Stand Up Comedy And Contemporary Feminisms PDF Download

This dissertation investigates how women performers participated in stand-up comedy in the postwar period and focuses on the role television played in both the emergence of stand-up and gender inequity therein. I use the concept of circuitry, decidedly rooted in its vaudevillian meaning, as the lens for my study, and I focus on "short-circuiting" as the systemic modes of shutting women out from the circuitries of live and televised stand-up, as well as from our historical accounts. Thus, the dissertation builds on feminist media historiography to make an intervention into our understanding of stand-up, its early history, and gender inequity. Each of the three chapters focuses on a case study of a comedian in the era, who has mostly disappeared from our accounts of early stand-up. First, I discuss Jadin Wong, often referred to as the first Chinese American stand-up comedian, and I highlight how we can read her comic material as a continuation and adaptation of her work as a dancer in the Chop Suey Circuit. In the second chapter, I highlight how Sally Marr's own comic career and contributions as a collaborator were sidelined due to her being the mother of comedian Lenny Bruce. In the third, I focus on Jean Carroll, who-unlike Wong or Marr-performed her own stand-up act on television as early as the 1940s and remained one of the most televised women performers over the next two decades. Through archival and digital research, I offer close readings of the comedians' television and film appearances and the print circulation of their written materials, and I trace their performance routes via newspaper sources. In doing so, I highlight the significance of the performers' gradual, trans-modal transition into stand-up comedy, and I demonstrate contemporary sources' consistent undermining of the comedy in women's performances. Thus, I argue that we need to use the definition of stand-up comedy with flexibility to better understand and account for women performers' contributions. Similarly, I show the significance of performers' connections, relations, networks, and the many (often gendered) forms of labor that together create and shape stand-up performance spaces.