer
and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City, Grace Helbig’s DailyGrace, and Issa
Rae’s Awkward Black Girl have turned more than a few heads—so many
that all of these women’s web series yielded opportunities for television
shows. Glazer and Jacobson have enjoyed greater visibility on Comedy
Central after the channel picked up Broad City in 2014 (network execu-
tives promise a 4th and 5th season). Maria Bamford lit up Netflix in the
experimental series Lady Dynamite, Helbig hosts The Grace Helbig Show
on E! and with Larry Wilmore as her creative co-pilot, Issa Rae’s web
series has been transformed into a television show called Insecure which
has garnered critical acclaim since its premier on HBO in October 2016.
Broad popular success ensured that HBO renewed the show for a second
season. This should be reason to wax jubilant; however, it illumines that
women are less likely to be given a crack at television until they dem-
onstrate an existing fan base to support production of the show. That
women have to undergo online hazing proves just how strongly we have
invested in the belief that women are inferior in the realm of humor pro-
duction. To comedian Micia Mosely’s point that women of color do not
have the same opportunities as white women, it should be noted that it
is much easier to find evidence of white women’s success in mainstream
comedy consumption than to report on the success of women of color
comic performers.
That the impact felt by both of these discourses may be compounded
when considering the experiences and opportunities for women of
color in the comedy industry barely factored into Bonnie McFarlane’s
unfortunately titled documentary, Women Aren’t Funny (2014), which
sought answers to why this belief continues to circulate despite evi-
dence to the contrary. Instead of offering cultural, historical, economic,
or political answers to this question, she places herself as centerpiece of
the documentary that devolves into the real conundrum: Why am I not
as famous as my husband, Rich Vos? Standing in a field naked from the
waist down and unable to take herself or the topic seriously, McFarlane
makes a mockery of any valuable insights about why this belief continues
to thrive. The tragedy of her failed denouncement of this belief cou-

pled with a title meant to be ironic but isn’t, makes for a painful view-
ing experience. Failed though her efforts may have been, her frustration
reflects a tenuous career that can be linked to her subject position as a
woman, further evincing the toll this belief takes on women comics.30
Unlike Bonnie McFarlane’s half-hearted attempt at confronting and
challenging this belief, the three-minute YouTube video, “A Day in the
Life of a Female Comedian” (2011), takes a satirical stab at the ste-
reotype. This cast of lady comic notables such as Amy Schumer, Nikki
Glaser, Maria Bamford, and Jackie Monahan spoof sexist beliefs and
simultaneously raise critiques about what it means for women to have to
“pay their dues” in the comedy industry—favors for male agents, club
bookers, and comic friends—and the pressures placed on women to ful-
fill white beauty ideals and develop content consonant with their subject
positions as women (and in this case, as white). In other words, being a
funny white lady requires a combination of shoulder pads, vulva jokes,
and making ignorant observations about people of color. More point-
edly, the video suggests that being a woman comic is akin to navigat-
ing an active minefield ranging from skepticism to outright repudiation
before she has even stepped on stage.31
Just as women use social networking sites to broadcast evidence of
their humorous potential, so, too, the content of women’s comedy belies
the stereotype that women are not funny. In her Netflix comedy special,
Baby Cobra, Ali Wong turns our attention to gender expectations when it
comes to performing stand-up comedy.
So, I don’t know if you guys can tell, but I’m seven and a half months
pregnant. [cheers and applause] Yeah! It’s very rare and unusual to see a
female comic perform pregnant … because female comics … don’t get
pregnant. [laughter] Just try to think of one, I dare you, there’s none of
them. Once they do get pregnant they generally disappear. That’s not the
case with male comics. Once they have a baby they’ll get up on stage a
week afterwards and they’ll be like: “Guys, I just had this fucking baby,
that baby is a little piece of shit, it’s so annoying and boring.” And all these
other shitty dads in the audience are like: “That’s hilarious! I identify!”
[laughter] and their fame just swells because they become this relatable
family funny man all of a sudden. Meanwhile the mom is at home, chap-
ping her nipples, [laughter] feeding the fucking baby, and wearing a frozen
diaper because her pussy needs to heal from the baby’s head shredding it
up. She’s busy [laughter]!
244 R. Krefting
She ends the bit saying: “So, I don’t know what’s going to happen to
me.” It is meant to be funny, but the concern is real. There is no model
for Ali Wong, no manual to unpack what to expect when you are expect-
ing (as a female comic). Wong gives us some context for why we don’t
often see mothers on stage, let alone pregnant women. Importantly, she
cites identification with a comic spokesperson as critical to their success.
Why are women’s experiences, including but not limited to pregnancy
and parenting, not considered relatable? The answer has less to do with
women being unfunny and everything to do with gendered social expec-
tations posing as natural or normate. As Wong illustrates, the outcome
radically transforms who populates our comedic landscape, what subject
matters we get to hear about, and even the ways we broach that content.
Why do these discourses trafficking false beliefs continue to circulate
despite the vast evidence to the contrary? What is our shared invest-
ment in treating them as truths versus false beliefs or stereotypes? I con-
tend that what we find humorous reflects who we are—as individuals,
as citizens, and as members of communities organized around religion,
region, race/ethnicity, sexuality, politics, and so on. We rally behind the
beliefs we want to believe are true because they serve us in some way;
in other words, they are functional. We have long extolled the value of
a democratic government and equal opportunity for all, taking up arms
to defend this right for others in Asia and the Middle East even as rac-
ism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia remain an accepted part of our
social and political institutions. The desire to be viewed as egalitarian
far outweighs the desire to fix the system so that it actually works the
way we say it does. It is not surprising then that new media prompted
another chorus of self-congratulatory claims to parity. The functionality
of the stereotype that women are not funny is simple. The belief main-
tains comedy as a male-dominated profession, ensuring more stage time,
money, and opportunities for men. More opportunities to make us laugh
means more opportunities to inform and shape audience’s world views.
For male comics, in theory, what’s not to like? Kevin Bartini’s com-
plaints about a changing industry that no longer hands out gigs to white
men (except it did for him) reflect professional concerns that will only
intensify the desire to maintain the discursive fiction that women aren’t
funny. Watching this discourse circulate over time and seeing the vitriol
dispensed by comics towards members of the public charging them with
being politically incorrect, it is clear that certain comics are wedded to
maintaining the current comedy status quo. And, to be fair, so are we—
the fans, the consumers, the groupies.
Conclusion
If the future of the comedy industry looks anything like the music indus-
try’s past, it could be characterized as “white space,” a term Los Angeles
talent agent Peter Clemente used to explain the current open-endedness
of the comedy industry due to changing dynamics. Clemente asserted
that “influencers,” those who have traditionally supported, sponsored,
and shaped a cultural icon, are driven by the ulterior motive of profit.
Complicating the dynamic of the comedy industry today are the “advo-
cates,” those who whole-heartedly, without ulterior motive, aim to pro-
tect, share, and spread the word about something in which they are
personally invested. These are the fans, the ones who post comedy clips
to their Facebook newsfeed, who retweet a comedian coming to town
on their Twitter account, and who may even fill the seats at the com-
edy clubs. In the comedy world, the biggest influence used to be late-
night talk show hosts directing our fandom. Now the advocates, the
fans, and the consumers bestow a comedian with popularity and power.
This model is far more decentralized and unquantifiably powerful, with
more voices recommending which comic to listen to, which comic writer
to read, or which video to watch. As we reside in this “white space,”
Clemente sees the fertile ground for an entirely new model. He fore-
sees an industry in which content creators and consumers have far more
agency in shaping what becomes popular comedic content, and distribu-
tors seek to listen to these voices. In contrast to the popular discourse
that SM is an impartial and equalizing force, Clemente’s observations
seem a far more accurate assessment of the role that new media plays in
the comedy industry.
In conclusion, both discourses lock women into a double bind. If
women are not funny—subjective though this may be—then the belief
has been confirmed. If women are funny then they don’t shift the rule,
they are an exception to the rule, a pleasant mirth-inducing aberration.
If women put out comedic content online and it is not successful, her
failure becomes one of content, ignoring the ways her subject position
may dictate consumption of her comedy. The blame for failure lies with
her, rather than the way we have been socialized to appreciate male
humor. As long as the belief that women aren’t funny remains salient,
246 R. Krefting
it’s difficult to know where the responsibility lies. With consumers?

Definitely. Our beliefs shape our consumptive practices—just ask anyone
why they buy local. Does the responsibility lie with her humor? Maybe.
Anybody can fail at comedy, men and women alike. But when the tas-
temakers are trained to see male humor as humor genera, when we are
still socialized to value a male opinion over a female’s, consumers will
gravitate towards male comic perspectives and world views. So long as
either belief exists—content is king and women aren’t funny—it contin-
ues to delimit what counts as humorous, negatively impacts interest in
women’s comedic production, and impedes potential for women’s suc-
cess. It is both a blessing and a curse that these beliefs cannot be sub-
stantiated as factual or objective: a blessing because beliefs are tractable
and a curse because most people cling intractably to their beliefs. What may
appear to be an easy resolution—stop believing this horseshit—remains
complicated and deeply ingrained in the American psyche.
Notes
1. José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social
Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2. For a lengthy and detailed discussion of the cultural history of Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Wikipedia, see: José van Dijck, The Culture
of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
3. John Leguizamo, Personal Interview, July 23, 2014.
4. YouTube, “Laughspin: Patton Oswalt—Keynote Speech—Just for
Laughs,” accessed June 15, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
brhuMYNzyQM.
5. Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” In Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael
S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, 13–20 (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books
Group, 2003), 18 & 14.
6. Christopher John Farley, “Will Jimmy Fallon Get the Last Laugh on
Social Media? #Hashtag #Tonight Show,” Wall Street Journal, February
20, 2014, accessed June 9, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/tag/
jimmy-fallon/.
7. L.J. Gambone, “Local Comedian Looking for Laughs: Travis Tapleshay
Making the Rounds With Brand of Stand-Up Comedy,” Hesperia Star,
March 10, 2015, accessed April 24, 2015, http://www.hesperiastar.
com/article/20150310/News/150319982.
8. Eric Schmeltzer, “Comedians Making Their Own Way in Era of Do-It-

Yourself Comedy,” Huffington Post The Blog, April 18, 2012, accessed
June 13, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-schmeltzer/come-
dians-on-twitter_b_1433048.html.
9. All of my research participants speak to this metrics phenomenon and
stress the importance of an online presence as mandate for professional
success, particularly for those without name recognition.
10. Alex Leo, “Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr,”
Tumblr, May 16, 2012, accessed June 9, 2014, http://storyboard.tumblr.
com/post/23163035436/lady-comics-who-needs-late-night-weve-got.
11. Meredith Lepore, “Female Comedians Prefer Social Media To The
Late Night Talk Show Circuit For Their Careers,” Grindstone.com,
May 21, 2012, accessed June 5, 2012, http://www.thegrindstone.
com/2012/05/21/office-politics/female-comedians-prefersocial-media-
over-the-late-night-talk-show-circuit-101/.
12. José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social
Media, 16.
13. Cornell University professor (Jeffrey T. Hancock) and graduate student
(Jamie Guillory) along with a member of Facebook’s Core Data Science
Team (Adam Kramer) published a study based on data gleaned from
adjusting the algorithm titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale
emotional contagion through social networks.”
14. Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 20–21.
15. Marty Kaplan, “Facebook and the Powers of Media Manipulation,”
Highbrow Magazine, July 21, 2014, accessed July 23, 2014. http://www.
highbrowmagazine.com/4155-facebook-and-powers-media-manipulation.
16. Gina Vivinetto, “Tig Notaro Won’t Tweet: Why the Comedian
Refuses to Live Her Life on Social Media,” Forbes August 21, 2015,
accessed September 1, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ginavivi-
netto/2015/08/21/tig-notaro-wont-tweet-why-the-comedian-refuses-
to-live-her-life-on-social-media/.
17. Lara Zvirbulis, E-mail, July 21, 2014.
18. Caroline Hirsch, Personal Interview, July 17, 2014.
19. Micia Mosely, Personal Interview, August 12, 2015.
20. “Woman’s Sense of Humor: Mr. Depew, May Irwin and Other Discuss Its
Existence,” The Washington Post, June 23, 1901, 22.
21. This list draws from dozens and dozens of articles published in twentieth
century historical newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington
Post, Chicago Defender, Pittsburg Courier, and Los Angeles Times.
I would like to thank students enrolled in multiple sections of my course:
Introduction to American Studies: A Humorous (Dis)Course for locat-
ing, analyzing and discussing these articles and the evolution/cycles of
248 R. Krefting
this popular debate with me. For a lengthier discussion of the same, see
Chap. 4 in Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its
Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 129–130.
22. Danah Boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2014); Carrie James, Disconnected: Youth, New
Media, and the Ethics Gap (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).
23. Amelia Wong, Personal Interview, July 11, 2014.
24. Laura Mickes, Drew E. Walker, Julian L. Parris, Robert Mankoff, and
Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, “Who’s Funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor
Production, and Memory Bias,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 19.1
(February 2012): 108–112.
25. Jade Hooper, Donald Sharpe, and Sam George Bradley Roberts,
“Are Men Funnier Than Women, or Do We Just Think They Are?”
Translational Issues in Psychological Science 2.1 (2016): 54–62.
26. Laura Mickes et al., “Who’s Funny”.
27. Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes
Affect Us (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010).
28. Ibid.
29. Women Aren’t Funny, Streaming, Directed by Bonnie McFarlane (USA:
McVos Productions, 2013).
30. “A Day in the Life of a Female Comedian,” Funny or Die video, 2:57,
September 12, 2011 http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d788058bcb/
a-day-in-the-life-of-a-female-comedian-with-amy-schumer?_cc=__d___&_
ccid=f8161c38-9e4b-42e4-8b5b-ff2a1da45385.
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Boyd, Danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven,
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Broadwayworld.com. “That’ll Play Podcast Welcomes Comedian Kevin
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2003.
Gambone, L.J. “Local Comedian Looking for Laughs: Travis Tapleshay

Making the Rounds With Brand of Stand-Up Comedy.” Hesperia Star,
March 10, 2015. Accessed April 24, 2015. http://www.hesperiastar.com/
article/20150310/News/150319982.
Hirsch, Caroline. Personal Interview. July 17, 2014.
Hooper, Jade, Donald Sharpe, and Sam George Bradley Roberts. “Are Men
Funnier Than Women, or Do We Just Think They Are?” Translational Issues
in Psychological Science 2.1 (2016): 54–62.
James, Carrie. Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
Leguizamo, John. Personal Interview. July 23, 2014.
Leo, Alex. “Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr.” Tumblr,
May 16, 2012. Accessed June 9, 2014. http://storyboard.tumblr.com/
post/23163035436/lady-comics-who-needs-late-night-weve-got.
Lepore, Meredith. “Female Comedians Prefer Social Media To The Late Night
Talk Show Circuit For Their Careers.” Grindstone.com, May 21, 2012.
Accessed June 5, 2012. http://www.thegrindstone.com/2012/05/21/
office-politics/female-comedians-prefersocial-media-over-the-late-night-talk-
show-circuit-101/.
Kaplan, Marty. “Facebook and the Powers of Media Manipulation.” Highbrow
Magazine, July 21, 2014. Accessed July 23, 2014. http://www.high-
browmagazine.com/4155-facebook-and-powers-media-manipulation.
Mickes, Laura, Drew E. Walker, Julian L. Parris, Robert Mankoff, and Nicholas
J.S. Christenfeld. “Who’s Funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor Production,
and Memory Bias.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 19.1 (February 2012):
108–112.
Mosely, Micia. Personal Interview. August 12, 2015.
Schmeltzer, Eric. “Comedians Making Their Own Way in Era of Do-It-Yourself
Comedy.” Huffington Post The Blog, April 18, 2012. Accessed June 13, 2014.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-schmeltzer/comedians-on-twitter_
b_1433048.html.
Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to how Stereotypes Affect Us.
New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Vivinetto, Gina. “Tig Notaro Won’t Tweet: Why the Comedian Refuses to Live
Her Life on Social Media.” Forbes, August 21, 2015. Accessed September 1,
2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ginavivinetto/2015/08/21/tig-notaro-
wont-tweet-why-the-comedian-refuses-to-live-her-life-on-social-media/.
“Woman’s Sense of Humor: Mr. Depew, May Irwin and Other Discuss Its
Existence.” The Washington Post, June 23, 1901, 22.
Women Aren’t Funny. Streaming. Directed by Bonnie McFarlane. USA: McVos
Productions, 2013.
250 R. Krefting
Wong, Amelia. Personal Interview. July 11, 2014.

YouTube. “Laughspin: Patton Oswalt—Keynote Speech—Just for Laughs.”
Accessed June 15, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brhuMYNzyQM.
Zvirbulis, Lara. E-mail. July 21, 2014.
Author Biography
Rebecca Krefting is Associate Professor in the American Studies Department
at Skidmore College, New York, USA. Her research specializations are studies
in humor and performance; identity and difference; media representations; vis-
ual and popular culture; and American subcultures. She is author of All Joking
Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents and contributing author to several
edited collections, including Hysterical! Women in American Comedy and Taking
a Stand: American Stand-up Comedians as Public Intellectuals.
Index
A Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 12, 27,

Abbott, Lyman, 43 43
Abortion, 85, 217–218 Audubon (Rourke), 67, 68, 72
Abstractionism, 31 Awkward Black Girl (Rae), 242
Acker, Kathy, 141, 144
Acosta-Bélen, Edna, 125
“Admonitions” (Clifton), 99–101 B
Ai, 99 Baby Cobra (Wong), 243–244
All Joking Aside (Krefting), 128, 240 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 39, 47
American folk culture. See Rourke, Ballou, Hannah, 209
Constance Bamford, Maria, 233, 237–238, 242
American Humor (Rourke), 18, 59, Barr, Roseanne, 206, 207
61, 63–68 Barreca, Regina
American Little Magazines of the 1890s on humor and power dynamics, 39,
(MacLeod), 20 44, 167, 176
“American Story, An” (Clifton), 103, Penguin Book of Women’s Humor,
104 The, 19
Anderson, Sam, 208, 211 Untamed and Unabashed, 39
Anti-suffragists. See Suffragist humor on women’s voice, 5, 10, 12, 158
Antonoff, Jack, 159 Barrett, William, 84, 89
Aoki, Guy, 211 Barth, Belle, 205
Are Women People? (Miller), 9 Barthes, Roland, 97
Aristocrats, The (film), 210, 223n32 Bartini, Kevin, 236–237, 244
Arnett, Will, 159 Bass, Ellen, 99
Art criticism, 32–33 Baumgardner, Jennifer, 219
Ask My Mom (web series), 242
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 251

Palgrave Studies in Comedy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56729-7
252 Index
Bawd comedic persona, 203, 204– Burke, Kenneth, 61–62, 63–64, 72–73
206, 218–221. See also Bitch Burne-Jones, Philip, 23–24
comedic persona Butler, Judith, 6
Bee, Samantha, 50–51
Behar, Joy, 206
Bellman, Samuel, 63, 67, 69–70, 72 C
Benson, Bea Bea, 205 Cane (Toomer), 97
Benstock, Shari, 162 Can’t We Talk About Something More
Bergson, Henri, 3, 39, 42, 48, 146 Pleasant? (Chast), 176–178
Bitch, as term, 85 Carlson, Cheree A., 44
Bitch comedic persona, 203, 211. See Carnivalesque, 5, 8, 124
also Bawd comedic persona Carter, Judy, 206
Blades of Glory (film), 157 Cartoons and humor, 175. See also
Blanch, Sophie, 45 Chast, Roz
Blessing the Boats (Clifton), 98 Celebrity autobiographies. See Femoirs
Blood and Guts in High School (Acker), Censorship, 61
141 Chapman, Mary, 38
Bluestein, Gene, 60 Charged humor, 128
Body awareness, 211, 218 Chast, Roz, 228–246
Bombeck, Erma, 175, 176 about, 175–178
Bookman, 27, 30 awards for, 156
Bossypants (Fey) “Bad Mom Cards”, 180
on body awareness, 163, 164 “Big Book of Parent-Child Fights,
cover of, 160 The”, 235
dedication of, 160 Can’t We Talk About Something
photographs in, 161 More Pleasant?, 176–178, 186,
reference to, 160 199n4, 200n10
Bowen, Elizabeth, 19 on death and dying, 186
Boyd, Phoebe-Jane, 215 “For Their Own Good”, 186
Brand-X Anthology of Poetry, The “Healing Truths”, 180
(Zaranka), 18 on mixed marriages, 175, 185
Brett, Simon, 17 on modern family, 178
Broad City (television show), 218, 242 “Mom-O-Grams”, 180
Brooks, Van Wyck, 59–61, 64, 66, New Yorker work of, 137, 139, 167,
68, 69 175, 177
Brower, Brock, 84 Party After You Left, The, 182
Bruce, Lenny, 210 “Passive-Aggressive Birthday Gifts”,
Bruja/curandera dichotomy, 121, 182
130n35 “Police Log from Suburbia Heights
Buck, Gertrude, 60–62, 73 in Haiku Form”, 183
Bueno, Eva Paulino, 121 “Regrets Only”, 178
Burgess, Gelett, 21. See also Lark on relationship with mother, 126,
(magazine) 230, 232
Index 253
on suburban life, 175, 183 Clinton, Hillary, 50

summary of cartoon work by, 21, Cochrane, Kira, 218
228–231 Colbert Report, The (television show),
Theories of Everything, 177 236
“True Confessions”, 234 Combe, Voltaire, 69–72, 237
What I Hate, 180 Comedians, memoirs by. See Femoirs
When in Rome..., 183 Comedy industry and new media. See
Cisneros, Sandra, 10, 115–119, 121, New media and comedy industry
125, 128–130 Comedy performance, 231–246. See
Cixous, Hélène, 2, 13 also Specific comics
Clap back by Clifton, 99–101, 103, language of, 64, 87
105, 106, 111n5 memoir as, 156, 170
Clemencia, 121 on sexuality, 117, 209
Clemente, Peter, 245, 305 power and modern forms of, 204,
Clifton, Lucille Sayles, 10, 97–112 207
“admonitions”, 99–101 summary of personas in, 10, 205,
“American Story, An”, 103, 104 207
ancestry of, 105 Company She Keeps, The (McCarthy),
awards of, 98 10, 87, 91, 92, 94. See also spe-
Blessing the Boats, 98 cific stories
clap back by, 101, 111n5 Content is king discourse, 11, 232,
“cruelty. don’t talk to me about 233, 235
cruelty”, 108–110 “Cruelty. don’t talk to me about cru-
Everett Anderson's Goodbye, 98 elty” (Clifton), 108, 110
“final note to clark”, 107 Cuba, 125–127, 131, 132
Good Woman, 98 Cubism, 31–33
“if i should”, 106, 166 Cummings, Whitney, 9, 11, 12, 211
narrator and, 112n21 Curandera/bruja dichotomy, 121,
Next, 98 130, 130n35
“note passed to superman”, 107
“Nude Dude, The”, 103, 104, 109,
110 D
summary of poetry by, 10, 97–100 Daily News, 140
“to thelma who worried because i DailyGrace (web series), 242
couldn’t cook”, 108 Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The (tel-
Two-Headed Woman, 98 evision show), 50, 236
Voices, 100, 239 “Dark Lady of American Letters, The”
“what the mirror said”, 108–109 (Podhoretz), 83
“why some people be mad at me Date Night (film), 156
sometimes”, 105 Davy Crockett(Rourke), 66–69, 73
“wishes for sons”, 101–103 “Day in the Life of a Female
won’t you celebrate with me, 110 Comedian, A” (video), 243
254 Index
Delaria, Lea, 206 Fallon, Jimmy, 168

Delicatessen Husband, The (Seabury), Farley, Christopher, 234
9, 47–48, 55 Feldmar, Shawna, 209
Dentith, Simon, 33 Femininity. See Gender and gender
Deveau, Danielle Jeanine, 218 stereotypes
DeVoto, Bernard, 59, 64–66 Feminist comedy, definition of, 214
Dialogical parody theory, 4 Femoirs, 157–169. See also Specific
Dick jokes, 205, 207, 221. See also celebrities
Sexuality and sexual desire about, 157–159
Dickstein, Morris, 89 body awareness in, 163–166
Difficult People (television show), 157 covers of, 162–163
Disparagement theory, 3–4 dual purpose of, 159, 168
Displacement. See Gentrification and front matter of, 159, 160
displacement narrative structure of, 161–162
“Diversions of the Echo Club” as performance, 162, 163
(Taylor), 27 on professional success, 158–159,
Dodson, Betty, 219 168–169
Double-voiced narrative, 4–6 on relationships, 158–159, 161–162
Douglas, Mary, 147, 148 reviews of, 157
Dresner, Zita, 39–40, 45, 46, 48 summary of modern popular femi-
Dundes, Alan, 72–73 nism and, 11, 156
Dunham, Lena, 156–157. See also as transgressive humor, 156–157
Specific works of Ferriss, Suzanne, 158, 166
construction of self by, 163–164 Fey, Tina, 156. See also Specific works
relationships and, 156, 161 of
on professional success, 168–169
relationships and, 158, 161
E “Final note to clark” (Clifton), 107
Elinore, Kate, 205 Fitts, Alexandra, 118, 130n12
Eliot, T.S., 97 Fontana, Kaitlin, 157, 161
Encyclopedia of American Humorists “For Their Own Good” (Chast), 186
(Gale), 18 Fourth wave feminism, 218–221,
Epp, Michael H., 39 226n78
Equal rights, 85–86. See also Suffragist Foy, Jennifer, 217
humor Franklin, Joe, 210
Esposito, Cameron, 211 Freedman, Jonathan, 25
Everett Anderson’s Goodbye (Clifton), Freeman, Hadley, 158, 161, 163
98 Freud, Sigmund, 3–4, 145–147, 207.
See also Specific theories
Friedan, Betty, 8
F “From Vivette’s Milkmaid” (Wells),
Faber Book of Parodies, The (Brett), 17 21–22
Facebook, 235 Frye, Marilyn, 233
Index 255
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Greek mythology, 2

50–51 Greene, Victor, 73
Greer, Andrew Sean, 126
Griffin, Kathy, 211
G Gross, Beverly, 85
Gagnier, Regenia, 41 Group, The (McCarthy), 87, 88
García, Cristina, 115, 125–128 “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess”, 116
Gender and gender stereotypes, 7, 8, Gubar, Susan, 2, 4
9, 46, 248. See also Sexuality and
sexual desire; Suffragist humor;
Specific issues H
female identity and McCarthy, 6, 7, Handler, Chelsea, 157, 167, 211
82, 83, 92 Handy, Bruce, 214
in legal practice, 46 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 85
performative language and, 6 Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 27, 28
social restrictions on women, 5, 6, Hashtag feminism, 218. See also
18, 19, 42 Fourth wave feminism
of women’s humor, 8–11, 239, 241 Helbig, Grace, 242
Gender Trouble (Butler), 5 Herford, Oliver, 23
Gentrification and displacement, Herland (Gilman), 9
143–144, 150, 151n44 Highet, Gilbert, 81
“Ghostly Father, I Confess” Hirsch, Caroline, 238
(McCarthy), 91–92 Hitchens, Christopher, 12, 116, 155,
Gilbert, Joanne R., 8, 11, 14n25, 221, 156, 168
225n74 Hobbes, Thomas, 39
Gilbert, Sandra M., 2, 4, 12n2 Hodge, Stephanie, 205
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 9 Holley, Marietta, 18, 39, 40–45,
Girls (television show), 156, 160, 164 54n50
Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, The Horatian satire, 82
(Schumer), 163 Humoring Resistance (Niebylski), 116
Glamour, 215 Humor theories, 10. See also Power
Glaser, Michael, 99 dynamics and humor
Glass, Ruth, 142, 143 of Bergson, 3, 4, 146
Glazer, Ilana, 233, 242 of Douglas, 147
“Glint of Malice, A” (Dickstein), 89 of Freud, 3, 4, 145, 146, 207, 208
Goehring, Charles E., 208 historical works by women, 9
Goltz, Dustin Bradley, 213 history of women in, 1–3, 6, 7
Good Woman (Clifton), 98 of Hitchens, 12, 116, 155, 168
Grace Helbig Show, The (television incongruity theory, 1, 3, 207, 220
show), 242 modern essay collections of, 18
Grand Rapids Herald, 70 relief/arousal theory, 1, 3, 4, 8, 217
Gray, Frances, 41 subversion in, 1–7
Gray rape, 217, 225n74
256 Index
superiority/disparagement theory, Jokes and their Relation to the

1, 3, 4, 220 Unconscious (Freud), 145
Humor writings, 3–7, 10, 23, 39. See Juvenalian satire, 82
also Femoirs; Specific authors
Hutcheon, Linda, 5
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 66–68, 72 K
Kaling, Mindy, 156. See also Specific
works of
I body awareness of, 163, 164
Idle Idyls (Wells), 23, 24 online brand and, 239
“If i should” (Clifton), 106 on professional success, 168, 169
I'm Fucking Matt Damon (video by relationships and, 156, 161, 177
Silverman), 210 Kardashian, Khloe, 215
“Importance of Being Sandra, The” Kaufman, Gloria, 8
(Bueno), 121 Kernan, Alvin, 82
“In a Minor Key” (Seabury), 49–50 Khazan, Olga, 12
Incongruity theory, 4, 207, 220 King of Cuba (García), 125, 126
Insecure (television show), 242 Kipling, Rudyard, 24–25
Inside Amy Schumer (television show), Knockers Up (Warren), 205
213, 214, 218 Kramer, Hilton, 85
Inside Out (film), 157 Krefting, Rebecca, 128, 129, 231
Intellectual Memoirs (McCarthy), 88 Krinsky, Leah, 206
Internet as egalitarian space. See Krutch, Joseph, 65
Content is king discourse
Irony’s Edge (Hutcheon), 5
Irony, summary of use of, 4–6. See also L
Under humor “Lady Comics” (Leo), 235
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Lady Dynamite (Netflix series), 242
(And Other Concerns) (Kaling), La Malinche, 117, 118, 130n12
162, 163, 167 Lark (magazine), 20–22
body awareness in, 166 Lasswell, Mary, 175–176
cover of, 166 Late Night With Conan O’Brien (tel-
dedication of, 160 evision show), 210
narrative voice in, 162, 163, 167 Latina fiction, 10, 115–116. See also
photographs in, 166 Specific writers
Laughter, 3–4, 7–8
Laughter (Bergson), 4
J Lauzen, Martha, 168–169
Jacobson, Abbi, 233, 242 La Virgen de Guadalupe, 117
Jesus is Magic (Silverman), 203, Le Gallienne, Richard, 24–26
209–211 Legal practice of women, 45, 47
Jewish stereotypes, 208, 210 Leguizamo, John, 232
Index 257
Leo, Alex, 235 childhood of, 91

Lepore, Meredith, 235 Company She Keeps, The, 87, 91, 92
Line of the Sun, The (Cofer), 121–123 description of, 28, 121, 124
“Literature as Equipment for Living” female identity and writings by, 82,
(Burke), 61 83
Little, Judy, 4 on feminism and equal rights, 85
Little magazines. See Magazine and “Ghostly Father, I Confess”, 91
periodical market Group, The, 87, 88, 92
Live at the Apollo (television show), on her own style of satire, 81
212–213, 216 “Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,
“Logic of Law, The” (Miller), 46 The”, 87, 89
Lorka, Holly, 205–206 men and, 84, 88, 214
Lott, Eric, 65–66 Oasis, The, 84
Lotus Magazine, 27 “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale
Lowks, Suzy, 206–207 Man”, 88, 90
Lowrey, Lacy, 208 on self expression, 81, 83
Lupton, Mary Jane, 99 summary of satire by, 9, 82, 89
Lurie, Alison, 82 on women sense writers, 86, 87
McCluskey, Audrey T., 99
McDonald, Betty, 175, 176
M McEneaney, Liam, 234
Mabley, Jackie, 205 McFarlane, Bonnie, 242, 243
Macdonald, Dwight, 84, 88, 90, 91 McKinnon, Kate, 242
MacLeod, Kirsten, 20 Mean Girls (film), 156
Madigan, Kathleen, 242 Medusa, 2, 3
Magazine and periodical market, 21, Memoirs. See Femoirs
22, 81, 83, 87 Men
Mailer, Norman, 84 characteristics of humor writings
“Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, by, 6
The” (McCarthy), 87 dick jokes about, 205, 220
Marcuse, Peter, 143 McCarthy and, 81, 84, 88
Marcus, Greil, 61 in new media and comedy industry,
Maria Bamford Show, The (web series), 231
242 Meyers, Seth, 161, 168
Martin, Courtney E., 219 Mickes, Laura, 241
Marx, Nick, 218 Midler, Bette, 205
Masculinity. See Gender and gender Mieder, Wolfgang, 61
stereotypes; Men, 217 Miller, Alice Duer, 40
Matteson, Pam, 206 Miller, Lynn C., 169
McCarthy, Mary, 81–94 Mills, Angela, 38
as bitch, 83, 84 The Mindy Project (television show),
character superiority by, 87, 88 157, 160, 166, 167
258 Index
“Mixed Marriages” (Chast), 185 Mayor Koch and, 139

Mizejewski, Linda, 116, 209 summary of recent history of,
Modernism in art, 70 140–145
Modern Satire (Kernan), 82 Tillman on, 10
“Mom-O-Grams” (Chast), 180 Next (Clifton), 98
Mo’nique, 211 Niebylski, Dianna, 116
Morreall, John, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 97
Morris, Wesley, 214 Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, The
Mosely, Micia, 239 (television show), 236
Munro, Ealasaid, 219 “Nineteenth-Century American
Murphy, Jackson, 212 Feminist Humor” (Ross), 41, 54
My Horizontal Life (Handler), 157 Noel, Hattie, 205
Myths and Rourke, 60 No Lease on Life (Tillman)
first section of, 137
humor theories and, 145, 147
N Mayor Koch in, 139
“Never Marry a Mexican” (Cisneros), second section of, 137
117, 118 street narratives in, 137
Newman, Kathe, 144 summary of, 50, 82
New media and comedy industry, Notaro, Tig, 238
231–245. See also Specific media “Note passed to superman” (Clifton),
outlets 107
content is king discourse, 11, 232, Not That Kind of Girl (Dunham),
233, 235–245 156–157
on 2016 election, 50 cover of, 160
fourth wave feminism and, 11, 204, front matter of, 162
218, 219, 220, 226 illustrations in, 183
metrics and, 234, 235 narrative voice of, 162, 163
race and, 240, 244, 247n9 on sexual assault, 164
summary of, 46 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
tribalism in, 241 (Duchamp), 31
women aren’t funny discourse, “Nude Dude, The” (Clifton), 143,
239–241, 244–246 103, 119, 120
New Yorker, 11, 137, 139, 167, Nussbaum, Emily, 213, 267
175, 177, 178, 183, 186, 199,
200n24, 224
New York Times, 157 O
New York Tribune, 45 Oasis, The (McCarthy), 84
New York’s Lower East Side, 10. See Olds, Sharon, 99
also No Lease on Life (Tillman) The Office (television show), 157
gentrification and displacement in, “On Not Believing All You Hear”
136, 142, 143, 151n44 (Miller), 45–46
Index 259
Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 10, 115, 122– “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale
125, 128, 131n62 Man” (McCarthy), 87–88, 90–91
Oswalt, Patton, 232, 237 Powell, Dawn, 82
“Our Leading Bitch Intellectual” Power dynamics and suffragist humor,
(Gross), 85 10, 37, 38, 41
“Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffrage Power dynamics and humor, 39
Reasons” (Miller), 46–47 Pregnancy, 244
Oxford Book of Comic Verse, The Progressivism, 63, 69
(Gross), 18 Proverbs and proverbial criticism of
Oxford Book of Parodies, The (Gross), Rourke, 59, 61, 65, 68–72
18 Publisher’s Weekly, 41
Pulling Our Own Strings (Kaufman), 8
“Purple Cow, The” (Burgess), 21
P
Page, La Wanda, 205
Parker, Dorothy, 5, 82, 83 R
Parks and Recreation (television Race and humor, 64, 210
show), 156 Rae, Issa, 233, 242
Parody Anthology, A, 17, 22–23, 27 Rahv, Philip, 84
Parody (Dentith), 33 Ramirez-Dhoore, Dora, 120
Partisan Review, 81, 84 Rape, 164–165
Party After You Left, The (Chast), 177 Rape jokes, 210, 217, 225n74
“Passive-Aggressive Birthday Gifts” Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 121, 130n35
(Chast), 182 Redressing the Balance (Walker and
Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, The Dresner), 39, 40
(Barreca), 19 Re-Echo Club, The (Wells), 27–33
Performance. See Comedy “Regrets Only” (Chast), 178
performance Relief theory, 1–8
Performing Marginality (Gilbert), 8, Remnick, David, 176
204, 206, 211 Renegar, Valerie R., 208
Periodicals, 10, 20, 21. See also Repplier, Agnes, 40
Magazine and periodical market Reproductive rights, 85
Piercy, Marge, 99 “Republic of Laughter, A” (Epp), 39
Plank, Elizabeth, 219 Rhea, Caroline, 205–206
Plath, Sylvia, 97, 99 Richmond, Jeff, 158–159
“Plight of the Funny Female” Rivers, Joan, 206
(Khazan), 12 Robinson, Lynn, 205
Podhoretz, Norman, 84 30 Rock (television show), 156,
Poehler, Amy, 156–159, 167. See also 166–169
Specific works of Roots of American Culture, The
Politically Incorrect (television show), (Rourke), 60, 63–66, 69
211 Ross, Cheri L., 41
260 Index
Rourke, Constance, 59–77 Seabury, Florence Guy, 10, 40, 48, 49,
American Humor, 9–10, 18–19, 40, 55n73
59–73 Sexton, Anne, 99
Audubon, 67, 68, 71, 72 Sexual assault. See Rape
Davy Crockett, 66–74 Sexuality and sexual desire
fantasy and, 64–66 Cisneros on, 116–119
gendered writing and, 66–67 comedy performance on, 233
myth and, 49, 60–63, 104, 106 dick jokes, 205, 220
Progressivism of, 63–64, 69 femoir on, 214
on purpose of literature, 60 fourth wave feminism on, 219
on race and humor, 64, 210 McCarthy on, 81–83, 89
Roots of American Culture, The, 60, Schumer on, 203, 215–218, 220
63–66, 69 Silverman on, 203–206
summary of study by, 12, 70 Shaw, Lillian, 205
Trumpets of Jubilee, 70–72 “Sheltered Sex, The” (Seabury),
“Voltaire Combe”, 69–72 49–50
writing style of, 59 Sheppard, Alice, 26
Rowe, Kathleen, 7–8 Shlesinger, Iliza, 242
Rubin, Joan Shelley, 60–61, 63–64, Showalter, Elaine, 4
67–69 Silverman, Sarah, 155, 167, 203–216,
Russell Baker’s Book of American 224n49
Humor (Baker), 18–19 Simpkins, Jennifer, 219
Sisters (film), 156
Slater, Tom, 144
S Smith, Lydia, 219, 227n88
Sale, Caroline Donald, 106 Smith, Neil, 144
Samantha series (Holley), 41–44 Snow, Carrie, 205
Sanders, Barry, 33 “Social Control of Cognition, The”
Sante, Luc, 141 (Douglas), 147
Sarah Silverman Program, The (televi- Social media (SM). See New media and
sion show), 209 comedy industry
Sarton, May, 99 Socolovsky, Maya, 122, 123
Satire, defined, 33. See also Under Specific authors, 24, 40
humor Specific celebrities, 24, 158
Saturday Evening Post, 44 Specific comics, 223n32
Saturday Night Live (television show), Specific issues, 166
156, 215 Specific media outlets, 24, 40, 147,
Schaal, Kristen, 51 158, 223n32
Schlueter, Jennifer, 62 Specific stories, 117, 147, 169
Schumer, Amy, 115, 162, 203 Specific theories, 147
Schweitzer, Dahlia, 166, 167 Specific works of, 24, 40, 147, 158
Scott, Angela, 205 Stand-up comedy. See Comedy
performance
Index 261
Stanley, Alessandra, 12, 208 “Toward a Feminist Poetics”

Steele, Claude, 241 (Showalter), 4
Stott, Andrew, 43 Trainwreck (film), 214
“Styx River Anthology, The” (Wells), Transgressive humor, defined, 1
30 Treacherous Texts (Mills and
Subversive humor, basics of, 1, 3–5, 8 Chapman), 38
Sudden Glory (Sanders), 41 Tribalism, online, 231, 236, 240–241
Suffragist humor, 37–55 Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina
of Holley, 18, 39, 41–48 Literature (Socolovsky), 122
modern criticism of, 45 Truants, The (Barrett), 89
of Miller, 10, 40, 44–48 “True Confessions” (Chast), 180
on power dynamics, 39 Trumpets of Jubilee (Rourke), 70–72
of Seabury, 9, 40, 47–50, 55n73 Tucker, Sophie, 205
success of, 40–41, 55n62 Two-Headed Woman (Clifton), 98
summary of, 46–47 The Mindy Project (television show),
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 3 157, 160–161, 166, 167–168
Superiority/disparagement theory, 3,
4, 207, 220
U
Unauthorized Versions (Baker), 18
T Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (televi-
“Taking Comedy Seriously” (Blanch), sion show), 156
45 Under humor, 3, 8, 21, 63, 123, 125,
Tanguay, Eva, 205 129
Tapleshay, Travis, 234 Unruly Woman, The (Rowe), 7
Taylor, Bayard, 26, 27, 28 Untamed and Unabashed (Barreca),
Taylor, Jacqueline, 169 39
Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film!
(film), 234
Tenuta, Judy, 206 V
Theatre Chronicles (McCarthy), 84 Valenti, Vanessa, 226
Theories of Everything (Chast), 177 “Vampire of the Hour, The” (poem by
Tig (film), 238 Wells), 23–26
Tillman, Lynne, 10, 135–149, “Vampire, The” (painting by Burne-
149nn17–18 Jones), 23
“To a Milkmaid” (Wells), 19 “Vampire, The” (poem by Kipling),
Tolentino, Jia, 214 23–24
Tolsch, Adrienne, 205, 207 Van Doren, Mark, 67
Toomer, Jean, 97 Vanity Fair, 12, 116, 155
“To thelma who worried because i Very Serious Thing, A (Walker), 11, 39
couldn’t cook” (Clifton), 109 Vidale, Thea, 206
Toth, Emily, 6, 11 Vivinetto, Gina, 238–239
Voices (Clifton), 98–
262 Index
“Voltaire Combe” (Rourke), 69–72 “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny? ”

(Stanley), 11–12
Why Not Me? (Kaling), 156–157
W “Why some people be mad at me
Waldron, John, 125 sometimes” (Clifton), 43
Walker, Nancy “Why We Aren’t Laughing…Any
on characteristics of women’s humor More” (Weisstein), 7–8
writings, 6, 7 “Why Women Aren’t Funny”
on humor and power dynamics, 39 (Hitchens), 11–12, 116, 155–
Redressing the Balance, 39 156. See also Women aren’t funny
on Rourke’s work, 59 discourse
on success of women’s humor, 40 “Why Women Do Not Wish the
on types of women’s humor, 9 Suffrage” (Abbott), 43
Very Serious Thing, A, 11, 39 Whyte, William H., 142, 143
Wall Street Journal, The, 233 Widow Bedott, The (Whitcher),
“Waltz, The” (Parker), 5 175–176, 200n9
Warfield, Marsha, 206 Williams, Jessica, 51–52
Warren, Rusty, 205 Williams, Pearl, 205
Weisstein, Naomi, 7 Wilson, Edmund, 83, 84, 91–92
Wells, Carolyn, 17–35 “Wishes for sons” (Clifton), 101–103
“From Vivette’s Milkmaid”, 21, 34 Wit, 6. See also under humor
Idle Idyls, 23–24 Woman in Hollering Creek (Cisneros),
magazine and periodical market and, 117
20 Women and Comedy (essay collection),
“To a Milkmaid”, 19 12
on modernism, 31 Women and Laughter (Gray), 42
modern representations of works Women Aren’t Funny (film), 242–243
by, 18 Women aren’t funny discourse,
in A Parody Anthology, 17, 18, 22, 239–246. See also “Why Women
27, 33 Aren’t Funny” (Hitchens)
Re-Echo Club, The, 27–32 Wong, Ali, 242–244
Rest of My Life, The, 20 Wong, Amelia, 241
summary of work by, 17 Won’t you celebrate with me (Clifton),
“Vampire of the Hour, The”, 23–26 110
Welter, Barbara, 2 Woolf, Virginia, 2
West, Mae, 205 Writings, 5. See also Femoirs; Humor
What I Hate (Chast), 177 writings
“what the mirror said” (Clifton), 109, Wyatt, Jean, 117, 118, 120
110 Wyly, Elvin, 144
“When in Rome... ” (Chast), 183–184
Whitcher, Frances, 18, 66, 175, 176,
200n9
Index 263
Y
Yellow Book, 20, 25, 26
Yes Please (Poehler), 156, 160, 161,
163
YouTube, 211, 215, 234, 240, 242,
243
Z
Zeisler, Andi, 220
Zukin, Sharon, 143
Zvirbulis, Lara, 238

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PA L G R AV E

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Comedy

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944597

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Getty Images/drante

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book arose out of a special session on “Transgressive Humor of

Catherine Loving, Sonia Alvarez Wilson, Diarmuid Hester, Anne-Marie

No Joke: Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers 1

“To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly”: Carolyn Wells and

From Headlines to Punchlines: Suffragist Humor in the

The Scholarly Transgressions of Constance Rourke 59

Embattled Embodiment: The Sexual/Intellectual Politics of

Humor as Clap Back in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry 97

Fidel and Gummy Bears?: Transgressive Humor in

Humor, Gentrification, and the Conservation of Downtown

Funny Women: Political Transgressions and

Roz Chast: From Whimsy to Transgression 175

Dueling Discourses: The Female Comic’s Double Bind

About the Editor

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Associate Professor of English in the School

Anne-Marie Evans is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and

Joanne Gilbert is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of

Amanda T. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Southwestern

From Headlines to Punchlines: Suffragist Humor in the Popular Press

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams

Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers is the first collec-

© The Author(s) 2017 1

construes the term “writers” loosely to include a range of genres and

is the butt. But it can also be seen as an assertion of female sexuality,

used to mock eccentric or deviant behavior in the interest of preserving

performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its

elaborates on this sense of difference in women’s humor in identifying

women activists in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1912 to 1940,

the turn of the nineteenth-century suffragist humor of Marietta Holley,

The remaining essays in the collection identify the transgressive nature of

… But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor, 1991) and in the

21. Naomi Weisstein, “Why We Aren’t Laughing … Any More,” Ms. 2.2

In the Introduction to his 1984 volume, The Faber Book of Parodies,

© The Author(s) 2017 17

By producing parodies, Wells broke with turn-of-the-century literary

The unkindest cut, however, comes from a latter-day feminist scholar

Wells’s poem illustrates perfectly Barreca’s intention, as expressed in

general and feminist comedy in particular had become newly respectable

A Mayde ther was, semely and meke enow,

Anthology (1904), she would later attempt to draw a clear distinction

A FOOL there was, and he paid his fare

… possessed of a power of mimicry with an instant appreciation of

Oh, the fads we make, and the freaks we take,

A critic there was, and he had his whack

(Even as you and I!)

That the supposedly “degenerate” Le Gallienne was described as

And it isn’t the vice and it isn’t the price

With “The Vampire of the Hour,” Wells successfully redirected the

major accomplishment in humor had come in the early 1870s, with a

Is Tipperary far? Egregious sir!

And all too short the scanty span you

If Wells’s irreverent laughter at the expense of individual poems from

‘What is it, anyway?’ asked Alf Tennyson, mildly curious.

‘It says it aims at the concrete intensitivity of life,’ explained Bob

As should be plain from this extract, however, the pantheon of nine-

21. Naomi Weisstein, “Why We Aren’t Laughing … Any More,” Ms. 2.2

6. Carolyn Wells, The Rest of My Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937),

31. Carolyn Wells, “The Re-Echo Club,” 298–299.

Fig. 4 Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern

24. Gagnier, “Between Women,” 144.

61. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 106.

18. Buck, “The Social Criticism of Literature,” 78.

74. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of

3. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University