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Gender and Humor
“An interdisciplinary, international volume exploring the complex relation-

ship between gender and humor and its attendant power dynamics is long
overdue. This collection will be an invaluable resource to scholars and stu-
dents in a variety of disciplines.”
—Joanna Gilbert, Alma College, USA
In the mid-seventies, both gender studies and humor studies emerged as

new disciplines, with scholars from various fields undertaking research in
these areas. The first publications that emerged in the field of gender stud-
ies came out of disciplines such as philosophy, history, and literature, while
early works in the area of humor studies initially concentrated on language,
linguistics, and psychology. Since then, both fields have flourished, but
largely independently. This book draws together and focuses the work of
scholars from diverse disciplines on intersections of gender and humor, giv-
ing voice to approaches in disciplines such as film, television, literature, lin-
guistics, translation studies, and popular culture.
Delia Chiaro is Professor of English Language and Translation at the Uni-

versity of Bologna, Italy.
Raffaella Baccolini is Professor of English and Gender at the University of

Bologna, Italy.
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Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
34 Science Fiction Film, Television, 40 Sport Beyond Television

and Adaptation The Internet, Digital Media
Across the Screens and the Rise of Networked
Edited by J. P. Telotte and Media Sport
Gerald Duchovnay Brett Hutchins and David Rowe
35 Art Platforms and Cultural 41 Cultural Technologies

Production on the Internet The Shaping of Culture in Media
Olga Goriunova and Society
Edited by Göran Bolin
36 Queer Representation, Visibility,
and Race in American Film and 42 Violence and the Pornographic
Television Imaginary
Melanie E.S. Kohnen The Politics of Sex, Gender,
and Aggression in Hardcore
37 Artificial Culture Pornography
Identity, Technology, and Bodies Natalie Purcell
Tama Leaver
43 Ambiguities of Activism
38 Global Perspectives on Alter-Globalism and the
Tarzan Imperatives of Speed
From King of the Jungle to Ingrid M. Hoofd
International Icon
Edited by Annette Wannamaker 44 Generation X Goes Global
and Michelle Ann Abate Mapping a Youth Culture in
Motion
39 Studying Mobile Media Christine Henseler
Cultural Technologies, Mobile
Communication, and the 45 Forensic Science in
iPhone Contemporary American
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Popular Culture
Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Gender, Crime, and Science
Richardson Lindsay Steenberg
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46 Moral Panics, Social Fears, 55 Transnational Horror Across
and the Media Visual Media
Historical Perspectives Fragmented Bodies
Edited by Siân Nicholas and Edited by Dana Och and
Tom O’Malley Kirsten Strayer
47 De-convergence in Global Media 56 International Perspectives on

Industries Chicana/o Studies
Dal Yong Jin “This World is My Place”
Edited by Catherine Leen and
48 Performing Memory in Art and Niamh Thornton
Popular Culture
Edited by Liedeke Plate and 57 Comics and the Senses
Anneke Smelik A Multisensory Approach to
Comics and Graphic Novels
49 Reading Beyond the Book Ian Hague
The Social Practices of
Contemporary Literary Culture 58 Popular Culture in Africa
Danielle Fuller and DeNel The Episteme of the Everyday
Rehberg Sedo Edited by Stephanie Newell and
Onookome Okome
50 A Social History of Contemporary
Democratic Media 59 Transgender Experience
Jesse Drew Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility
Edited by Chantal Zabus and
51 Digital Media Sport David Coad
Technology, Power and Culture in
the Network Society 60 Radio’s Digital Dilemma
Edited by Brett Hutchins and Broadcasting in the Twenty-First
David Rowe Century
John Nathan Anderson
52 Barthes’ Mythologies Today
Readings of Contemporary Culture 61 Documentary’s Awkward Turn
Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian Cringe Comedy and Media
McDougall Spectatorship
Jason Middleton
53 Beauty, Violence, Representation
Edited by Lisa A. Dickson 62 Serialization and Popular Culture
and Maryna Romanets Edited by Rob Allen and
Thijs van den Berg
54 Public Media Management for
the Twenty-First Century 63 Gender and Humor
Creativity, Innovation, and Interdisciplinary and International
Interaction Perspectives
Edited by Michał Głowacki and Edited by Delia Chiaro and
Lizzie Jackson Raffaella Baccolini
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6244-0279d-1pass-0FM-r02.indd iv 2/26/2014 7:23:58 PM
Gender and Humor
Interdisciplinary and International
Perspectives
Edited by Delia Chiaro and

Raffaella Baccolini
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First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[cip data to come]

[CIP data]
ISBN: 978-0-415-74285-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81432-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
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[comp: please insert a b/b space between
dedicatioin and quotes]
For Clarissa and Giacomo

“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
—George Carlin
“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog

so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
—Nora Ephron
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6244-0279d-1pass-0FM-r02.indd viii 2/26/2014 7:23:58 PM
Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Humor: A Many Gendered Thing 1

DELIA CHIARO AND RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI
[AU: We normally called these Parts and

SECTION I not Sections. Can we use the term Part?]
2 Blended Spaces as Subversive Feminist Humor 13

JANET BING AND JOANNE SCHEIBMAN
3 Traditional Comic Conflicts in Farce and Roles for Women 30

JESSICA MILNER DAVIS
4 The School for Scandal: Humor and the Scandalized

Narrative in Women’s Speculative Fiction 53
JENNIFER A. WAGNER-LAWLOR
5 “A Gay Arcadia of Happy Girls”: Women, the Body,

and the Welfare State in British Film Comedy 75
FRANCES GRAY
6 Humorless Lesbians 85
DON KULICK
7 Gender Trouble in Sketches from Japan 100

FRANÇOIS BOUCHETOUX
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x Contents
SECTION II
8 Humor and Gender: An Overview of Psychological Research 123

ROD A. MARTIN
9 Gender and Humor in Everyday Conversation 147

JENNIFER COATES
[comp: this s/b a

10 Funny, Feminine, and Flirtatious: Humor and
regular cap S]
Gendered Discourse Norms at Work 165
JANET HOLMES AND STEPHANIE SCHNURR
11 Power and Connection: Humor in a Cantonese Family 182

JOHNs. Y. HUI
SECTION III
12 Humor and Contemporary Product Design:

International Perspectives 201
SHERI R. KLEIN
13 Being Bovvered and Taking Liberties: Female

Performance and Female Identities in
The Catherine Tate Show 212
SHARON LOCKYER
14 Little Miss Sunshine and the Avoidance of Tragedy 226

GAIL FINNEY
15 “What’ya Mean I’m Funny?” Ball-Busting Humor

and Italian American Masculinities 240
FRED GARDAPHÉ
16 “A Woman, a Wog and a Westie”: Monica

Pellizzari’s Critical Humor from Down Under 253
ALESSANDRA SENZANI
17 Gender and Grotesque Humor in Contemporary

Italian Literature: Language, Culture, and Translation 262
BRIGID MAHER
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Contents xi
18 Queer Humor: Gay Comedy Between
Camp and Diversity 276
RAINER EMIG
19 Petite Flower, Giver Goddess, and Duchess of

Discipline: Sexual Nonconformity, Play, and Camp
Humor in the Performance of Judy Tenuta
GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO 288
20 Humor and Gender, Directions for Future

Research: Where Do We Go from Here? 298
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI AND DELIA CHIARO
Contributors 305
References 311
Index 343
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6244-0279d-1pass-0FM-r02.indd xii 2/26/2014 7:23:58 PM
Acknowledgments
Our first acknowledgment is to our contributors, not only for their essays,
but for their promptness (at least most of them!), cooperation, enthusiasm,
and especially patience for the project. More broadly, we thank the commu-
nity of humor and gender scholars, in particular the reviewers at Routledge
who gave us very useful suggestions in order to improve our work. We
would also like to thank our undergraduate and postgraduate students who [you are so lovely
have shared in and challenged our engagements with humor and gender to put me in the
studies. Acks. But I
cannot be in the
More immediately, we want to thank all those who worked with us in
Acks since I'm not
producing this volume: Louisa Semlyen at Routledge for pointing us across
an employee of
the Pond and in the right direction; our editor at Routledge–New York, T&F--I"m a
Felisa Salvago Keyes; our editorial assistant, Andrew Weckenmann; our project manager
production editor, Deborah Kopka; and our copyeditor Lisa Bintrim. for a vendor to
We would also like to thank Giuseppe Nocella for his precious help on T&F. You can
the figures and tables; Cicci Bollettieri, Rachele Antonini, Sam Whitsitt, leave in Lisa's
Chiara Bucaria, and Linda Rossato for useful and humorous discussions name if she was
about the project. In addition, Raffaella would like to thank Delia for invit- someone you
hired directly; if
ing her to collaborate on this project. Most of all she would like to thank
she was the
the women and the men in her life who variously contribute to making her
copyeditor we
work possible: Adua, Roberta, Lusi, Giacomo, Rita, Bruna, and Simonetta hired to review
all offered support, assistance, humor, conversations, food, babysitting, your mss., I'm
love, and friendship. Delia would like to thank Raffaella for introducing afraid we need to
her to glass ceilings and obsessive copy editing, especially the glory of en take our her
dashes. In particular, she is grateful to the four ladies in her life: Jessica Jane, name as well.
Rebecca Rose, Clarissa Clare, and Concettina. And, of course, Pippo. Really sorry!! But
thank you!!! Deb]
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6244-0279d-1pass-0FM-r02.indd xiv 2/26/2014 7:23:59 PM
1 Humor
A Many Gendered Thing
Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini
It is commonly accepted today that, consciously or subconsciously, our gen-

der affects a myriad of actions we carry out as part of our daily routines.
It conditions the way we present ourselves, the way we interact with oth-
ers, and the way we speak. Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of “situated
knowledges”—the notion that whenever we receive or produce culture we
do so from a particular, partial position—has long become a tenet of gender
studies. Together with Adrienne Rich’s (1985) “politics of location”—the
recognition of the position we inhabit and from which we speak—they rep-
resent some of feminism’s strong points. Initially considered as a proof of
feminism’s lack of objectivity, they have become the backbone of women’s
and gender studies. Women scholars have had the merit to take what, from
the outside, looked like a weakness and transform it into a strength. But
gender, like the notion of “woman,” cannot be monolithic: the idea that
gender alone in itself represents a homogeneous category has long been
dismantled. The binary opposition between male and female genders has
been deconstructed, for one, by the introduction of GLBT and queer studies.
Likewise, Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of gender performance has contrib-
uted to questioning the sex/gender binary. Nowadays sex, like gender, is also
considered as a cultural construct and gender is performed regardless of the
sex attributed to individuals. Gender conditions the most minute details of
our lives, possibly more than our age, our social background, and our eth-
nicity, and, thus, it stands to reason that the way we “do” humor, the way
we receive humor, and perhaps even our sense of humor may also, in some
way, be accordingly gendered.
Yet humor is an extremely complex, slippery, and multifaceted concept.
First and foremost humor is an emotion that can be summed up in that kind
of positive feeling of glee, usually—but by no means exclusively—manifested
through smiling or laughter in response to a stimulus we have found to
be amusing. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged that humorous
stimuli, things that make us smile or laugh, whether visual, verbal, or situ-
ational, contain some kind of positive incongruity that will trigger a mirth-
ful response (Chafe 2009). And laughter, inextricably linked to humor, may
well be considered an evident factor of gender difference; the vocal folds of
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2 Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini
females are, on average, shorter than those of males, and thus the sound of
laughter—in particular the pitch—will tend to differ accordingly. However,
the concept of averageness is clearly hypothetical, and allegedly average
males and females will certainly be surrounded by numerous outliers whose
modes of laughter will not concur with a theoretical baseline. In terms of
averageness and regularity, the relationship between humor and gender and
how they are reciprocally anchored remains fluid and somewhat taxing to
pigeonhole into watertight categories.
In whatever form it may occur, however, humor does not arise in a vac-
uum; thus a central aspect of humor is its social function. In fact, humor can
act as an ice breaker, as a bonding device, as a pacifier, as a distraction in
moments of pain and anxiety. Equally humor can be used to attack others
and therefore may also irritate, anger, hurt, and offend. Yet it can also act as
a sensor. By expressing in jest what we might consider to be a controversial
view to our interlocutors, we can test their opinion on the subject and with-
draw, if necessary, without losing face with an “I was only joking” when we
discover that they have different ideas from our own. Likewise, a glance at
personal ads of the “lonely hearts” variety in online dating sites suggest that
we tend to seek partners who have a “good” sense of humor, presumably
rendering sense of humor a much sought after personality trait (see Kulick,
ch. 6, and Martin, ch. 8, this volume). Thus, many questions arise from
these first considerations: Do we all interact humorously in the same way,
regardless of gender? Are male and female humor styles the same? Do we
react with mirth to the same comic stimuli? And even if a physiological reac-
tion such as laughter is not gender specific, do women laugh in the same way
as men, for example, as loudly and as raucously, in all social contexts? By
the same token, is it admissible for grown men to giggle, or would it under-
mine their masculinity? Again, is it acceptable for women to guffaw? From
comedy on stage and screen to stand-up, what, if any, are the differences in
the way women and men perform humor? And here we find one of the main
leitmotivs present in this volume: the concept of performance—how natural
is the way we laugh and the way we do humor, and how far has it become
part of our gendered performance?
On the other hand, could it be that difference simply boils down to indi-
viduality? So far we have only scratched the surface by simply considering
the perceptions of male and female, knowing full well that the notion of
gender, as we mentioned previously, is anything but polarized, yet more
likely to consist of a continuum in which boundaries blend and fuzziness
reigns.
The studies in this volume address many of these issues from a wide
variety of disciplines so that the concepts of humor and gender cross-cut
notions of the way they are constructed in writing, on stage, on screen,
and in art forms, as well as in the conversations of everyday life. Divided
into three sections, the book opens with six comprehensive and all-
encompassing overviews of humor and gender from different perspectives
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Humor 3
ranging from linguistics (Bing and Scheibman, ch. 2) to anthropology
(Kulick, ch. 6) and stretching across both Eastern (Bouchetoux, ch. 7) and
Western cultures (Gray, ch. 5; Milner Davis, ch 3; Wagner-Lawlor, ch. 4).
In contrast, the second section opens with an extensive overview of psycho-
logical research on gender differences in sense of humor (Martin, ch. 8),
followed by three studies focused on humor and gender in conversation,
firmly anchored within the tradition of conversational analysis (Coates,
ch. 9; Holmes and Schnurr, ch. 10; Hui, ch 11). The third and final section of
the collection is introduced by a discussion of visual humor produced by
female designers for objects in the home (Klein, ch. 12), followed by a series
of studies that explore the fluidity of both gender and ethnic identities and
how these tend to clash and merge in the creation of humor (Lockyer, ch. 13;
Finney, ch. 14; Gardaphé, ch. 15; Senzani, ch. 16; Maher, ch. 17; Emig, ch. 18;
Del Negro, ch. 19). Nonetheless, there is much overflow among the con-
tributions contained in these three sections as certain features arise repeat-
edly, albeit from diverse stances. Among the recurring themes that link the
chapters are, first and foremost, those of gender and performance—often
and especially in terms of body politics—and second, the concept of uncer-
tainty, that of knowing and not knowing and issues regarding shared and
unshared knowledge with respect to humorous discourse. A further aspect
that emerges concerns the frequent inability to separate genders, or rather
that, whereas on the one hand the notion of humor and gender can, at first
sight, be completely polarized, on the other it can also become extremely
blurred. Humor, it would appear, is a many gendered thing.
Janet Bing and Joanne Scheibman open this volume from a feminist per-
spective that challenges binary linguistic theories on humor while simulta-
neously engaging with the notion of the uncertainty of partial knowledge.
Introducing conceptual blending theory, Bing and Scheibman argue that the
indistinctness of humorous messages can contest the status quo. Challenging
the canonical notion of verbal humor being made up of two separate scripts
(see Raskin’s [1985] Semantic Script Theory) that overlap and oppose each
other beneath the disguise of a single script, they argue in favor of a model
of blended spaces that are capable of subverting and creating utopias and
dystopias. Furthermore, the amalgamation and sense of cognitive inclusion
of conceptual blending is in sharp contrast with the dualistic opposition
and overlap inherent to Semantic Script Theory and later to the General
Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991). Bing and Scheibman’s
concept of blended spaces is in line with the findings of Jennifer Coates and
those of Janet Holmes and Stephanie Schnurr regarding how females tend
to prefer collaborative humor. Thus, the sensitive blending of female sup-
port and collaboration through humor fits well with the idea of conceptual
blending rather than the seemingly harsher idea of script oppositions.
Inescapably, humor is very much based on knowing and not knowing,
or more bluntly, “getting” or “not getting” a joke, a pun, or more generally,
the instance of humor in question. Regina Barecca (1991) famously reflects
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on the ambiguity and double standards that exist in mixed-gender joke-
telling situations. Are sexual jokes told by men in female company to
be considered in terms of linguistic harassment? Should women laugh at
sexually explicit humor articulated by men, or should they coyly refrain?
Damned if they laugh (that is, overtly acknowledging their familiarity with
explicit sexual know-how and running the risk of being labeled as being
sexually available—a nonstarter for females) and equally damned if they
don’t (that is, having no sense of humor and therefore being straitlaced),
Barreca argues that women are in a no-win situation as far as humor is
concerned. Yet Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor seems to overturn this argument
by demonstrating how this very indistinctness of humorous discourse can
be used to women’s advantage. Picking up on this double-faceted aspect of
humor and the perception of what Susan Sontag labeled the “partial knowl-
edge” connected to it, Wagner-Lawlor explores the way in which three nov-
els expose the scandal of women’s subjectivity through the uncertainty of
the seriousness of the writers. Undoubtedly, the ambiguity inherent to irony
present in the imaginary societies described in Herland, The Female Man,
and The Gate to Women’s Country gives extra force to the underlying pur-
pose of the novels, namely, to provide harsh criticisms of traditional social
hierarchies. Suffice it to think of the effect of Jonathan Swift’s famous essay,
A Modest Proposal.
This same notion of knowing and not knowing is also exploited in the
movie Little Miss Sunshine, as discussed by Gail Finney—a film in which
black comedy hides a number of gender-linked family traumas. As Finney
points out, the portrayal of the excesses and exaggerations of a dysfunc-
tional family allows the public to come to grips with a series of family dis-
turbances in a more successful way than would have been possible had the
director adopted a more dramatic form. Behind the partial knowledge that
provokes laughter lies a bleaker reality that the film is challenging through
humor.
From the seriously anchored fictional humor reported by Wagner-Lawlor
and Finney, Rod A. Martin takes us back to the reality of everyday life with
his extensive overview of psychological research on gender differences in
sense of humor in which he underscores the complexity of researching this
many-sided concept coupled with the characteristically wide variability that
exists among individuals within each gender. Reporting numerous studies
that have investigated various aspects of gender and sense of humor through
different methodologies or experimental designs, Martin takes care to point
out that there are possibly more similarities between the sexes than differ-
ences, a conclusion also reached by Helga Kotthoff (2006b: 2) in a review of
gender variances in Western culture. Moreover, based on scientific evidence,
Martin suggests that we should tread lightly when drawing conclusions,
because different patterns could well be found in people from different cul-
tural and ethnic groups, ages, sexual preferences, and social classes. And
yet the prevailing view that women’s sense of humor is generally inferior to
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Humor 5
that of men’s (see Wickberg 1998) can certainly be refuted. This argument is
further backed up by Jessica Milner Davis, who highlights the fact that over
the centuries theatrical farce has been enjoyed by both sexes and that there
is no evidence that women have ever been excluded from participating as
part of the audience. And on the subject of reception, Giovanna Del Negro
explores the whys and wherefores of the huge gay following of female comic
and icon Judy Tenuta.
However, appreciating or not appreciating humor is only part of the
story. People also “do” humor, and more recent research on humor and
gender has moved away from an emphasis on enjoyment or non-enjoyment
of humorous stimuli, such as jokes and cartoons, to studies of the way men
and women use humor in everyday life.
Three contributions in this book explore women doing humor in every-
day situations. Jennifer Coates looks at humorous talk occurring in all-
female and all-male friendship groups. Working from the framework of
linguistics, and especially within the tradition of conversational analysis,
her findings, based on naturally occurring conversations, support evidence
previously found in psychology research that men seem to prefer more for-
mulaic joking (Crawford and Gressley 1991), whereas women prefer to
share funny stories and anecdotes to create solidarity (see also Martin, ch. 8,
this volume). Evidence of women crafting harmony through the use of
humor also emerges from the study of linguists Janet Holmes and Stephanie
Schnurr. Their examination of humor in the workplace, based on quantita-
tive data collected from workplace meetings, demonstrates the diverse ways
in which humor is used as a resource by women, among other things, to
mitigate and soften conflict. Here, too, the myth that women do not have
a sense of humor is repudiated as they are seen able to use different kinds
of humor strategies as a form of empowerment. Jon Hui’s research on how
humor works within the asymmetrical power relationships existing in a Chi-
nese family is also based on traditional conversation analysis methodology.
Needless to say, gender is a significant factor in the Chinese family’s power
hierarchy, thus affecting who uses humor, with whom, and how.
As well as doing humor on an everyday basis, we also receive it. If we
consider the joke form, for example, as a “genre” on the interface of conver-
sational humor and performance, we clearly see that underdog jokes, those
in which we laugh at a victim, not only involve dimwits and the avaricious,
but alongside a long series of peripheral figures, such as Blacks, Latinos,
and the diversely abled (for a full discussion, see Davies 1998), we find
jokes replete with women and homosexuals acting as butts. Fat women,
ugly women, old women, promiscuous women, sexually naïve women,
cuckolded women, mothers-in-law, feminists, and blonds—they all seem to
work well as the protagonists of underdog jokes (see Chiaro 2005a). Fur-
thermore, it is also worth considering that whereas straight males inhabiting
jokes are often connoted by their professions (e.g., medics and politicians)
or by their ethnicity, females are marked by their physicality or sexuality,
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as in US blonde jokes, transformed into Essex girls in the UK (although, to
be fair, the professions of teachers and nurses do occur). As for homosexual
males, in jokes they appear as sex-starved individuals to be avoided by full-
blooded males, whereas lesbians, like feminists (and women in general?),
have no sense of humor. On this subject, Don Kulick provides a fascinat-
ing argument comparing “humorless lesbians” with other groups depicted
and perceived as being humorless, ranging from the Germans in general to
present-day Muslims as depicted in the media. How intriguing that, accord-
ing to the common imaginary, the male “queen” is seen as the embodiment
of gaiety and wit, and the lesbian as dour and humorless. In a similar vein,
Rainer Emig explores contemporary queer comedy on stage, film, and TV,
classifying the homosexual as a male-deviant figure of fun and calling for
more truly subversive comedy that tackles common perceptions of mascu-
line, feminine, gay, and straight. According to Emig, there is a need to refute
the many clichéd stereotypes attached to gendered humor. More destabiliz-
ing than the limp-wristed stereotype of the humorous queen is a stand-up
comedian such as Eddie Izzard, who, although a cross-dresser, performs
as a straight male, thereby surprising the public and making a gendered
statement. And once again we find ourselves in the knowing/not knowing
territory that is essential to humor. The performances of Judy Tenuta, dis-
cussed by Giovanna P. Del Negro, also challenge gender stereotypes, not
only through the comic’s excessive stage costumes and offbeat personae,
but also through her ability to use her vocal chords to the full by exploiting
their deeper masculine possibilities as well as the shriller options, resulting
in a style of disturbing transgression that recalls the voice of singer Annie
Lennox. This larger-than-life character totally dismantles gender norms in
her show—a mix of vaudeville, burlesque, slapstick, and screwball—and
brings forth the suppressed anger of women stuck in alien roles. Tenuta
contradicts other gendered expectations, too. First, she is a minute, slightly
built woman and not the typically larger-than-life overweight comedienne,
and second, she makes no use of the self-effacing humor that is so typical in
female stand-up. And, as pointed out by Del Negro, Judy Tenuta overrides
her male targets, often pulverizing them into wimps. Tenuta is never the
object of humor; she is, instead, all subject.
Jessica Milner Davis’s discussion of farce sees men and women very much
on an equal footing. Although stereotypes such as the mother-in-law and
the under/over-sexed wife are indeed stock characters in farce, Davis shows
that these women are often strong characters who are not necessarily to be
laughed at. Davis’s overview of female stock characters in farce is very much
in agreement with François Bouchetoux’s outline of Japanese humor, espe-
cially in his discussion of kyōgen—the wild words of Japanese theatre—in
which it is not at all unusual for the female character to overpower the male.
The strength of routine female characters is also highlighted by Frances
Gray in her discussion of low-budget comedies produced in the UK in the
wake of World War II. Gray convincingly argues that the female characters,
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Humor 7
such as the “busty blonde” in the low-budget Carry On series, played by
Barbara Windsor, was not simply there to satisfy the male gaze. Windsor
successfully ironized a number of female roles, as did the stereotypically
large woman played by Hattie Jacques, who, according to Gray, was never
to be laughed at as she was very much in charge of her own sexuality,
rendering her feeble and skinny counterpart (and useless lover) Kenneth
Williams as the butt of the joke. British humor cannot escape from marking
itself in terms of class. Whereas Gray explores the comedic film characters
of postwar Britain, a moment in time when the world was an oyster for
working-class women (free education for all, the pill, sexual equality, etc.),
Sharon Lockyer provides us with a glimpse of today’s women as depicted in
televised comedic sketches. In Catherine Tate’s sketches, in which she enacts
“chav” Lauren Cooper and older woman “Nan” Taylor, the sad reality of
an impoverished Britain is inescapable to the viewer. Once more, Sontag’s
hide-and-seek notion of knowing and not knowing emerges; behind the
comic mask of a young girl who chooses pregnancy as a career option and a
cantankerous, old, unruly woman relegated to the care of strangers lies the
bleak reality of underprivileged women in Britain today.
Several contributors focus on the notion of the body and humor. As we
have seen, Frances Gray discusses the busty blondes of the Carry On series
of films, and emphasizes the role of the large woman compared to the skinny
male, a trope from well-known British “saucy” seaside postcard tradition,
while Kulick discusses the funny/unfunny overweight lesbian at length.
Again Wagner-Lawlor picks up on the ambiguity of the women inhabiting
the utopias of the novels she examines. If men are the baseline from which
women extend and perform difference, in absence of female performance a
series of unknowns will arise regarding women’s bodies. Emig’s discussion
of the misperceptions surrounding comic Eddie Izzard also brings elements
of the unknown into question. Is he gay? Is he straight? If he dresses like a
woman, why doesn’t he talk and act like one? Why is Izzard’s humor not
female? Most importantly, do these questions actually matter? Unlike so
many female stand-ups, cross-dressed Izzard unexpectedly does not act the
disruptive part of the screaming queen—he simply performs as a male. Sheri
Klein’s overview of visual puns inherent to humorous household objects
created by female designers and her discussion of a need for us to be sur-
rounded by objects and things that amuse and titillate us also tags on to the
concept of ambiguity. Is this a corkscrew or a doll? Is this a salt cellar or a
toy rabbit (see the Alessi corkscrew)?
Although several chapters focus on unruly women, especially old unruly
women (see Davies, Lockyer, and Maher), Alessandra Senzani, in her essay
on the hyphenated cinema of Monica Pellizzari, compares different gen-
erations of working-class Italian Australian women and their relationships
with their bodies. Through the use of grotesque humor, Pellizzari overturns
traditional definitions of feminine identity, but above all, she challenges typ-
ically “male-gaze”-oriented cinematic language while playing with a more
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distorted female gaze. Similar grotesque humor is also exploited by con-
temporary Italian writers to comment critically on relationships between
the sexes, as described by Brigid Maher. Rosa Cappiello’s Paese fortunato,
for example, and its bi-cultural protagonist’s relationship with her body are
reminiscent of Pellizzari’s cinema. Maher explores how this and two other
Italian pulp novels fare in their English translations. Bakhtinian-style com-
edies of excess, preoccupied with the body and that continually underscore
bodily functions, run the risk of being censored in translation and thereby
losing their subversiveness.
No volume on gender and humor would be complete without a dis-
cussion of masculinity and humor. Fred Gardaphé explores the construc-
tion of Italian masculinity and how, through the process of emigration, it
clashed and later co-existed alongside US values of manliness. With regard
to hyphenated cinema, Gardaphé explores so-called ball-busting humor and
the way this Italian American male verbal banter sets out to test virility with
examples from Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas. Significantly, laughter and
masculinity are central to Goodfellas, not only in the challenging of mascu-
linity through humorous offense, but also through the presence of hysterical
laughter in combination with ferociously violent acts.
Finally, although all humorous behavior is inherently subversive, and
both women and men are destabilizing when performing in the comic mode,
it has to be said that in the male, such behavior is unmarked and that unruli-
ness is marked in the female alone. In fact, it would appear that compared
to men, women as perpetrators of humor appear to be more subversive and
unruly—in fact, from Mae West to Joan Rivers, in order to be funny, women
tend to perform in a way that goes against the status quo of female behavior
(see Barreca 1991; Gray 1994; Finney 1994; Walker 1998; Chiaro 2005a).
Furthermore, whereas the male comic portrays something of the innocent
child in his facial features and demeanor—consider the childish expressions
of Stan Laurel, Charlie Chaplin, and Mr. Bean (for further discussion see
Sontag [n.d.]), the female comic is rarely childlike, let alone pretty or beau-
tiful (Chiaro 2005a) because in order to be funny she needs to let go of a
number of gendered restraints. Performing humor involves the donning of
the comic mask, which Aristotle defined as being an ugly mask. Unattrac-
tiveness not only goes against the expected notion of femininity, but also
challenges an unwritten law of female demeanor that includes the goals of
beauty and perfection. Thus, many women learn early on that being funny
and being attractive are mutually exclusive; consequently it is not unusual
to find that female stand-up comedians engage in self-deprecating humor.
Comedians such as Phyllis Diller and Jo Brand typically draw attention
to their physical shortcomings in order to get a laugh. Interestingly, many
male comics also dispense with their attractiveness—Jim Carrey and Rowan
Atkinson, for example, typically adopt a distorted gait and unlikely facial
expressions when performing in comic mode—yet like their female counter-
parts, none of these comedians are intrinsically unattractive. Thus, males,
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Humor 9
too, have to don the ugly comic mask when wanting to amuse, but the
essential difference between men and women lies, of course, in the dispensa-
tion of canons of beauty. Suffice it to think of the many sassy, wisecracking
“best friends” on screen playing supporting characters who, by embracing
a comic style, do not seem quite as pretty and attractive as the leading lady.
These women are typically loquacious and witty, yet it is the (seemingly)
prettier, verbally more restrained lead who inevitably comes up trumps by
getting her man.
According to Barreca, in the common imaginary, “Good Girls” once
smiled rather than laughed, and sense of humor was a trait supposedly
reserved for men, alongside intelligence, ambition, and economic acumen.
It was the “Bad Girls” who engaged in behavior normally reserved for men,
such as laughing loudly as well as telling and getting racy jokes. As the con-
tributions in this volume have shown, nowadays boundaries have become
fuzzier and gendered behaviors are no longer so clear cut and as classifiable
as they once may have been. Traditionally men have joked about women
and women have joked about men—so far, so good. But hopefully, in time,
more women will move away from their predilection for the use of self-
deprecating humor and be able to laugh out loud and generally behave in
a boisterous humorous manner without this seeming marked. Nonetheless,
for the time being, we can at least begin to say with conviction that humor
is indeed a many gendered thing.
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6244-0279d-1pass-001-r02.indd 10 2/26/2014 7:19:44 PM
Section I
Part I
AU: Make this Part I ???
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6244-0279d-PI-1pass-002-r02.indd 12 2/26/2014 7:39:07 PM
2 Blended Spaces as Subversive
Feminist Humor
Janet Bing and Joanne Scheibman
1. INTRODUCTION
The children of Israel wandered around the desert for forty years.
Even in Biblical times men wouldn’t ask for directions.
The fact that this joke may amuse some listeners and not others is uncon-
troversial. However, whether or not jokes convey any sort of bona fide mes-
sage is still being discussed and debated (see Attardo 1994: ch. 9). In this
chapter, we assume, based on arguments from Zhao (1988), Oring (2003),
and Barcelona (2003), as well as the analyses offered here, that jokes such
as the one above do convey joke thoughts. A number of humor scholars,
including Douglas (1975), Green (1977), Hay (2000), and Crawford (2003),
have also claimed that jokes and other forms of humor have the potential
to communicate messages indirectly in cases where a more direct commu-
nication would have been difficult, particularly in situations when there is
a power differential. Messages sent humorously always have deniability
(“It was just a joke!”). As Kuipers (2006a: 9) notes, “The polysemy of a
joke makes it impossible to say with certainty which function it fulfills or
what the joke teller meant: humor is by definition an ambivalent form of
communication.”
Some humorous messages can challenge the status quo, and thus are
potentially subversive in the sense that they reframe an existing situation
or stereotype to suggest an alternative. In this chapter we discuss a type of
potentially subversive humor that results from conceptual blending, also
referred to as blends or blended spaces. Conceptual blending is a theoreti-
cal framework that models how language users integrate information from
different domains of knowledge to form novel concepts as they produce and
interpret discourse (Coulson and Oakley 2000: 176). With respect to the
humor discussed here, the novel or “unreal” (Raskin 1985: 111) concepts
produced in the blends provide feminist alternatives to more traditional cul-
tural interpretations.
We begin by discussing some of Oring’s ideas about joke thoughts and then
discuss mental spaces, conceptual blending, and the type of humor that results
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14 Janet Bing and Joanne Scheibman
from blended mental spaces. We compare blending to script opposition and
suggest that some jokes that seem to be simple script opposition or script over-
lap (Raskin 1985: 104–17) involve not only generic spaces (representations
of overlap), but also the creation of new blended spaces. We then show how
humor that results from blending can be subversive because of the creation
of new possible worlds—situations that suggest alternatives to the status quo.
2. JOKE THOUGHTS
In his book Engaging Humor, Elliott Oring (2003) suggests that Freud’s
book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious contains a number of
useful hypotheses for the analysis of humor. Oring (2003: 28) notes, “If one
hypothesis among them [Freud’s ideas] is basic, it is that underlying every
joke is a thought.” Oring’s (2003: 29) first approximation of a joke thought
is, “a joke thought might be characterized as a proposition: a statement with
a subject and predicate contained within the joke that is basically sensible
and commensurate with our conceptions and experiences of the world.”
He later modifies this definition by adding that, in many jokes, the thought
must be inferred, and inferred from the entire joke and not just parts of it.
Oring (2003: 37) discusses how different types of jokes communicate differ-
ent thoughts to different people.
In response to Raskin’s (1985) claim that jokes and other types of humor
violate Grice’s (1989) maxims of cooperation and thus are a non-bona fide
mode of communication, Oring (2003: 95) comments, “The implication of
this view is that jokes should lack communicative import, since no commu-
nicative effect should follow from a violation of the cooperative principle.”
Like Zhao (1988), Oring rejects a characterization of jokes as non-bona
fide communication, and provides ample evidence that what he calls joke
glosses communicate messages.1 In other discussions Raskin (1985, 1992)
and Attardo (1993, 1994) also suggest that bona fide (BF) communication
can be a combination of BF and non-bona fide communication. Attardo
(1994: ch. 9–10) provides an explanation of how jokes can violate Grice’s
maxims and still convey joke thoughts.
Messages conveyed by humor often have social significance. Both Wolf
(2002: 39) and Ziv (1984: 34–38) describe how humor can help reinforce
group norms; Ziv notes that humor can also act as a social corrective, and
Attardo (1994: 322–29) summarizes other social functions of humor. Oring
(2003: 92) notes, “The joke glosses I have recorded have been used to advo-
cate a course of action; disengage from answering a delicate question; ques-
tion authority; support a friend; ridicule a behavior; criticize a point of view
on policy decision; and illustrate any number of scientific and sociological
principles.” Our focus in this chapter is on one particular function: how
humor created through conceptual blending challenges and subverts exist-
ing norms that marginalize some groups.
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Subversive Feminist Humor 15
3. CONCEPTUAL BLENDING
Conceptual blending is one aspect of mental space theory (Fauconnier 1994),

a theoretical framework that models how speakers construct meaning in dis-
course. Mental spaces themselves are partial representations of the entities
and relations of a particular scenario referred to in discourse, and these con-
ceptual constructs guide interpretation by indexing both linguistic material
and background, often cultural information, or scripts.2 Relative to humor
studies, Attardo (1994: 198) defines “script” as “an organizedchunk of infor-
mation about something (in the broadest sense). It is a cognitive structure
internalized by the speaker which provides the speaker with information on
how things are done, organized, etc.” Although both mental spaces and con-
ceptual blends necessarily rely on script (or frame) information, blend analy-
sis and script analysis are not the same, as will be discussed later.
Most humor theorists are familiar with the role of script opposition in
humor, as discussed extensively in Raskin (1985) and Attardo (1994). Script
opposition is one aspect of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH)
proposed in Attardo and Raskin (1991). Many standard jokes begin by
evoking one script—that is, one structure of expectations (Tannen 1993)—
and then at some point (usually the end) switching to another.
For example, the following joke from Attardo and Raskin (1991: 305–6)
is a case of simple script opposition:
George Bush has a short one. Gorbachev has a longer one. The Pope
has it but does not use it, Madonna does not have it. What is it?
A last name.
In this joke there is the original script, which might be called the “penis
script,” and this is switched to the “name script” in the punch line. What
is funny here is that one set of potentially bawdy expectations is replaced
by a second more mundane domain of cultural knowledge (e.g., the shared
understanding that popes are not referred to by their last names and that
Madonna does not go by hers), but the only possible overlap is that names
and penises are attributes of males. No new concepts result from the script
switch.
Conceptual blending, on the other hand, describes how people combine
information from different semantic domains to form new concepts. Con-
ceptual blending is similar to, but not identical to, the idea of “bisociation”
proposed by Koestler (1964: 35), which he defined as “the perceiving of
a situation or idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible
frames of reference.” However, unlike either script opposition, which sub-
stitutes one set of interpretive expectations with another, or bisociation,
which results in a simultaneous perception of two scripts, in blended spaces
elements from different areas of social and cultural knowledge are inte-
grated into one emergent cognitive structure, which then has the potential
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to contribute to subsequent reasoning and interpretation.3 Although there
may be script overlap in script opposition (Attardo 1993: 203), overlap is
similar to the generic spaces in conceptual blending rather than to the emer-
gent spaces, or blends themselves (as will be illustrated later). In conceptual
integration (blending) networks, generic spaces represent “some common,
usually more abstract, structure and organization shared by the inputs and
defines the cross-space mapping between them” (Fauconnier 1997: 149).
Scholarly descriptions of jokes and humorous discourse as blends are not
new. Seana Coulson’s blend analyses of a variety of humorous texts (1996,
2005a) such as jokes, cartoons, and radio discourse are key contributions
to this work. Coulson (2005b) has also shown that blending processes are
important for humor production and comprehension. In noting the value
of conceptual blending for humor research, Attardo (2006: 342–43) writes,
“one of the observations of blending theory is that some blends exhibit
‘emerging’ features, i.e., features that belong to neither of the input (mental)
spaces. This strikes me as a potentially very useful tool to handle complex
examples, such as those analyzed by Laineste (2002), who correctly—it
seems to me—suggests the use of emergent features in a blended space to
explain two jokes.” In a discussion of topical jokes, Laineste (2002) observes
that blending lends itself to a creative type of humor in which alternative
possibilities to the status quo are offered.
Fauconnier and Turner (2002: xvii) suggest that conceptual blending is a
“basic mental operation” that plays a pivotal role in human understanding
and operates in many contexts, including “the way we learn, the way we
think, and the way we live.” Linguists and cognitive scientists are interested
in blending because the process sheds light on how people select from their
existing knowledge structures to create new meanings. Furthermore, Fauco-
nnier (1997: 166) suggests that blends are not simply “conceptual constructs.
They are genuine domains of mental exploration.” Feminists interested in
creating humor can construct these blended spaces to create possible worlds
that suggest alternatives to the “normal” world where males predominate.
Our exploration of blending theory to explore jokes, cartoons, and stories
allows us to consider how novel concepts found in these blends can poten-
tially subvert heteronormative expectations.
Although blends can be found in almost any type of humorous discourse,
they lend themselves particularly well to visual humor, especially comics and
cartoons (e.g., Marín-Arrese 2008). Because in blended spaces information
from distinct areas of knowledge combines to form novel scenarios, blends
often produce some type of possible and even improbable world. Readers
familiar with Gary Larson’s The Far Side will recognize blends in many of
his cartoons. For example, one cartoon portrays “Hell’s video store,” where
the only video for rent is Ishtar (Larson 1992: 28). This cartoon blends one
mental space, a traditional conception of Hell, with another mental space,
a modern video store. The emergent space, then, would be Hell for some
people: a video store that rents out only one really bad movie. Another
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Larson cartoon labeled “Punk worms” pictures two worms whose piercings
are fish hooks, thus blending the idea of body piercing (human self adorn-
ment) with that of an equally human practice of skewering worms to use as
fish bait (Larson 1992: 48). In the blend, however, it is the worms that are
decorating themselves with objects that in the “real world” would kill them.
For some readers, the anthropomorphic figures in Larson’s cartoons con-
vey messages with social import. For example in one Larson cartoon, a but-
terfly is being interviewed by another butterfly that seems to be a TV news
reporter. In the background yet another butterfly cameraman is shooting a
video of a dead butterfly victim that has been collected and pinned into a
collector’s glass case. The butterfly being interviewed says, “Oh, the whole
flower bed is still in shock. He was such a quiet butterfly—kept to himself
mostly” (Larson 1993: 140). This blend of a murder scene TV news inter-
view with that of the display case of a bug collector not only satirizes these
familiar broadcast interviews with neighbors of crime victims, it also sug-
gests a new perspective about killing and collecting butterflies. Although, as
Oring (2003) notes, interpretation of a joke thought can vary from person to
person, Larson’s blends construct scenarios that place expectations related to
social conventions onto beings that are not infrequently the victims of such
conventions. Perhaps, too, for some readers Larson’s animal-human blends
have the effect of mocking or trivializing the human activities he depicts.
Of course, not all blends are visual. The satirical online publication The
Onion frequently uses blended spaces for drawing humor out of current
political issues in the US. For example, an article titled “Lethal injection ban
leads to rise in back-alley lethal injections” clearly refers to the abortion
debate, although abortion is never explicitly discussed (The Onion 2007).
This clever blend is subversive because it undermines many of the arguments
of the anti-choice movement by using a capital punishment framework in
which state governors suffer great guilt because they are forced to execute
prisoners with “back-alley lethal injections.” Because the language of the
“right-to-life” position is familiar to people in the US, the blend success-
fully makes fun of those who oppose abortion but at the same time support
capital punishment.
4. SUBVERSIVE BLENDED SPACES
Our interest in humorous blends is twofold. We hope to show that humor

produced by blending is different from the overlap of scripts. We briefly
discuss the blended spaces produced in some jokes previously thought to
be the result of script opposition. In terms of the GTVH, our claim is that
emergent spaces are not simply a notational variant of script opposition
(as claimed by Attardo 2006), but are a different process that produces a
new knowledge source. In addition, we explore the subversive potential of
humor produced by blended mental spaces.
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For example, the following joke by performer and activist Robin Tyler
is an example of a humorous conceptual blend, one that is also potentially
subversive:
If homosexuality is a disease, let’s all call in queer to work. “Hello, can’t

work today. Still queer.” 4
The counterfactual utterance evokes information from two domains of

cultural knowledge (represented by the two top circles in Figure 2.1), and
information in these two domains is combined to form a blended space
(represented by the bottom circle). The representations of knowledge con-
tained in the circles are called inputs or input spaces in blending theory.
Input spaces represent the different types, or domains, of information whose
elements combine to produce the blend.
In Tyler’s joke, a new meaning emerges when elements from these two
domains of knowledge are combined. The domain on the left contains infor-
mation related to classification by institutions and individuals of homosexu-
ality as a disease, and includes characteristics of diseases (e.g., that they are
debilitating and distressing, that they often impede regular performance).
The second domain of knowledge includes information about everyday situ-
ations in which employees notify their supervisors or coworkers that they
will not be at work because of health problems. The partial overlap between
the two inputs to the blend, called the generic space (not illustrated in the
figure), is the concept of disease or illness that occurs in both the “homo-
sexuality as a disease” and the “calling in sick” spaces.
Figure 2.1 Calling in queer to work
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In the blend, classification of homosexuality as a disease is subverted
when combined with the everyday situation in which an employee calls in
sick to work. The joke is funny because in the blended space, “we” (from
“Let’s all” of the counterfactual utterance) are in good health, but we end
up being excused from work. Furthermore, when information in the clas-
sification of “homosexuality as a disease” input combines with interpreters’
understanding of activities related to “calling in sick,” the resulting con-
ceptualization (what happens when you call in queer) demonstrates that
“homosexuality” is inconsistent with cultural construals of the notion of
“disease.” In this way, then, the blend undermines the authority of homo-
phobic expectations.5 Not only is a new meaning created in the blend, the
meaning is performative due to its activist message.
Those assuming a script opposition analysis might treat Tyler’s joke as
a switch from an “illness” script to a “queer” script, and conclude that the
source of the humor is the incongruity and surprise triggered by the oppo-
sition of the two scripts. However, something else is happening in this joke.
In addition to invoking and juxtaposing two incongruous but overlapping
scripts, the joke suggests a new possible world, one in which gays and
lesbians could claim sick leave simply by virtue of their homosexuality.
Indeed, in this world, being gay would be an employment benefit.
As noted earlier, mental spaces and blends incorporate script (frame)
information, represented as knowledge, in the input and blended spaces.
However, because blends produce novel possibilities, the incongruous hypo-
thetical situation not only can make us laugh, but also contains an indirect
joke message in the sense of Oring and Zhao.
At first glance, the joke at the beginning of this chapter, repeated here,
seems to simply be a straightforward script opposition:
The children of Israel wandered around the desert for forty years. Even
in Biblical times men wouldn’t ask for directions.
The joke begins by evoking a frame set several hundred years BCE, a script that
could be called a “biblical” script. It switches to a “modern” script. The
overlap between the scripts is the shared scenario of people being lost on
journeys. However, the joke does more than trigger humor based on incon-
gruity of the contrasting scripts. Like blends discussed by Fauconnier and
Turner and others, the punch line of this joke creates a blended mental space
that combines elements from two input mental spaces, in this case, from
two different eras and cultures, as shown in Figure 2.2. Although there are
two contrasting input spaces in this joke, a blended space is created that
combines these mental spaces. In some jokes (and elsewhere) modern males
driving cars are stereotyped as being unwilling to ask for directions when
they are lost. In Biblical times, Moses and the children of Israel would have
had few opportunities in the desert to ask for directions to the Promised
Land, which is why the joke is funny. The blend created by the joke depicts
a hypothetical universe never mentioned in the Bible.
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Figure 2.2 Even in biblical times men wouldn’t ask for directions
Like scripts in humor research, mental spaces select from existing knowl-
edge sources, but, in addition, information combines to create new scenar-
ios. The blend in this joke uses the time from the “biblical” script, but the
stereotypical male unwillingness to ask directions from the “modern” one.
Notice that one cannot predict the resulting blended space simply from
knowing the character of the input spaces, because blends only select a small
number of elements from the inputs. Consider Figure 2.3, which is a much-
circulated picture of a billboard advertisement for Fiat taken by photogra-
pher Jill Posener in 1979.
There are two counterfactual sentences on the billboard: (1) the pub-
lished ad: “If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched”; and (2) the
graffiti: “If this lady was a car she’d run you down.” These utterances trig-
ger two different, but related conceptual blends, and both of them emerge
from the same cultural information: shared understanding of “small cars”
and what it means to be positioned as a “lady” in this culture. However, the
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Figure 2.3 “Fiat/Ad Graffiti.” Copyright © by Jill Posener. Courtesy of Jill Posener.
authors of the two utterances highlight different aspects of shared cultural

information, which results in their indexing different ideological stances in
the resulting blends.
In the published ad (“If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched”),
there are two input spaces.
The first input space in Figure 2.4 contains information related to what
it means to be a lady in this culture, so it includes characteristics such as the
fact that lady refers to a human female and stereotypical attributes of lady
(at least at the time this picture was taken) as a type of woman who is cultur-
ally construed as ornamental, typically compliant and passive, and often a
sexual object open to public viewing. The second input to this blend includes
cultural knowledge of small cars: for example, that they are attractive, that
they are fast, and that they are possessions that must be controlled (driven)
to run. The overlap between the two inputs of this blend, or the generic
space, includes the abstract understanding of entities moving in space (true
for both ladies and cars) and interacting with other entities (e.g., men).
As in the previous cases, information in the two input spaces comes
together and forms a new conceptual structure. In the blend, the interpre-
tation of the entity in the counterfactual is an objectified human female
referred to with the nonpersonal pronoun “it” who, like the “small car,” is
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Figure 2.4 If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched
a possession that lacks agency. Supporting this interpretation is the fact that
the second clause (“it would get its bottom pinched”) is what is called a get-
passive—a construction that typically marks the subject of the sentence as hav-
ing little agency or responsibility (as in other expressions, such as “got fired,”
“got drunk,” “got lost”). This advertisement normalizes what feminists have
labeled “street harassment” or “street terrorism” (Gardner 1980; Kissling
1991). That is, in the billboard ad, the “Fiat as a lady” evokes a situation in
which a woman can be addressed or even pinched in public by any male.
Now consider the graffiti, “If this lady was a car she’d run you down,”
which results in a different blended space than the original billboard, as
shown in Figure 2.5. Although the input spaces for this blend are the same
as that of the previous blend, the elements from these two spaces that con-
tribute to this blend are different. In this case, Input 1 does not project infor-
mation about “lady” as a stereotypical class; instead the selected information
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Figure 2.5 If this lady was a car she’d run you down
refers to “this lady,” the writer of the graffiti, who has obvious agency. Fur-
thermore, the writer directly addresses the creator of the advertisement as
“you” and makes him a grammatical object, not a pincher or possessor, as
in the first blend. In this blend, then, the graffiti artist de-normalizes street
harassment and proposes alternatives by invoking the “power” of the car
rather than its appearance and its ability to be controlled. The grammar of
the two sentences is also different. In contrast to the passive construction
of the first blend, the clause “she’d run you down” has an active subject
(she) and a dynamic, transitive verb (run down). Additionally, in contrast to
the subjunctive verb “were” in the published ad, which codes the event as
hypothetical, the verb in the graffiti utterance is the indicative “was,” a use
that represents the event as fact.
In the examples of the blends on this particular billboard, the messages,
or joke thoughts, are rather transparent. In the first case, the joke thought
could be paraphrased as “Cute little cars, like cute little women, are a good
source of fun.” In the second case, the joke thought might be “If you put
6244-0279d-PI-1pass-002-r02.indd 23 2/26/2014 7:39:09 PM

your hands on me, prepare to suffer!” The first message tends to reinforce
the status quo, whereas the second one tends to subvert it, and does so by
emphasizing different aspects of representations of both the Fiat and the lady.
The next example of subversive humor from blended spaces is from the
Guerrilla Girls, themselves a visual blend, as can be seen in Figure 2.6.
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of activists who routinely and effectively
use blends to challenge the status quo, particularly in the arts community.
Figure 2.6 The Guerrilla Girls. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, Inc. Courtesy www.
guerrillagirls.com
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The example in Figure 2.7, The Women’s Homeland Terror Alert System,
is a blend between the now-defunct US Homeland Security Advisory Sys-
tem and warnings to women about threats to their rights. This is a clear
example of humor that results from an emergent space rather than a script
opposition.
Figure 2.7 The Women’s Homeland Terror Alert System. Copyright © Guerrilla
Girls, Inc. Courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com
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Figure 2.8 The Women’s Homeland Terror Alert System blend.
One input to the Guerrilla Girls’ blend was the Homeland Security Advi-
sory System, which was established by the US government and used from
2002 to 2011. This color-coded system was created to communicate threat
advisories to the public in the event of a possible terrorist attack. This input
provides the basic structure for the blend, including the idea that citizens
must be vigilant and protect themselves.
Figure 2.8 shows that the second input to this blend contains information
related to impediments to women’s rights, such as discrimination, violence,
and threats to reproductive rights and health care. The generic space (over-
lap) contains schematic information about danger, attacks, and defensive
measures, information that is relevant to both input spaces. In the resulting
blend, the threat is no longer from terrorists, as is the case in Input 1, but
rather from former US president George W. Bush, and the targets of these
attacks are not all US citizens, but women.
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According to this blend, women were at their “safest” green level when
Bush was absent from Washington, for example, clearing brush on his ranch,
but the threat was a higher yellow level when he nominated judges, and the
highest red level when he sent women off to fight in unprovoked wars. As
with all blends, the result of this one is not simply a sum of bits of informa-
tion contributed from the input spaces. Instead, the combinations of infor-
mation from social and cultural knowledge produce new meanings in the
emergent space. In the blend, the tacit recommendation to women to be alert
to threats against their rights carries with it the urgency of the Homeland
Security Advisory System. Unlike the US government’s advisory system, how-
ever, the threat to women here is not from terrorists but from the president
and the government itself. Unfortunately, the possible world suggested in
this particular blend was uncomfortably close to the real world experienced
by women in the US under the George W. Bush administration.
Although the Homeland Security Advisory System is no longer in use, the
Guerrilla Girls’ blend has more recently inspired others, including a number
of blends critical of remarks about rape made by Republican lawmakers
in the United States. For example, The Daily Kos published the “Romney
Administration Department of Lady Parts” (Connecticutie 2012), as well as
“The Republican Party Rape Advisory Chart” (Brainwrap 2012), and these
charts were reproduced and imitated on other sites.
A different example of a subversive blend in which the emergent space
is more than a simple script opposition is found in a cartoon by Marian
Henley (Hysteria, Summer 1993), in which a male robbery victim is filing a
complaint to two policewomen. The text is as follows:
MAN: I’ve been ROBBED! Some&#* took my WALLET!
COP 1: Well, what did you EXPECT?
COP 2: You’re dressed so EXPENSIVELY!
COP 1: I’m afraid you wouldn’t have much of a case . . .
COP 2: It’d be YOUR word against THEIRS!
MAN: WHAT?!
COP 2: How could you prove that you weren’t willing?
MAN: WILLING?!
COP 1: Nice men keep their wallet covered in public. They spend money
MODESTLY . . .
COP 2: . . . and don’t call attention to their FINANCIAL CHARMS!
COP 1: Otherwise, people get the wrong idea!
COP 2: If someone takes your money, it’s YOUR fault, not THEIRS!
MAN: This . . . THIS IS CRAZY!
COP 1: No, this is role-reversal!
COP 2: I mean, if you arouse somebody financially, you’ve GOT to
follow through . . .
This particular blend evokes two scripts. The first is the “robbery” script,
and the second is the “rape” script. The robbery script provides the structure
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for the joke. However, the rape script provides the content. As Mary Craw-
ford (1995: 230–32) says about this “much-repeated feminist classic,” it
“applies the blame-the-victim logic often used about rape victims to rob-
bery victims.” In far too many rape trials, the way the victim was dressed,
the issue of whether she was provocative and willing, and the fact that it is
her word against his all too often become issues. As Crawford notes, this
joke “acknowledges men’s ability to define reality in ways that meet their
needs,” and subverts that ability by exposing its social construction. As the
joke itself points out, role reversals are a good source of subversive blended
humor, and feminists have long used role reversal as a basis for humor, as in
Steinem’s (1993) well-known essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”
5. CONCLUSION
Not all blends are subversive, of course. Blends can create both utopias and
dystopias, as in the cartoon in which a bemused middle-aged man is watch-
ing the TV news. The newscaster reports:
Our stories tonight: world peace and universal equality for women have
been achieved! But first, our top story: Hell has frozen over.
Consider also Raskin’s famous joke (Raskin 1985: 32):
“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.
“No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come
right in.”
Raskin’s extensive analysis of this joke as a switch from a “doctor” script

to a “lover” script fails to note that, in addition to the script opposition,
the joke has created a new blended space, a hypothetical world in which
pretty young wives are ready and eager to have sex with any male who asks,
regardless of how unattractive or sick the male is. This particular blend is
one that contains the joke message that women, particularly young pretty
ones, are no more than sex objects, a message sometimes interpreted as
bona fide by male college students.6
Feminist scholars such as Kotthoff (2006a: 5) believe that humor can
send messages and challenge existing norms: “Humorous communication
plays an important role in the production of normality and normativity
[. . .] By violating norms and creating unconventional perspectives, humor
certainly influences norms.”
It would be worthwhile for feminist humor scholars to re-examine jokes
that have been designated as funny because of script opposition. Some of
these jokes also construct blended spaces, and these blended spaces create
novel joke messages that are sometimes sexist and sometimes subversive. Any
type of humor can be subversive, as feminist humor scholars such as Douglas
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(1975), Barreca (1975), and Crawford (2003) have shown. However, blend-
ing provides a particularly promising addition to subversive humor and
its analysis because it creates new mental spaces and fictional possible
worlds. These newly created mental spaces have the potential to suggest
creative alternatives to conventional stereotypes and expectations. These
blends challenge existing assumptions about who has the social authority
to act and to define. For example, in the Tyler joke about calling in sick to
work, Tyler challenges society’s authority to define homosexuality as illness.
The writer of the graffiti blend, “FIAT as an angry woman,” disputes the
assumption that males have the authority to harass unaccompanied females
in public, and it encourages women to resist sexual street harassment. In
The Women’s Homeland Terror Alert System, women are reminded that
unless they become actively involved in protecting their rights, they will lose
them. Henley’s “Robbery as rape” cartoon challenges the blame-the-victim
arguments used in rape trials and in the media by showing how absurd
such arguments sound when used in the context of a robbery. In these few
examples, the resulting blended spaces implicitly invite the audience to ques-
tion the status quo and perhaps to perform their own authority.
NOTES
1. One illustration Zhao (1988: 284) uses to illustrate how jokes can convey
information is an incident that occurred shortly after she arrived at Purdue to
become a teaching assistant (TA). Several other TAs were talking about a friend
burdened with an overly active sex drive, to which another TA responded,
“Oversexed?! Well, just tell him to come to Purdue and be a graduate student
and a TA for a month. Then his problem will be gone.”
2. Linguists who do humor studies, such as Raskin and Attardo, use the term
“script” in the same sense as scholars such as Tannen (1993) and Fillmore
(1982) use the term “frame.”
3. Conceptual blending is also referred to as “conceptual integration” (e.g., Fau-
connier 1997; Fauconnier and Turner 2002).
4. Robin Tyler (personal communication, February 1, 2014) believes that the
first time she did the joke was at the Southern Women’s Music & Comedy
Festival in the 1980s. The original joke was: 'If homosexuality is a disease,
let’s all call in sick to work. Hello, can’t work today, still gay.”
5. Since the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Man-
ual of Mental Disorders (DSM) stopped categorizing homosexuality as a dis-
order in 1974, Tyler’s joke is out of date. However, because discourses and
practices pathologizing homosexuality are still ubiquitous, the humor in the
“calling in queer to work” blend still works.
6. See Louwagie (2008) for a description of sexual assault on college campuses
in the US.
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3 Traditional Comic Conflicts in
Farce and Roles for Women
Jessica Milner Davis
Despite some personal, cultural, and gender differences, laughter and the
appreciation of humor are by nature common to both sexes, part of a uni-
versal form of human self-expression and communication. Summarizing
two published reviews of quantitative research about gender differences in
Western countries—one from 1998 (Lampert and Ervin-Tripp) and her own
in 2006—Helga Kotthoff concluded that “[o]n the whole, there are more
similarities than differences in the humor of women and men” (2006b: 2).
More recent reports from brain research do suggest some underlying,
gender-based differences in cognitive and emotive processing during the
experience of laughter (possibly even amusement).1 These findings reinforce
earlier studies, such as Crawford and Gressley in 1991, suggesting that
contemporary women self-report being more emotive in their responses to
laughter and also less confident about assuming that they will be amused
by anticipated humorous stimuli. Perhaps a fair summary of general atti-
tudes by women in today’s Western societies (setting aside individual and
cultural differences) would be that they tend to have a more cautious atti-
tude to humor than men. Nevertheless, despite such differences in emotional
and physical expression of humor appreciation, it is quite possible that the
degree of enjoyment felt by men and women may prove equally satisfying
in any particular instance—if it were possible to measure such a variable.
Looking at various types of stage comedy and audience reactions, this seems
quite likely to be so.
1. WOMEN AND SCRIPTED COMEDY
There is little to suggest from historical records that men and women differ
now or have in the past in their appreciation of types of comedy intended
for general audiences. In terms of performing in such comedies (both ama-
teur and professional), it is true that the social norms of many cultures have
often either debarred or discouraged women from acting of any kind, seri-
ous or comic. And for both sexes, performed comedy—that is, comedy that
depends for its full effects on being enacted—has traditionally been and
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Farce and Roles for Women 31
in some quarters still is less respected as a theatrical profession than seri
ous drama. Despite this, women are now and always have been as much
in evidence as men as spectators and as subjects of comedy. Powerful roles
for women evidently existed at the beginnings of recorded theater history
(for example Aristophanes’s Lysistrata or the New Comedies of Menander).2
When considering comedy and gender, there is an important distinction to
be drawn between the roles themselves and the question of who discharged
them in performance. Although there is of course a subtle and not unim-
portant difference in audience response when women’s roles are interpreted
by men or boys, the significance of the roles to the comedy itself remains.
That is the focus of this chapter.
In fact although comic actresses and performers down the ages have been
historically rarer than their male counterparts, they have nevertheless won
fame and admiration sufficient to inscribe many of them in the pages of the-
atrical history—and not just for their sex appeal. There are many legendary
names, from Salomone in Byzantium, a fifteenth-century female court-jester
(Marciniak 2014), to Molière’s leading lady (and wife) Armande Béjart,
to the star actresses of the Italian commedia dell’arte troupes and those of
the French and English stages during and after the late seventeenth century,
and including comediennes such as Beatrice Lillie and Lucille Ball.3 These
celebrated women were not the only ones on the comic stage long before
the advent of today’s talented generation of women stand-up comics who
command equal billing with men.4 A feminist critic such as Susan Carlson
(1991) will see these early exceptional figures as ultimately defeated by the
male-dominated structures of the comedies they played in, the women’s
temporary comic rebellions only reinforcing their overall position of sub-
jection. I make a different appraisal: these pioneers are not well served by
latter-day judgments reserving praise for committed revolutionaries. To win
general respect, as those women did in their own male-dominated times,
without compromising artistic or personal standards, is a triumph worth
celebrating (see Lockyer, ch. 13, and Bing and Scheibman, ch. 2, this vol-
ume). They certainly did more to pave the way for future generations than
to hinder them.
Women actresses only became a permanent feature of the English
stage with the Restoration of King Charles I in 1660, when theatres were
re-opened, predominantly under French stage customs. For most earlier
comedies it is impossible to be sure whether female roles in stage comedies
were played by women or by cross-dressing men and boys. This does not
argue for the relative unimportance of such roles, nor indeed for their less
demanding nature. In fact it stands to reason that—regardless of the gen-
der of the performer—the interpretation of women’s roles needs to be con-
vincingly accurate when presented to any audience, but especially to one
including women themselves. Women were certainly present in the audi-
ence for medieval and Renaissance performances in streets, fairgrounds,
and inn-yards, in private houses and palaces, as well as later for the gas-lit
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32 Jessica Milner Davis
stages of European capitals.5 Failure in a comic role produces not laughter
but groans and booing—except perhaps for the narrow exemption granted
a pantomime “dame,” where the unbelievability of female impersonation
being done by a mature male is the whole point of the comedy. Even in the
protean comedy of Aristophanes (which includes what we would now call
farcical elements among its powerful mix of satire, allegory, obscenity, and
realism), Michael Ewans (2011: 261–62) draws attention to the high demands
for realism that were placed upon (and evidently fulfilled by) the masked
male actors of the Athenian dramatic festivals as they portrayed a complex
range of masked (and mixed) gender roles.6
Later actors in more naturalistic theaters would need to have shared
something of these exceptional powers in presenting their own more realis-
tic female roles in comedies and farces. Any dramatic show that corresponds
to real life will almost always entail some female roles, because comedy
must mirror actual society. A performance is also in and of itself a social
event, requiring an audience for its success. These female comic roles and
their reception as convincing to mixed audiences is unfairly devalued by
comments that dismiss them as simply subordinate to roles for men in a
reflection of women’s historic social status (e.g., Carlson 1991: 11–42). Such
restrictive gender-based roles must necessarily appear in comedy, because
comedy must reflect the broad sweep of the human condition and all its
varied tribulations and triumphs. But neither is it helpful, when interpret-
ing female comic roles of the past, to ignore fact and attempt to retrofit a
liberation perspective onto these comic plots and joking from earlier times.
Being overeager to identify hitherto unsuspected pioneers of women’s rights
runs the risk of misinterpretation.7 Caution and balance are always prudent
when revisiting humor from the past. Even situations that may seem not
only outdated but also so socially unjust as to be beyond a joke—such as
complete sexual objectification of the passive female body—may still work
brilliantly as comedy today, as Michael Ewans has shown in contemporary
Australian productions of Aristophanes (Ewans and Phiddian 2012: 4).
In fact, it seems essential that there should be some measure of egalitari-
anism or power balance between the sexes if sustainable dramatic conflict is
to be created in comedy, because without it there is no struggle worth laugh-
ing at. Enacted comedies are not like oral jokes: they depend on sequential
developments to create a (more or less) protracted narrative. The twists and
turns of the plot are crucial to the nature of the laughter as power swings
backwards and forwards between the protagonists. Giselinde Kuipers
(2006a: 187) has described the genre of jokes as masculine in its construc-
tion in the sense that its dominant subjects and perspectives tend to be male:
Women play roles in jokes only if the joke makes a woman’s presence
absolutely necessary—and, in fact, this always has to do with sex and
family relationships. Women are never neutral joke protagonists; they
are always horrible mothers-in-law, women lurking behind doors with
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rolling pins at the ready, seductive secretaries, and other male dream
and dread images.
Farce, the style or form of performed comedy that is my subject matter, can
be seen as “comedy reduced to its basics” (Davis 2003: 1) and it certainly
contains all the misogynist images described by Kuipers. The issue, however,
is how these roles fare in the broad sweep of comic narratives.
Deferring for a moment a fuller discussion of the nature and definition
of farce, I stress here that as a comic genre farce depends on achieving
structural balance in order to be received as funny (Davis 2003: 2–3, 88,
and 141). This may seem paradoxical, because, as we shall see, farce is
unadorned by poetic or witty exchanges and is notorious for the enacted
violence of plots that rely on practical jokes, slapstick, and trickery of the
“robber robbed” kind. All these require dupes or victims. This would seem
to entail clear, simple, one-way outcomes of victory and defeat that either
reinforce the dominant power or overturn it, depending on whether the
rebellion and trickery is successful. However, all four types of farce plot
reveal a meta-structure designed to contain such temporary triumphs and to
produce some kind of pivoting balance between victim and victor (see also
Davis 2003: ch. 2, 3, and 4).
Happy endings to comic conflicts are important in all performed comedy
and certainly in farce, which is determinedly rebellious but fundamentally
conservative. Perhaps such structures reflect the ritual basis of comedy—
an invocation of fertility and marriage, to which both gender partners are
of course essential. It is certainly traditional for comedies to end with a
betrothal or marriage feast or, if that is not the case, with a reconcilia-
tion of some kind between previously warring parties (youth versus age,
lower ranks versus their superiors, and so on; see, e.g., Cornford 1934;
Langer 1976; Segal 2001). In a farce however, this kind of festive truce is
often marked as existing only for curtain-lowering purposes and not to be
regarded as too believable. Its use nevertheless conveys an underlying phi-
losophy of Realpolitik, acknowledging that the social conventions under
attack during the body of the plot must ultimately be restored for the game
to end. Thus the key to any farce structure is equipoise, a careful balance
between revolt or rebellion on the one hand and order or propriety on the
other. A complex array of devices, such as framing, plot, characterization,
timing, and acting style, serve to maintain this delicate balance. Such factors
are designed to avoid triggering either offence or excessive empathy from
spectators: perhaps they explain the historic cross-gender appeal of comedy
in general and specifically of farce.
1.1 Women in the Audience

Turning to comedy’s patronage by women as spectators, one might suppose
that styles of comedy more romantic or sympathetic than farce would hold
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greater appeal, especially in light of the brain research findings about per-
ception of humor cited earlier. It is difficult however to find any historical
evidence that one form or type of stage comedy has typically been preferred
by women as opposed to men—setting aside striptease (always a special
case in which comic devices run second to other stimuli).8 Nevertheless,
individual differences in taste as well as cultural differences about what is
considered fashionable or “proper” certainly affected audience composition
for specific plays and specialized theater venues. Cultural history of manners
shows that what was considered proper about civilized behavior influenced
attitudes to public laughter, as well as much else (see Arditi 1998; Kuipers
2006a, 2006b). A well-known case in point regards the personal exhorta-
tions in letters written by Lord Chesterfield (1847: 1, 211) to his son, such
as one dated October 19, 1748, from Bath:
Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob who are only pleased with silly
things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh since the cre-
ation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to
smile but never heard to laugh.
Because farce, the most basic physical and visual form of comedy, is specifi-
cally designed to elicit raucous laughter, it might be thought the most likely
form to run up against manners or gender barrier. In the case of the British
theater, at least, this is simply not so. In fact, from the earliest notices in
the sixteenth century about farce as a recognizable genre down to George
Bernard Shaw’s reviews of the 1890s London theater scene, the ubiquitous
critical complaint about farce was that it was simply too popular with both
sexes and, hence, vulgar and unrefined. Inveighing against the popularity of
such a “low” form of comedy, Shaw (1932: 2, 118) pointed out that
people who would not join in the laughter of a crowd of peasants at the
village idiot, or tolerate the public flogging of a criminal, [are] booking
seats to shout with laughter at a farcical comedy, which is, at bottom,
the same thing.9
Rosalind Crone’s (2006) study of nineteenth-century Punch and Judy pup-

pet shows similarly testifies to the fact that these violent slapstick punch-ups
in small booth theaters were enjoyed equally by men and boys and women
and girls of all classes. Changing taste later somewhat modified the tradi-
tional plots, but evidently not on a gender basis, with the show continuing
to be popular in varying forms with all classes from the close of the eigh-
teenth century to the 1890s (Crone 2006: 1055–82).
Surveying the history of farce more widely in the Western world, such
evidence as there is about who populated the Roman theaters in the sec-
ond century BCE for Plautus’s five-act farcical comedies, who attended
the open-field performances of the religious vie de saints with their comic
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interludes known as farsses in late medieval France,10 who roared with
laughter at the farcical episodes in Shakespeare’s plays (whether at court
or in the Globe Theatre), and so on consistently indicates mixed, not segre-
gated, audiences. Farce has always been a reliable crowd-pleaser and, rec-
ognizing this, London theater impresarios from the Restoration to the end
of the eighteenth century took care to add farcical afterpieces to their bills
to ensure that the (mixed) audience stayed the course of a long afternoon
and evening. To cite just one specific instance of evident appeal across gen-
der and class, London theater records from 1793 report that the King and
Queen (George III and Charlotte) failed to attend a farce as planned at Cov-
ent Garden Theatre because two of their daughters were ill and could not
accompany them (Hogan 1968: cxix).
A century later in the civilizing progress of British society, the mildly ris-
qué French bedroom-farces about which Shaw complained so loudly were
staged at London theaters such as the Savoy and the Lyceum, and were
eagerly attended by women as well as men. The silent slapstick comedy films
of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers proved general hits in their time, as
did the specialized farces of Ben Travers at the Aldwych Theatre in the 1920s
and Brian Rix’s later “Theatre of Laughter” at the Whitehall, where farces
flourished in the 1950s and 1960s (see Rix 1995). Farces of today, such as
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1985: 359–494) (a meta-farce, or a farce about
a farce) and Ben Elton’s Gasping (set in the 1980s financial boom; 1990),
demonstrate continuity in this broad appeal across the sexes.11 Turning to
the other side of the world, even in Muromachi Japan (sixteenth to eigh-
teenth century), when social rules about the appropriate times and places
for laughter and humor for both men and women were very highly codified,
farces called kyōgen were attended by both sexes—although female roles
were certainly delivered by highly-trained male actors. Just as in the West,
these farces were enjoyed as comic relief within programs of more serious
Nō plays (Wells and Davis 2006; Bouchetoux, ch. 7, this volume). This was
so despite the fact that their plots have sometimes been seen by Japanese
critics as a dangerous form of gekokujō (social topsyturvydom, a threat to
proper order; Wells 2006: 206).
There are no known historical periods when farce was prescribed to be
male-only viewing. Indeed, given the commercial drawing-power of com-
edy in all its shapes and forms, if women’s enjoyment of stage comedy had
proved markedly different to that of the men, it seems likely that over time
theater repertoires would have responded to that economic factor, lead-
ing to the emergence of differing comic forms tailored for gender-based
audiences (in the same way as some types of novel, film, and comic book
have evolved that are more favored by one sex). Performed comedy in
general—with the exception of stand-up, a form outside the purview of this
chapter—is surprisingly free of this feature. Perhaps it is still accompanied
by traces of its religious origins in fifth-century Athens, marking it as a com-
munal and inclusive activity. As for farce, its name has become shorthand
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for its power to elicit uproarious—and harmless, if thoughtless—laughter
from everyone.
1.2 Single-Sex Comedy?

Despite brave efforts by “women’s theater” fringe companies (see Carlson
1991: 273–302; Gray 1994: 141–53), Western theater and its audiences
largely remain communal. Scripts for stage comedies and farces, whether
large or small, reflect this in their casting. A recent search of farces in the
British Library catalogue of published English theater scripts revealed only
a bare dozen featuring all-women casts, dating from the 1930s to 1970s
(perhaps the most recent are not yet catalogued; or, more likely, fringe
theaters do not favor farce, which is notoriously challenging to perform).
A parallel search for those with all-male casts resulted in only one, dated
1938. Farces with mixed casts are clearly the norm. Important outliers
are Dario Fo’s early one-acter from 1945 with five men and one woman,
L’uomo nudo e l’uomo in frak (translated in 1985 by Theatertexts as One
was Nude and One Wore Tails: A One-act Farce by Dario Fo), and Michael
Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years (1977), a farce poking fun at some very British
institutions, cast for eight men and one woman. In both of these, however,
the single woman member of the cast is crucial to the way the plot develops
and thus indispensable. To me, such theatrical facts reflect the essential-
ity of women’s roles in all comic conflicts, especially the bare basics often
found in farce.
2. NATURE OF FARCE AND HUMOR THEORY
Farce can be viewed as comedy reduced to its fundamentals. It is a world in

which a plot can get going (as Kathleen Lea observed in her classic study of
Italian Renaissance commedia dell’arte, 1934: 188) merely by having one
scheming clown to say to another, “let’s do the old man,” and then suiting
action to the word. Nevertheless, the genre succeeds in eliciting laughter
not just by directness of approach, but by maintaining an overall balance
between, on the one hand, a comic challenge or rebellion and, on the other,
the preservation of conventional social order. Elsewhere I define its spirit
as “one which delights in taboo-violation, but which avoids implied moral
comment or social criticism and which tends to debar empathy for its vic-
tims” (Davis 2003: 2). Combining these three qualities, farce (mostly) avoids
triggering any social censorship in either the public or personal sphere—
which as suggested earlier may go far to explain its ability to appeal to
females as well as males and across all social classes. Importantly, farce does
not make serious social criticisms as does satire, nor does it depend like liter-
ary or high comedy on complex character development and witty exchanges
of dialogue—although it may make some use of both those latter features.
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Its comic techniques thus largely exclude such things as ambiguity, serious
critique of social mores, poetic diction, and nuances of characterization. It is
nevertheless a rigorous theatrical form, requiring finely honed performances
from its actors—speed, precision timing, and believable enactment of broad
type-characters—to achieve its laughs.
In terms of humor theory, farce’s dependence on immediate recognition
of stereotypes exemplifies how incongruity underlies much humor. Such
stock characters allow for both prediction and for surprise overturning of
expectations. Indeed, surprise is as important as predictability in any farce
plot and together these two elements create incongruity. This is the ele-
ment at the heart of the one currently fully theorized approach to humor,
the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991; updated
Attardo 2008). However, as noted earlier, performed comedy entails an
extended dramatic narrative and thus sustained interplay between predict-
ability and surprise. Such plots respond well to analysis in terms of the
comic techniques set out by Henri Bergson (1859–1941) in his essay on
laughter, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1900, translated as
Laughter in 1924).
Bergson’s theorizing was informed by the stage tradition of Molière and
by the elegantly constructed and hugely popular five-act farces that domi-
nated the Parisian stage at the turn of the nineteenth century. He identified
many of the major and minor recurring devices that shape such plays and
that in fact characterize farce more generally (Davis 2003). His emphasis on
mechanical patterns such as repetition, inversion, “crossed-wires” in mis-
communication, and so on is not of course inconsistent with the notion of
incongruity and its resolution being a key to humor. But he stressed one
particular aspect of that mismatch—the mechanical or rigid opposed to the
flexible. He saw the first as characterizing the essence of humor or the comic
(le comique) and the second as the ever-evolving dynamic vitality of life
itself. These concepts accurately describe the nature of both plot devices and
character types found in farce, whether simple or complex.
Humor in farce is thus more than just setting up and resolving succes-
sive incongruities. Its tropes of trickery and aggression derive from classical
theories of humor as superiority (the notion that we laugh in triumph, hark-
ing back to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy). But they are also allied
to Freudian satisfactions of Schadenfreude and humorous transgression, as
well as to the spirit of carnival indulgence usually termed Bakhtinian (after
Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of Rabelaisian humor; see Ivanov 1984). Hence
I would argue that farce refuses to be pigeonholed in any one camp of the-
ory in humor.
2.1 Farce and Its Comic Structures

Because plot usually outranks talk in farce, plot structures provide a legiti-
mate lens through which to examine the function and nature of women’s
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roles. Studying the genre over many years, in both its “pure” (simple) form
and its “applied” form (combined with other comic styles and structures to
serve a variety of dramatic purposes—probably the prevailing contempo-
rary mode; Davis 2003: 14–31), I have found that pure farce plots usually
conform to one of a limited number of patterns.12 Either singly or in combi-
nation, these have the effect of achieving the all-important balance described
previously. As a result, limits are placed on the comic aggression or rebel-
lion and the conventions and authorities under comic challenge are (mostly)
safely restored by the play’s end. The patterns can be summed up in four
categories (Davis 2003: 7):13 (1) Humiliation or deception farces in which
an unpleasant victim is exposed to his or her fate, without opportunity for
retaliation. These farces are unidirectional in their joking and require special
justifications for the pleasure taken in the sufferings of others. (2) Reversal
farces in which the tables are turned on the original rebel or joker, allowing
the victim retaliation in return. Often there are further switches of direc-
tion permitted, to prolong the mirth and ensure the “proper” conventional
outcome. (3) Equilibrium or quarrel farces where the plot focuses upon a
narrow, perpetual-motion kind of movement, in which two opposing forces
wrestle each other literally or metaphorically in a tug-of-war without reso-
lution, remaining in permanent balance. (4) Snowball farces in which all
the characters are equally caught up as victims in a whirlwind of escalating
sound and fury. Often these plots are driven by an elaborate series of mis-
understandings and errors, giving rise to many “crossed lines” among the
different parties. The physical power of nature and of inanimate objects,
tools, and machines to dominate the merely human is frequently the source
of the joke.
At the core of all four plot types—perhaps of any comic plot—is a conflict
of some kind that derives from the setting up (and often the subsequently
incongruous inversion) of expectations about the behaviors or roles of key
characters. Hence the importance of stock character types, including all pos-
sible negatives stereotypes of both sexes. These “masks” (a term reflecting
the characters’ origins in classical masked comedy and further developed by
the actors of the Italian commedia dell’arte) must be both realistic enough to
engage the audience and sufficiently individuated to avoid broad allegorical
or satirical meaning. They usually fall into the following camps of signify-
ing values whose opposing energies spark the ensuing conflicts: Youth ver-
sus Age; Inferior versus Superior; Insider versus Outsider; Indulgence versus
Restraint; Flexibility versus Patterns/Rules/Norms; and Surprise versus
Expectation. Irrespective of plot type, these basic pairs (or oppositions) of
character—either singly or perhaps in layered combinations—drive forward
the comic conflict(s) underlying the plot. Although these categories of con-
flict may well extend to other forms and styles of comedy, here I concentrate
on farce.
To become drama, these oppositional themes must be embodied in
characters. It is scarcely surprising to find that conventional gender roles,
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so fundamental in their own bipolarity, are often pressed into service—
frequently conflated with other polarities. Thus the opposition of woman
(or girl) to man (or boy) may well (but not always) be aligned with the
social values most conventionally associated with each gender. The ways
in which the female/male opposition may present include the following:
(1) what Rosalind Crone (2006: 1059) calls “the traditional theme of the
‘struggle for the breeches’ ” between married (or courting) partners; (2) the
struggle for the triumph of love (more realistically, sex drive) aligned with
youth or indulgence (often a rebellion against a May–December or other
pairing imposed from above); (3) the struggle for power against authority
by an inferior such as a child, pupil, or employee; and (4) the struggle of
wits against stupidity, perhaps simply the struggle for common sense to
prevail in the face of inflexible rules and thinking.
The central questions for this study are, what functions do these female
roles serve in the plots and how important are they to the overall structure?
If these roles reflect the conventional and limited values of their day, are
they only minor and dispensable parts of the whole? Do they reinforce
those values or serve to subvert them, at least in the limited holiday from
normality that lasts for the duration of a farce? To answer these ques-
tions, I will examine four farces from a wide range of European theaters
that illustrate the four major plot types. Although all were popular in their
day, these farces are examples from different historical periods and lan-
guages and probably regrettably unfamiliar. I have summarized the plots
to clarify how each play unfolds (Viollet Le Duc 1854: tom. 2). Because
discussing the entire plot is easier with simpler pieces, these are examples
of short farces usually played as part of a longer bill, either as a curtain-
raiser or an afterpiece. More recent examples tend to be longer and to use
farce techniques for more complex dramatic purposes, and therefore are
not included.
2.1.1 Humiliation and Deception Farce:

Women Getting Away with It
This is the simplest of all farce structures and, to judge by surviving texts,
was far more popular in earlier times than it is today. There are a number
of possible reasons for this shift in taste. Reflecting Norbert Elias’s (1978)
theory of the progress of the civilizing drive, contemporary pressures such
as political correctness and awareness of multiculturalism mean that the
Schadenfreude-type pleasure to be gained from straightforward, unidirec-
tional humiliation or deception of an unpleasant victim now requires a good
deal more nuanced handling than in past eras. In fact Shaw’s impassioned
plea for sympathy with comic victims may finally have been answered by
contemporary theatrical taste, although many cartoons and computer games
still offer an endistanced comic humiliation of their victims, while violence
that shifts from comic to serious increases every year, in film especially. Nev-
ertheless, plots like those of Punch and Judy, where the uppity wife is the
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target of beatings and similar humiliation, proved quite rare in a review of
surviving older examples. Certainly in texts from early Renaissance times in
France, England, and Spain, and also in later derivative fairground farces, it
is usually weak men rather than strong women who feature as the victim of
the comic pranks and punishment.14
A typical example is the early Tudor play by John Heywood, John John
the Husband, Tyb His Wife and Sir John the Priest (circa 1530). This is an
adaptation of an earlier anti-clerical French farce, La Farce du pasté. As
in the original, the comedy turns on the ease with which a cuckolded hus-
band is cheated, bullied, and kept working at unpleasant domestic tasks.
By the penultimate scene, John John the husband has been goaded into
action by his wife and her clerical lover. John John tries to assert him-
self by demanding that the priest leave the house. After some fisticuffs he
seems to have won (the stage direction reads, “Here they fight by the ears a
while, and then the priest and the wife go out of the place”). But common
sense suggests this is a hollow triumph, and in fact the farce concludes
with John John unable to escape his mental vision of the lovers’ ultimate
victory:
John: for by God, I fear me,

That they be gone together, he and she,
Unto his chamber, and perhaps she will,
Spite of my heart, tarry there still. (Heywood 1966: 89)
He bids the audience a hasty goodbye and rushes out in pursuit of more
suffering. Nothing can or will change the nature of his fixed mask as the
cuckolded house-spouse.
The butt of this farce is not the stereotypical self-indulgent cleric of the
French original: here, the hypocritically corrupt divine becomes a jolly mask
in the style of Friar Tuck. The jokes are made at the expense of the pathetic
husband. All the slight variations that Heywood made to the original mate-
rial increase this emphasis on the victim’s powerlessness and humiliation
(Davis 2003: 92). Despite the fact that his wife carries the interest and
empathy of the audience as she manipulates both men, the rationale of this
joke is that husbands like John John deserve what they get and that lusty
wives ought to be stopped.
A comparable but much later French piece comes from the early eigh-
teenth century. In 1881 Thomas Gueulette collected and published Théâtre
des boulevards, ten volumes of fairground and street-theater pieces that
were played in competition with the official monopoly then exercised by
the Comédie Française. Short introductory parade farces were presented in
an effort to attract patrons to competing theaters playing burlesques and
operettas that combined music with drama in an attempt to circumvent the
legal impediments to performance. Parades were often given on a narrow
stage outside the theater itself. Their principal characters are immediately
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familiar from the world of the commedia dell’arte—although they have
become somewhat more world-weary in their attitudes both to love and to
commerce, reflecting the social mores of the time. Arlequin was the cyni-
cal valet to Léandre, an elegant but dissipated man-about-town; the young
girl, Isabelle, was of dubious virginity, whereas Cassandre, an aged roué,
might play either her father or another elderly role. The chief butts of the
plots were a range of stupid clowns, based on street life of the day, who
provided Arlequin with targets for his practical jokes. These stupids also
provoked laughter by their antics with would-be mistresses who were often
egregiously dressed male “dames.”
In my earlier study of farce, I analyzed at some length the typical piece,
Le Marchand de merde. Judging by its early position in the collection, it
was popular but certainly not addressed to polite society: it concludes with
the miserable dolt, Gilles, sitting forlornly in the middle of the stage with
a barrel of night-soil broken over his head. Despite scatological and ribald
concerns, the piece is cleverly structured, and its combined humiliation and
deception plots leave its single key “girl” figure neither fooled nor subdued.
The chief plot concerns the men. It involves the rustic layabout, Gilles, who
has offended the bourgeois Léandre by thoughtlessly fouling the neighbor-
hood’s doorways. Appropriately enough, Gilles is duped by Léandre’s ser-
vant Arlequin into believing he can aspire to earn a professional income by
honestly marketing his own produce. Gilles is happy to try this out because
he needs to find a steady income in order to propose to Catin (an Isabelle
figure). Arlequin makes a demonstration sale to an unsuspecting apothecary,
but this rebounds when the purchaser discovers the smelly and fraudulent
nature of the goods. This happens just at the point when Gilles arrives to
cry his own wares, staggering under the weight of an enormous cask of mer-
chandise. The apothecary deals out immediate punishment for both frauds,
leaving the clown to explain to his hypocritically sympathetic friends and
mentors that learning a trade is not as easy as it looks.
AR1EQUIN: You didn’t perhaps make some mistake or other? Surely

not, it’s not a difficult profession to follow.
GILLES: No, really, I swear to you. I didn’t do anything wrong. The mer-
chandise was good, just smell it! You’ll have to bear witness to that.
The rotten Apothecary, curse his arse, he just wouldn’t sample it!
AR1EQUIN: It’s not diarrhetic by any chance?
LÉANDRE (INTERVENING): We’ll just have to hope, M. Gilles, that
you’ll have better luck next time. Don’t be discouraged and give up.
GILLES: Dammit, sir, I’m really fed up with this trade-business.
(Gueulette 1881: 1, 257–58, my translation)
Gilles’ humiliation is complete when the “lady” Catin enters, the key
female character of this parade. Very much her own woman, she scornfully
denounces him as an idiot and flounces out, seeing far more clearly than he
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does the trick that has been played on him. Still mostly uncomprehending,
and bemoaning the unreasonableness of women, Gilles is left to brood and
perhaps to try for his revenge another day in another farce.
These two examples are admittedly both drawn from the French farce
tradition and are both simple, unidirectional farces, where the laughter
comes from constantly one-upping familiar “masks” who are unable to
learn from or adapt their behavior to experience. They show that even at
this basic level, it is not really the women who are the butts in the battle of
wits, and certainly they are not the victims of trickery. There is a sense of
Bakhtinian holiday from the conventional social order in which females are
subservient: here there is a permitted time for gekokujō and inversion that
allows subordinates of both sexes to indulge themselves.
Despite this time of fun and trickery, the underlying concept of the way
social life ought to be remains fundamentally unaltered in these comedies.
This is so even though uppity rebels go unpunished, because the victims,
whether high or low, bring their own humiliation on themselves, and so
allow the audience’s social censor to sleep on undisturbed. Suffering is prin-
cipally caused by male stupidity and rigidity that ignores the dramatic real-
ity that the women characters possess far greater intelligence and at least
an equal sex drive. Given these factors, appeals by male actors for audience
sympathy are unlikely to succeed when made by pathetically incompetent
men like John John and Gilles. The role of women in these plays is thus
to bring punishment to males unable or unwilling to uphold the domi-
nant hierarchy. They are not themselves comic butts, but agents of comic
revenge.
2.1.2 Reversal Farce: Rebellion and Payback Time

In another step forward in complexity, successful revenge by the victim is
not just wished for or planned but actually permitted, introducing the theme
of the “robber robbed.” This alters the farce structure from unidirectional
to something more complex with one or more reversals of direction. When
revenge proceeds logically from the initial humiliation rather than being
somewhat arbitrary—as in some of the more protean early farces—the
result is naturally more satisfying. In this respect, the famous but anony-
mous French Farce du cuvier (“Farce of the Washtub,” circa 1500) is a small
masterpiece.
It also opens with the inversion of marital roles commonly found in
these medieval pieces, whereby the lusty wife usurps the authority of her
weak husband. Here she is aided and abetted by her mother (thus tapping
into the deep vein of mother-in-law jokes). This struggle is not about access
to lovers but equality of domestic workload—a very modern preoccupa-
tion. Despite Jacquinot’s stated determination to refuse his equal share as
demeaning, the plot reveals that (like Heywood’s John John) he spends his
days meekly helping out. In fact his list of tasks is so long that he com-
plains he cannot recall all the items. So the women propose that he write
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up un rolet (a scrolling catalogue) as an aide-memoire. Cannily, when he
agrees, he stipulates that he will only be bound to perform the listed items.
A fierce struggle ensues about some items such as nappy-washing down at
the river, and, right at the end of the negotiation, his mother-in-law has a
bright idea.
MOTHER: Oh yes, and now and then you’ll steal a moment to give her
a bit of you-know-what.
JACQUINOT: She’ll get a taste, maybe once a fortnight or a month or
thereabouts.
WIFE: No! Every day, five or six times! That’s my minimum!
JACQUINOT: God help us, there’s no way you can get that! By St
George, five or six times! Five or six times? Not even two or three!
Body of God, no way! (Bowen 1967: 24–25, my translation)
Nevertheless, the list is signed by both sides in fully legal fashion. Because it
includes helping to hand-wring the laundry over the heating copper wash-
tub, Jacquinot is immediately pressed into service before the on-stage tub
gets too hot. But then an accident occurs—or does it? As the couple stand
on either side of the great copper washtub, pulling on water-logged sheets,
by design or chance a great heave from Jacquinot tumbles his wife into the
dirty water and tangles sheets. Her pleas for help fall on surprisingly deaf
ears: her husband decides to stand on the letter of the law. Search as he will,
he cannot find this particular job included anywhere on his long scroll—
there is nothing about rescuing her from the tub.
The arrival of the shrill mother-in-law does not help break the deadlock—
she is a traditional mask in the mold identified by Kuipers (2006a: 187; see
also Shade 2010). Jacquinot mechanically repeats that the task of saving his
wife’s life is “not on the list.” At length he offers a bargain: if his wife will
acknowledge his position as master in the house, he will use his strength to
pull her out. She rapidly agrees—or does she? “I’ll do all the housework
and never ask you to help and never order you about—except when I just
have to!” sounds very much like giving him fair warning that nothing will
really change. But for better or for worse, she is hauled out and the ensuing
conventional reconciliation temporarily restores some kind of normality.
Interestingly, it was this kind of reversal achieved by a henpecked hus-
band that Heywood preferred to omit when he adapted his interlude of
John John from the French Farce du pasté. In the original, the victim is
driven beyond all endurance by his wife and her lover-priest, seizes the bag
of flour he has been given, and literally “makes a pie” by pasting over the
Curé (priest). The complex symmetry found in both French originals is
innately more satisfying than a simple humiliation plot. Both also have a
degree of precision in the way in which the weapon of attack or humilia-
tion is turned back upon the attacker. Le Cuvier is nevertheless the better
constructed—and therefore funnier—because its reverse movement is highly
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effective. It is also sustained long enough to provide some real balance to
the opening scenes of humiliation and allows the equivocal ending, which
underlines the eternal and continuing nature of the conflict.
Le Cuvier was probably written by and for the law clerks of the medieval
society called the Basoche,15 and certainly the limitations of the law when
confronted with real life lie at the heart of its joking. This legal facet is
a perfect exemplar of the Bergsonian comic struggle between rigidity and
the life-force. It continues to be exploited for laughs in annual law student
revues in today’s Australian universities and elsewhere. The tradition has
proved a productive training ground for brilliant comedians such as the
British Monty Python team (see Carpenter 2000: 303–6) and The Chaser
team in Australia (see The Chaser n.d.).
The point of the joke in Le Cuvier is that the whole purpose of the legal
agreement is defeated by applying a strict constructionist interpretation.
The metaphorical sense in which Jacquinot has bound himself to the (writ-
ing on the) scroll becomes concrete as he tangles with the bulky thing (one
visualizes it unscrolling all over the floor, the tub, and the mother-in-law,
while he pores over it with excruciating slowness, spelling out each item
to try and find the vital words, “save wife from drowning”). The women’s
intended weapon of control turns in its victim’s hand to become an instru-
ment of passive-aggressive retaliation in a way totally unforeseen by them.
Despite this, the women’s roles here are hardly subservient or adjunct.
They form a league to initiate the plot; they demand assistance, sexual ser-
vice, and respect; and they understand enough of the law to want all these
things codified in a binding legal agreement—postnuptial rather than pre-
nuptial, it should be noted. Although they suffer a setback, this promises
to be only temporary, because farce characters do not change their nature.
At the end of the play, a future round two can be anticipated in this ongo-
ing battle for the trousers—and for enough sex all round. Even in a retalia-
tive “robber robbed” farce structure like this, the very symmetry of balance
achieved implies that neither side can predict a lasting victory. Dominance is
challenged, retaliates, but must fight again on another day.
2.1.3 Quarrel Farce: The Equilibrium of Shared Stupidity

Beyond the simple forwards-then-backwards movement of a reversal farce
is the more complex structure of a quarrel farce. Here, a series of coun-
tervailing reversals takes place very quickly, compressed into a single play.
The result is an almost permanent oscillation between two characters or
two opposing forces. Observing the principle at work in French medieval
farces, Barbara C. Bowen (1964: 37–38) termed it le balancier (the coun-
terpoise): “To begin with, the first element gains ascendancy—and it is
irrelevant whether this is just or not—and then the second.” Bearing the
seeds of its own permanent renewal, this perpetual “tit-for-tat” poses quite
a challenge for a farce writer to terminate. The comic patterns created can
be quite sophisticated—in some cases even posing metaphysical questions
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about the nature of reality and perception. Two short farces, one by the
early Spanish farceur Lope de Rueda (fl. 1550), the other by Anton Chekhov
(1860–1904), exemplify this kind of joking about the nature of the human
condition, as well as about the battle of the sexes, in which the female roles
turn out to be quite crucial.
In Lope’s Paso séptimo (also known as de las aceitunas or “of the
olives”), the old peasant, Toruvio, and his snappish wife, Águeda, nearly
come to blows over the price their daughter should charge for their olives
when she takes them to market. The quarrel is absurd, because they have
only just planted their single olive tree—which, as a Spanish audience would
know, will not fruit for five or six years. But for them, the prospect is very
concretely in the here and now. So much so that their young daughter,
Mencigüela, is drawn into their argument, dutifully siding first with one,
then with the other parent. The principle of the counterpoise becomes
embodied in the figure of the girl crisscrossing the stage as she takes the line
of least resistance.
TORUVIO: What do you mean, “Two Castilian reals”? Come here Men-
cigüela, how much are you going to ask?
MENCIGÜELA: Whatever you say, Father.
TORUVIO: Fourteen or fifteen dineros.
MENCIGÜELA: So be it, Father.
ÁGUEDA: What do you mean, “So be it, Father”? Come here. How
much are you going to ask?
MENCIGÜELA: Whatever you say, Mother.
ÁGUEDA: Two Castilian reals. (Flores 1968: 16)
When fighting breaks out between the two parents, it is Mencigüela-in-the-

middle who most unfairly catches the blows. Her yells attract a friendly
neighbor who agrees to act as arbitrator, but when he wants to inspect the
quality of the olives, he finds they are not available. Step by patient step,
he tracks down the fictitious fruit and berates the couple back to sanity. The
daughter’s tears are dried when she is promised a new dress by her repentant
parents—but when she learns she will only get it when the olives are sold, it
is clear to the audience that the joke is still alive. Ignoring reality, the stub-
born peasants are still fixated on their putative fruit-to-be.
In farce, physical objects frequently play a focal role. Humans who
should be in control of events find themselves dominated by and chas-
ing after inanimate props that take on an apparent life of their own. The
laughter provoked by this bears out Bergson’s insight about the mechanical
versus the flexible as an important source of comic tension. The power of
this joke is doubled however when the object exists only in the minds of
the characters on stage. This is the case in Lope’s paso, where the parents’
mental facilities are shown to be as hapless and inflexible as their physical
bodies. The victims of this joke are quite precisely matched, husband and
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wife equally stupid, and each giving as good as s/he gets. Their daughter,
although not party to the quarrel, lacks the authority to do anything about
it. However, in a classic (but realistic) inversion of conventional wisdom,
she proves wiser than her parents—quick-witted enough to see that she can
only win by bringing in a tie-breaker from outside. When even this figure is
unable to switch off the “perpetual balancier” effect, it becomes clear that
male and female are matched in their illusionary avarice and that sanity
resides with the powerless child, despite her apparent role as butt of the
comic beatings.
In later dramatic epochs such as our own, this aspect of farce as conflict
in perpetual motion has become increasingly attractive to dramatists for
the possibilities it offers of exploring emotional cruelty and creating what
can be termed “black” or “gallows” humor. From the early precursors
of the Theater of the Absurd onwards, farce techniques have been used
like this for the purposes of existential reflection, changing the nature
and emotional charge of the laughter they create (Davis 2003: 17–18;
143–45).
2.1.4 The Farce of Sexual Violence

The quarrel structure openly admits that both sides are to blame but power-
less to change. As noted earlier, this creates a challenge to find any ending
other than perpetual motion. One technique for resolving such a dispute
was used several times by Chekhov in his short farces, The Bear, The Pro-
posal, and The Anniversary. These were written for the actors of the Korsh
Theater Company in the period 1885–91 and when published were all sub-
titled “jokes in one-act.” Each farce focuses on an apparently irreconcil-
able clash between the opposing forces of male and female but—with deep
psychological insight—gradually reveals that the clash is not a simple oppo-
sition but a combination of attraction and repulsion. Thus, theoretically,
if the magnets could once be briefly aligned, they might be stabilized in
mutual attraction.
In The Bear (1888, also translated as The Boor and The Brute), the
young widow Popova has sentimentally determined to mourn her husband
in seclusion, despite his past ill treatment of her. She is outraged when a
rough-mannered country squire (Smirnov, the Bear) arrives, demanding she
repay her husband’s debt to him. She tells him she cannot be concerned with
such crude matters. Accusations and counter-accusations fly as Smirnov sees
through Popova’s affectations and says so loudly. Presenting herself as the
exemplar of woman’s capacity to be faithful despite their husbands, she
provokes the Bear to retort, “You may have buried yourself alive, but you
haven’t forgotten to powder your face.” When the useless old servant Luka
is called to eject the intruder, he roars at him, causing Luka to faint from
fright. Popova becomes even angrier, moving from insults to challenging the
Bear to a duel. When she leaves to fetch the pistols, Luka (who has revived)
also rushes out for help.
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At this point Smirnov begins to realize that his own emotions are not
simple and soliloquizes:
SMIRNOV: That’s a woman for you! A woman like that I can understand!
A real woman! Not a sour-faced nincompoop but fiery, gunpowder!
Fireworks! I’m even sorry to have to kill her! (Chekhov 1965: 239)
When the lady proves determined on a duel, his control begins to crack—as
does the furniture.
POPOVA (LAUGHS ANGRILY): He likes me! He dares say that he

likes me! (Points to the door.) Out!
SMIRNOV (LOADS THE REVOLVER IN SILENCE, TAKES CAP AND
GOES; AT THE DOOR, STOPS FOR HALF A MINUTE WHILE
THEY LOOK AT EACH OTHER IN SILENCE; THEN HE AP-
PROACHES POPOVA HESITANTLY): Listen . . . Are you still an-
gry? I’m extremely irritated, but, do you understand me, how can I
express it . . . the fact is, that, you see, strictly speaking . . . (he shouts)
Is it my fault, really, for liking you? (Grabs the back of a chair; chair
cracks and breaks.) Why the hell do you have such fragile furniture!
I like you! Do you understand? I . . . I’m almost in love with you!
POPOVA: Get away from me—I hate you! (Chekhov 1965: 240–41)
Words give way to physical contact, with effects that are at first tentative
but then decisive:
SMIRNOV (APPROACHING HER): How angry I am with myself! I’m

in love like a student . . . (Puts his arm around her waist.) I’ll never
forgive myself for this . . .
POPOVA: Get away from me! Get your hands away! I . . . hate you!
I . . . challenge you! (Prolonged kiss.) (Chekhov 1965: 242)
The unthinkable has happened—to the amazement of the servants when

they enter. In some confusion and embarrassment—rare for a character in
farce—their mistress acknowledges her change of heart by countermanding
the order she had previously given for extra oats for her husband’s favorite
horse. The stage directions note that she avoids their eyes as she does so.
Once again, the female role in the battle of the sexes claims equal status
in this farce, despite ultimately conforming to social expectations. Popova
admits defeat while claiming victory—but so too does Smirnov, so hon-
ors seem even. The servants (male and female) may justifiably doubt the
longevity of this strangely magnetic attraction—further dueling may seem
more likely than unalloyed marital bliss—but maybe wrongly. Who can tell,
given the complex human psychology that Chekhov manages to incorporate
into his fixed comic masks? Certainly to deliver this comic gem successfully,
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acting skills of a very high quality are required, particularly for the crucial
woman’s role.
2.1.5 The Snowball Farce: The Egalitarianism of Suffering

Beyond the two-directional movement of reversals and quarrels, farce
plots tend to have a circular structure in which all the characters are
caught up together as victims of a joker or the crossed wires of a mutual
misunderstanding—what Bergson called the “interference of series.” here,
two or more independent and unconnected plotlines intersect, leading to
confusion on the part of characters who cannot understand what is hap-
pening to them. Eric Bentley (1958: xx) describes these circular structures
as creating a kind of “closed mental system, a world of its own, lit by its
own lurid and unnatural sun [. . .] Danger is omnipresent. One touch, we
feel, and we shall be sent spinning in space.” Combined with a natural-
istic setting, these “snowball structures” (the term is Bergson’s) accom-
modate extreme comic violence—more successfully in fact in terms of
laughter production than stylized and endistanced worlds such as puppet
theater or animated cartoons. One, Georges Courteline’s Les Boulingrin
(The Boulingrin Family), is the most violent stage farce I know: its struc-
ture combines a snowball with a straightforward humiliation farce (Davis
2003: 9–10).
Not as well known outside France as it should be, Les Boulingrin
(literally “The Bowling-Greens”) was first performed in 1898 at the Grand
Guignol theater in Paris. Unlike most of Courteline’s farces, it is short and
thus highly focused. Its principal victim is Monsieur Des Rillettes (rillettes is a
potted shredded meat; thus, one might translate the name as Mr. Mincemeat),
a self-centered and self-invited dinner guest. Although his hosts, Monsieur
and Madame Boulingrin, compete in devotion to his comfort, like little Men-
cigüela, he becomes reluctant witness to a domestic squabble that escalates
as the evening progresses. Springing politely to the lady’s defense when her
manners are criticized, his actions simply increase the level of complaint and
counter-complaint. Words turn to blows, blows to kicks and hair-pulling—
all of which seem unintentionally to land on him as the victim. Although
the intention is to provide him with a better seat, his chair is snatched from
beneath him so that he lands on the floor. He is forced to taste just how
badly corked the wine is, how awful the soup (“genuine ratsbane”), and
in the process both liquids are spilled on his evening suit. Finally, when the
husband grabs a revolver and threatens Madame’s life, she seizes her guest
as a shield. Darkness descends as the lights are shot out; Des Rillettes suf-
fers a calf wound and falls. There is a crescendo of noise and destruction
as plates and windows are smashed. Finally fire breaks out and, on stage, a
lurid red light increases while the maid (who has previously been pestered
by sexual advances from Des Rillettes) manages to tips a bucket of water
blindly over him as he crawls about trying to escape from the madhouse.
The curtain falls with the sound of a fire engine’s galloping horses. But it
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cannot deter the host, who returns exclaiming, “But you mustn’t go, Mon-
sieur Des Rillettes! You’re going to drink a glass of champagne with us!”
(Courteline 1929: 2, 49, my translation).
In production this farce is uproariously funny, exploiting for maximum
comic effect the selfishness and folly it portrays without bitterness or cen-
soriousness. Des Rillettes’s greediness about insinuating himself into free
hospitality is duly punished—but there is a pleasing ambiguity as to whether
this is done wittingly or not by his hosts. This is especially unclear in the
case of the maid and her bucket of water—which adds an extra layer of
hilarity to the closing scene. Between the egotism of the wife and that of
her husband there is not a jot of difference, and each step in the escalating
violence of their quarrel is perfectly calibrated. At no time is any deliberate
aggression shown toward the guest, so that social conventions of politeness
toward the outsider are never broken. The essence of the joke is that the
humiliation is all accidental and self-imposed.
It is entirely consistent with the tradition of farce outlined earlier that the
victim—the would-be freeloader—is male. Madame Boulingrin is an essen-
tial and equal partner with her husband in ensuring (whether intentionally
or not) that the intruder’s presumption is punished. At the close of the farce
she remains locked in equipoise with her husband in a marriage of mutual
hate and discord, which the outsider has learned he should avoid. The sec-
ond female role—that of the maid—scores a bonus for women and all right-
minded men in the audience by dousing the intrusive and presumptuous
visitor. Carried out by his social inferior, the ambiguous intentionality of
this act allows the audience to enjoy an underling’s retaliation without guilt
or any open challenge to the established social hierarchy. It forms the climax
of the interloper’s physical degradation and humiliation.
3. CONCLUSION
Although women’s roles in these farces are unquestionably pivotal, they

necessarily reflect the gendered roles of their times. No fully successful or
permanent revolutions are shown, nor do the plays do more than tempo-
rarily suspend conventional social norms. Nevertheless they all depend on
an essential egalitarianism between the sexes, in terms of who speaks, who
reveals what they want—and what it is they want—and who initiates action.
Despite their varied origins, all the farces studied seem remarkably modern
in several respects. All are based on the premise that men and women are
co-equal in sexual matters, in aggression, in general intelligence, and in the
ability to get things done—or fail to get them done. The reverse is also
true: the two sexes are equally lacking in insight, equally self-preoccupied,
and equally unable to see the impact of their behavior on others. As a gen-
eral reaction, contemplating the plots outside the atmosphere of the theater
auditorium and in the cold light of academic analysis, one is reminded of
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Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum, “Hell is other people.” What is surprising
is how funny that can be, in the right circumstances.
In terms of performance, farce remains par excellence the theater of
physical jokes. It follows that the true leading roles will always be reserved
for “those who get kicked,” that is, the hapless victims at the receiving
end of all the trickeries, confusions, and deceptions—the John Johns, the
Des Rillettes, the little Mencigüelas, and the wives in the washtub. When
Lucien Guitry, leading French tragic actor of the nineteenth century, asked
the famous farceur, Georges Feydeau, to write a farce in which he could star,
Feydeau replied:
My dear Lucien, there are two principal figures in my theater . . . those

who deliver kicks to the backside and those who receive them. But it is
the latter who have the leading role, because they create the laughter.
And you, Lucien—well, I just can’t see you receiving kicks on your bot-
tom. (Lorcey 1972: 141, my translation and emphasis).
Unlike our tragic hero, most women know very well about not taking them-
selves too seriously and dealing with comic attacks as in their crucial roles
in farce down the ages. There are of course exceptions. With the advances
of women in leadership roles today, perhaps the number of both men and
women who inhabit the corridors of overweening power is growing. To lose
self-perspective is to invite joking revolt. Like all art, farce should over time
reflect evolutionary patterns in social attitudes including those to women’s
roles. In 2012, Mel Brooks found it possible to stage successfully his farcical
anti-Nazi musical, The Producers (2001), in the heart of Germany, reflecting
changes in cultural attitudes about subjects for joking. Perhaps one can see
Absolutely Fabulous, a widely admired 1990s BBC TV series, as a pioneering
step forward, given its farcical plots focused on all-female intergenerational
conflicts about fantasy and reality, selfishness and fashion.16 Evaluating joke
memes to see what the Internet generation finds humorous, Limor Shifman
and Dafna Lemish (2010) saw some indicators that feminism is gradually
transmuting into what they call “fun(ny)mism”—a more relaxed attitude
about joking at the expense of women. The possibility seems tantalizingly
close of new farce plots that exploit the comic potential of powerful women
being subverted by other women (and the occasional man).
NOTES
1. For a review of fMRI scan research results into differences between male and
female subjects during humorous laughter, see Azim and colleagues (2005).
For a full discussion, see Chapter 8 by Martin in this volume.
2. Such roles have been studied by Taaffe (1994). Textual evidence about women
in Old Comedy (impersonated by male actors) is documented in Olson (2007)
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and discussed by O’Higgins (2003). Women’s roles were even more crucial
for the later New Comedy, as Traill (2008) has demonstrated.
3. Armande Grésinde Claire Elizabethe Béjart (1645–1700) was sister to
Molière’s first love, Madeleine Béjart (1618–72, stage name Mlle Hervé).
Beatrice (Bea) Lillie (b. Canada 1894, d. England 1989) was a star of film and
stage, especially known for her roles in revues and light comedies on both
sides of the Atlantic; Lucille Désirée Ball (1911–89), American film, televi-
sion, stage, and radio actress, was star of the sitcom series I Love Lucy. For
an account of both, see Tucker (2007).
4. For a list of female pioneers in British radio comedy between 1950 and 1995,
from Irene Handl to Margaret Rutherford, see The Comediennes (n.d.).
5. To illustrate for one or two periods only, see Beam (2007: 11–17) on mixed
audiences for fifteenth-century farce in Dijon; on mid-eighteenth-century
London theater attendance by respectable women, see Pedicord (1954:
48–50). For the likely presence of women in the theaters of Dionysus, see
O’Higgins (2003: 135–38).
6. Ewans (2011) discusses the high competence required from male actors who
had to impersonate a wide range of female and interchangeably sexed roles
and also the extraordinary permissions granted in the theater of Aristophanes
to obscenity and personal invective, as well as to satire.
7. For instance, see Lisa Perfetti’s (2013) exploration of a late fifteenth-century
French farce, Les Femmes qui apprennent à parler latin (“The women who
learn to speak Latin”) as an early celebration of educated women. In fact,
a complete analysis of the plot shows that the aspiring females prove them-
selves hopeless students. In doing so, they expose to ridicule the supposedly
enlightened university member (the Provincial) who admitted them. Here,
as in several of the cases I discuss in this chapter, the principal butt of the joke
is not the stupid women, but the unrealistic man who is humiliated in front
of his colleagues (Cohen 1949: 123–34).
8. Attending the Paris institution Crazy Horse in the mid-70s, I found that my
own mixed group’s equal appreciation of the show was a microcosm of the
general audience. Judging by applause and vocalizations, the spectacular
mise en scène and the skill of the dancers, jugglers, and magicians more than
outweighed the “scantily clad” factor as a draw card.
9. This article is a review of Pink Dominos, adapted in 1877 for the London
stage from Les dominos roses by A. N. Hennequin and A. L. Delacour.
10. For a summary of the history of these earliest named farces and evidence of
their popularity, see Davis (2003: 77–78).
11. Noises Off was first performed in 1982 at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith,
and the Savoy Theatre, London. Gasping was first performed in 1990 at the
Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London. Elton, with Richard Curtis, authored
the famous Blackadder sketches starring Rowan Atkinson for BBC TV
between 1983 and 1989.
12. The earliest examples of such use of farcical techniques for non-farce pur-
poses can be found, however, in Aristophanes.
13. The following descriptions of these plots are based with kind permission of
Transaction Publishing on more extended discussion of the texts in Davis
(2003: ch. 2–4).
14. By the terms “victim” and “butt,” I mean those characters and roles in far-
cical conflicts who are physically or mentally humiliated by the (temporar-
ily triumphant) comic rebels. This usage differs from that of, for example,
Joanne Gilbert, who writes of female stand-up comics such as Phyllis Diller
that they present themselves as victim in order to make society the butt of
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their joking (2004: 29; 163). The actor’s relationship with the audience and
the constraints of plot structure make for very different comic possibilities in
scripted comedy than in stand-up, where the comic artist may improvise and
interact directly with audience.
15. The Basoche was one of many festive associations of lay people staging plays
(among other things) in various European countries during the sixteenth cen-
tury before permanent theater companies and theaters were established. See
Beam (2007: 21–24, 196–204).
16. Absolutely Fabulous, written by Jennifer Saunders and starring Joanna
Lumley, Jennifer Saunders, and Julia Sawalha, screened on the BBC from
1992 to 1996 and a second series from 2001 to 2004.
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4 The School for Scandal
Humor and the Scandalized Narrative
in Women’s Speculative Fiction
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
Susan Sontag, generally not thought of as a student of comedy and humor,

nevertheless speculated in a speech to PEN about just that. The comic, she
said, is “essentially a theory of non-knowing, or pretending not to know, or
partial knowing” (2004: 92). She goes on to explore film comedies, espe-
cially the old silent ones, referring to the innocence of heroes like Charlie
Chaplin, whose helpless interactions with modern society, whose apparent
“defect of understanding and childlikeness,” are the stuff of both laughter
and tears. But Sontag’s primary subject is the writing of Gertrude Stein,
whom she regards as quite simply a great comic writer. At the same time,
Sontag is characteristically insightful into another aspect of the theory of
the comic: that it is also a theory of performance: “By comic, I don’t mean
anything really different from funny. And by a comic writer, a great comic
writer, I mean a comic person; I mean a persona; I mean a constructed voice
[. . .] I mean a comic persona. And finally by defect of understanding and
childlikeness, I don’t mean to suggest anything other than the ruthless intel-
lectual brilliance and the adult imperiousness” (n.p.) of any great comic
artist, and of the subtle Stein in particular.
This chapter will explore the import of Sontag’s connection of the comic
and the performative in the works of several works of speculative fiction by
women. It is not simply a matter of displaying the performativity of gender,
although that is at the heart of the matter. It is that, like feminist political the-
ater, feminist speculative texts are designed, in the words of theater theorist
Janelle Reinelt (1990: 150), to “make ideology visible [. . .] to foreground
and examine ideologically-determined beliefs and unconscious habitual per-
ceptions.” Each of the novels I consider is, in essence, a school for scandal,
staging for the reader, male and female alike, an education, a “leading out,”
of what is, in each case, presented as a kind of ignorance about the con-
structedness of gender. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland ([1915] 1992),
Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s
Country ([1988] 1989) are three speculative fantasies that re-envision the
nature of gender and society, and reflect back the illogicalities of contem-
poraneous gender ideologies at the same time. These incongruities are the
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54 Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
source of the texts’ transformative charge but they are also the source of the
narratives’ ironical humor.
Of the three novels, only The Female Man is typically described as comic.
But all three in fact exploit the resources of humor, not only by including the
rhetorical humor of jokes, but also by consciously invoking the genres of
satire and comedy. I suggest that one textual strategy for the use of humor
and comedy in such texts is to “scandalize,” in the active sense of “to make
scandalous,” the ideology of female inferiority and repression that has long
exiled women from the realm of wit, humor, and speculation alike. A second
strategy for employing humor is also to scandalize the reader in two senses:
first, that the reader is made to see and judge the scandal of women’s subjec-
tion; second, that the reader is made to feel the embarrassment of not seeing,
“not knowing,” and of having to admit that ignorance as it is represented
before him or her on an imaginative stage.
1. HUMOR AND GENDER
According to theater theoretician Herbert Blau (1992a: 4), the fact that the
image of the woman has itself been linked, through the entire history of
the theater, to the status of commodity has been “the ideological burden
of much recent theory”; there is “no way” for women “to escape the com-
modity form.” Feminist theory as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft has rec-
ognized the crucial connection of theatricality and commodification;1 her
employment of tropes of gender performativity throughout, most notably,
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remarkably anticipates analyses
nearly two centuries later of the female subject. Calling them “cyphers,”
Wollstonecraft (1992: 107, 263, 144) blames women’s insignificance (both
perceived and actual) on their own cultivation of appearances according to a
“false system of female manners,” with the consequent creation of an “arti-
ficial character.” She understands (1992: 258) very clearly that so-called
feminine behavior is a “masquerade” (her word), a “display of affection
which is put on merely because it is the appropriated insignia of a certain
character.” Female sexual character, as she puts it, satisfies a notion of femi-
ninity created by men and designed to maintain the patriarchal authority
men have established over women. The “great art of pleasing men” (1992: 111)
has made woman invisible, and thus it is the “making visible” of women’s
“false” sexual character that Wollstonecraft seeks.
Nearly two hundred years later, contemporary feminist philosophers have
been rigorously filling out Wollstonecraft’s historically precocious insight
into the performative and theatrical nature of sexual character, as she called
it. For the purposes of this chapter, I point only to the exemplary work
of Luce Irigaray (1985), first, and of Judith Butler (1990) after her. What
most interests me is Irigaray’s highlighting of the theatricality of women’s
behavior and (self)definition in her famous formulations of “masquerade”
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The School for Scandal 55
(la mascarade) and “mimicry” (le mimétisme), whereby women “act,”
either unselfconsciously or with deliberate irony, according to a notion of
sexual character that is dictated by contemporary gender ideologies. Just
as Wollstonecraft (1992: 144) recognized women’s theatricalized behavior
to be a “false system of manners” that reduces a woman to a caricature of
male desire, Irigaray describes her own notion of masquerade in negative
terms as “what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire,
to participate in man’s desire, but at the price of renouncing their own”
(1985: 133). The masquerading woman is unselfconscious and unaware
that she is so; she therefore loses herself, because any pleasure she may feel
from “being a woman” comes from “being chosen as an object of consump-
tion or of desire by masculine ‘subjects’ ” (1985: 84).
Nevertheless Irigaray (1985: 76), contra Blau, does see a way to escape
the wholesale commodification of the female body, whether in the mar-
riage market or on the stage, that is, through a second type of theatricalized
behavior she calls mimicry (le mimétisme):
One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already
to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to
begin to thwart it. [. . .] To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to
try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allow-
ing herself to be simply reduced to it.
This sort of duplicitous mimicry gives women a critical distance from

themselves, Irigaray seems to argue (1985: 76), even as, or because, she
“resubmit[s] herself [. . .] to ‘ideas,’ in particular to ideas about herself, that
are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible,’ by an
effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible.” Women
gain thereby a sort of ironical double consciousness, a presence in their
apparent absence, and thereby initiate a resistance to their (en)forced invis-
ibility.2 As Irigaray (1985: 76) points out, “if women are such good mimics,
it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain
elsewhere,” [emphasis in original] simultaneously visible and invisible, pres-
ent and absent.
The figurations of visibility and invisibility in Irigaray’s notions of mas-
querade and mimicry, as well as their implicit recognition of the resis-
tance functions of irony, will provide the crucial theoretical background
for my discussions of the several contemporary novels. But I would add
to this broad-brush outline of that background a further elaboration of
Irigaray’s work in the writing of Judith Butler. Butler (1990: 47, emphasis
added) accepts much of Irigaray’s descriptions of the “playful” (both in
the sense of theatricalized and in the sense of pleasure seeking) nature of
gender, and agrees that the burden of women is to “initiate feminist strate-
gies of unmasking in order to recover or release whatever feminine desire
has remained suppressed within the terms of the phallic economy.” Butler’s
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attention to the pressure of ideology upon performative gender construc-
tion undergirds her description of gender as in fact a “repeated stylization
of the body” that she later describes as “ritual social drama,” interest-
ingly reviving Wollstonecraft’s theatricalized notion of “sexual character”
(1990: 33, 140). Butler’s analysis of the surface politics of the body is one
Wollstonecraft (1992: 190, 202) would have recognized in her own descrip-
tion of women’s pathological attention to the surfaces of their bodies—the
dress, the cosmetics, the arts of coquetry—which together form a “system
of dissimulation” that Wollstonecraft associates with a theatrical duplicity.
What Butler (1990: 136) adds to Wollstonecraft’s analysis is a postmodern
recognition of the active play from both directions; that is, she describes the
almost literal “incorporation” of culture by the woman’s body; she stresses
gender’s polymorphously productive relation to cultural fantasy; and she
defines the contingency of the performative structure of gender, given the
absence, in her view, of any ontological status of the gendered body “apart
from the various acts which constitute its reality.” Whereas Wollstonecraft
might not have accepted that gender is an entire illusion, Butler’s empha-
sis on the endlessly productive interaction of individual, society, and cul-
tural fantasy in the performance of gender would have been familiar to her
thinking.
The rhetoric of theater and role-playing among these philosophers is not
merely figurative, for it describes what each philosopher sees as a literal
theatricalization of women’s behavior, a ritual with origins so obscure as to
nearly blind insight. But it is precisely the discernment of falseness that is
insisted upon in each case: Wollstonecraft’s early exposure of the ironically
complicit nature of women’s subjection is a keynote that will sound in Iri-
garay’s call for deliberate role-playing, or mimicry; Irigaray’s exploration of
masquerade and mimicry; and Butler’s strategies of unmasking and analy-
ses of drag (the latter certainly an instance of comic persona construction).
These theoretical discussions of performative identity and social drama will
resonate strongly in these novels’ pervasive references to theatricality, as
each author explores the performative, indeed often ritualistic, nature of
female (and male) identity and women’s ability to actively construct their
places in a social space, either in complicity with existing forms or in resis-
tance to them. The trope of theatricality fulfills well, in other words, the
manner in which, according to Jennifer Burwell (1997: xii), the “utopian
form in literature ‘visualizes’ certain logics in theories of social transforma-
tion.” This visualization constitutes not only the polemic of these novels but
to a large extent their very plots, as the narratives expose the transformative
possibilities inherent both in the nature of the theater of the body and in the
agency discoverable in a social space that is understood to be itself theatrical
and, therefore, open to the play of irony and humor alike.
These observations provide a general theoretical context for a new wave
of humor studies that have begun exploring the nature of female/feminist
humor. Although critics of humor in literature, according to Regina Barreca
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(1988: 3), have for centuries offered their “speculations on why humor
remains beyond the reach of women,” recent revisionary studies by Barreca,
Nancy Walker, and many others have taken us a considerable way toward
understanding, if not exactly dispelling, the centuries-long allegation that
women are not funny. Scholars have traced this tradition to a ferocious
repulsion of women’s enthusiastic participation in ancient festivals and cults,
in which the jesting and “scoffing” said to be typical of these ceremonies
is deemed inappropriate, if not outright dangerous, to an ordered soci-
ety.3 The fear of performing women, women with a persona that acts, that
mocks, that challenges, is at the heart of this narrative of the ideological
“original sin.” And in the centuries since, women’s supposed lack of a sense
of humor clearly is a consequence of the association of women with the
body, rather than with the brain. As Eileen Gillooly (1999) explains in her
important feminist contribution to humor studies, what has been defined as
“humor” is equivalent to “wit”—the kind of superior knowing and intel-
lectual edge that men possess and that women were long judged incapable
of. Gillooly’s reading of Austen and other nineteenth-century women writ-
ers is akin to Sontag’s reading of Stein: the humor of someone like Austen
comes from exposing the ignorance the “partial knowers,” male and female,
who become targets of laughter because we are—or have been led by the
author—to “know better.”
My focus on the scandal of humor in women’s speculative fiction emerges,
then, from the connection between “performing irony” precisely as a way of
speculating about other imagined possibilities. Although irony and humor
are not the same thing, these works are not simply ironical but in many
instances funny—sometimes with a kind of sly humor; sometimes in a slap-
stick mode; sometimes with a very dark, ironical self-awareness. In any of
those cases, what’s “funny” about them is precisely their engagement with
the politics of what is supposedly “known,” but exposed as not known or
as misunderstood.4 The positive scandal of the imaginative literature we
call “speculative” is in forcing both men and women to see the nature of
ideological un-knowing, and to admit to the self-interestedness in dwell-
ing among the community of “partial knowers” who are too afraid, or
too stubborn, to learn. As Julie Giese (1998: 111) observes, “the ability of
feminism to produce socially regenerative narratives is central to this inter-
change [between literary and social history]: feminist struggles ‘have got to
result in happy ends for all’ [quoting Maxine Hong Kingston]”; one model
for “narrativizing social change” is the “process of comically transforming
outcomes as an act of imaginative revision.”
2. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S HERLAND
So tenacious are our sexual ideologies that to a large degree the situa-
tion today remains little changed from the one Gillooly describes in the
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nineteenth-century novel, or that Sontag teases out in the comedy of Stein: it
remains the case that the humorous woman—whether in writing, on stage,
or at a cocktail party—is a kind of scandal (indeed we can extend this scan-
dal to the male-in-drag, another betrayer of masculine dominance). Humor
is “historically considered a masculine enterprise” (Gillooly 1999: 15):
the display of wit, “essentially” indecorous for a woman, is viewed as a
kind of spectacle. The frenzies and mockeries of ancient female cultists;
the excesses of vaudeville artist Lillian Shaw in the early twentieth century
(see Kibler 1998); the brazen laughter and the “largeness” of presence of a
Roseanne Barr (see J. R. Gilbert 2004: 140–50);5 the “shock” of both word
and gesture in the performances of Karen Finley: all of these have evoked
“scandalized” responses from viewers offended by a woman not conform-
ing to an ideological persona for women that is without agency, wits, or
will. The unexpected “rapier wit” of women writers may be delivered with
the sleights of the pen in the restrained work of an Austen, a Stein, or, as we
will see, a Gilman; it can also be delivered with an angry flourish from the
pen of a Russ. What each artist, whether on stage or in text, has in common
is her exploitation of performance’s power: they all “perform their mar-
ginality in order to make audiences laugh—ultimately, at social construc-
tions that they (even unknowingly) help to create” (J. R. Gilbert 2004: 25;
emphasis added).
This describes well the source of much of the humor of Gilman’s Herland.
Narrator Vandyck Jennings acknowledges as much in the earliest pages of
the text, a retrospective accounting of his and his friends’ discovery of the
remote Herland:
And with all my airs of sociological superiority I was no nearer

[in their speculations of what they would find in the “Woman Country”
reported by tribal guides] than any of them. It was funny, though, in the
light of what we did find, those extremely clear ideas of ours as to what
a country of women would be like. It was no use to tell ourselves and
one another that all this was idle speculation. We were idle and we did
speculate. (Gilman 1992: 10).
But their speculations could only imagine women who conformed entirely
to an ideological projection as conventional as it was incorrect.6
Once they reach Herland, the men’s first reactions could be characterized
as amused disbelief in the face of the incongruous contrast of speculation
and reality: “They were girls, of course, no boys could ever have shown that
sparkling beauty, and yet none of us was certain at first” (1992: 17). Follow-
ing their unsuccessful rush to breach the women’s building, during which
they are literally carried off and subdued with anesthesia, Vandyke describes
a slow “awakening” that he compares to “the mental experience of coming
back to life, through lifting veils of dream” (1992: 26). This indeed paral-
lels the topsy-turvy territory of romance comedies such as A Midsummer
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Night’s Dream,7 the three men finding themselves “stripped and washed and
put to bed like so many yearling babies—by these highly civilized women”
(1992: 27). Once fully awake and dressed in the “costume” of the land,
they are “feeling like a lot of neuters” (1992: 28). As in Shakespeare’s com-
edy, the gentle humor of Herland lies in its presentation of what Gillooly
(1999: 27–28) calls its presentation of a “transitional space [. . .] an area
of creative play, liminal to both psychic and external reality, where law is
suspended, anxiety is kept at bay, and desire is safely mediated.” Safely
mediated indeed—but only thanks to the women’s almost comically literal
“upper hand,” five of the women grasping each one of the men and carrying
them overhead into one of their buildings before putting them to sleep and
“neutering” them.
We see early on the scandalized response of Herland’s three male pro-
tagonists to the inexplicably “unladylike” behavior and appearance of
this country’s citizens, which contrast with their expectations: the travel-
ers immediately notice the short hair, the loose and practical clothing, the
women’s extraordinary physical agility, their “impressive [. . .] absence of
irritability” (1992: 48)—and their sheer intelligence:
These women [remarks Vandyck] whose essential distinction of moth-

erhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly
deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very promptly to
the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not
feminine at all, but merely reflected masculinity—developed to please
us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real
fulfillment of their great process. But Terry came to no such conclusion.
(1992: 60)
And thus does Terry become the butt of most of this story’s humor, to the
extent that even the narrator and fellow traveler Jeff find themselves “eye-
ing Terry mischievously” (1992: 53) as they egg him on in the display of his
un-knowing. Much of Herland’s narrative plot consists, as in so many uto-
pian novels, of these unknowing protagonists receiving their educations—
with Terry having most to learn. Terry is almost immediately offended by
the women’s curiosity about his culture, and by their effort to educate him
in their own:
I’m sick of it! [. . .] Sick of the whole thing [. . .] cooped up as helpless

as a bunch of three-year-old orphans, and being taught what they think
is necessary—whether we like it or not. (1992: 35)
Nevertheless, says Vandyck, “we were taught,” and later he admits that the
women’s society as a whole is “far better educated than our people” (1992: 65).
The women display their own sense of humor and put it to strategic
use in the men’s education, creating a satiric context8 that shows up the
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illogicalities of Terry’s assertions regarding gender roles and social mores.
Humor here affirms the strong communal sense of Herland, highlighting dif-
ferences in the men’s and women’s cultures and also affirming the women’s
“apartness.”9 Vandyck notes the “quiet enigmatic smile” of their teacher,
Moadine, as she gently challenges Terry’s assumption of physical superiority
to the women. When she asserts “[t]he danger is quite the other way. They
might hurt you,” the narrator reports Terry’s reaction as “so amazed and
outraged that Jeff and I laughed outright, but she went on gently” (1992: 67).
The “genial laughter” of Moadine was, the narrator concludes, “not only
with, but, I often felt, at him [Terry]—though impeccably polite” in the
face of the men’s “cocksure” beliefs and petty vanities (1992: 75, 82). As
Gillooly (1999: 16) points out about humor “saturated in the feminine,”
there is a risk “of being ignored, on the one hand, and of being patholo-
gized,” an observation borne out by Terry’s dismissal of Moadine’s lesson
in female cooperation and “close inter-service” as being “against nature”
(Gilman 1992: 68).
Vandyck retrospectively describes the errors of himself and his comrades
by invoking an imagery of social role-playing grounded in an essential
nature:
In all our discussions and speculations we had always uncon-

sciously assumed that the women, whatever else they would be, would
be young. [. . .] “Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume,
charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into pri-
vate ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies
were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been
a grandmother. (1992: 22)
The women’s unexpected insistence on not only staying “on the stage” but
also on directing the show creates much of the novel’s comedy; but the real
power of the women is signaled in their unexpected gesture toward tragedy
instead. As the men and Herlanders learn more of each other’s worlds, the
women consider allowing one of their group, Ellador (now also Vandyck’s
lover), to return to the “Other World of yours,” but under one condition
only. Observing that, for all men’s accomplishments, “there is still [. . .]
ignorance, with prejudice and unbridled emotion,” the Herland leaders con-
clude that “we are unwilling to expose our country to free communication
with the rest of the world—as yet” (1992: 145). Therefore, “you promise
not in any way to betray the location of this country until permission—
after Ellador’s return.” Terry refuses and is consequently threatened with
“remain[ing] an absolute prisoner, always” (1992: 145). Ellador suggests
that “ ‘He will promise, I think’ [. . .] And he did. With which agreement
we at last left Herland” (1992: 146). With that, the novel claps shut. These
women’s humoring of the men has been strategic from the beginning, and
as long as the men pose no real threat the humoring remains playful. Once
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the intransigence of “cocksure” Terry is exposed, the response turns deadly
serious. The “absolute”-ness of his imprisonment is not elaborated—but
when Moadine urges that “[a]nesthesia would be kinder” (1992: 145), we
understand that the indulgence is over.
Although Herland does not entirely depart from the utopian traveler’s
characteristically reluctant return to his own world, the threat of “contami-
nation” hints that this “paradise” is not, like the dream worlds of other uto-
pian narratives, entirely closed off from the violence and ignorance of that
“Other World” that is our own reality. Although originally the “scandal”
of this text is presented according to the men’s perspective as the “unnatu-
ral” character of these women, what is scandalous by the end is the threat
that the men continue to impose on the women, by the very fact of their
knowledge of Herland. Gilman’s text is not in the end benign, although
the Herlanders’ relative passivity and indirection has offered a gentle and
humorous prod to the male travelers’ ignorance. In her text’s sudden and
open-ended conclusion, Gilman underscores the degree to which Vandyck
and his friends underestimate the aggressiveness of the women’s defensive
postures. According to Gillooly (1999: 21), feminine forms of humor char-
acteristically employ rhetorical strategies of self-effacement, which “permit
expression while at the same time guarding against its widespread disclo-
sure.” This observation is literalized in the narrative strategy of Herland, in
which the women’s true authority is most discernible only at those moments
when they deem their land truly threatened. The novel concludes darkly,
therefore, with an anything-but-playful revelation of defensiveness and
aggressiveness.
3. JOANNA RUSS’S THE FEMALE MAN
The rough and openly disruptive humor of Russ’s The Female Man cel-
ebrates the scandal caused by the reverse voyage, of an alien visitor to Earth,
and revels in a scandalous narrative that exposes the limits of form as it
tosses those limits aside. The irrepressible Janet, a sort of eiron/trickster
figure, busts apart by making visible the contradictory and incongruous
sexual ideologies absorbed by earthlings Joanna and Jeannine, and she does
so nearly always to comic effect. More darkly humorous, however, is the
shadowy figure of Jael, powerfully intelligent and powerfully angry, who
oversees this time-splintered narrative. Like Bertha Mason, whose unset-
tling laughter breaks through the narrative of Jane Eyre,10 Jael’s presence
recalls the scandalous unpredictability and incongruous visibility of female
desire and female anger alike, both subversive of male authority. Jael is
the witch of this fairy tale—and her aims are at once more comprehensive
and less coherent as compared to the dignified leaders of Herland. Unlike
those composed women, Jael intrudes into the narrative as a mysterious
unnamed presence, unpredictable, playful, and aggressive, revealing only
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what she wishes about her nature and appearance, and mocking our curiosity
about both.
Theatricality in The Female Man at one level creates a rather obvious
metaphor for feminine behavior as social ritual. But at another, the novel’s
connection between gender construction and the dynamics of theatricality
constitutes nothing less than a structural trope. The figure of the author,
Joanna herself, is divided into four characters, four roles, constituting what
critics have called a “cluster protagonist” (Bartkowski 1989: 54), or an
“interactive identity” (Burwell 1997: 91).11 The “four Js”—Joanna, the
“author”; Janet, the alien from the future; Jeannine, the mousy librarian
from the past; and the spectral Jael—create a dynamic, dialogic dramati-
zation12 of self-discovery, a making visible of the author’s own compos-
ite identity, which has remained hidden precisely because of the kind of
ideologically enforced self-fashioning and dissembling that Wollstonecraft
abhorred. “All I did,” says narrator-Joanna, was
dress for The Man

smile for The Man
talk wittily to The Man
sympathize for The Man
flatter The Man
defer to The Man
entertain The Man
live for The Man. (1975: 29)
Joanna, in other words, is clearly well skilled in the art of pleasing men,
and the novel highlights the theatricalized behavior of Joanna herself, and
of women generally, with “the vanity training, the obedience training, the
self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the
passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation
training” (1975: 151). This is particularly evident when Joanna takes the
alien Janet to a party on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, having coached her
rigorously beforehand on how to “act” like “a good girl.” Janet does not
take to her role successfully and is continuously coached during the party:
“Janet, sit down. Janet, don’t do that. Janet, don’t kick Jeannine. Janet!
Janet, don’t!” (1975: 31).
These moments are wonderfully comic because they reveal Janet’s inno-
cence of gender roles in this society and show the absurdity of both the
women and the men who mindlessly assume those roles. The theatrics of
female behavior during what Joanna calls the “opera scenario that governs
our lives” (1975: 30) is highlighted by the graphic reduction of the text itself
into a script-like format in order to represent various “typical” (which is
all they can be) encounters between men and women. The latter are given
names like Sposissa, Eglantissa, Aphrodissa, Clarissa, Lucrissa, Wailissa,
Lamentissa, Travailissa, Saccharissa, and Amicissa, names that reflect their
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primary behavioral traits and determine their social roles. Trouble brews
when the party’s drunken host refuses to let Janet and Joanna leave, trying
to detain them first with unwelcome sexual charms, then with brute force
as he grabs their arms to prevent exit. Throughout the scene, Joanna’s reac-
tions to Janet’s increasingly visible and unladylike hostility are included in
italics, like stage whispers:
Uh-oh. Be ladylike [. . .] Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.

Can’t I rescue myself? No. Why not? [. . .] No, no, keep on being lady-
like! (1975: 45).
When Janet finally decks him, the man can only respond according to his
own mental script, that is, according to a “little limp-leather [. . .] volume
bound in blue,” says Joanna, “which I think they give out in high schools.
On the cover was written in gold, ‘WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUA-
TION’ ” (1975: 46). The host, at a loss, consults the book for some kind of
response, the parentheticals registering his hasty search for answers:
“Bitch!” (flip flip flip) “Prude” (flip flip) “Ballbreaker” (flip flip flip flip)
“Goddamn cancerous castrator” (flip) “Thinks hers is gold” (flip flip).
(1975: 46)
When Janet calls him a “savage,” he
leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come
up with anything. Then he looked up “savage” only to find it marked
with an affirmative: “Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good.” So he
smiled broadly. He put the book away. (1975: 45)
Joanna, for that matter, has her own pink book, which, under “Brutality,”
instructs the reader that “Man’s bad temper is the woman’s fault. It is also
the woman’s responsibility to patch things up afterwards” (1975: 47). The
point is obvious: gender roles are clearly prescribed, proscribed, scripted,
and ritualized, and what Joanna begins to realize is, as Burwell notes
(1997: 95), that “her discomfort originates not from a failure within her-
self or her own scandalous desires but rather from a logical paradox that is
built into the structure of gendered society,” a structure troped in the novel
as theatrical.13
The less obvious point highlighted in this party scene concerns Janet:
she functions here and throughout the novel as a figure of mimicry in pre-
cisely Irigaray’s sense. Author-Joanna hints as much in her remarks that she
“called up Janet, out of nothing, or she called up me” (1975: 29). The con-
juring of the fictional Janet, and indeed the splitting of Joanna into the four
Js, is obviously Russ’s theatricalization of her own identity constitution.
But Janet is Joanna’s mimic, performing gender roles with a literally alien
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self-consciousness. Sometimes awkward to the point of unintended near-
parody, sometimes resistant to the point of anger, always ironical, Janet
reveals to Joanna her own complicity with scripted gender discipline and
produces what Burwell (1997: 90) calls the “cognitive alienation” needed
“to set up the utopian moments of resistance motivating the narrative.”
Not surprisingly, therefore, Joanna notes just as she reaches that Riverside
Drive party that “I shadowed Janet” (1975: 34). In the newly de-naturalized
atmosphere created by Janet’s presence, Joanna feels she has lost the sub-
stantial part of herself, until she comes to a more nuanced understanding of
identity construction.
This feeling of absence of self is scrutinized even more intensely in the
character of Jeannine, who seems to desire nothing more than to be actu-
ally.14 Her lover, Cal, presciently refers to her as the “vanishing woman”
(1975: 4), after glimpsing the headline announcing the first appearance of
Janet. Jeannine herself spends much of the novel trying to escape the glare of
Janet’s visibility, preferring to live as an “evasive outline”: “Jeannine had all
but disappeared”; “Jeannine was cowering out of sight or had disappeared
somehow”; “she melted away through the Chinese print on the wall” to
reappear on the “other side of the bathroom mirror”; “she vanishes dimly
into a cupboard, putting her fingers in her ears” (1975: 20, 21, 25, 143).
The defiantly visible Janet is constantly irritated by Jeannine’s desire either
to disappear entirely or at least to become an object, a piece of furniture,
“relieved of personality at last and forever” (1975: 93)—this last quotation
a line that can’t help but pull up an ironical smile. Despite dissatisfaction
with her oppressive conditions, Jeannine yearns for the cypher-dom that
Wollstonecraft criticizes, and her precipitous decision to marry Cal would
seem best to accomplish this goal.15 Her behavior here displays a clear
example of Irigaray’s (1985: 84) masquerade of femininity whereby “loses
herself by playing on her femininity.” In the context of this essay’s atten-
tion to the trope of theatricality, it is appropriate that, midway through the
novel, Jeannine is said to “[fall] in love with an actor”:
It didn’t matter which actor or which character she fell in love with;
even Jeannine knew that; it was the unreality of the scene onstage that
made her long to be in it or on it or two-dimensional, anything to quiet
her unstable heart; I’m not fit to live, she said. (1975: 121)
“Even Jeannine” knew it, because even she recognizes in her yearning for
the unreality of the stage and its players a compensatory fantasy rejecting
the unreality of own life, scripted as it is by the little volume bound in pink.
The most mysterious of the four Js, Jael (aka Alice Reasoner), is at first a
disembodied voice (another vanishing woman it would seem) and remains
so through much of the novel, haunting the text and the activities of the
other Js, teasing us with parenthetical come-ons—“(Sorry, But watch out.)
You’ll meet me later”—until we finally meet her in Part Eight (1975: 19).
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But even then she is “really terrifying, for she’s invisible” (1975: 158). Her
head and crippled hands occasionally appear, literally disembodied, and
she has a way, like all of these women, of suddenly “vanish[ing] again”
(1975: 158). Jael clearly embodies that other hidden aspect of woman: rage.
But she is also responsible for actually staging the confluence of these four
versions of the same person. From her position in the future, she performs
a sort of literal genealogy of her self, tracing backward and forward in sev-
eral alternative universes “my other selves” (1975: 160). Because all four
women are genetically the same, in a biological sense the “same woman,”
bringing them all together as characters of a sort of cosmic comedy has
the effect of endorsing a notion of identity as performative and flexible. As
Judith Kegan Gardiner (1994: 93) notes:
the novel presents its multiple first-person heroines to dramatize how

different any one might be if raised in a different society. In this sense,
it illustrates common feminist beliefs about the priority of culture over
nature and about the socially constructed determination of both gender
and personality. (emphasis added).
The four Js are, as Gardiner notes, reintegrated by the novel’s end as a

sort of community, but this dramatization of social and personal identity
scarcely offers, a coherent vision of a feminist community of women, except
perhaps in Janet’s description of her home, Whileaway.
Gardiner persuasively argues that the novel is peculiarly self-centered,
in fact technically narcissistic, but the novel can be recuperated politically
by stressing the satiric effectiveness of Russ’s visualization of gender per-
formativity and by remembering who (or what) has motivated this staging
of Joanna’s self-discovery. If rage, rather than simply sexuality, is what is
repressed here, then the logic of Jael’s deliberate forcing of alternatives is
clear. In staging their appearance, she brings about her own; in staging them
together and simultaneously as oppositional voices, she ironizes their expe-
rience of social ritual as scripted, the experience of her own alternate voices
as ventriloquized.16 She transforms theatricalized social experience from a
performance that hides to one that reveals. Even if the composite Joanna
remains peculiarly unsocialized, as Gardiner suggests, she has gained much
nevertheless: visibility out of invisibility, voice out of voicelessness, agency
out of passivity. She is able to see the possibility of the other, non-Jeannine-
like role that Irigaray (1985: 84) defines as available for women: “Woman
could be man’s equal [. . .] She would be a potential man [emphasis in origi-
nal].” That is, she could be a female man. The potentialities of character,
both sexual and novelistic, are embraced by the four Js, that is to say by
the theatrically ironized Joanna who is the novel’s author. It is an irony that
playfully (theatrically, humorously) releases the very nature of sexual char-
acter and draws the curtains onto the infinitely variable stages that imagina-
tion offers for utopian speculation on gender and society.
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4. SHERI S. TEPPER’S THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY
While employing the same interrelated tropes of theatricality, irony, and

identity explored by Russ, Tepper turns performance, ritual, and humor to
both similar and profoundly different ends in The Gate to Women’s Coun-
try. In the novel’s opening scene, the doubleness and duplicity of theatrical-
ity is introduced as Stavia, the novel’s protagonist, steps into a role she had
long hoped never to perform. She is summoned to participate in the rit-
ual release of her youngest son, Dawid, who will be officially joining the
garrison ranks of the militaristic Warriors who live just outside the Wom-
en’s Country walls. During this ceremony, Stavia’s cool, passive, scripted
responses to Dawid’s repudiation of his mother belie the agony of giving up
hope her son might return to Women’s Country. Instead, she must let him
commit himself forever to a society she is working to destroy. Her response
to this is to act her way through the ritual, as an excerpt from the second
paragraph of the novel makes clear:
As usually happened on occasions like this one, Stavia felt herself

become an actor in an unfamiliar play, uncertain of the lines or the
plot, apprehensive of the ending. If there was to be an ending at all.
In the face of the surprising and unforeseen, her accustomed daily self
was often thrown all at a loss and could do nothing but stand aside
upon its stage, one hand slightly extended toward the wings to cue the
entry of some other character—a Stavia more capable, more endowed
with the extemporaneous force or grace these events required. When
the appropriate character entered, her daily self was left to watch from
behind the scenes, bemused by the unfamiliar intricacy of the dialogue
and settings which this other, this actor Stavia, seemed able somehow to
negotiate. So, when this evening the unexpected summons had arrived
from Dawid, the daily Stavia had bowed her way backstage to leave the
boards to this other persona. (Tepper 1989: 1)
The theatrical nonchalance of the actual dialogue exchanges later in the

scene is fraught with a rhetorical irony that at once disguises and acknowl-
edges Stavia’s true feelings. But this irony belies a far more profound situ-
ational irony in the novel. The rituals involving men and women in this
novel endorse an ideology of separate spheres, with the warrior men and
their commanders placed literally outside the walls of Women’s Country, a
society that exists wholly, as far as the warriors know, for their own physi-
cal care and for the production and early cultivation of their warrior sons.
Stavia’s apparently passive acceptance of the role of spurned mother in the
opening ceremony appears to the men as a mark of women’s dependence
upon their protection and of the women’s acceptance of the most traditional
gender roles. But Stavia’s obvious mimicry of this position is crucial, for the
novel’s plot revolves around the women’s clear understanding of how to
exploit theatricality’s relationship to ideological and political control.
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Women’s Country is governed by a network of councils composed only
of women selected for their intellectual character and leadership quali-
ties; by the novel’s end Stavia becomes the youngest-ever councilwoman.
These councils control every aspect of life, including reproduction—a “state
secret” that gives this novel its peculiar moral twist. The council network in
fact engages in a kind of genetic engineering, a process of unnatural selec-
tion. They manipulate women’s fertility with implants or, in the cases of
women deemed unsuitable for motherhood, with hysterectomies falsely
ascribed to medical necessity. They regulate the population of the warrior
men, who live outside their gates in garrisons, by planning wars that kill
off predetermined numbers of them. And, in fact, with few exceptions the
children are not fathered by warriors at all, although the women let the men
believe that, but by the so-called servitors, men who are themselves products
of the genetic weeding-out of aggressive masculine behaviors and who as
boys of fifteen years choose to return to Women’s Country after a ten-year
training stint with their supposed warrior fathers.
What the councilwomen are attempting is an ambitious grab at a sort
of evolutionary utopianism, and it is clearly working, thanks in part to
their firm manipulation of the hierarchical ideologies of the warrior soci-
ety. Equally powerful is their understanding of the need to create and pro-
mulgate a separatist female cultural identity. And both of these goals, the
control of warrior cultural identity and the creation of a female cultural
identity, are effected through an elaborate set of performances. One level of
performance simply has to do with the theatrics of leadership. As Morgot, a
councilwoman and mother of the precocious Stavia, says:
half of what we do is performance. Ritual. Observances. If we are seen

to be in control, the people are calm and life moves smoothly. Nothing
upsets the citizenry more than to believe its administrators are uncertain
or faltering. Doing nothing with an appearance of calm may be more
important than doing the right thing in a frantic manner. Learn to per-
form, Stavia. I have. (1989: 126)
Clearly Morgot understands the Machiavellian relationship between the

politics of leadership and the illusions of theatricality.
This kind of dissociation is well developed among all the councilwomen,
for they perpetrate upon their citizens what amounts to—indeed what is
figured in the novel as—an elaborate masquerade, staging yearly summer
carnivals during which sexual assignations between women and warriors
take place and sanctioned impregnation is permitted. Welcomed by warriors
and women alike, the ritual seems to endorse, even to preserve, traditional
gender roles; the virile warriors are served by the fertile, domestically indus-
trious females. But these carnivals are a skillfully staged ruse disguising the
councilwomen’s surreptitious impregnation of their citizens, during suppos-
edly routine gynecology appointments, with servitor semen. The council-
women, in other words, exploit anachronistic male–female gender roles to
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stage a society-wide masquerade that hardly promotes real carnivalesque
freedom; rather, the carnival reflects the highly authoritarian control of men
and women alike in the promotion of a recognizably feminist agenda.
The centrality of theatricality is reflected not only in the engineering of
the carnival, but also in those rituals created for Women’s Country citizens
alone. The coherence of the separatist Women’s Country itself is cultivated
through the ritualized performance, every year, of an “actual” play entitled
Iphigenia at Ilium, which all the women drama students learn and for which
they create costumes and sets (1989: 23). This apocryphal play, based on the
Iliadic tales and on such Euripidean tragedies as Iphigenia at Aulis, portrays
the suffering of the Greek and Trojan women alike during the Trojan War
and focuses particularly on Iphigenia, the sacrificed daughter of Agamem-
non, whose ghost haunts the play. The councilwomen deploy these ritual-
ized performances in a subtle way, not the least of which is their recasting
of what is clearly a tragedy into a comedy. The play is studied in school,
with elaborate commentary that mocks men’s insistence on the absence of
female subjectivity while demanding the female body. The simultaneous
presence and absence of women is troped in the play by the appearance of
nearly every female character, sooner or later, as a ghost after she has either
been murdered by the opposing army or has killed herself in defiance or in
grief. These ghostly personae become the “I-told-you-so” truth-tellers in the
afterworld, and their haunting becomes one of the strategies by which this
tragic history play becomes comical. Another strategy is that all male roles
are handled ironically, as parodies of masculinity, the male soldiers’ brag-
gadocio, machismo behaviors enhanced by costumes emphasizing comically
gigantic phalluses that simultaneously highlight the warriors’ posturing
“power-plays” and their actual political powerlessness. This double vision
of the history of gender relations as both tragic and comic is confusing to
the young Stavia, who is corrected by her sister Myra:
“You keep forgetting this is a comedy [. . .] They use that crazy clown-
faced doll for the baby [this is Astynax, who is ripped from his mother’s
hands and thrown over the walls of Troy by the Greeks]. It doesn’t even
look like a real child. It isn’t supposed to be a real baby. The old women
aren’t real old women. The virgins aren’t real virgins. It’s supposed to
be a satire, you know?” She frowned, trying to remember something
an instructor had said. “A commentary on particular attitudes of pre-
convulsion society.” [. . .] “I know” [says Stavia]. Stavia knew it was a
commentary, but knowing and feeling are two separate things. She felt
the play in ways she didn’t know it. (1989: 38–39)
Obviously it is the force of the play-as-ideology that is being felt. The play
guides the women’s responses to many life situations but particularly to the
loss of their sons to warrior training at age five, to the loss of their sons and
lovers to the staged wars, to the women’s suffering, still, at the hands of
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the physical and psychological manipulations of male aggression, as well as
at the hands of the hidden manipulations of the councilwomen. Indeed, at
various points in the text, the novel’s characters feel they have become char-
acters in the play—Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, the ghosts of Polyx-
ena or of Iphigenia herself—and speak these characters’ lines as their own:
“So they’ve killed him, too, killed him, too,” moans Myra over and over
again upon the death of her warrior-lover (1989: 130), echoing almost ver-
batim Polyxena’s line upon the Greeks’ murder of her baby nephew Astynax.
It is clear at such moments that the councilwomen use this drama to
indoctrinate, and its effect is as potent as the celebrations of masculine
power that the male commanders stage in their garrisons. The cynical aspect
of the councilwomen’s control, however, is that their subjects are being
taught to accept with an ancient fatalism the warrior deaths that are taking
place through a gradual, systematic genocide that the leaders themselves
are enacting. The fact that the play ironically conflates Women’s Country
and Hades only heightens the reader’s uncomfortable sense of the directors’
duplicity and of the costs that Women’s Country leaders have paid for their
utopian vision of a society where the battle of the sexes is eliminated.17 The
very unconsciousness of most of the women to their social conditioning by
the councilwomen points to the danger of the theatrical mode these leaders
have adopted, promoting through several theatrical modes (the play, their
own play-acting) near-absolute control.18 The councilwomen understand
well the relationships among theater, myth, and culture, as their recasting of
Greek tragedy as modern comedy suggests. The theatricalization of Women’s
Country by the councilwomen must itself be seen, in Ben Halm’s (1995: 93)
words, “as a cultural-aesthetic institution with its own self-legitimizing and
self-authenticating conventions.”
In the Russ text, the “ordinary woman”/protagonist—Joanna—comes
to understand these connections and to use theater ironically in resistance
to a patriarchal system that has revealed to her its strategies of legitimiza-
tion and oppression. The ironical double consciousness gained by Joanna is
purposely denied, however, to all but a select few in Women’s Country. The
councilwomen are the mimics here, disguising their political power, making
invisible, both to their own women subjects and to their counterpart male
commanders, the highly questionable means to their utopian ends. Taking
the lead roles each year in the Iphigenia play, the councilwomen hone their
theatrical skills on the public stage, reinforcing what they do each and every
day well behind the scenes. These leading women are deeply dishonest, and
they know it. The price for their own ideological conspiracy, through per-
formance and the careful management of knowledge production and dis-
semination, is that they are condemned by their own collective conscience.
They refer to themselves ironically as “the Damned Few,” and if, as Morgot
says, “the Lady has a heaven for the merciful, we are not sure any of us will
ever see it” (1989: 291). Theirs is a duplicity made possible by the same abil-
ity to dissociate the moral self from the acting self that we saw in Stavia, by
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an ironical perspective that continuously directs their actions toward their
social vision. The genocide and sterilizations they commit can only be justi-
fied by a notion of “social good” so abstracted that “the notion of collective
harmony comes to override concerns about justice” (Burwell 1997: 66),
gender equality or no.
The logic of resolution Burwell (1997: 66) sees as common to many uto-
pian texts shades much too easily and insidiously into yet another “logic of
domination” in this one, where the prior invisibility of patriarchal power is
replaced by the invisibility of the women’s power.19 Indeed the novel plays
with the same tropes of visibility and invisibility we have seen before. How-
ever, although many of the female roles in Iphigenia are stage ghosts who
refuse to disappear in order to continue their vengeful attacks on men, the
Councilwomen insist on invisibility. When Morgot and her servitor risk
themselves to save Stavia, they disguise themselves as angels mysteriously
sent from Heaven to punish and cow the Holylanders who have kidnapped
her. Appearing in their full power and without disguise before the con-
spiratorial commander Michael and his cohorts, though, Morgot seems a
dea ex machina. The soldiers’ bewilderment is short-lived and disturbingly
comical; they are decapitated seconds later by Morgot and by the servitor
Joshua, who, in an obviously ironical reversal of roles reveals himself to be,
as in fact all servitors are, a fatally formidable warrior.
Tepper presents the uncomfortable possibility that enacting this uto-
pian transformation means simply replacing one form of domination with
another. Blau’s (1992a: 27) comments cited earlier on the relationship of
theater and ideology are apt once again, for he wonders about “the har-
rowing prospect of a reality which is nothing but spectacle whose principle
is illusion.” For critics of utopianism generally, this has always been a dan-
ger. But the complexity of The Gate to Women’s Country is that, unlike
the other novels discussed, in which theatricality is clearly a demystify-
ing force, first, and a politically empowering one, second, Tepper’s novel
recalls rather frighteningly the power of theater and of ideology alike to
conceal. This author suggests the possibility that no utopian conception can
hope to get beyond ideology even as it creates a new one. The dynamic
ironies that theatricality self-reflexively foregrounds through playing with
tropes of appearance and essence, visibility and invisibility, are exposed in
Tepper’s text to be the two edges of a dangerously sharp sword. The council-
women’s comedy, understood as a strategy of critique and of an imaginative
transformation of society, exposes its ironical underside: the mystification
of a brutal campaign to keep the males (and indeed many of their women
subjects) in ignorance.20
Of the three narratives discussed here, the handling of theatricality is
most optimistic in Russ’s Female Man, the most playful and humorous in
its awareness of the positive force of irony in self-conscious mimicry. By
the end of that novel, the discovery of freedom in the deconstruction and
reconstructing of one’s self brings the hope for renegotiating women’s posi-
tion in society.21 The joy in these discoveries illuminates the novel’s final
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envoy: “Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free” (1975: 213).
Gilman’s text is more narrowly didactic, but even as an early example of
feminist utopian speculation, more darkly skeptical of the possibilities of
contemporary change. Tepper darkens this utopian vision even more to
remind us that oppression is not a males-only policy. Her scenario reveals a
society in which women’s roles are ironically posed by those “in the know,
and insofar as the councilwomen are successful in masking their knowledge
of genetics and reproductive medicine in particular, they are successful in
their patient acquisition of power and in their bid for a world of gender
equality. Like Russ, Tepper highlights the inseparability of ideology and
theatricality, but Tepper recalls Gilman in warning any utopian, feminist
or otherwise, of the need to remain aware of the tragic implications of that
complicity. In all of these texts, however, the trickster-writer behind the nar-
rative pries open and makes visible to the mind’s eye of the reader the “Oth-
erworld” of speculation and an imperative for change.
This chapter has outlined how just three (of many) twentieth-century
feminist authors, from Gilman to Tepper, explore and exploit the possi-
bilities of comedy, understood both as “humor” and as a theatrical mode,
or strategy, for gaining (double) consciousness and for projecting social
change. But this discussion also reveals how well these writers understand
the dangerous connection between theatricality and its speculative illusions.
As Blau (1992b: 432) reminds us:
Over and over again we learn, as it is in life so it is in theater, which in

its reflexive mirror doubles the inadequacy of any truth. Regarded thus,
theater is the instrumental virtue that gives the lie to life—the doubly
unjudgable sense of giving: refusing it as a lie and endowing it with
falsehood at once.
So it is when we regard the handling of theatricality in these novels. Each

demonstrates what can be gained by the recognition of performative struc-
tures in cultural discursiveness and constructions of, in this case, gender
ideologies. Each shows also that this gain is best achieved by an ironical
distance to one’s own performances. The critical space opened up by irony
is a field occupied by the author, and shared with us, the readers, where we
fence with the rapier wit of the speculative writer.
NOTES
1. In her landmark Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft

inaugurates the analysis of the gender as “performatively enacted significa-
tion” (as Butler [1990: 33] would put it) and its consequences on the formation
of women’s identity, either individually or in a social context. Wollstonecraft
(1992: 111) explicitly argues that women’s identity is essentially “masked” by
their training for “the great art of pleasing” men. She condemns women for
their indulgence in the “arts of coquetry,” a “system of dissimulation” that
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she specifically associates with theatrical doubleness, with a duplicity that
encourages women, indeed requires them, to “act contrary to their real inter-
est on an enlarged scale” (1992: 190, 202, 135). The self-fashioning described
here is most damaging to women, she continues, because the body’s surface
is manicured at the expense of developing the intellect and moral character.
A woman’s sense of identity is based only on appearances, with her thoughts
“ever hover[ing] round [her person]”—that is, around her make-up, dress,
hair, the “agreeable gesture, [the] pleasing modulation of voice, an easy car-
riage and behaviour” (1992: 173, 185). Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric (1992: 245,
216–17) throughout this treatise is permeated with figures of the theatrical:
“acting,” “character,” “masquerade”; a woman is a “practised dissembler”
on a “stage on which pantomime is daily performed for the amusement of
superior beings.” Note her use of the word “pantomime”: Woman is voice-
less. Her greatest objection is that women become, without a character of
their own, fundamentally dishonest, although unaware of the duplicity they
enact, unaware of the very emptiness of their own “character,” in both senses
of the word.
2. In their introduction, Elizabeth C. Fine and Jean Haskell Spear (1992: 8)
remind us that “the power of performance to create, store and transmit iden-
tity and culture lies in its reflexive nature. Through performance, human
beings not only present behavior, as in Richard Schechner’s notion that perfor-
mance is ‘twice-behaved behavior,’ but they reflexively comment upon it and
the values and situations it encompasses.” Fine and Spear furthermore cite
Victor Turner’s observation that this performative reflexivity is a condition in
which “a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting repre-
sentatively, turn, bend, or reflect back upon themselves the relations, actions,
symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal
rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves’ ”
(1992: 8). See also Crawford (2000, 2003); Keck and Poole (2011); and
Riley (2000).
3. According to Dianna C. Niebylski (2004: 14), relatively recent evidence of
the significant role that women played in these ancient festivals and cults
“makes it all the more plausible to speculate that among Plato’s prejudices
against Attic comedy and Attic clowning was the suspicion of widespread
female participation in these [excessive and sometimes pornographic ritualistic]
practices.”
4. Niebylski (2004: 149) notes that “as the level of comic aggression increased,
so did the sense of ambivalence and ambiguity regarding the strategic use of
the ludic tactics deployed. In other words, the more disruptive the humor, the
less concrete its politics.” The parallel is true in the works that I will look at
in this chapter.
5. The entirety of Gilbert’s book provocatively details the ways and means of
female comics “performing marginality.”
6. Vandyck’s theory is no closer than Terry’s vision of “just Girls and Girls and
Girls”—but his vision is worth noting here for its similarity to the women’s
society portrayed in the last novel I will discuss in this chapter, The Gate to
Women’s Country: “ ‘You’re all off, boys,’ I [Vandyck] insisted. ‘If there is
such a place—and there does seem some foundation for believing it—you’ll
find it’s built on a sort of matriarchal principle, that’s all. The men have a
separate cult of their own, less socially developed than the women, and make
them an annual visit—a sort of wedding call. This is a condition known to
have existed—here’s just a survival.’ ‘How about the boys?’ Jeff asked. ‘Oh,
the men take them away as soon as they are five or six, you see’ ” (1992: 9).
This social structure is apparent in Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country.
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7. See Judy Little’s discussion of liminal motifs employed in the English comic
tradition—the “world upside down” topos popular during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, which made possible political critiques that could not
be safely expressed in other ways. In our own time, liminality remains a
creative motif: “Liminality tends to generate not only new norms, but also
new myths, which may find expression in rituals, philosophy, and art”
(1983: 4–6). Joanne Gilbert also discusses the importance of “borderlands”
and other liminal or marginal spaces as the political spaces where culture is
challenged and negotiated—and the relation of these kinds of spaces to the
performance of comedy (2004: 4–5). Also see Rob Baum (2006) on humor’s
role in creating narrative spaces for play and resistance. A recent review of
the “state of the art” of women’s humor by Helga Kotthoff (2006a) focuses
on women’s revision of generic conventions in an effort to express a humor
of their own.
8. “When actions are a censure upon themselves, the reciter will always be con-
sidered a satirist” (from The Female Quixote, quoted in Barreca 1988: 6).
9. There is a substantial literature, starting with Bergson, on humor as an
“inherently social, if not communal” behavior. For a summary that is focused
on the relation of humor theory to women’s humor, see J. R. Gilbert (2004:
8–31).
10. Bertha’s laugh is generally taken to hint at and finally to expose Jane’s
growing desire for Rochester—as well as his own truly scandalous near-
polygamy.
11. On Russ’s rejection of the “singular characters” of conventional realist texts,
and on the relation of that rejection to feminist strategies to define a female
subjectivity, see Crowder (1993: 238–39); DuPlessis (1979: 5–7); and Bur-
well (1997: 97–108). For a relevant discussion of feminist narratology and
the multiple voicing of women’s narratives, see Lanser (1986).
12. Bartkowski (1989: 54) uses this term in her discussion of this novel, though
she does not pursue the implications.
13. For other discussions of this scene, see Ayres (1995: 24–25) and Rosinsky
(1982: 33–34).
14. Burwell (1997: 98) describes Jeannine’s efforts at self-effacement as them-
selves “a spectacle that dramatizes society’s act of neutralizing her desires”
(original emphasis).
15. In her full discussion of Jeannine, Burwell (1997: 97–99) points out, inter-
estingly in relation to my argument, that Joanna’s irritation with Jeannine
is marked by the occasional intrusion of Joanna’s voice as an “ironized
social conscience” into Jeannine’s thoughts. Burwell describes this goading
as a “mimicking [of] the voice of society that Jeannine is trying to escape”
(my emphasis). Though it is unclear whether Burwell actively had Irigaray
in mind here, her description of these moments of mimicry as a resistant
strategy seems relevant.
16. For a related argument on humor as a strategy of resistance and revelation
in Russ’s text, see Rosinsky (1982: 32): “Fully conscious of the explosive
potential of such tactics [joke, irony] Russ uses humor [. . .] as a metaphor
for women’s changing consciousness.”
17. Wendy Pearson (1996: 207) also recognizes the importance of the play in the
novel: “It serves as both memory and identity not only for Stavia but also
for all the more perceptive women in Women’s Country [. . .] Its distortion
of both history and of what Morgot, at least, seems to identify as the ‘male
myth’ (war as glory) becomes an excuse for all of the truly unpleasant things
that the women themselves do.” Pearson (1996: 208) concludes that the play
is itself a “failure”: “as history for the women, myth for the men, and art
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for the author” because it “symbolizes the eventual and inevitable failure
of Gate to invent a utopian world for the heterosexual woman.” Pearson’s
article is a trenchant critique of this novel—particularly of its apparent com-
mitment to essentialism. For other critiques of the novel, see Fitting (1992:
36–39, 43) and Wolmark (1994).
18. For a similar reading, see Beverly Price (1992: 43), who argues that Stavia
comes to recognize the “equality” the councilwomen work toward to be a
kind of “sham,” as it is achieved by such deception and aggression. Also see
remarks by bell hooks (quoted in Burwell 1997: 72): “Clearly, differentia-
tion between strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has been a central
defining aspect of gender globally, carrying with it the assumption that men
should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them. As
significant and important as that fact is, it should not obscure the fact that
women can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetrators as
well as victims—that we dominate, that we are dominated.” Also see Nor-
man Beswick (1997: 35), who comments upon Tepper’s characteristic refusal
to “let us be falsely comforted by the stories she builds.”
19. Along similar lines, see Tom Sellar (1995: 86–87): “Only by remember-
ing that ideologies are staged, that utopian projections are the theatrical
masques to be dismounted and discounted after their presentation, can the
danger of utopian speculation be removed. Ideologies might best be seen
as fictions and performances, their creators—like all philosopher-kings—as
actors, their following members of an audience. Social models are disposable
things, creations to be contemplated and shedded [sic] when the presenta-
tion is complete, and never to be honored in real life since all are potential
counterfeits.”
20. As Auerbach (1978: 5) points out, communities of women in literature are
always “a rebuke to the ideal of a solitary woman living for and through
men, attaining a citizenship in the community of adulthood through mascu-
line approval alone.” Such communities are thus “emblems of female self-
sufficiency which create their own corporate reality, evoking both wishes and
fears.” On the dynamics of power and language in women’s humor, also see
O’Barr and Atkins (1980); on humor and women’s speech communities, see
Nichols (1980).
21. See Walker (1988: 61) on The Female Man: “In short, humor is a principle
of life in Whileaway, but it is not composed of jokes at the expense of others;
instead, it is a free expression of joy in human equality.”
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5 “A Gay Arcadia of Happy Girls”
Women, the Body, and the Welfare
State in British Film Comedy
Frances Gray
Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the

opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary
moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions. (Beveridge
1942: 6)
World War II showed England to itself. Those of an age to be called up found

themselves working alongside people from very different backgrounds in
factories, the Land Army, or the fighting forces. The Blitz forced civilians of
all classes into unexpected juxtapositions as help was improvised for those
bombed out of their homes. City children streamed off to the country to be
billeted on families who might learn from them something about other cul-
tures and other values, or just about the nature of poverty. The advent, not
just of changes in the system of social insurance but of the whole structure
of a welfare state, as envisaged by the Beveridge Report cited above, was an
inevitable consequence. So too was a way of imagining the world on film.
The revelations also brought to the fore the idea of the documentary as art
form; through the work of organizations like the Crown Film Unit, England
learned to interpret itself.
For years afterward, this would have implications for the way that fiction
films also were judged. The brief of the filmmaker, it was tacitly understood,
was to reflect the surrounding world. This did not preclude surreal comic
stories such as the widely acclaimed Ealing Comedies, but the picture of a
grimly rationed postwar London was one of the driving energies that made
films like Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949) so beloved. By the
1960s the most highly acclaimed British cinema uncovered a country of
class tensions and cultural deprivation in realist movies such as Room at the
Top (John Braine, 1959) and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963).
Meanwhile, costume dramas, such as those made by Gainsborough Films,
or horror films, like those made by Hammer, were treated as potboilers.
I would like to argue, however, that two apparently lightweight series
of British comedies, the Carry On and St. Trinian’s movies, profoundly
reflected the material context from which they sprang and—precisely
because they were not “realist”—offered female performers some unique
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76 Frances Gray
opportunities. The British New Wave had, certainly, a new sexual honesty,
allowing actresses as different as Rachel Roberts and Simone Signoret high-
profile performances, but the basis of these performances differed from
those of their male counterparts. Whereas the hero faces culturally specific
pressures—materialism, the decay of working class culture—the female
characters experience what the films construct as eternal verities: adultery,
abortion, domestic abuse. They possess (and brilliantly portray) endurance,
but they do not have agency. The humbler comedies, in the face of argu-
ments that they are tacky, sexist, or slapdash, gave actresses precisely that.
They offered a chance to demonstrate technical skill and to be part of a vital
response to postwar social change.
The Government’s purpose in putting forward the reforms described

in this Paper is to secure for children a happier childhood and a better
start in life: to ensure a fuller measure of education and opportunity
for young people and to provide means for all of developing the vari-
ous talents with which they are endowed. (Educational Reconstruction
1943: 3)
Following the implementation of the Butler Education Act in 1944, the chil-
dren born in the population explosion known as “the Bulge” were, for a few
years, to take for granted their right to primary and secondary education,
a right that as they grew up extended to tertiary education in new univer-
sities built by the Wilson administration. In theory, at least, the playing
fields were leveled not just in class, but also in gender terms; women were
to take advantage of what was on offer and also, as they came of age, to
deconstruct it and demand further change. One of the first films to consider
these changes, at least obliquely, was Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s
The Belles of St. Trinian’s in 1954.
St. Trinian’s, with its whisky sodden, twenty-a-day girls in gymslips
who occasionally murdered a teacher, was invented by Ronald Searle while
a prisoner of war in the notorious Changi Jail. The school’s appearance
in book form in 1947 turned it into a communal male fantasy. Searle’s
cartoons—ornate, sinister, and elegant—were accompanied by texts from
D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Arthur Marshall; school songs were supplied by
Robert Graves, Cecil Day Lewis, and Flanders and Swann. The film tried
to find an equivalent visual style, though nothing could match the credit
sequences by Searle himself, but it also shifted the focus slightly by placing
the school in an unmistakably postwar world. Searle’s St. Trinian’s was a
dodgy private school rather than a state institution. But its contemporary
setting in the world of the eleven-plus (not to mention the fact that it was
founded during the General Strike and had never asked any pupil what kind
of family she came from) meant that for many of the audience it symbolized
the new opportunities freely available under the Education Act and hence
confronted questions the Act inevitably raised: Now that our daughters have
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“A Gay Arcadia of Happy Girls” 77
grammar school places, the uniforms and the Latin lessons of the old public
schools, and the right to stay on and work for university scholarships, what
will they be like? How will intelligence, sexuality, and women’s rights mesh
in a generation whose expectations are not those of their mothers?
The sibling-rivalry plot motif provides an interesting context. The twin
heirs to the rundown country seat of Fritton embody opposing traditions:
Millicent sees herself as continuing a gracious aristocracy symbolized by the
fabric of the (beautifully photographed) house, while stigmatizing the “black
market values” of her brother Clarence. Racing, a sport with a wide class
base, both divides and unites them. Clarence backs a horse called Blue Prince.
Millicent puts the school budget on Arab Boy, who belongs to the father
of a pupil. The plot revolves around Clarence’s attempts to hobble Arab
Boy; in the process, school inspectors are seduced, the policewoman who
infiltrates the school disguised as a gym teacher is concussed at a violent
hockey match, and the Fourth Form smuggle the horse into the dormitory
with a pulley.
What is interesting is that there is no moral dimension whatever. You are
not invited to admire either Fritton—indeed they are played by the same
actor, Alistair Sim. In the end, however, it is Millicent who wins the sup-
port of the audience. This is partly because the “aristocratic” values she
proclaims do not prevent her from imparting education to anyone, even if
they cannot afford it. But it is also a function of Sim’s performance. It is not
a pantomime drag act, but a presentation of a flustered, charming spinster
with a dainty way with a lace handkerchief and genuine relish for teaching
as “the breath of life.” Sim does not call attention to his masculinity: that
is achieved by his performance as Clarence. The effect is not to suggest that
the brother is the “real” Sim but to underline his versatility, his body play-
fully stressing the performativity of gender itself. As Millicent recalls, with
intriguing ambiguity, the school was once “a gay Arcadia of happy girls.”
Among the cast it was not only Sim who destabilized conventional gen-
der roles; others included a female math teacher with mannish clothing and
voice, a blonde bombshell played by a young Dora Bryan, and a gloomy
dominatrix in charge of scripture and needlework. Overall the staff denoted
a benevolent liberty granted to the pupils in terms of self-definition. For
a grammar school girl in the 1950s, this had its attractions. Modeled on
boys’ public schools, girls’ grammars insisted on ties, Cicero, and science.
Preaching the postwar “family values” that drove women from the work-
place, they also set the brightest of their generation to sewing cookery
aprons. A girl’s grammar school years straddled the change from active
prepubescent to sexually aware teenager obliged to hide her intelligence or
physical strength from a boyfriend. The St. Trinian’s movies blurred that
boundary, implying nothing need be lost in the transition. The older girls
might flash black stocking tops and burst seductively out of their gymslips
to vamp jockeys and schools inspectors, but they continued to play hockey
as a martial art. Adolescence did not make them dwindle into objects of the
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78 Frances Gray
gaze: as Millicent remarks, she is not preparing girls for a merciless world,
but preparing the world for her merciless girls. The inspectors, indeed, are
won over and never return to the Ministry of Education; they lie about in
the grounds with the prefects, eating—as a scandalized policewoman, with
rationing a very recent memory, puts it—“a French lunch,” an image indi-
cating Millicent’s Arcadia is alive and well as the age of austerity draws to
a close. Clarence is defeated with the ultimate weapon: the Old Girls. We
never see the Old Girls; when they go into battle they form a concealing
testudo with the African shields that decorate the hall—a classic Roman
formation suggesting that Latin lessons have their uses. Their invisibility
is presumably connected to the film’s small budget, and they are almost
certainly the Sixth Form recycled. But it also suggests that St. Trinian’s
exists to produce an infinitely adaptable female body. The postwar girls’
school allows women to be untidy, dirty, inkstained, gin-swilling, sexy,
subversive, or clever, or all of these things; this is evidenced by the casting
of Sabrina, owner of the most famous bosom of the 1950s, as Virginia the
School Swot. The new generation of educated women, in short, did not
have to choose between sexual, intellectual, or domestic fulfillment. They
could do it all.
St. Trinian’s girls were not, however, individualized. The set pieces of
the films were chase sequences, backed by Malcolm Arnold’s superb music.
Girls outwitted the enemy through their physical prowess—their hockey
tactics involved both brute force and the efficient transportation of coma-
tose opponents—or with their ability to engineer elaborate counter-weights
to lift a racehorse or create explosives in the chemistry lab. The effect was
Bergsonian, a comic use of the body as machine—although these were
machines you laughed with, not at, images of solidarity and cooperation
among women. Typically, the female performers were at the start of their
careers; Launder and Gilliat were looking for an unchanging set of kids,
small and untidy, or black-stockinged sex symbols, and the way to do so,
paradoxically, was to shift performers from film to film so that nobody ever
aged. Many actresses did, however, emerge into comic individuality, with
the lessons learned from regulars like Sim and Joyce Grenfell put to good
use. They were likely prospects for the Carry On series—notably Rosalind
Knight and Barbara Windsor, both of whom appeared in the most sustained
comic examination of the Welfare State movies produced over the next three
decades.
The new educational opportunities must not [. . .] be of a single pattern.

It is just as important to achieve diversity as it is to ensure equality of
opportunity. (Educational Reconstruction 1943)
In view of the Carry On reputation for sexual stereotype and low produc-
tion values, the term “individuality” might raise eyebrows. Peter Rogers and
Gerald Thomas typically ran off a Carry On in six weeks, and it was rare
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for a scene to have more than two takes. If an actor fell over, it was incorpo-
rated into the action. The location was generally close to Pinewood Studios
and the common around it, occasionally smartened up with some potted
palms to suggest a jungle. Costumes were recycled, and it was not unknown
for a performer to be told to pay for a prop or a bit of cheap jewelry. There
was no attempt to exploit the setting, in the fashion of British New Wave
films, to make the audience perceive the relationship between character and
background in a new way. The characters—busty blonde, lecherous idiot,
inept little man, and enormous nagging woman—were as cardboard as the
seaside postcards to which they were often compared.
However, Rogers and Thomas drew on a group of performers equally
experienced in nondramatic formats as in acting. Hattie Jacques was a
noted radio comedian and had worked on sitcoms with Sid James; Barbara
Windsor was a club singer and her first major role was with Joan Little-
wood’s Theatre Workshop; Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, and Joan Whit-
field worked in intimate revue. This had consequences for the Carry On
style. First, their faces and voices were well known in contexts where they
were not submerged in character but showing off a skill. They had the vari-
ety artiste’s talent for improvisation: on one occasion when a stage show
based on the films, Carry On London (1937), was ineptly organized by
outside management, the cast stepped in and reorganized the show from
scratch. Although to play the Carry On characters realistically would have
resulted in the frozen predictability of postcard images, the actors imparted
their own awareness of the characters as ongoing constructs. They shared
with the audience a series of variations on the stereotypes, so the audience
watched the Carry On series less to see the mixture-as-before than to enjoy
what Barbara Windsor, Hattie Jacques, or Joan Sims could do this time.
The pairing of Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams across several
decades of hospital movies is a case in point. They conform to the stereo-
type of small ineffectual man and large fearsome woman, familiar from
the postcards, but persistently avoid the easy laughs to be reaped from it.
Rather, they emphasize what their characters have in common: authority.
Jacques uses the fact that she is the largest woman in the cast to stress
that, as Matron, she is also the most powerful; her entrances in Carry on
Nurse (1959) are like the Day of Judgment: underlings flatten themselves
against the wall as she storms past, her fingers snaking out to check for dust,
her eyes swivelling to spot a poorly arranged bed. Williams’s flaring nos-
trils and precise, nasal voice counterpoint his physique to suggest class and
education. In Nurse Williams and Jacques clash as almost-equals: Williams
is a patient who resents being stuck in bed and makes some reasonable
suggestions about the hospital routine; Jacques regards all male patients
as potential exploiters of her overworked nurses and literally puts him in
his place—she will not have patients hanging about making the ward look
untidy. However, Williams is also one of the few patients with the nerve
to stand up to her at all, a function of his evident status as an educated
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80 Frances Gray
man, and the reasonableness of his argument is tacitly acknowledged inso-
far as he is not treated to the ultimate sanction: the irritating upper-class
patient played by Wilfrid Hyde White demands too much attention from
the overworked staff, and the nurses finally shove a daffodil into the place
more conventionally occupied by a rectal thermometer; Jacques raises an
eyebrow, smiles slightly, and utters not a word of reproof to the nurses she
has constantly harried for the slightest inefficiency.
In Carry on Doctor (1967) Williams and Jacques have equal profes-
sional status, as Matron and consultant; this cut across the film’s use of
them as sexual stereotypes: Jacques might be the large woman in pursuit
of the skinny man, but there is no suggestion of desperation on her part.
Rather, she assumes that a woman of Matron’s status would have a degree
of sophistication. She vamps Williams in a husky, genuinely sexy voice; she
wears a becoming black lace negligee rather than a garment to make her
body look comic; she opens a bottle of champagne with the assurance of
one who could afford it. Williams might be a shrimp when stripped, but
he never has the sad resignation of the little postcard man: he preens, poses
before the looking glass, and smirks at his prowess with chest expanders.
If he writhes beneath Jacques’s attentions—“I was once a weak man!” he
protests—he is never a victim, and her retort is not a plea but a brisk defla-
tion: “Once a week’s enough for any man.” Four years later, in Carry on
Again, Doctor, Jacques wears the same negligee (as I said, these films were
cheap), but Williams is the pursuer, convinced that he is about to change sex
and anxious to prove himself with Matron. The pleasure for the audience
lay not in the stereotype, but in an intertextual battle of the sexes.
Similarly, Barbara Windsor played the stereotypical “busty blonde” in
nine Carry On movies, but as spy, nurse, stripper, highway robber, beauty
queen, schoolgirl, and wife to Henry VIII, she had a whole series of con-
texts in which to ironize the role and demonstrate skills from dancing
to riding a horse or a motor bike. This detachment from the stereotype
allowed her to continue playing into her forties, whereas other series that
used the busty-blonde characters, such as the Confessions films of the
1970s, preferred youth to versatility and employed starlets on a very tem-
porary basis. The Carry Ons had their share of these, but Windsor was
often shown as a kind of mentor to the young beauties (also to Kenneth
Cope disguised as a nurse in Carry on Matron in 1972), giving the stereo-
type a new warmth. Joan Sims, the most versatile of them all, applied her
mobile face and immaculate timing to alternate between the roles of nag-
ging shrew and glamorous vamp; whereas the audience expected sexual
vitality from Windsor and authority from Jacques, they never knew what
to expect from Sims at all.
What they did know, although it was never overtly acknowledged, was
that women, and these three women in particular, were central to the suc-
cess of the films. The way they persistently and playfully varied their ste-
reotypes gave the Carry On movies a heart. The audience’s affection for the
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actresses resulted in an emotional investment in the characters beyond that
warranted by the immediate situation.
Perhaps the most important point of all is the need for a new attitude
towards health care [. . .] the plain fact remains that there are many
men, women and children who could be enjoying a sense of health
and physical efficiency which they do not in fact enjoy; there is much
subnormal health still, which need not be. (A National Health Service,
Ministry of Health and Department of Health for Scotland 1944: 5)
The Carry On movies returned again and again to the hospital setting.
Their specialty was making fun of British institutions, from the Army to the
Empire on which the sun had just set. The best way to mock an institution
is to bring its rigidity into collision with the realities of the body. Carry On
authority figures were reminded (usually by someone lower down the peck-
ing order) that they were slaves of desire—for food, money, survival, sex.
This did not undermine the hospital, the school, the Army, or the factory
so much as issue a brisk communiqué to its high-ranking servants that they
were just that. The institution’s capacity to regulate itself through laughter
was a guarantee of its worth.
To generate the laughter that sprang from desire, it was necessary to
bring the sexes into collision; consequently the satirized institutions had
to involve credible functions for women. The Carry On movies had their
share of sexist jokes, but could not avoid women in significant professional
roles. They showed women as Army officers, teachers, managing directors,
explorers, and queens. Persistently, however, they turned to the National
Health Service. Hospitals offer countless opportunities for jokes about the
body—bedpans, bedbaths, near-nudity, and the infantilization of patients
are all part of its day-to-day working. But to contrast the Carry On movies
with other British medical comedies of the period is to see key differences
emerge. The 1950s saw the emergence of the Doctor series, based on the
books by Richard Gordon and starring Dirk Bogarde. Although the Doctor
series employed slapstick humor in a hospital setting, they are always filmed
from the point of view of the dashing student or junior doctor. His youth,
gender, and patrician accent mark him as hero; patients tend to be working
class and know their place, or rich eccentrics who go private. Senior author-
ity figures are pompous (male) or hags (female). Young nurses exist to be
chased; they may hold out for marriage, but rarely voice a point of view.
Everyone, in short, is fixed in the England in which Gordon first studied
medicine, one in which a gentleman could buy himself a practice.
The Carry On movies do not operate from a single point of view. The
“romantic lead” played by Jim Dale in Carry on Doctor (1967) is as inept as
Bogarde’s Doctor Simon Sparrow, falling over trolleys and sticking his hypo-
dermic where it is not wanted, but his fate is decided not, like Sparrow’s,
by his own professional development, but by the patients, who refuse to let
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82 Frances Gray
Jacques and Williams fire him and threaten them with an enema when they
try. He might explode the X-ray machine while gazing at Barbara Windsor
wearing just three spangles in Carry on Again, Doctor (1969), but Windsor
is too vital to be the passive recipient of the gaze, whether of Dale or the
audience, and her energy makes her the driving force in their courtship. The
student nurse, the porter, the expectant mother, and the patient with piles all
have their own segment of the Carry On hospital narrative and equal rights
to the attention of the audience. What does remain consistent, however, is
that the Health Service is seen as intrinsically valuable. In Carry on Nurse,
made in 1959 as the NHS was still in its teens, a patient who pretends to
go private is ridiculed. Doctors who operate a private practice on the side
are also figures of fun: Kenneth Williams in Carry on Again, Doctor tries
to seduce Joan Sims as a rich hypochondriac in order to finance his private
clinic, only to find himself prey to all manner of sexual anxieties as the drugs
produce strange side effects.
A nurse in the Carry On movies would never work in the private sector.
Throughout the series, nurses are underpaid angels of mercy. They may
set fire to the sluices or do wicked things with daffodils, they may inflict
comic indignities on patients, but their office is never ridiculed and they are
devoted to the public. When in 1972 Kenneth Cope dragged up as a student
nurse to steal contraceptive pills in Carry on Matron (1972), it was inevi-
table that he would fail—but in the process he fell in love not just with a
pretty nurse but with the profession, a sentiment stressed by publicity shots
for the film that show him posing with the nurses of Wrexham Park Hospi-
tal, which was used for the exterior shots.
The NHS, in short, is coded as both laudable and female. Doctors may
deliver the cures—even Jim Dale manages to do some good—but the com-
munity of patients and staff is shaped by those directly responsible for its
physical welfare. Whereas in the Doctor series nurses were objects of desire,
in the Carry On movies they also stand for the rights of everyone to be
cared for and respected. Patients may stage an open revolt against matronly
authority—in Carry on Nurse they take over the operating theatre because
one of them is sick of waiting a few days for an operation (a situation that
in view of the current pressure on the NHS looks positively idyllic)—but it is
the women in uniform who have turned a ward full of people with nothing
in common but illness into a community able to organize.
It seemed that the NHS had become a bottomless financial pit. If more
money had to be provided, I was determined that there must at least be
strings attached. (Thatcher 1993: 608)
The 1979 election put Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives into gov-
ernment. The next day the Sun announced its role in the Tory victory: “It’s
the Sun what won.” If it could boast of its responsibility for an admin-
istration that systematically attacked the roots of the Welfare State, the
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Sun, with its barebreasted pin-ups on page three, could also claim that it
had changed the ground on which sexual comedy operated. Sex, the paper
liked to say, was the “right” of every consumer (Holland 1983). By “sex” it
meant, with its habitual cheerful chauvinism, a commodity that men “got”
from women. Popular film comedy in the 1970s liked to think of itself as
showing a “permissive” society. Workplace comedies such as On the Buses
(Harry Booth, 1971) or the Confessions (1974–77) series, designed to allow
for as much soft-core nudity as humanly possible, showed men as single
minded and divided women into the prudish or the obliging. In the pro-
cess, the Carry On movies suffered. They could not compete successfully
on the same ground. The emphasis on men “getting” what they wanted
from women was at odds with the egalitarian company spirit among the
regulars; the female stars, especially Windsor, were increasingly unhappy.
Although all the Carry On movies had both romance and innuendo, they
were not sexually explicit; most scenes which looked as if they might end
with copulation actually concluded with the collapse of the furniture, or,
if there was the slightest hint of harassment on the part of a male, with
brisk slapstick chastisement involving water or mud in copious quantities.
No always meant no. The combination of more explicit and more male-
oriented sex play in films and the erosion of the liberal consensus that under-
lay Britain’s vision of its own institutions spelled the end of the Carry On
ethos. The last film, Carry on Emmanuelle (1978), managed to be, as the
title song put it, about a woman’s search for “good lovin,” while lacking a
single scene involving genuine female pleasure of any kind. Only Williams,
broke as ever, and Sims, perhaps out of comradeship, remained of the old
team to bring a touch of professional comedy to a dire script.
The gradual falling away of the Carry On regulars through age and resent-
ment of the new style is movingly dramatized in Terry Johnson’s play for the
National Theatre in 1998, Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, charting
the relationship between Windsor and Sid James across fifteen years, from
1960s optimism to the assault on the Welfare State in 1979 that coincided
with the release of Emmanuelle. The play, praised not just for its comedy
but its “poignant sense of mortality” (Spencer 1998), cemented a change
in critical perception of the films, which had recently been the subject of a
National Film Theatre Festival. Increasingly, they were seen as vehicles for
undervalued talent, and the touchstone for that talent was its truthfulness
to the lost liberal consensus.
The Carry On movies, however, did not need an outsider to write their
epitaph. In 1988 Norman Hudis, responsible for several of the early screen-
plays, including Carry on Nurse, was asked by Rogers and Thomas to come
back from Hollywood to write Carry on Again, Nurse. Hudis paid homage
to Nurse. The part of Matron Bullivant was written for Joan Sims; as Stu-
dent Nurse Bullivant in Nurse she had let a collection of implements boil
dry, a blunder now committed by one of her own students. Plotlines were
replicated, such as the story of a bickering couple falling in love over the
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84 Frances Gray
husband’s sickbed. But there were also indications that times had changed;
when Sir Roderick the irascible surgeon (written for Williams) finds that
only one student has not fainted at an operation, he howls, “Only one left—
and it’s a girl? What is the world coming to?” to which the student coolly
replies, “Its senses, perhaps” (Bright and Ross 2000: 115).
The spine of the film, however, was highly topical. New government ini-
tiatives were reshaping the infrastructure of hospitals, closing many of them,
and devolving the role of matron into that of senior management, far more
distant from patients. In Again, Nurse, the Regional Hospital Board (or as
the slightly crooked porter puts it, the “devious masturbations of burooc-
racy”; Bright and Ross 2000: 98) is trying to close a beloved old Victorian
hospital. Sims, as Matron, battles the board. If in the process she loses her
dignity by attempting to bug the men’s toilets, she regains it by redoubling
the already formidable discipline she inflicts on her nurses. It is this, in the
end, that saves her—her most apparently useless student nurse is the daugh-
ter of one of the Board and wins him over to Sims’s way of training “proud,
responsible, super nurses” (Bright and Ross 2000: 158). As the film closes,
Sims hands over her job to her friend and sister; as she leaves, she looks at a
photograph on her desk and asks, “Well? Did I do right?” (2000: 159). The
camera pans to reveal that the photograph is of Hattie Jacques, who died
in 1980. Again, Nurse was never made; budget cuts afflicted the British film
industry as well as the Welfare State.
In the years to follow, there was furious debate about the disappearance
of matrons; eventually the title was restored by Labour in 2003. However,
the role was diminished in scope. The words “Bring back Matron” remain
a kind of shorthand for expressing discontent with the state of hospitals,
whether for poor hygiene or lack of beds, and whenever the call is sounded,
it seems inevitable that someone will mention the name of Hattie Jacques.1
This is perhaps a fitting memorial, not just to Jacques but to the genre of Brit-
ish institutional comedy. Its use of female sexuality achieved more than some
easy farcical interludes; it showed that the institution needed female energy
and wit if it was to serve society. Indeed in the face of Margaret Thatcher’s
(1987) famous assertion to the contrary, institutional comedy proclaimed
that that society did exist, and it created one possible image of that society—
a slapstick but unmistakable Arcadia, where health and education are rights
and where women bring their own power to bear upon both.
NOTE
1. See, for example, Johnston (2005), commenting on Michael Howard’s com-

mitment that the Conservative Party would “bring back Matron” to deal with
the MRSA “superbug.”
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6 Humorless Lesbians
Don Kulick
The entire history of the philosophy of humor—from Plato and Aristotle,

through Hobbes, Kant, and Shopenhauer, on to Freud, Bakhtin, Bergson,
and, perhaps most recently, Simon Critchley (2002), F. H. Buckley (2003),
and Michael Billig (2005)—has consisted of millennia of meditation on why
certain things are funny. This chapter breaks with that august philosophical
tradition. I am not concerned here with why certain things are funny; I am
concerned with the opposite: why certain things are not funny. I am particu-
larly interested in lesbians.1
Now reading that, and seeing that the title of this chapter is “Humorless
Lesbians,” I have no doubt that many readers may be somewhat on edge and
feeling apprehensive, combative, or offended. These, indeed, were the very
reactions I tended to elicit whenever, in conducting research for this article,
I walked into a gay and lesbian or feminist bookstore and asked women
behind the counter whether they had any books that were on lesbian humor
or representative of lesbian humor. Those reactions were always instructive.
In one particularly memorable case, at the Gay’s The Word Bookstore in
London, the woman I asked narrowed her eyes, pushed back her glasses,
stood up from her seated position, glared at me so darkly that the lesbian
friend who had accompanied me to the bookstore receded discretely and
safely into the background, and asked me, in a voice dripping with challenge
and threat, “Why do you wanna know?”
In another case, in the Bluestockings Feminist Bookstore in New York
City, the two women booksellers treated my query as a kind of puzzle to
be solved. “Rhonda,” the woman I asked shouted across the store to her
colleague, “Do we have any lesbian humor?” “Lesbian humor?” Rhonda
hollered back, “Gee, I dunno. What would that be?” Much loud banter
across the store ensued, and in the end, Rhonda and Carol concluded that
they were all out of lesbian humor. They recommended that I try the Oscar
Wilde bookshop, in the heart of New York’s gay village. So I did. When
I asked the female bookseller there if she had any lesbian humor, she directed
me to the latest volume of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which,
as I explained to her, I already owned. This gave this woman pause, but she
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86 Don Kulick
was determined not to let me leave the store empty-handed. After thinking
about it for a few minutes, she went to the stacks and pulled out a recently
published memoir called Weeding at Dawn: A Lesbian Country Life. The
author of Weeding at Dawn is a woman who had renamed herself after a
bird and a tree, Hawk Madrone. The back cover was emblazoned with effu-
sive praise by women who had written books with titles like Cactus Love.
I later learned, because of course I bought it, that Weeding at Dawn is a
white, middle-aged lesbian’s memoir of her day-to-day life on her secluded,
organic, woman-only homestead. The author describes her daily routines,
which she shares with her partner, Bethroot, and her cats, who have names
like Lilith and Missy Moonshine. These routines consist of activities like
watering her garden with her own urine and fertilizing her plants, not with
manure, but with her own and other women’s feces—“womanure,” she
calls it (Madrone 2000: 89). “I don’t know if the woman who wrote this
meant it to be funny,” the bookseller at Oscar Wilde winked at me, “but
I thought it was a scream.”
I recount these reactions in some detail because they are, as I have men-
tioned, instructive of the kinds of things people seem to think of whenever
the phrase “lesbian humor” gets enunciated. “Lesbian humor” seems to
be met with either bewilderment (as in Rhonda’s “What would that be? ”),
with a sly hint that lesbians can be laughed at because they have no ironic
distance to themselves, as the Weeding at Dawn example suggests, or as a
kind of dare, an insinuation or accusation that lesbians really don’t have
any humor at all and that the only reason I as a man would go into a book-
store and ask for it is to mock lesbians.
And hence, my point. There is a perception, widespread certainly in much
of the English-speaking world, at least, that lesbians are humorless. Indeed,
one of the most widely circulated lesbian jokes is precisely about that. The
joke is, “How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” The
answer, which must be delivered in a terse, rough growl, is, “Lesbians don’t
screw.” Another version of the same joke makes the point about humorless-
ness in an even more obvious way. In this version, which appears in the
lesbian-authored book So You Want to Be a Lesbian?, the joke goes, “How
many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” and the answer, which,
again, must be delivered in a terse, rough growl, is, “That’s not funny”
(Tracey and Pokorny 1996: 175).
The question to be addressed in this chapter is, Why do people think that
lesbians are humorless? And so let me now finally end the suspense and put
any still-anxious reader at ease by declaring plainly that my point with this
chapter is not going to be that lesbians really are humorless. There are a lot
of funny lesbians—in fact, I will discuss several examples of lesbian humor.
If one set about trying to measure such things in an empirical investigation,
there is no reason to believe that one would not discover that individual
lesbians have neither considerably more nor less humor than individuals
who are not lesbians.
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Humorless Lesbians 87
So why is there a stereotype that insists that lesbians are humorless? One
might think that the stereotype is a manifestation of homophobia, which
is expressed, precisely, in denigrating caricatures of homosexuals. However,
even to the extent that such is doubtless the case, what about gay men? Gay
men are also targets of homophobia. But they are stereotyped in the opposite
way; not as humorless, but, au contraire, as sparklingly witty and campy. The
homophobia argument is also undermined by the fact that even some lesbians
seem to believe that lesbians are not exactly barrels of laughs. The lesbian
feminist scholars Julia Penelope and Susan J. Wolfe (1979: 15), for example,
lament in a study about lesbian humor that “[o]ur difficulty in approach-
ing Lesbian humor is that few Lesbians seem to be aware of its existence.”
Another researcher quotes a lesbian activist, who explains that lesbians
still don’t know what things we can quite laugh at about ourselves. It’s
very tentative, the definition is evolving because we are still in the stage
where we are taking ourselves so seriously, we have to, that we almost
don’t trust each other to laugh. (McDonald 1984: 295)
1. LESBIAN HUMOR
In their examination of lesbian humor, the linguists Janet Bing and Dana
Heller (2003) point out that it takes many forms. One place many people see
it is on bumper stickers and t-shirts. It is also a feature of lesbian zines, comic
books, and cartoons, such as Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel,
which is a syndicated comic strip that has been appearing in gay and lesbian
newspapers and magazines for over twenty years and has resulted in eleven
collected books. Another popular lesbian comic strip is Diane Dimassa’s
Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Hothead Paisan is a raging
lesbian avenger who deals with misogyny or homophobia by shooting the
offender, chopping him—always him—up with an axe, sawing him in half
with a motor saw, ripping out his spinal cord with an oversize pliers, and—
well, you get the idea. Much of the humor in these strips is raised through
the outrageous shattering of taboos about how women should behave in a
patriarchal world (see Queen 1997 for an extended analysis of Hothead).
Besides cartoons, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and the rest of it, lesbian
humor can also be found in performances by women like Sandra Bernhard,
plays by lesbian playwrights like Lisa Kron and Holly Hughes, and books
by lesbian authors like So You Want to Be a Lesbian? (Tracey and Pokorny
1996), which I mentioned previously, or The Inflatable Butch (Orleans
2001). There are also comedy routines that feature multi-character perfor-
mances, like those by the American comedian Lily Tomlin or those that
made up the 1990s New Zealand television show The Topp Twins, which
featured two twin sisters, Lynda and Jools Topp, both of whom are publicly
declared and politically active lesbians.2
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88 Don Kulick
In addition to all the comic series, books, and sketch comedy routines,
there is also stand-up comedy, a form of humor that lesbians, like women
more generally, have only really broken into during the past thirty-five years
(Auslander 1993; Gilbert 2004; Lavin 2004). There are a relatively small
number of established lesbian standup comics in the English-speaking
world. The most internationally well known is probably Ellen DeGeneres,
whose situation comedy Ellen ran from 1994–98. The show is famous as
being the first US sitcom in which the main character “comes out” as homo-
sexual both in the series and in real life. Since 2003, DeGeneres has hosted a
popular daytime television talk show, and she still occasionally does stand-
up comedy. But unlike other performers who are known as “lesbian comedi-
ans,” lesbianism has never featured much in DeGeneres’s act; she performs
observational humor, not humor concerned with or directed to lesbians
(Lavin 2004: 119–124). This contrasts with performers like the Americans
Kate Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Marga Gomez, or Lea DeLaria, all of
whom build their stand-up acts around their lesbianism and lesbian culture.
Westenhoefer sometimes begins sets by immediately telling her audience,
“You know, I’m a lesbian comedian,” and then quickly addressing issues of
particular concern to lesbians and gays:
People still hate gay people, isn’t that boring? It’s so last millennium.
I’m so bored by that. But they still do, they still make these little horri-
fied comments. Like there was a woman in Phoenix who was running
for something [. . .] and she actually compared homosexuality to canni-
balism, human sacrifice and bestiality. You know, I’ll give her cannibal-
ism. But that other stuff is just mean. (Westenhoefer 2003)
Bisexual comedian Margaret Cho (2000) likewise talks a lot about lesbians
and her sexual experiences with women. One extended joke about lesbians
begins like this:
One of the first jobs I ever had working as a standup comedian was
working on a lesbian cruise. I was the ship comedian on the lesbian
love boat. It was Olivia Cruises. They do cruises for women all over
the world and I went with them to Alaska, because lesbians love whale
watching. They fuckin’ love it! They love it more than pussy! They
love it. They love whale watching. It’s any kind of sea mammal really.
Whales, manatees, dolphins—they go crazy for the dolphins. I don’t
know what it is, I think it’s the blowhole.
Later in the same act, Cho reveals that on the cruise, she had sex with a
woman:
And I went through this whole thing, you know, I was like, “Am I gay?”
“Am I straight?” And I realized: “I’m just slutty.”
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Another example of lesbian comedy is a joke from a book by stand-up
comedian and singer Lea DeLaria. Much of DeLaria’s humor comes from
vigorously poking fun at both stereotypes of lesbians and at actually occur-
ring types of lesbians. The following is a typical DeLaria (2000: 55) joke:
I won’t call myself a lesbian, because it sounds like someone you call to
repair things in your home. “Honey, the air conditioner is on the blink.
Better call the lesbian.”
I prefer “dyke,” even if by doing so I inadvertently ally myself with
healingsistermountainwomanrain feminists. I mean the ones who paint
themselves lavender, dance naked around tiered fires, and have beards.
I want to secretly follow behind them like a stealth bomber and whisper
things like “Tweezers.”
In a similar way, DeLaria also mocks “lesbian chic,” the name given to the
phenomenon in which, during the 1990s, lesbians were suddenly touted by
the media as being hot, happening, and sexy (Sharon Stone in the film Basic
Instinct [Paul Verhoeven, 1992] was an archetype for the chic lesbian).
DeLaria (2000: 130–31) lampoons lesbian chic by imagining a television
advertisement featuring lesbians:
INT: Camera fades in on a foggy haze of a bedroom. Two smoky figures

lie in bed. As the camera pulls focus we see that they are hugely fat
and wearing flannel pajamas.
CLOSE-UP: The first woman looks directly into the camera.
WOMAN ONE: I am fat and I am watching Xena.
INT: Woman Two turns on her side. We see she is holding a hockey stick.
INT: Two cats run across the bed.
WOMAN TWO: (calling to cats) Gertrude. Alice.
INT: One cat knocks over a mug of chai tea.
INT: The two women gaze deeply into each other’s eyes.
WOMAN ONE AND TWO (IN UNISON): I am fat and I am watching
Xena.
Camera pulls out of focus as the two put their heads together. Voice
over (female):
Fallopian Tube. The new fragrance from Calvin Klein.
Fade out as a sea gull calls.
The humor in that imagined advertisement arises from the incongruity

between the media portrayal of elegant sleek lesbians who buy expensive
Calvin Klein perfumes and the more common stereotype of lesbians as over-
weight, Gertrude Stein–reading, herbal tea–drinking, cat-loving, flannel-
clad feminist sports fans. Xena is a US television program that stars a feisty
Amazon hero, Xena, who has a younger girl warrior-in-training as her
sidekick (unsurprisingly, it has a massive lesbian following). The sea gull
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90 Don Kulick
is in there because several years ago zoologists claimed to have discovered
that female seagulls in some species form long-term partnerships with one
another. They could tell which seagulls were the lesbian ones because they
are the ones who brought along their moving vans when they arrived for the
second date (that last line, for the uninitiated, is an example of an in-group
lesbian joke—one that is analyzed at length in Bing and Heller 2003).
With all this kind of rich material from so many different sources and
women, it would be possible to do a content analysis in order to assess
whether there are themes that one might generalize as being typical of les-
bian humor. That is precisely what researchers who have written about les-
bian humor have tried to do, in scholarly articles that all reach the same,
arguably rather self-evident conclusion that humor by lesbians draws on les-
bian frames of reference and can reinforce lesbian identity and community
(Bing and Heller 2003; Queen 1997, 2005). The way that humor by lesbians
like Lea DeLaria can also mock, insult, and destabilize lesbian identity and
community is an interesting topic not addressed by anybody, for reasons
that deserve examination and debate at some point.3
In any case, however, a content analysis of lesbian humor in order to
determine what it is and what it does is not what concerns me here. Instead,
having established that there is undeniably such a thing as lesbian humor—
in the sense of humor produced by women who identify as lesbians and con-
cerned with lesbian identity, relationships, and life—I want now to return
to my question about why there is a stereotype that lesbians are humor-
less. This is not a question about genre or rhetoric or performance; it is
a broader sociological question about how humor is socially distributed.
Why is humor socially distributed in such a way that some groups—gay
men, for example, or Jews, or African Americans—come to be thought of
as inherently funny, whereas others, Germans, for example, or lesbians, are
stereotyped as congenitally humorless?
2. GERMANS AND OTHER CONGENITALLY

HUMORLESS TYPES
Germans are an interesting kind of parallel case to lesbians, because like

lesbians, a widespread assumption about them is that they have no sense of
humor. Type the words “humorless Germans” into Google and you will get
250,000 hits.4 The stereotype of the humorless German is a staple of Anglo-
American comedy. From Charlie Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel character in
his movie The Great Dictator (1940), to television comedy shows like the
British ‘Allo ‘Allo or the US Hogan’s Heros, to John Cleese’s famous “Don’t
Mention the War” sketch on Fawlty Towers, Germans are portrayed as fas-
tidious, dull workaholics, obsessed with orderliness and cleanliness. (Ria
Lina, a mixed-race stand-up comic in London, does a routine about how her
mother was Filipina and her father was German: “So,” she quipped, “I don’t
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just clean your house. I exterminate all ze germs.”) In addition, Germans
are always supposed to be humorless. In a way that parallels how lesbi-
ans like Julia Penelope and Susan J. Wolfe think that other lesbians do not
know about lesbian humor, the stereotype of the humorless German is even
expressed by Germans. A few years ago, one of them established a nation-
wide network of “laughter clubs” that encouraged Germans to meet once a
week to practice laughter and tell jokes in order to expel the commonplace
perception that, for example, Germans have no sense of humor, Germans
are very serious people, and the like.
Before I began doing research on humorlessness as a social phenomenon,
I assumed that the stereotype of humorless Germans arose during the two
World Wars as part of the Allied propaganda campaigns, in ways similar
to what we are seeing happening now, in relation to Muslims, who are
resolutely portrayed as dour fanatics who completely lack a sense of humor.
In fact, however, people have found Germans to be humorless for over
two thousand years. The idea goes back at least to the Roman historian
Tacitus, who lived in the first century CE Tacitus (1999: 45, 49) describes
Germans as violent, war-loving drunkards who “love idleness as much as
they hate peace” and who completely lack cunning or subtlety. This last
observation is almost identical to Madame de Stäel’s remark, in a letter
written eighteen centuries later, that the German language is “incapable”
of French subtlety (in Jameson-Cemper 2000: 30) and that “the Germans
are not naturally frivolous, there is always something melancholy about
their gaiety, which always induces one to say ‘Why do you do it then?’ ” (in
Jameson-Cemper 2000: 187).5 Expanding comments like these in her book
De l’Allemagne, published in 1810, de Stäel explained that Germans can-
not write comedy because they were thoughtful, but serious, graceless, and
without “gaieté” (Folkenflik 1987: 42–43). A few decades prior to de Stäel’s
book on Germany, the British diplomat Lord Philip Chesterfield commented
that “Germans are very seldom troubled with any extraordinary efferves-
cences of wit and it is prudent not to try it upon them” (in Rosten 1996: 333).
Later, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself, of course, a German, observed that
“[e]verything that is ponderous, viscous and pompously clumsy, all long-
winded and wearying kinds of style are developed with variety among Ger-
mans” (in Rosten 1996: 333)
The explanations offered by authors who perceive Germans as ponder-
ous, unsubtle, dull, and without gaiety or wit vary. For many, German
humorlessness is a result of Germany’s cold climate. French writing about
Germany, in particular, has continually emphasized the coldness of both the
climate and the people. Madame de Stäel in fact splits Germany between a
cold Prussian north and a more moderate, Catholic south. It is in the north
where one finds the coldest, least humorous German character. Another
explanation might be found in Max Weber’s classic book The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), in which he argues that Luther’s
idea that work is a “calling” given by God and that one’s religious duty
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92 Don Kulick
involved a reliable, punctual, and efficient performance of the tasks of one’s
vocation laid the groundwork for the development of an ethic that empha-
sized duty, discipline, and restraint.
Perhaps the most original explanation of German humorlessness, though,
was offered a few years ago by David Myers, a psychologist from Hope
College, in the US. According to Myers (2000), Germans are grumpy and
lacking in humor because speaking their language makes them that way. He
claims that the muscle movement required to produce German phonemes—
Myers identifies the /ü/ as the real culprit—causes the face to frown and
look glum. And continuous frowning, says Professor Myers, leads people to
become unhappy. Thank goodness for English, which, Myers explains, has
lots of /e/s and ah—sounds which are far more cheerful and put people in
better moods.
Explanations like Professor Myer’s frowny-face theory of language or
Madame de Stäel’s observations about climate are not answers to the prob-
lem they are trying to understand—they are symptoms of it. In other words,
they do nothing more than contribute to and augment the stereotype. And
that stereotype, although it may seem trivial and harmless, is in fact anything
but. On the contrary: to claim that a particular group lacks a sense of humor
is to make the ominous assertion that they lack humanity. Aristotle famously
asserted that laughter was what distinguished humankind from the beasts—
a claim that has gone uncontested for over two millennia. What this means
in social terms is that fostering a view that particular groups are without
humor is tantamount to dehumanizing them.
Another example: Given the strong connection today between Jews and
humor—think of Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Brooks, the Marx Broth-
ers, Bette Midler, Joan Rivers, Barbra Streisand’s early movies, and best-selling
books like Leo Rosten’s (1970) The Joys of Yiddish—it may be surprising to
learn that in previous eras, one of the many stereotypes that circulated about
Jews was that they were humorless. The French philosopher and Oriental-
ist Ernest Renan wrote in 1855 that “the Semitic peoples are almost com-
pletely lacking in curiosity and the capacity to laugh” (in Adler 1893: 457).
The Scottish author Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is quoted as asserting
that Jews have shown no trace of humor at any period in their history (in
Adler 1893: 457). Remarks like these prompted the response of none less
than the Chief Rabbi of London, Hermann Adler (1893), who published an
article attempting to refute the stereotype and prove that Jewish people did
indeed have a sense of humor.6 It is not difficult to understand why Rabbi
Adler went to the trouble: he was well aware of the possible consequences
of adding humorlessness to the already gargantuan burden of negative ste-
reotypes about Jews.
Another example of this same process, as I mentioned earlier, is occur-
ring right before our eyes: we are witnessing the creation of the humorless
Muslim. Every day on our television screens we see bearded Muslims, veiled
Muslims, shouting, screaming, wailing, throwing rocks, raising their fists in
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angry defiance. Who can remember the last time you saw an image of Mus-
lims laughing or telling a joke? Humorless Muslims are clearly a subset
of the “humorless religious fundamentalist” stereotype. Humorlessness, in
the West at least, seems to attach to the religiously devoted—which is why
images of “Laughing Christ” are rare, jarring, and, for some, inappropriate
or even blasphemous (judging from a film like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of
the Christ [2004], it is much less controversial to sadistically portray Christ
bleeding and in agony than it would be to portray him telling jokes). The
interesting sociological issue is how and why particular kinds of religious
devotees, at particular moments, come to be seen as icons of humorlessness.
There is an important study there to be done by someone interested in humor
(one that has been touched on—if only superficially and rather dubiously—
by the US comic Albert Brooks in his 2006 film Looking for Comedy in the
Muslim World).7
In any case, my point is that the belief that lesbians are humorless is
not inconsequential. Indeed, the weightiness of the charge may explain the
defensive reaction that my query about lesbian humor elicited from the les-
bian bookseller in the Gay’s the Word bookstore. Consciously or not, she
understood that humor is a serious thing and that regarding lesbians as
humorless is one way to denigrate them.
3. THE GENESIS OF HUMORLESSNESS
How then can we think about how certain groups come to be regarded as
humorless? Social history obviously plays an important role here. Analyses
of gay men’s camp, for example, often emphasize camp’s role as a kind of
defense. Bruce Rodgers (n.d.), the compiler of The Queen’s Vernacular,
with over 12,000 entries, the most extensive dictionary of gay slang in exis-
tence, summed up the opinion of many scholars when he wrote that gay
slang was
the street poetry of the queen. It was invented, coined, dished and
shrieked by the gay stereotypes. The flaming faggot, men who look like
women, flagrant wrist-benders [. . .] They stereotype others because
they have been labeled offensively [. . .] They jeer because they have
been mocked, they retaliate with a barrage of their own words which
ridicule women, male virility, the sanctity of marriage, everything in life
from which they are divorced.
In ways similar to what Rodgers claims for camp, scholars of Jewish humor—
which one writer claims “is unique in its ability to find a jest among tears
and make tragic situations tolerable” (Adler 1998: 19)—emphasize that it
developed as a response to the extreme hardships that have been faced by
the Jewish people over the centuries.
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94 Don Kulick
It is noteworthy and somewhat puzzling that historians and social scien-
tists seem fairly agreed that humor has never played a particularly impor-
tant role in the formation or maintenance of lesbian communities.8 This is
the case despite the fact that identifiable lesbians were the targets of harass-
ment and sometimes vicious homophobia. In their study of the lesbian com-
munity in Buffalo, New York, during the 1940s and 1950s, for example,
historians Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis (1993: 383) observe a
“striking” difference between gay male and lesbian communities. They
write that “anyone who talks to these old-time butches is not struck by
their campy sense of humor, as one is when listening to or reading about
old time queens.” Anthropologist Esther Newton (quoted in Halberstam
1998: 237) agrees, recalling that “My own experience of butch-femme bar
culture in the late fifties and sixties was not [. . .] ironic, not a camp, and
certainly not, as Judith Butler had suggested, a parody.”
Kennedy and Davis (1993: 383) argue that the reason why lesbian cul-
ture seems never to have developed camp or a particularly characteristic
sense of humor is because the gender hierarchy affects men and women in
different ways. They claim that the lesbian butch persona
centered on physically taking care of lesbians [. . .] and protecting and

defending women’s right to live independently from men and pursue
erotic liaisons with women [. . .] The butch persona, unlike that of
the [gay male] queen, carried the burden of twentieth century women’s
struggle for the right to function independently in the public world.
Camp was not designed for the task.
This is an intriguing observation, but it is really more of an assertion than

an explanation. It is not clear why Kennedy and Davis see humor as neces-
sarily incompatible with the butch struggle to carve out a space for lesbians
in the public world. A shared sense of victimization could have created a
shared humorous response to oppression, as it has done for many oppressed
groups. Effeminate gay queens, to return to that example, generally had
more access to public space than women did, because they were male. But
we would be mistaken to imagine that the world in general was a particu-
larly friendly or welcoming place for queens. Like butch lesbians, queens
had to be continually ready to defend themselves against harassment and
physical attacks by others who objected to seeing them in public. Despite
this constant threat of harassment and attack, queens developed camp as
one of their strategies of defense. It is not obvious why lesbians could not
do something similar.
On the other hand, Kennedy and Davis’s insistence that lesbian humor
can only be understood in the context of gender oppression is important. It
draws our attention to the crucial fact that lesbians are women. And gen-
erally speaking, women are not thought to be particularly funny. This is a
theme that runs through every book or article ever written about women
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and humor. It is still regularly recycled: in an article about the American
comedian Sarah Silverman in The New Yorker in 2005, journalist Dana
Goodyear pointed out that “comedy is probably the last remaining branch
of the arts whose suitability for women is still openly discussed” (see also
Auslander 1993; Barreca 2004; Haggins 2008). And that is true: incredibly,
another recent occurrence was a long, blowhard (but much-discussed) arti-
cle by journalist Christopher Hitchens titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny”
in the magazine Vanity Fair in January 2007.
Now one could argue that the stereotype of the humorless lesbians arises
because if women are considered to have no sense of humor, then lesbians—
who are, as they themselves sometimes say, woman-identified—must have
even less humor than heterosexual women. A problem with the argument
that lesbians are seen as humorless because they are somehow “more wom-
anly” than heterosexual women is of course that lesbians are not stereotyped
as being more womanly than heterosexual women—just as gay men are not
stereotyped as being “more manly” than heterosexual men. Quite the oppo-
site. Lesbian chic and the big-haired, long-nailed “lesbians” of heterosexual
pornography notwithstanding, the most common stereotypes of lesbians, as
media scholar Suzanna Walters (2001: 161) has pointed out, is that they are
all “flannel shirted, overweight, hairy-legged, ‘man-haters.’ ” This is the ste-
reotype that comedian DeLaria lampoons in her fictional advertisement for
“the new fragrance from Calvin Klein.” So even though there is undoubtedly
something to the idea that one reason why lesbians are considered humorless
is the fact that they are women, there must be more to it than that.
In her groundbreaking book, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor
and American Culture, literature scholar Nancy Walker (1988) provides us
with a hint of what that might be. Walker discusses the fact that one particu-
larly humorless kind of woman is thought to be the feminist. She suggests
(1988: 140) that the stereotype of the humorless feminist arises because a
woman who devotes herself to a cause rather than a man forfeits her femi-
ninity. Forfeiting femininity has consequences for perceptions of humor-
lessness, because even though women aren’t supposed to cultivate comic
talent, they are expected to cultivate themselves as appreciative audiences
for men: smiling to appear demure and laughing at the jokes men tell—even
when those jokes make women the butt of the joke (a point made by many
others as well, such as Barreca 1991; Beatts 1975; Kramarae 1981). Walk-
er’s observation correlates with empirical research that demonstrates that
(1) women laugh more when men speak than when other women speak and
(2) in heterosexual personal ads, women more often than men seek partners
with a GSOH: good sense of humor (that is, they seek a man who will make
them laugh). Men, on the other hand, offer a good sense of humor in their
ads—that is, they offer humor for women to laugh at (Provine 2000: 27–30;
32–35; Coser 1960).
Nancy Walker’s argument about the relationship between feminism and
humor works for lesbians, because if the criterion for having a sense of
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96 Don Kulick
humor is to either be a man or be devoted to one, then lesbians fail on both
counts. But Walker’s account is incomplete, because even though it illu-
minates some of the links between femininity and humor, it leaves largely
unexplored the relationship between masculinity and humor. This has a
direct and crucial bearing on lesbians.
At this point, the queer literature scholar Judith/Jack Halberstam’s work
(1998) on what she calls “female masculinity,” which is to say masculin-
ity performed by women, becomes very relevant. Halberstam suggests that
one of the reasons why lesbians did not develop a camp aesthetic similar
to that of gay men is not just because they were women living in a tough
world, as the historians Kennedy and Davis claim. Halberstam argues that
lesbians, particularly butch lesbians who completely rejected heterosexual
female roles, behavior, clothing, and other attributes, were also invested in
particular forms of masculinity. In other words, these women did not just
forfeit femininity. Instead, many of them actively cultivated particular forms
of masculinity as ways of staking claims to public life. This is important
in this context because Halberstam argues that mainstream understand-
ings of masculinity rest on the assumption that it is nonperformative. In
other words, masculinity is presumed to be natural, real, unproblematic.
Femininity, on the other hand, says Halberstam (1998: 234)—and here she
echoes many other commentators, at least since Simone de Beauvoir and
Joan Rivière—“reeks of the artificial.”
I reached a similar conclusion in my own research on the linguistic advice
offered to men and women who want to appear as being the “opposite sex”
(Kulick 1999). The overwhelming bulk of this advice is directed to trans-
sexual women, that is to say, men who transition to women. In books and
articles by and about transsexual men (women who transition to men), lan-
guage issues are virtually nonexistent. The reason given in the literature for
this lack of concern about female-to-male speech is physiological: estrogen
has no effect on the vocal chords of men who transition to women, which
means that their pitch level remains low. But this is different for women who
transition to men. The ingestion of testosterone thickens their vocal cords,
thereby deepening their voice.
As research on language and gender has consistently shown, however, a
gendered voice is not only about pitch. And indeed, according to the books
advising transsexual women how to talk, speaking as a woman involves a
mastery of a wide range of skills that encompass not only pitch and intona-
tion but also lexicon, syntax, paralinguistic behavior such as speaking softly,
and nonverbal behavior, such as moving one’s mouth more, looking others
directly in the eyes when speaking, and smiling and nodding encouragingly.
For this reason, the absence of literature advising transsexual women
has less to do with the physiology of their bodies than it has to do with the
larger ideological context in which they exist. It both reflects and invokes
widespread cultural attitudes that hold that being a man is unproblematic
and self-evident, whereas being a woman is a complicated set of procedures.
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These procedures require careful adherence to detailed, explicit instruc-
tions (instructions that are often issued by men) about how to walk, talk,
sit, eat, dress, move, and display affect. All of this is also consistent with
the interesting fact that whereas women who transition to men generally
solicit few surgical interventions (most have only mastectomies and perhaps
liposuction around their buttocks and hips), many men who transition to
women spend years returning to surgeons to undergo a large number of
procedures and operations, including breast augmentation, lip augmenta-
tion, face-lifts, rhinoplasty, chin reduction, jaw realignment, brow shaves,
cheek implants, false rib removal, chemical peeling, tracheal shaving, and
vocal cord surgery. Being a man, both in cultural models and in transsexual
practice, seems easy. Being a woman requires advice, assistance, and lots
and lots of effort.
The constructedness of femininity makes it easy fodder for humor. The
woman who goes to bed in the evening festooned with a head full of curlers
and a face caked in facial cream is a staple of comedy, whereas an unadorned
man who pulls the covers over his head and falls asleep is not. The effort
and skill required to navigate into a pair of sheer silk stockings without rip-
ping them, and then to step into and balance on a pair of six-inch stiletto
heels—this is a comedy routine waiting to happen. Slipping on a pair of
socks and loafers is not.
The point is not to claim that men are not funny. On the contrary, we
know that men are funny—the overwhelming majority of comedians and
comedy writers in Western culture are men. The point is something dif-
ferent: masculinity is not funny. Or, to be more precise, masculinity only
becomes funny when it is seen as failed masculinity, as masculinity that
does not manage to embody the understated, self-evident, contained, and
nonperformative quality that characterizes mainstream notions of what a
man ought to be. Note the crucial difference: whereas humor is raised by the
failure of masculinity, it is raised by the achievement of femininity.
4. SO WHY ARE LESBIANS THOUGHT TO BE HUMORLESS?
This brings us back to humorless lesbians. My conclusion is that lesbians

did not develop a camp aesthetic not only because of their particular social
history, but also because of their particular structural positioning. Lesbians
find themselves positioned culturally at the nexus of perceptions that hold
that (1) women have no real sense of humor except in relation to men,
(2) women who do not engage in heterosexual relationships forfeit their
femininity and consequently become masculinized, and (3) masculinity is
no laughing matter unless it is failed masculinity. When these three ideo-
logical planes collide, they produce the humorless lesbian: a figure that can
be laughed at but that, itself, does not laugh. The laughter it raises results
from the perception that as masculinized women, all that lesbians can ever
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98 Don Kulick
achieve is failed masculinity. This makes them funny; indeed, flannel-shirted,
overweight, hairy-legged, man-haters are a staple of comedy about lesbians.
But those butch lesbians like the ones discussed by Kennedy and Davis—
the ones who invested in masculinity in order to protect other lesbians
and defend a space for women in the public world, and the ones who even
today serve as the archetype of what a lesbian looks like and how lesbians
behave—those women did not see themselves as producing failed masculin-
ity. On the contrary, they strove to embody the kind of no-nonsense, taci-
turn, non-ironic, and self-contained form of masculinity that derives from
and results in real power and real privilege in the real world. The problem
is that to the extent that masculinity in itself is perceived to be nonperfor-
mative, conscious attempts to perform it can only ever fail. This perpetual
failure, coupled with the fact that the old-school butches drew no ironic
attention to their performance of masculinity—unlike gay queens, they did
not put their gender performances in big fat quotation marks—resulted in
making the lesbian an icon of earnest, ridiculous humorlessness.
I have examined the stereotype of the humorless lesbian to make a larger
point about humor. And that point is a simple one: just as culture and social
structures produce humor, they also produce humorlessness. In research
on humor, what most often gets examined is why certain things, certain
relationships, and certain kinds of people are funny. But surely it is just as
interesting to investigate why other things, relationships, and people are
not funny. Indeed, the processes through which humorlessness are gener-
ated are important, because as I have already noted, to perceive a group of
people as humorless can be a way to diminish that group’s claims to a com-
mon humanity. In this sense, the social consequences of being stereotyped as
humorless are anything but funny.
NOTES
1. This paper developed out of a keynote address delivered at the 2nd Euro-
pean Workshop on Humour, University of Bologna, May 20–22, 2004. I am
extremely grateful to Delia Chiaro for inviting me to give the talk and hence
spurring me to think about the social construction of humorlessness. A revised
version of the talk was later given as a keynote address at the 5th International
Gender and Language Association biennial conference in Wellington, New
Zealand, July 3–5, 2008. I thank Janet Holmes for that invitation, and I am
grateful to all the participants of both the Bologna and Wellington conferences
for invigorating discussion and criticism. I also thank members of the Center
for Gender Studies, Stockholm University, for their comments on an earlier
presentation of the paper. Christopher Stroud and Heinz Leo Kretzenbacher
provided very helpful critical readings of an earlier version, as did an anon-
ymous reviewer for the press. Conversations with Deborah Cameron have
inspired many insights into humor, lesbians, and Weeding at Dawn.
2. See the Topp Twins homepage. Thanks to Janet Holmes for alerting me to the
existence of the twins, whose fascinating career and stunning performances is
overdue for scholarly attention and analysis.
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3. My own hypothesis is that the emphasis on solidarity and happy communi-
ties of jovial lesbians is due to two related factors. The first is that research
on lesbian humor is influenced, naturally, by research on feminist humor. And
the analysis of feminist humor by feminists is characterized by an inatten-
tion to or dismissal of the complex and often conflictual nature of humor as
a genre of interaction. In those analyses, feminist humor tends to be rosily
depicted as visionary, honest, affirmative, empowering, and celebratory. It is
contrasted with what one scholar has dismissively dubbed “female humor,”
which is humor by women who have no political agenda (Kaufman 1980),
or with the self-deprecatory humor of comedians like Phyllis Diller or Joan
Rivers, which is regarded as retrograde, embarrassing, and even anti-feminist
(e.g., Auslander 1993; Barreca 1991; Merrill 1988; White 1988). See Gilbert
(2004) for an extended discussion and criticism of this analytical trend. The
second factor in accounting for how lesbian humor is analyzed in the existing
literature is the fact that those researchers who analyze lesbian humor are usu-
ally themselves lesbian, and they are also usually explicit about their political
investment in documenting the coherence and strength of “the lesbian commu-
nity.” In this kind of framework, which can be seen as part of what Deborah
Cameron and I (2003: 76–98) have labeled the “third phase” of research on
lesbian and gay language, conflictual language is downplayed or ignored, and
analysis focuses on how speakers create solidarity and strengthen their own
identities as lesbian or gay.
4. October 17, 2013: 169,000 hits for “humorless Germans”; 78,200 hits for
“humourless Germans.”
5. I am grateful to Heinz Leo Kretzenbacher for directing me to Tacitus and
Madame de Stäel as sources for stereotypes about humorless Germans.
6. Adler’s method of refuting these remarks was to recount funny stores about
rabbis and other Jews, and to quote from the Torah—in other words, to do
exactly what Leo Rosten did, a century later, in his books about Yiddish and
Jewish humor.
7. Released in January 2006, this film is summarized on its website as “the hilari-
ous story of what happens when the U.S. Government sends comedian Albert
Brooks to India and Pakistan to find out what makes the over 300 million
Muslims in the region laugh.” The film comes nowhere near to living up to
this intriguing promise. It ends up revealing absolutely nothing about indig-
enous humor, and even giving it the benefit of the doubt as a satire, it would
take a very forgiving analysis to conclude that the film does not simply reiter-
ate many of the current stereotypes about humorless Muslims—such as that
they are generally inscrutable but also childlike, in that the only humor they
seem to appreciate is slapstick humor (e.g., people falling down or getting
hit with things). A take-home message of the film seems to be that to the
extent that Muslims do not laugh at the same jokes that amuse certain kinds
of Americans, then they really do lack a sense of humor.
8. On the other hand, as I noted earlier, recent treatments of lesbian humor
stress that lesbians use humor as “narrative means of self-construction and
community imagining” (Bing and Heller 2003: 157) and an “interactive pro-
cess through which similarity is created, recognized, and solidified” (Queen
2005: 244). It might be debated to what extent this attention to the community-
building function of humor among lesbians is a recent historical development
of lesbian sociality and to what extent it is an artifact of the kind of scholarly
interpretation that I discuss in note 3 (see also Davies 2004: 319–20).
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7 Gender Trouble in Sketches
from Japan
François Bouchetoux
1. INTRODUCTION
A sketch may either mean a preliminary draft, an outline, or a skit, a comic

scene. The Japanese “sketches” of my title intend to summon up these two
meanings at the same time, like the word “manga” that refers to Hoku-
sai’s rough drawings and literally to “funny pictures.” Thus this chapter
does not claim to determine the ultimate nature of Japanese humor, to put
the finishing touches to it, or to exhibit its definite colorations; instead, a
few illustrations outline the contributions of gender patterns, of male and
female roles (in real practices and their representations), in the construction
of humor in Japanese culture. By construction I mean the historical produc-
tion, through language, of both humor and gender—and in particular, their
reciprocal influence as studied by historians, sociologists, anthropologists,
and linguists alike.
Humor importantly reflects people’s ways of thinking and living. Whether
rehearsed and performed on stage or spontaneously occurring on the real
“stage” of daily life, Japanese jokes do not reveal fixed male and female
categories, but sexual formations and transgressions. As such, humor paves
the way for thinking about and experiencing gender as a creative process.
More specifically, an assumption that humor creates some kind of order will
give the chapter its impetus. As Mary Douglas (1969: 4) puts it,
[I]deas about separating, purifying, demarcating [. . .] have as their

main function to impose systems on an inherently untidy experience.
It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without,
above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance
of order is created. (emphasis added)
In a country whose patriarchal hierarchy has been said to intensify gen-

der differences (Daniels 2010: 125–26), one would expect the exaggera-
tions of humor to mirror, delineate, and why not, at times contest such
differences. The question that motivates my investigation can therefore be
formulated as follows: What kind of order are comical amplifications of
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Gender Trouble in Sketches from Japan 101
differences between masculinity and femininity creating in Japanese society?
And ultimately, can the interactions of humor and gender be more broadly
construed?
To address these questions, the two parts of this chapter explore gen-
der issues (“troubles”) in either daily life or traditional and contemporary
shows. The first part will articulate the specificities of Japanese humor to
gender roles within a specific linguistic context. A transition on the central
concept of performance (2.4) will lead to an examination of gender politics
in a number of performing arts, highlighting ways in which humor con-
structs the feminine.
2. GENDER TROUBLE, FROM DAILY LIFE TO THE STAGE
2.1 Articulating Humor and Gender

A vast array of writings have been concerned with questions about gender
and humor (Kotthoff 2006a). Relatively recent literature tends to underline
differences in nature between male and female types of humor, sometimes
for lack of cultural (that is, historical, geographical, linguistic) contextu-
alization. However, the mere difficulty—and manifold impossibilities—of
translating humor indicates that one cannot readily laugh about that which,
due to cultural specificity, is bound to remain elusive. In this respect, studies
that are clearly situated, say in a Cantonese family (see Hui, ch. 11, this vol-
ume), have an advantage over cross-cultural generalizations. But such gener-
alizations are still helpful in that they complement, somewhat paradoxically,
the regional idiosyncrasies they are based on. Thus on the one hand, the
relationships that humor and gender entertain in Japan may inspire com-
ments about the “nature” of male and female humor in general; and, on the
other hand, some typical features of Japanese jocularity may be identified
as universal. In the end, it seems vain to try and assess the proportion of the
literature on humor that is relevant to the Japanese case and, conversely,
how much of the chapter applies to this literature at large.
For example Kotthoff (2006a: 13–16), among many others, contends that
“in many cultures” feminine humor avoids overt aggression whereas male
humor displays “competence in verbal (and physical) fighting.” This is con-
sistent with observations of aggressive and “obscene”—though the Puritan-
ism of the word makes me laugh—behavior among either pre-school boys
or adult males, in contrast to young girls and women who are expected to
“behave.” Kotthoff takes this opportunity to conjure up an important, stra-
tegic aspect of joking, which consists in addressing topics in implicit rather
than obvious ways. Women are nevertheless universal victims of sexually
explicit jokes and favor more intimate forms of humor dealing with the
disappointments and constraints they experience in everyday life. Swords
(1992: 78) and Holmes (2006a: 30) report similar findings, according to
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102 François Bouchetoux
which male humor is more hostile and sexual than the personal anecdotes
and empathetic stories that typify women’s humor. Women’s humor is inclu-
sive, supportive, and self-healing, whereas their male counterparts prefer
exclusive, challenging, and self-aggrandizing jokes. Women’s humor is also
more cooperative than men’s: it expands on others’ humor but not as com-
petitively as male humor would. Crawford (1992: 30–31) concludes that a
good sense of humor is often believed to be gender-linked, namely, men are
said to be more creative when they joke. She attributes this belief to “dif-
ferences in conversational goals”—women would seek intimacy and men
positive self-presentation.
Much research has reproduced rather than challenged the stereotype of
humorless women (Johnston, Mumby, and Westwood 2007; Schnurr 2009).
Yet women’s absence from many forms of humor is linked to the social
control exercised over them (Palmer 1994; Ross 1998; Gilbert 2004). Given
that women have fewer choices outside their expected gender roles, Kotthoff
(2000) argues that they develop greater “role distance” than men. This
greater distance between how women see themselves and the patriarchal
norms they have to endure shapes female styles of humor and makes women
more easily prone to accept humor at their own expense. As a result, humor
at one’s own expense does not necessarily imply a weak sense of self-respect;
it might as well convey “a very specific sense of self-respect.” Is this very
specific sense about resisting or, through sublimation, tolerating patriar-
chy? Kotthoff does not venture further. But some studies of humor in the
workplace have challenged the argument that women use fewer instances
of humor and appreciate it less than men (Kuipers 2008; Schnurr 2009).
For Holmes and Marra (2002), women’s humor shows their unwillingness
to accept the values of a male-dominated business world. Holmes (2006a;
2006b) provides evidence from New Zealand that comical gender stereotyp-
ing can maintain good relations among colleagues. Consequently, time and
again humor portrays women as sexual objects offered to the scopophilic
gaze of a male audience; but in other instances it can contest the (stereo)
typical gendered patterns of behavior, at work and elsewhere.
2.2 Specificities of Japanese Humor

Although there is an extensive literature in Japanese about Japanese humor,
few books in English (Wells 1995; Cohn 1998; Hibbett 2002; Davis 2006)
have focused on the subject. This relative paucity of information directed
toward English-speaking readers is unfortunate because, in spite of some
universal traits of humor overviewed earlier, people do not laugh about
the same things at any point in time and space. At times, the Japanese
sense of humor might seem mysterious to the non-Japanese, just as the Japa-
nese might be at a loss when hearing a foreign joke (Lewis 2005). Already
in the penultimate chapter of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, published in
1894, mutual incomprehension is expressed in the contrast between the
“angry faces” of foreigners, as seen by the Japanese, and the “Japanese
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smile,” which for foreigners betrays insincerity (Hearn 2007: 657). Today
there is an enduring belief among Westerners that Japanese humor does
not really exist or that the Japanese take everything literally (Zola 2010;
Okada 2012). Davies (1998: 40) has claimed for example that “the paucity
of Japanese jokes of any kind remains an enigma,” following a tradition
that characterizes Japanese humor by its absence:
Noguchi was not entirely exaggerating when he complained, in a 1904

article, that [. . . the Japanese] did not know how to laugh, they regarded
laughter as degenerate, and Japanese humorists were content with clever
wordplay. (Marx 2007: 148)
Such arguments rest upon the assumption that we all laugh about the same
things and that jokes manifest themselves in translatable and transferable
ways; they reflect an ignorance of Japanese language and culture and naïve
yet persistent parochialisms and ethnocentrisms. However, nothing can be
inherently, unquestionably, eternally, or universally funny. The very concept
of joke is conditioned by the historical and spatial circumstances through
which it acquired its present status and contagious power. Moreover, jokes
will elicit different reactions depending on people’s age, language, education,
social position, gender, sexuality, and other variables that shape their iden-
tity in a given temporal and local context. The meaning of a joke depends
on the context in which it is told (Palmer 1994; Billig 2005).
The case of the Japanese smile, for example, reveals an ignorance of
sociocultural norms of communication through which humor is confused
with deceiving “signs” of humor. Cultural aspects of humor are for this
reason worth disseminating. The Japanese smile does not always signify
amusement, pleasure, or relaxation. A silent language of propriety as part of
a social obligation (giri), it may communicate embarrassment and even grief
(Clapier-Valladon 1991). Awareness of this sort of cultural specificity sheds
light on the anecdote of the Japanese maid in Yokohama who, “smiling as
if something very pleasant had happened,” asks her mistress permission to
attend her husband’s funeral. She returns in the evening and, showing the
little urn that contains the husband’s ashes, says with a laugh, “that is my
husband.” Hearn (2007: 660, 669) suggests that this laugh is “politeness
carried to the utmost point of self-abnegation.” In Oda’s (2006: 18) words
the Japanese smile is of “exquisite consideration for others and indicate[s] a
desire not to place burdens upon their feelings.”
Comparative research on humor attempts to eschew parochialism and
deliver instructive clues on what makes the Japanese laugh. Thus Blyth
(quoted in Dodge 1996: 58–59) outlines traditional Western comedy as “just
wit, without any increase of our wisdom or understanding of life”; clas-
sic Japanese humor is not exempt from vulgarities but, by way of contrast,
offers deeper meanings and didactic resources. Blyth regards such humor
as “almost kind in nature, lacking the personal invective and general abuse
found in many western forms of humor.” Wells (1995) elucidates other
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differences in her book Japanese Humour. She uses the term “expurgation”
to label the process through which English speakers censor certain humor-
ous forms, from religious offenses to “toilet jokes” and other humiliations.
Then she argues that Japanese culture prefers “containment,” which means
that humor is more narrowly acceptable in particular situations or “contain-
ers” (such as in performances or in the presence of alcohol); at the same
time the ethical rules of humor within containers are more broadly defined,
hence some Japanese jokes might seem crude or puerile or extreme to English
speakers. In fact, foreigners recurrently denigrate Japanese humor, locating
its roots in voyeurism, sadism, and masochism and its organization around
unsubtle characters such as incompetent doctors, cheated partners, naïve
feminists, or contestants in awkward situations on TV shows (Karadimos
2009). Meanwhile Takekuro’s (2006: 90, 94) comparison of English and
Japanese jokes refers to the requirement for contextualization introduced
earlier. Japanese conversation evades jokes with business acquaintances, new
people, and strangers, even in informal settings. Takekuro stresses that “Jap-
anese jokes are limited to situations in which participants know each other
well and the degree of formality is low.” By contrast, English jokes circulate
in conversation regardless of the participants and degree of formality. This
is consistent, she explains, with the adjustments of one’s behavior to the
context in which exchanges take place in Japan. Oda (2006: 18) has accord-
ingly identified “laughter places” (warai no ba) where it is socially appropri-
ate to laugh openly, from drinking places to flower viewing (hanami) sites.
Notwithstanding their specific relation to humor studies, both Wells’s “con-
tainers” and Oda’s “laughter places” resonate with Goffman’s (1974) bor-
rowing of Bateson’s (1972) frames, which enclose a “special reality” isolated
from everyday reality, or with Foucault’s (1994, 2004) heterotopias, “other
spaces” absolutely disparate from their surroundings—spaces that our imag-
ination has turned into real utopias.
Ben-Ari (2002: 134) depicts in this vein a “forgetting-the-hardships-of-
the-year party” (bōnenkai) organized in 1982 by the sports promotion com-
mittee of two communities near Kyoto. As karaoke songs—including some
men’s amusing attempts at impersonating female stars—punctuate conver-
sations, things gradually warm up:
[P]eople told jokes and funny, often lewd, stories. Conversations wove
in and out of a variety of themes in rapid succession. It often consisted
of series of quick wisecracks, one-liners, retorts and quips which pro-
duced much laughter. Little by little, the participants began to show
greater and greater familiarity. The language used began to assume the
direct and rather guttural masculine form. People sat shoulder to shoul-
der, they hugged each other and looked into each other’s eyes. Some
lay on the floor, while others shouted or laughed loudly. Finally, as the
evening wore on some would open their slacks and scratch their groins.
(Ben-Ari 2002: 134)
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In this extract people adapt their behavior to the festive, permissive circum-
stances of a party that takes place in a specially designated drinking frame,
an alternative spatio-temporal reality—it is away from both work and
home, in a separate room within the inn, on a Saturday evening as opposed
to a working day, and rituals of togetherness (speeches, karaoke songs, and
so forth) clearly unbind this “other space” from everyday routines. Eased by
the temporary abolishment of dress codes and status, solidarity is expressed
and encouraged by including everyone around one table and toasting to
celebrate the impact of individuals on their organization. Humor plays a
major role in the formation of this collective spirit. People within the drink-
ing frame expose facets of their identity they had hitherto concealed: in their
infantile and boisterous language, in their female-male impersonations, they
deliberately violate etiquette and disrupt an order existing outside the frame
(section 2.4 connects the functions of such practices to that of the carni-
val). “Social nudity,” which results from the individual stripping off social
masks, is positively received in Japan where both inebriated stupidity and
demonstration of human sympathy can be signs of manliness (Lebra 1976:
110, 118–19). Hence, excesses are very likely to be forgiven and forgotten
when people are back to the reality of work. Ben-Ari (2002: 139) concludes
that the bōnenkai creates “a frame where a dominant principle is that of a
group that transcends individuals, and is more than the sum of its parts.”
Further, this frame can be read as a miniature ideal community—the “in-
group” (uchi).
The bōnenkai account epitomizes how Japanese humor aims to produce
harmony with interlocutors, whereas English jokes are permeated with
self-assertion and individual expression (Takekuro 2006; H. Inoue 2006;
Ōshima 2006). This is why in Japan farce and wry humor will be preferred
over satire (Wells 2006). Attitudes toward jokes and joking are accordingly
constrained, unlike that of English-language speakers, by clear separa-
tions between the “in-group” (uchi) of family members, partners, and close
acquaintances, the “out-group” (soto) of colleagues and neighbors, and the
complete strangers or outsiders (yoso) with whom one is hardly in contact.
Japanese studies routinely clarify the crucial significance of this inside/out-
side (uchi/soto) division among other related binaries (Vogel 1963; Lebra
1976, 1992; Peak 1991; Kondo 1989; Rosenberger 1992; Johnson 1993;
Bachnik 1994; McConnell 2000; McVeigh 2000; Maynard 2002; Sugimoto
2003; Hendry 2003; Carroll 2006; Martinez 2006; Inouye 2008). Takeku-
ro’s (2006) data show that Japanese jokes were all observed in uchi. None
appeared in soto or yoso.
2.3 Articulating Japanese Humor and Gender

Not only do uchi and soto throw light on the conditions of production of
Japanese humor, they are also associated to the female and male domains
respectively; even if this classification does not turn out to be inflexible
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(Stefánsson 1998) and even if it has been ideologically used by Japanese
theorists of “Japaneseness” (nihonjinron) as well as their foreign counter-
parts (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986), only recently has the aphorism “man
outside, woman inside” (otoko wa soto, onna wa uchi) started to decline
(Cwiertka 2006: 90). Therefore uchi/soto and its companion concepts can
help us to comprehend the gendered structure of language that of its play-
ful forms. They demonstrate, to complement the previous subsection, that
gender-based humor is but a contested territory once it has been situated
in space and time. So for instance in her autobiography published in 1925,
A Daughter of the Samurai, Sugimoto Etsu Inagaki speaks of her difficulty
in adjusting to the nature of humor targeted at women in the US:
One thing in America, to which I could not grow accustomed, was the
joking attitude in regard to women and money. From men and women
of all classes [. . .] I heard allusions to amusing stories of women secret-
ing money in odd places, coaxing it from their husbands, borrowing it
from a friend, or saving it secretly for some private purpose. (Sugimoto
quoted in Dodge 1996: 64)
Gender discrimination within humor is today more likely to be directed

toward Japan, in some ironic reversal of Sugimoto’s accusation, which only
time is capable of. From a broad cultural stance, Sugimoto did not find
American jokes about women very funny. Reciprocally, the narrative chaos
in some contemporary Japanese comedies may take the foreigner aback.
In a way preceding the theater of the absurd, the Japanese “nonsense
genre” (nansensu mono) was already quite popular in the 1930s. This genre
could be defined as a decisive and even surrealist “victory over [. . .] the
discursive mind” (Buruma 1984: 191). In a spirit of nihilism (nihirizumu)
that derives from Zen Buddhism, it does not attempt to connect jokes in
any coherent order. The 1930s also saw the popularity of shabekuri man-
zai, the most common form of manzai (dialogue shows in which a pair of
comedians exchanges a series of jokes), grow in Osaka. The region of Osaka
(Kansai) has a reputation for innovative entertainments, from general com-
edy (kigeki) to puppet theater (bunraku) and rakugo. To compete with the
rise of film in urban areas traditionally dominated by performance stages,
the shabekuri style introduced Western suits and a formal division between
the wit or “sharp man” (tsukkomi) and the fool (boke). New Chinese char-
acters (kanji) for manzai inaugurated this modernization (Stocker 2006:
57–59). Manzai later appeared on national television, where Kitano Takeshi
(“Beat Takeshi” in the manzai tradition) first built his notoriety with his
friend Kaneko Kiyoshi in the 1970s. Together the two “Beats” improvised
on daring themes targeting minorities and women, leading to indecent (read
sexual) humor that was censored on several occasions.
Japanese humor can be more systematically based on gender issues, as
in Ranma ½—a manga created by star female mangaka Takahashi Rumiko
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toward the end of the 1980s and adapted as a cartoon (anime). The anime
overtly deals with sexual themes rooted in what this chapter calls “gender
trouble,” for Ranma is always in trouble in the TV series. Humor draws on
the reversals, confusions, uncertainties, and adjustments caused by forced
gender switching. Ranma is a cursed male hero who turns into an attrac-
tive girl when splashed with cold water (see also Pflugfelder 1992). His
father transforms under similar circumstances into a giant panda, and both
return to their original bodies when splashed with hot water. A frequent
joke revolves around someone squeezing Ranma’s breasts to ensure that
he has changed into a female. Ranma sees his magic ability as a problem
that he endeavors to dissimulate at school, and the humorous energy of the
story stems from his efforts to avoid being splashed with water in public.
According to Newitz (1995), Ranma ½ exploits a number of heterosexual
male fears around gender transposition—the possibility, however absurd,
of becoming a woman. The female, it should be said, is associated in this
anime with passivity. As such, “Ranma stands in for male anxieties about
losing power or being ridiculed” (Newitz 1995: 6–7). Other comic situa-
tions cause comparable fears. For example, Ranma cannot imagine being
kissed by Kuno, a young man who has fallen in love with Ranma’s female
half (even if the dreadful act, should it happen, would involve “straight”
Ranma as female). Or again, the rather tomboyish girl that Ranma falls
for is ambiguously gendered. Ranma even jokes with her that his breasts
when he is female are bigger than hers. Within this humor Newitz reads an
implicit fear, for young heterosexual men, of becoming bisexual or homo-
sexual. Incited to identify with Kuno, for instance, they feel uneasy about
Ranma’s male half because they, too, could be attracted to his female half.
Fan (otaku) culture tends to alleviate such uneasiness by representing female
Ranma as womanly as possible. On posters and T-shirts she will appear
emphatically feminine in a bikini that she hardly wears in the anime, ready
for consumption as a static sex object, at a safe distance from the young
male Ranma and his gender troubles. On the sticker, the T-shirt, and the
collectible figure, the disturbing oscillations of gender have been interrupted
and femininity pinpointed, as still as a still life.
It should be concluded at this point that there is no society devoid of
humor (Critchley 2002). Ranma ½ is only one example among a plethora of
hilarious manga and anime, from Hasegawa’s Sazae-san and Sakura’s Chibi
Maruko-chan to Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Usui’s Crayon Shin-chan, Fuji-
sawa’s GTO (Gurēto Tīchā Onizuka), and countless others. Even popular
adventure, action, or fantasy genres are pervaded with humor, as in Punch’s
Lupin III (Rupan Sansei), Hōjō’s Cat’s Eye and City Hunter, Terasawa’s
Cobra, and so forth. Likewise, comedy films such as Itami’s masterpiece,
Tampopo, Yaguchi’s Waterboys, or Katsuyuki’s Summer Time Machine
Blues, among others, would inspire fertile discussions on gender roles in
the Japanese sense of humor, or even on humor “in the Japanese spirit”
from the nansensu mono to male and female codes of sensuality. Upon close
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examination of the media, Japanese humor cultivates strong, imaginative
links with eroticism in its most spectacular manifestations (voyeurism,
sadomasochism, scatology, experiments and oddities involving food, cloth-
ing, animals, machines, and the like). In the TV broadcast Takeshi’s Castle,
for instance, candidates disguised as modern samurai are imprisoned in a
castle and subject to a series of tests and stunts through which they suffer
physical humiliations. An obviously softer version of the Silling castle in
which Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom takes place, Takeshi’s Castle nevertheless
exploits the same erotic drives. Many other shows are based on the same
kind of incarceration, where participants are put to the test of more or less
sexual teasing. In the tradition of festivals (matsuri) and carnivals, the Japa-
nese enthusiastically dress up to share the fun. Cross-dressing makes gender
a particularly important tool that triggers humor. Embedded in the serious-
ness of “cosplay” (kosupure, “costume playing”) is the jovial distance that
the cosplayer creates between herself and the character she embodies—an
ephemeral but decidedly cathartic flight away from the ego, toward the
cherished avatar or alter-ego.
Another important conclusion concerns the findings that introduced the
chapter, according to which female humor is more intimate and collab-
orative, less aggressive or more polite. Such findings could point toward a
“nature” of women’s humor that would, through naïve tautological rea-
soning, explain everything and nothing at the same time. Rather, one must
bear in mind the linguistic determinisms through which female humor has
become what it is. Language participates to a remarkable extent in the con-
stitution of gender. Irigaray (1977) has for example deplored the “phal-
logocentric” failure of language, which does not take women into account
and eventually makes them disappear. Women become in this perspective
the sex that is excluded, “which is not one.” Without going as far as Iriga-
ray, but along the same line of thought, Japanese humor should be under-
stood in direct connection with the extremely gendered structure of the
Japanese language. “There is no language,” Nakae claimed in 1888, “in
which men’s everyday words and women’s everyday words are so different
from each other as Japanese” (quoted in Nakamura 2008: 32). The differ-
ences between male and female idioms remain striking nowadays. Femi-
nine speech uses polite, gentle, and refined styles referred to as “women’s
language” (onna kotoba or josēgo) or “womanly ways of talking” (onna
rashii hanashikata), which have been historically fashioned within intricate
discourses on class, nation, and race (M. Inoue 2006: 279; Okamoto and
Shibamoto Smith 2008a: 2).
The onna kotoba originates in the attempt to regulate women’s speech.
Educational books for women in the Meiji era (1868–1912) repeated the les-
sons of the Muromachi (1392–1573) and Edo (1693–1868) eras, demand-
ing that women do not speak too much and use simple, polite words and
formulations—specific first-person pronouns (atashi, atakushi), sentence-
final particles (wa, dawa, no, yone, noyo, teyo, chatta), the honorific or
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“beautification” prefix (o-), and the like (Nakamura 2008: 33). And whereas
the “school girl language” (jogakusei kotoba) sounded “strange,” “vulgar,”
and “unpleasant to the ears” up to the 1890s, it was elevated in the early
twentieth century to onna kotoba by an ironic twist corresponding to the
rise of consumer culture and notably the dissemination of novels, maga-
zines, and advertising. At present onna kotoba is still taught to girls, along
with newer additions and rules of politeness, in some homes and schools,
according to which they should speak quietly, non-assertively, and in a high-
pitched voice (Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith 2008b). Predictably, some
teenage girls challenge these dominant models of femininity. Thus the “high
school gal language” (ko-gyaru-go), sensationalized in the media, attempts
to resist and subvert predetermined gender roles (Endo 2008; Bohn and
Matsumoto 2008). In sum, the relations between gender and humor can-
not be understood without scrutinizing the culturally produced gender of
any language. In Japanese, gender differences can be more clearly located in
morphology than in most European languages (Matsumoto 2004). “Men’s
language” (dansēgo) dramatically contrasts with josēgo with onna kotoba.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Ide (2004) observed that women’s use of polite hon-
orifics was not due to their subordinate position in society, but to their roles
of housewives, which involved much social interaction. More recently women’s
language, she asserts, has diversified. People belong to several “group lan-
guages” (isō), which overlap “so that women’s language and Tokyo lan-
guage and teachers’ language all play a role in determining how a female
teacher from Tokyo will express what she has to say” (Ide 2004: 181–82).
2.4 Japanese Humor at Work: Toward Staging Gender

Both Freud (1960) and Bergson (2007) made the point that humor is a
social, group phenomenon that calls for the participation of at least two or
more people, real or imaginary. And when people are at work, so is humor.
Strategically toyed with, language offers opportunities for either reassertions
or redefinitions of gender. Thus Bethel’s (1992) study in the Aotani Institu-
tion for the Elderly introduces Mrs. Otake, a female member of staff who
uses kin terms for their humorous value. Some of the residents she calls by
their first names, adding the infantilizing suffix -chan. This suffix is usually
heard in the family circle and reserved for children, but Mrs. Otake uses it
to point out a nonconforming resident for public ridicule, for example, dur-
ing mealtime. She earns in return the affectionate name of “Otake-chan,”
which for Bethel proves that her funny habit has established relationships of
enhanced intimacy. However, one could allege that this verbal manipulation
of age simultaneously achieves the symbolic removal of gender toward the
sexless category of the child, the sexually immature or non-sexualized being.
The case would then illustrate the power of staff over residents through
language, on the one hand, somewhere between gentle control and “sym-
bolic violence” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970), but also, on the other hand,
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the more specific influence of humor on gender. McLendon (1983) provides
a related example in a large trading company. Men use the word “aunt”
(obasan) in their native Kansai dialect (obahan) in order to enhance the
sense of ridicule they want to express toward a minority of single women,
whose age is older than what is regarded as marriageable. Other sarcastic
terms are used in reference to this minority, such as “old maids” (ikazu
goke). McLendon speaks of cruel humor and disdain, but again I rather
insist on the capacity of humorous language to deteriorate or suppress gen-
der. As if these women did not deserve their appellation, as if they were not
exactly or hardly women, such derisions erode their humanity.
Yoshida (2001) witnessed opposite dynamics in a Japanese inn (ryokan).
Whereas in Japanese society men have greater social status and power than
women, the men’s work in running the ryokan was subordinate to that of
women. In other words, the organization of the ryokan replicated that of
society, but turned inside out. Women joked more energetically than males,
thereby expressing an alternative gender hierarchy and in particular the
superiority of their role in providing hospitality, for guests expected a sense
of Japaneseness that females felt able to incarnate. Finding themselves mar-
ginal and the butts of jokes, men would quietly and humbly swallow their
pride, when pride was precisely what the female inn workers conveyed about
their work in their caustic remarks. An analogy between Yoshida’s research
in the ryokan and Bakhtin’s (1968) classic can offer a useful transition to the
second part of this chapter, which connects artistic masks to social masks, or
the playful unreality of performances to the serious reality of life. Bakhtin
saw the popular culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as carni-
valesque. At the heart of the carnival was the idea of overturning reality in
a “grotesque” burst of laughter that must have sounded very similar to that
of the female inn workers. The related idea that “all the world’s a stage” has
been quite popular with sociologists and anthropologists. Thus Goffman
(1959) draws on the extended metaphor of the (theatrical) performance to
interpret people’s interactions. He describes two main teams: the performers
and the audience. To address their audience, the performers use the front
and back regions of the show. The audience appears only in the front region,
whereas outsiders are excluded from both regions. A parallel ought to be
drawn in passing with the omote/ura (front/back) distinction and a set of
similar dichotomies (e.g., uchi/soto in 2.2) that are essential for understand-
ing Japanese culture and as such repeatedly mentioned in the anthropol-
ogy of Japan (see Doi 1986; Lebra 1976; Rosenberger 1992; Smith 1997;
Hendry 2003; Sugimoto 2003).
A chapter can only be very limited in scope, which is why this one focuses
on a specific type of stage. It is Japanese and comic on the one hand, and it
is permeated with gender on the other. It will be suggested through a num-
ber of Japanese imitative and conversational arts that the intersection of
humor and gender is a diverting locus where existence fuses with pretense,
being with acting, our own experience with its collective representations.
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In this perspective, the classic feminist contention that gender is “acted
out” in front of a participative male and female audience rings true enough
for Goffman (1959: 50), who includes an incisive passage from Simone de
Beauvoir’s (1986) Second Sex:
[T]he least sophisticated of women, once she is “dressed,” does not

present herself to observation; she is, like the picture or the statue, or
the actor on the stage, an agent through whom is suggested someone
not there—that is, the character she represents, but is not. It is this iden-
tification with something unreal, fixed, perfect as the hero of a novel,
as a portrait or a bust, that gratifies her; she strives to identify herself
with this figure and thus to seem to herself to be stabilized, justified in
her splendour.
By the same token, gendered language dresses women in ways that have
been outlined earlier. Its humorous tones, from bluntly sexist stories to more
subtle witticisms, barely conceal opinions about how women are really seen
or imagined. It is in this sense that representations are so crucial to scru-
tinize when it comes to gender relations. Jokes, puns, and parodies fulfill,
under their derisory looks, a very serious function. Huizinga (1970) did not
believe, for instance, that the commonsensical boundary between play and
seriousness should be taken seriously. Humor as a form of mimetic or nar-
rative play “creates order, is order [. . .] Play demands order absolute and
supreme” (Huizinga 1970: 10). For the game to exist, players by definition
must stick to its rules. Humor is endowed with a creative force that gener-
ates order out of chaos.
Mary Douglas, as noted in the in introduction, refers to this order as
the making of clear-cut categories through exaggeration of, say, male and
female features, to the detriment of more realist portrayals. Anthropologists
like to emphasize this performative function of humor in their accounts of
rituals, folk tales, and other playful forms. Radcliffe-Brown (1965) studied
joking relationships in a couple of African societies. And there are societ-
ies where certain kinship relations, for example between son-in-law and
mother-in-law, have to be articulated through jokes (Le Goff 1997). Anthro-
pology does share with humor a function of defamiliarization: both disturb
common sense, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar (Clif-
ford and Marcus 1986; Bourdieu 1993; Driessen 1997; Critchley 2002).
3. GENDER TROUBLE, FROM THE STAGE TO DAILY LIFE
3.1 Gender Politics in Kyōgen and Kabuki

The classical theatrical genres that are still performed today are known as
sarugaku and kabuki. Gaining popularity throughout the fourteenth and
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fifteenth centuries, the two types of sarugaku, nō and kyōgen, acquired their
present form between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nō
is Japanese drama that is now played worldwide, whereas kyōgen, the comic
plays derived from it, have seldom made it outside Japan. Nō and kyōgen
are traditionally executed by different actors but on the same stage and
within the same program (typically three nō plays interspersed with two
kyōgen plays today, though programs were longer in olden days). The for-
mer is a highly stylized, dramatic opera in which performers wear masks
and dance along with minimalist accompaniments (see Tyler 2005); the lat-
ter is comedy, without music and usually much less emphasis on dancing.
Kyōgen relies on punning, onomatopoeia, and physical action to poke fun
at human foibles. It is also concerned with the everyday life of the masses,
as opposed to nō’s representations of elite lifestyles. Across the small kyōgen
repertoire of between 200 and 260 plays still enacted today, humorous
forms range from mild social satires and farces to more subtle, gender-based
comedies. Thus if monks and feudal lords (daimyō) were popular targets,
somewhat shrewder entertainment staged psychological haggling between
husband and wife. In Lacquer Craftsman (Nushi), for instance, the husband
makes every effort to welcome his master and yet the wife, fearing that the
master might rival her man, attempts to trick him (Kato 1997; Brandon
2002; Wells and Davis 2006; Wells 2006). Here the female orientation to
maintaining harmony in the household humorously clashes with the male
objective of integration to wider society. And when husbands and wives
fight on stage, usually the woman wins, so that the kyōgen repertoire enacts
a rueful and deeply comic acknowledgement of reality. No matter what

the supposed social power of the man, either at the time of the composi-
tion of these plays or even now, his wife still had then—and has today—
the power to make his life miserable. kyōgen simply acknowledges this
as fact, and as cause for laughter. (Wells and Davis 2006: 147)
In this view humor acts on gender conventions (here the institution of mar-
riage) to destabilize patriarchal stereotypes and insinuate that the nature of
husband-wife relations is in reality more unconventional or less unilateral
than the doxa acknowledges. Today in the same vein, Japanese women joke
that a good husband makes a lot of money and is never home (Ellington
2009).
On stage, the humorous impact of such questioning of gender roles is
enhanced by the fact that men often play female roles. Of even more spec-
tacular relevance to constructions of gender are the kabuki theatre and its
onnagata tradition, comparable to the ancient Greek practice of male actors
in female roles, Shakespeare’s boys as female protagonists, or the Beijing
opera’s “female role specialists” (dan). By the early seventeenth century the
masses turned away from sarugaku, which had become the leisure of the
ruling class, and instead attended the kabuki instigated by a former shrine
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maiden, Okuni. In 1603, her troupe of female performers was so successful
in the capital that onna (women’s) kabuki flourished, until the Tokugawa
Shogunate decided in 1629 to ban women not only from kabuki but from
all other theatrical performances. This decision was motivated by disqui-
eting connections between onna kabuki and the prostitutes it advertised
in the pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara. However, the attempt to eradicate
female prostitution from the theater failed, as the male adolescents between
the ages of thirteen and fifteen who replaced women were in turn involved
in male prostitution (danshō). Twenty to thirty years after the ban of onna
kabuki, wakashū (young men’s) kabuki was also prohibited to give rise to
yarō (men’s) kabuki. The older troupes of yarō kabuki were forced, besides,
to reduce their physical attractiveness. At this period, kabuki would evolve
from dance and mime to drama (Jackson 1989; McDonald 1994; Kato
1997; Mezur 2005).
3.2 How Onnagata Fashion Women

Noteworthy in this brief overview of the origins of kabuki is the institution
of the onnagata, a male impersonator of female roles, who appeared in
1629 as a result of a political maneuver and is still very much alive in the
all-male kabuki that nowadays predominates in Japan. Onnagata actors
strive to enact not the essence of femininity, but a highly stylized female-
likeness: literally the “form” (kata) of the female (onna) gender. Although
this fictional persona favors patriarchal values, it has been respectful of
women—possibly because the artistic status and reputation of the onna-
gata depends on the credibility with which they capture not female charac-
ters, but a male-body-styled vision of “womanliness” (onnarashisa) (Leiter
2002). The onnagata aesthetic principles specifically refer to the nostalgic
“erotic allure” (iroke) of the adolescent boy (wakashū). Due to their young
age the wakashū or shōnen are not always clearly distinguishable from girls.
They are girlboys. And the kata that are reproduced today were instigated
by wakashū kabuki because it displayed, in addition to some elements of
kyōgen, the gender ambiguity arising from the bodies of “beautiful boys”
(bishōnen). Contemporary onnagata deliberately cultivate a fantasy, a “lie”
(uso) that goes beyond the binary of male and female toward imagining
reality rather than emulating it; they perform according to the “beauty of
stylization” (yōshikibi) and the “beauty of the artificial” (jinkō no bi)—
a female-likeness that appears uncertain, porous, ambiguous (aimai), and
transformative. So the onnagata exploit their own physical limitations to
fabricate, in collaboration with spectators who picture a male body beneath
the feminine costume, an aesthetics of the artifice rejecting realism and
realizing instead the potentials of invention and exaggeration. Through
the same kind of sophisticated codes that Barthes (1993) praises in Chi-
nese theatre, the onnagata “magnify” (ōkisa suru) their postures, gestures,
costumes, make-up, accessories, vocal performances, and so forth, which
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together participate in the representation of otherworldly, extra-ordinary
gender acts—what they call “made-up things” (tsukutta mono). Hence the
onnagata often refer to their roles as “exaggerated beings” (kyōchō shita
mono). By partially obscuring their male bodies beneath, they produce a
stylized abstraction that disrupts sexed bodies and gender roles, questions
and subverts the male/female dichotomy, and eventually dismantles the illu-
sion of a natural gender identity, of a female essence or ideal womanliness.
The “fascination of the onnagata” (onnagata no miryoku) appears with this
choreographed, ambivalently gendered sensuality (onnagata no iroke).
To put it succinctly then, the kata of the onnagata emphasizes form over
mimetic representation of female-likeness and, in so doing, denaturalizes
gender norms, thereby defying socially prescribed behaviors and reasonings
such as “opposites attract.” The Japanese verb kabuku, from which kabuki
perhaps derives, means “to shift off center,” to “be outside the norm.” Based
on the young male body, this stylized fiction of woman distances itself from
reality and plays with the illusion of surface appearances toward a wider
interpretation of gender (Mezur 2005). The fact that female roles in kabuki
were never performed in search for an ideal “Woman” or in imitation of
real women does not imply that these roles have no impact on reality; on
the contrary, it indicates that gender can be realistically envisaged as a series
of creative acts (such as humorous acts) that repeatedly perform unfixed
male and female identities. For example, the impersonators of “male roles”
(otokoyaku) in the all-female Takarazuka revue train hard to accomplish
sublime forms of masculinity (Robertson 1989, 1998).
Although the combination of certain mimetic and verbal forms of rep-
resentation in kabuki theater corresponds to what Freud (1960: 192, 200)
called “ideational mimetics,” the onnagata’s (re)creation of one gender is
unlike parody or travesty in the Freudian sense of a “degradation” (Her-
absetzung) of people and objects worthy of respect. Rather, the onnagata is
engaged in the allegorical performance of female-likeness. Sometimes per-
ceptible in codified speech and body language, humor actively participates
in the construction of such allegory, perhaps on two levels.
The first level might sound amusing today, but once contextualized it
takes on a serious air. Women of the early Tokugawa period (1603–1867)
were encouraged to replicate the ambiguous mannerisms of the onna-
gata, and the bishōnen became ideals of beauty for both men and women
(Robertson 1998; Mezur 2005). As Robertson (1991: 106) explains,
women’s hypothetical achievement of “female” gender was tantamount

to their impersonation of female-like males, who in turn, were not
impersonating particular females but rather enacting an idealized ver-
sion (and vision) of female-likeness.
Stereotypes executed by male actors stood as arbiters of taste, driving forces

for women’s fashion, and upper-middle-class women began in the early
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eighteenth century to outnumber men in the kabuki audience. Ironically, the
onnagata used to find inspiration among the dress of high-class prostitutes
(Jackson 1989). The influence of male “women” on the collective imagina-
tion of how a woman should look and behave cannot be underestimated,
even today and even in a humorous mode, because the patterns of parody
from good-humored caricature to the utmost grotesque only amplify, in the
end, real features. Parallels between these dialectics of gender appearance
and current adoptions of fashions and lifestyles that circulate in the media
certainly abound, along with the very same ironies. To cite but two brief
examples, take the development of black-and-white films in the 1920s in the
US, when street fashions moved toward screen images so that “color drained
out of elegance, and was replaced by the whole black and white spectrum”
(Ewen and Ewen 1982: 201). Or take designer Christian Lacroix declaring to
Vogue that “it’s terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from
the poorest people” (quoted in Klein 2001: 74). Borrowing from wealthy
prostitutes, black-and-white images, or people in rags, fashion exposes gen-
der as a performance inspired by the marginal, the liminal, the extreme, in
short onnagata-like ambiguities and amplifications. In both the onnagata
costume and the fashionable dress resides the sarcastic pride of incarnating
what most people are not, yet may feel attracted to or tempted to be.
The second level is more directly concerned with the humorous potential
for gender confusion that a construct such as onnagata is bound to entail.
For example, the play Shibaraku was originally designed for a very mascu-
line hero, who in a later feminized version is performed by an onnagata.
This hero exits the stage via the traditional runway (hanamichi) in a typical
male style first; but then, realizing with a start that he is a woman, becomes
embarrassed and runs off in the female fashion (Leiter 2002). This results
in laughter in the crowd: the indeterminacy of gender boundaries arouses
“good silly humor” (Dunning 1985). This kind of embarrassment estab-
lishes complicity with an audience who is knowledgeable about the codes
of kabuki as a theater of men playing women, and in a more fundamental
way it generates humor through gender “trouble”—through a disconcerting
impression of wrongness and instability, for the feminine can no longer be
fixed or taken for granted. The onnagata is sorely conscious of his acting
womanly. On the stage he knows that he is, always already, becoming a
woman. And this woman transcends femininity in ways that female specta-
tors cannot, and hence admire. Two points can be made about this becom-
ing. First, it is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s (1986) famous allegation
that one is not born a woman, but becomes one. If gender is in this view an
acquisition, a cultural construction of sex, something that one becomes and
can never just “be,” then it should be understood not as a static entity but
as a repeated and incessant activity. Second, the onnagata’s constant state
of becoming makes her the incarnation of humor, the humorous person par
excellence or for Noguez (2004: 80) the “impossible person”—she exists
only virtually, like an asymptote. And we can only be to this impossible
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humorist what the philosophos is to the sophia, dwelling in the distance
of the philein. We draw nearer and nearer to her without ever reaching
her. What Noguez calls “humor” is this feeling of impossibility experienced
to the point of uncontrollable laughter. Critchley (2002: 2) concurs that
“humour is a nicely impossible object for a philosopher. But herein lies its
irresistible attraction.”
3.3 What Humor Does to Women

As stated earlier, the audience recognizes real female traits in the gender
portrayed on stage, thus participating in the creation of the feminine iden-
tity. The example of classic Japanese theater, which could be expanded to
virtually all representational acts, shows that ideas about what it is to be a
woman result from the collaboration of artists and models on a stylized con-
struct. The humor of kyōgen or kabuki illustrates a performative process of
gender creation. This process relates to the notion of gender trouble running
through the chapter. The meaning of trouble, that of a serious problem, can
be perverted into its opposite, that of a funny situation (e.g. “Ranma is in
trouble!”). As such, it reflects the ambiguity and performativity of gender-
based humor. Gender trouble is also an allusion to Judith Butler’s (1990)
influential work. And with a little stretch of the imagination, Butler and the
audience of kabuki together laugh in the face of serious gender categories. If
the expression “female trouble” is for Butler (1990) a bad joke according to
which “being female is a natural indisposition,” the trouble also refers to a
crucial instability in the concept of Woman. Butler (1990: xv) believes that
gender is not something that simply is; instead it appears “manufactured
through a sustained set of acts” (my emphasis), just like onnagata acts.
Following Foucault’s (1994) genealogical approach, gender is not so much
defined on the basis of natural causes than from the very expressions that
are said to be its result. Claiming that the gendered body is performative is
akin to proposing that it has no ontological status apart from the plurality
of acts that constitutes its reality. That is, gender proves to be a “doing”
that shapes the identity it is purported to be. Hence Butler (1990: 45) does
not argue toward the artificiality of gender, but on the contrary develops a
“genealogy of gender ontology” according to which
gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts

within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce
the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (my emphasis)
Depicted here is the consolidation of the female gender through rehearsals,

reiterations, insistences, and repetitions. Doing gender implies re-doing it,
over and over again, diligently until automatisms are acquired and the per-
formance looks and feels “natural.” Gender requires that the performance
be repeated in a plurality of social rituals, which re-enact a set of meanings
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already established. Repetition is then “the mundane and ritualized form of
their legitimation,” and as Butler (1990: 191) continues,
Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an

exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gen-
der [. . .] must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily ges-
tures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of
an abiding gendered self.
Consequently for Butler the construction of gender is by definition ideologi-

cal, inasmuch as it conceals its genesis in the mask of the ordinary, that is, in
a prosaic and tacit manner. Such construction is credible to the extent that
it compels our belief in its naturalness. In other words, people are incited
to believe in the necessity and reality of what is, in fact, a cultural fiction.
It can be argued first that humor results from a collapse of this belief,
from the realization in a burst of laughter that the existence of male and
female categories is incredible. Men under female disguises (the onnagata,
the transvestite) parody the misleading notion of an “original” gender. In
reality, not only does such imitation reveal the imitative dimension of gen-
der itself, but at the same time it highlights its contingency (Butler 1990).
That is, the discovery that the relation between the sex of performers
(as biological givens) and their gender (as performance) is contingent cre-
ates surprise and at best it is this “disappointed expectation” that defined,
in Cicero’s De Oratore, the typical joke (Critchley 2002: 1). If following
Critchley one accepts that humor occurs in the discrepancy between the
way things are and the way they are represented, between reality and pre-
tense, then by implication it will occur in the revelation that gender is not
as natural and necessary as it may look. Because there is more to gender
than meets the eye, humor neither reinforces nor confirms the legitimacy
of discourses on natural gender. It is quite the opposite—by staging ille-
gitimate women in kyōgen kabuki or other cross-dressing manifestations,
it deconstructs gender as a performance, of which women like men become
aware in their real lives. Spectators laugh as they identify comparable acts
within their own experiences. The humorous tale tears up another tale, that
of a naturally gendered reality, and in doing so demonstrates its power of
de-fetishization and catharsis: the artificiality of gender is made suddenly
and blatantly visible.
Second, Butler insists on repetition. In French, repetition can be a syn-
onym of rehearsal and even become a “running joke’ ” in the humorous
context (comique de répétition). To be sure, there is much fun and much
repetition in the rehearsals of the onnagata. They spend a great deal of
time and energy in the meticulous reproduction of traditional patterns,
the kata of female-likeness. Their skills and reputation rest in part upon
the accuracy with which they repeat the kata that past generations, long
before them, endlessly executed. In this connection the humorous aspects
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of kabuki, transpiring for instance in the Shibaraku play, hint at Bergson’s
(2007) analysis despite the criticisms it received. For Bergson, the person
who gives the impression of becoming a thing, say a fake woman or an ani-
mated doll, embodies the comic figure. Likewise, in the effects produced by
repetition he sees evidence of the mechanical dimension of humor. If doing
gender entails acquiring automatisms (so that doing parades as being), then
an extreme stylization or personification such as the onnagata’s will some-
what verge on objectification. According to Bergson, this objectification is
likely to look amusing, entertaining. Early kabuki was based on mimicry,
and the transvestite in a farce happens to make us laugh just as a human
puppet or automaton would. Funny scenes routinely feature people who
merge with or turn into objects or machines. One may think of the scene
of the feeding machine in Chaplin’s Modern Times or classic US cartoons
such as Road Runner and Tom and Jerry in which neither the coyote nor the
cat will ever catch their prey and will be crushed or squeezed into inhuman
shapes (cubes, lids, etc.).
Third, the logic of objectification draws on the assumption that we often
laugh because we are troubled by what we laugh at, because it terrifies us.
Laughter unveils an anxiety of accessing the troubling knowledge that gen-
der may be more complex than its reassuring icons. Gregor’s transformation
into an insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for instance, belongs to this kind
of grotesque, which confuses the reader and makes her question what she
knows about the world. By the same token the laugh of a kyōgen spectator
contains such interrogations as, what on earth is a woman? With laughter
comes the anguish of uncertainty. Tickle a baby’s belly and watch her face
and body shake with the spasms of hilarity; after a while, as she struggles to
breathe, you will read fear in her eyes. What is happening to me? she must
be thinking; and years later, during an orgasm, am I dying? The superior-
ity of Bataille’s (1970a, 1970b, 1973, 1976) theorization of laughter over
Bergson’s resides in the discernment of and elaboration on this torment. In
short, laughter is for Bataille an act of nondiscursive knowledge through
which we achieve communication. This type of knowledge is only accessible
through identification with the experience of the Other or mental projection
of oneself into a traumatic episode (what he calls the “inner experience”).
Death is a salient example: we cannot know much about our own death but
we still attend a sacrifice or any other distressing manifestation and com-
municate our anxiety with fellow witnesses. As such, laughter has a function
of cohesion that characterizes human interaction.
CONCLUSION
Drawing on cultural idiosyncrasies, comparative studies, conversations in

the workplace, traditional arts, and the contemporary media, this chapter
has offered glimpses of Japanese humor with a gendered flavor. The first
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part of this chapter rooted the specificities of Japanese humor in history,
and notably in linguistic regulations of gender. The second part attempted
to link the metaphor of the stage to feminist theory, via what has been called
“gender trouble.” Trouble refers to a state of irresolution, of hesitancy, of
anxiety. The same sort of anxiety is manifested in laughter. The trouble with
gender, therefore, emerges from the smiles and laughs that gags elicit.
To recapitulate, the humour produced by gender confusion is performa-
tive, meaning that it contributes to designing and refining gender categories.
The feminine and the masculine are yin and yang, defining each other along
exaggerated models or caricatures that reinforce the very oppositions that
condition their existence. Thus the credibility of the onnagata is enhanced
by his very excesses: his ambiguously gendered body radiates a metaphysi-
cal kind of sensuality (iroke) that appears more deeply human, somehow
post-human. In this chapter I have attempted to address the position of
gender-based humor in Japanese society and how Japanese culture can
inform our understanding of the relationship between humor and gender.
A great deal of humor is concerned with the ordering and structuring of
gender, with the delineation of clear boundaries between the male and the
female—even if this implies, as the characters of Ranma and the onnagata
epitomize, their deliberate blurring in an attempt to fully grasp what dif-
ferentiates them, as well as what delimits straight from gay sexualities. Like
eroticism, humor builds on a fascination with the real ambiguity of gender,
and, reciprocally, gender is sensually and humorously fashioned. Humor-
ous performances arise from the aesthetic disturbance or subversion of his-
torically specific gender prescriptions, just as the child develops role-playing
strategies to understand what makes a male and a female body, game, or
activity before assimilating the gender divisions that prevail in her world.
When life is construed as such a parody, then without a doubt, “laughter
is to man unique,” as Rabelais, reiterating Aristotle’s maxim, wrote in his
preface to Gargantua.
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6244-0279d-PI-1pass-007-r02.indd 120 2/26/2014 7:23:21 PM
Section II
Part II
AU: Make this Part II ???
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8 Humor and Gender
An Overview of
Psychological Research
Rod A. Martin
Do men and women differ in their sense of humor? To investigate this ques-
tion, we need to consider the nature, forms, and functions of humor, and
to clarify what is meant by a sense of humor. Humor is a complex psycho-
logical phenomenon that involves several different components, takes many
forms, and serves a variety of psychosocial functions. Each of these may or
may not be relevant to gender.
1. CONCEPTUALIZING AND MEASURING

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN HUMOR
In broad terms, humor may be viewed as a form of mental play comprising

cognitive, emotional, social, and expressive components (R. Martin 2007).
Cognitively, humor involves the perception of non-serious incongruity, a
mental process that has been referred to as bisociation (Koestler 1964) or
synergy (Apter 1982). This mental process occurs when two contradic-
tory images or conceptions of the same object or situation are held in one’s
mind at the same time. Not just any incongruity is humorous, of course: it
must be accompanied by a non-serious, playful attitude, in which things are
viewed as relatively unimportant or trivial. Emotionally, the perception of
humor activates the specific positive affective response of mirth (R. Martin
2007). Humor is also a social phenomenon, most frequently occurring
spontaneously during interactions between people. Laughter is a type of
nonverbal facial and vocal communication that expresses the positive emo-
tion of mirth. As such, laughter, like humor in general, is inherently social
in nature.
Humorous communication takes many different forms, which may be
broadly categorized into (1) performance humor and (2) conversational
humor. Performance humor includes such forms as standup comedy,
humorous literature, TV sitcoms, comic strips, and comedy films. Conver-
sational humor refers to the more spontaneous forms that arise in every-
day social interactions, such as verbal witticisms, ironic statements, jokes,
puns, teasing, double entendres, and amusing personal anecdotes. People

124 Rod A. Martin
can be producers of humor, amusing others and making them laugh, and
they can also be humor appreciators, enjoying the humor created by oth-
ers. Gender differences that may be observed in one form of humor do not
necessarily apply to others.
Although humor is inherently playful and non-serious, it also serves a
number of important psychosocial functions in our daily lives (Kane, Suls,
and Tedeschi 1977; Long and Graesser 1988; Martineau 1972; Mulkay
1988; Norrick 1993). Most of these uses of humor have to do with the fact
that it is inherently ambiguous and even contradictory, and can therefore
be interpreted in multiple ways. Moreover, a message communicated in a
humorous manner can be retracted more easily than if it were expressed in
a serious mode, allowing both the speaker and the listener to save face if the
message is not well received. For example, humor can be used to disclose
personal information, such as one’s values, attitudes, or emotional state, in
a tentative manner that can be denied if not well received (e.g., “I was only
joking”). Humor targeting deviant behaviors or attitudes can also be used to
enforce social norms and influence others’ behavior. Thus, the social play of
humor can be used to communicate a variety of messages in order to achieve
any number of social goals, some of which may be congenial and pro-social,
whereas others may be more aggressive or coercive. As I have previously
noted (R. Martin 2007: 150),
[humor] can be used to bring people closer together or to exclude them,

to violate social norms or to enforce them, to dominate over and manip-
ulate people, or to ingratiate oneself with others. Humor can also be
used to reinforce stereotypes or to shatter prejudices, to resolve conflicts
in relationships or to avoid dealing with problems, to convey feelings of
affection and tolerance, or to denigrate and express hostility.
When we consider humor in this multifaceted manner, it becomes evident

that the concept of “sense of humor” is not a unitary construct. Individual
differences in humor, which may include gender differences, can relate to
any of these varied components, forms, and functions. For example, indi-
viduals may differ cognitively in their ability to perceive incongruous con-
nections in situations, to produce humorous jokes and stories, and to make
others laugh; the ability to remember jokes and reproduce them; or the abil-
ity to catch on quickly to the jokes of others. Sense of humor may also
refer to aesthetic differences in the degree to which one enjoys particular
types of humor, such as canned jokes, particular themes such as sexuality
or aggression, or particular structural characteristics (Ruch 1992). Alterna-
tively, it can relate to differences in temperament: the degree to which one
is generally cheerful and playful, taking a non-serious perspective on situa-
tions (Ruch and Köhler 1998). In addition, it can refer to habitual behavior
patterns: the tendency to laugh frequently or to tell jokes and amuse oth-
ers. Individuals also differ in their style of humor: whether they use it in an

Humor and Gender 125
affiliative manner to enhance relationships, as a means of coping with stress,
in an aggressive manner to diminish others, or in an ingratiating manner to
amuse others at their own expense (Martin et al. 2003).
Researchers interested in individual differences in humor have developed
a number of measurement techniques for assessing these different conceptu-
alizations of sense of humor (R. Martin 2007). Interestingly, many of these
are only weakly correlated with one another, lending further support to the
view that sense of humor is a multifaceted set of traits rather than a unitary
dimension. For example, there is very little correlation between the degree
to which individuals enjoy jokes and cartoons and their ability to create
witty productions or their tendency to tell jokes and amuse others in daily
life (Babad 1974; Köhler and Ruch 1996; Koppel and Sechrest 1970).
When we consider gender differences in humor, then, we need to recog-
nize that this is a very broad and multifaceted concept. Rather than ques-
tioning whether men or women have “more of a sense of humor,” we need
to think in terms of the different forms of humor that men and women may
enjoy, the different ways they engage in and express it, and the different
purposes for which they use it in particular social contexts. Indeed, because
humor is such a ubiquitous social phenomenon that touches on all areas
of life and plays an important role in communication, we can expect that
gender differences in humor will likely reflect differences in other social,
personality, and cognitive characteristics. To the extent that men are more
aggressive than women (Bettencourt and Miller 1996), we can expect them
to enjoy and engage in more aggressive forms of humor. To the extent
that men and women show differences in sexuality and mate preferences
(Feingold 1992; Oliver and Hyde 1995), we can expect that humor may
play different roles in their courtship behaviors. To the extent that men and
women have different conversational goals, we can expect them to use humor
in different ways in same-sex and mixed-sex social contexts (Crawford 2003).
In the sections that follow, I will explore a number of different approaches
that researchers have taken to assess individual differences in sense of
humor and will summarize research findings relating to gender differences
(as well as similarities) in each of these approaches. This review is limited to
research employing quantitative empirical methods. This is not meant to be
a comprehensive meta-analysis, but rather a selective review of representa-
tive studies.
Before embarking on this review of the research, it is important to remind
ourselves that the finding of a statistically significant difference between men
and women on a particular humor-related variable does not mean that all
men and women differ on this variable (Dindia 2006; Lippa 2002). Rather,
it simply means that there is a difference in average scores between men
and women. Because there is typically a great deal of variability among
individuals within each gender, even though the mean scores for men and
women may differ, there will still be a large overlap in their distributions.
Just as there are many women who are taller than many men, even though

126 Rod A. Martin
men are taller than women on average, there are also many women who use
humor more aggressively than many men, even though, on average, men
are more likely than women to engage in aggressive humor. In addition, it is
important to emphasize that the discovery of a significant gender difference
does not tell us anything about the cause of that difference. Further research
would be needed to determine whether any observed gender differences are
due to culturally-based socialization processes or to biologically-based neu-
rological or hormonal differences between the sexes.
2. GENDER RESEARCH USING MEASURES OF INDIVIDUAL

DIFFERENCES IN HUMOR
2.1 Humor Appreciation

Prior to the 1980s, the most common approach taken by researchers to
study individual differences in humor was the use of humor appreciation
measures. In this approach, research participants are presented with a series
of jokes, cartoons, or other humorous materials, and are asked to rate them
on such dimensions as funniness, enjoyment, and aversiveness. The humor
stimuli are typically clustered into various categories (e.g., sexual, hostile,
non-tendentious), either on a theoretical basis or by means of factor anal-
ysis, and separate scores are computed by summing participants’ ratings
within each category. In this approach, then, sense of humor is conceptual-
ized in terms of the degree to which the individual enjoys particular types or
categories of jokes and cartoons.
Numerous studies using this methodology have investigated potential
gender differences in humor appreciation. Research conducted prior to the
1970s indicated that men were more likely than women to enjoy these forms
of humor in general, and particularly jokes containing aggressive or sexual
themes (Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 1998). To the extent that they enjoyed these
forms of humor at all, women preferred jokes described as non-tendentious
(i.e., neither aggressive nor sexual; Groch 1974; Landis and Ross 1933;
Malpass and Fitzpatrick 1959; Terry and Ertel 1974; Wilson 1975). There was
also early research evidence that both men and women enjoyed sexist jokes
making fun of women more than jokes targeting men (Cantor 1976; Losco
and Epstein 1975). This finding suggested that women tended to accept the
sexual stereotypes contained in female-disparaging jokes and identified more
with the male protagonists than with the female targets. These differences
between men’s and women’s enjoyment of humor were assumed to be due
to differences in socialization, dominance, aggressiveness, and social status.
These research findings were often extrapolated well beyond the enjoyment
of jokes and cartoons to draw wide-ranging conclusions about gender differ-
ences in humor, and were used to support the prevailing view that women’s
sense of humor is generally inferior to that of men (Wickberg 1998).

Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (1998) examined the humor appreciation
research conducted between 1970 and 1996 to determine whether these
earlier findings had changed with the rise of feminism. With a greater
sense of empowerment and increased solidarity among women resulting
from greater social, political, and economic opportunities, they expected
to find that women would show a declining appreciation for anti-female
humor and greater enjoyment of humor in general, including sexual and
hostile types. Their review of more than forty studies published during this
period revealed that, as expected, there was now little evidence of gender
differences in the enjoyment of either aggressive (hostile) or neutral (non-
tendentious) humor. Overall, it appeared that women enjoy jokes that make
fun of others just as much as men do.
With regard to hostile jokes targeting women versus men, however, the
results were somewhat more mixed. Some studies showed that women still
seemed to enjoy jokes making fun of other women just as much as men
did, whereas others indicated reduced enjoyment of female-disparaging
humor among women. Overall, the authors concluded that there was some
trend among women toward a decreased appreciation for anti-female jokes
and increased enjoyment of anti-male jokes. However, there was also con-
siderable evidence that, for both women and men, the more an individual
endorsed feminist values, sexual equality, and nontraditional sex roles, the
less appreciation he or she showed for anti-female jokes. In contrast, among
both men and women, those who enjoyed female-disparaging humor were
more likely to endorse generally sexist attitudes and stereotypes (Butland
and Ivy 1990; Chapman and Gadfield 1976; Gallivan 1992; Henkin and
Fish 1986; Herzog and Hager 1995; Moore, Griffiths, and Payne 1987;
Ryan and Kanjorski 1998). Thus, as women and men became more accept-
ing of feminist values, they became less tolerant of female-demeaning sexist
humor.
Although Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (1998) found an apparent increase
in women’s appreciation of hostile humor over the preceding two decades,
their review of the literature revealed continuing evidence that women were
much less likely than men to enjoy sexual jokes and cartoons. Out of eigh-
teen studies reviewed, fifteen showed a significant gender difference, with
men enjoying sexual humor more than women in every case. However, the
authors noted that this continuing difference was likely due to the fact that
much of the sexual humor employed in these studies was sexist in nature,
demeaning women and treating them as sex objects. Five additional studies
were reviewed in which participants were asked to rate sexual humor that
was judged to be non-sexist in nature. Interestingly, none of these found a
significant difference between men and women in their enjoyment of non-
sexist sexual humor (Chapman and Gadfield 1976; Hemmasi, Graf, and
Russ 1994; Henkin and Fish 1986; Prerost 1983; Wilson and Molleston
1981). More recently, Herzog (1999) found no differences between men
and women in the enjoyment of sexual jokes in which men were the target,

128 Rod A. Martin
whereas women showed significantly less enjoyment than did men of sexual
jokes disparaging women. Herzog attributed this change from previous pat-
terns to the continued influence of the women’s movement. Thus, women’s
general disliking of sexual humor seems to be due to the sexist nature of
much of this type of humor; women appear to enjoy sexual humor just as
much as men do, as long as it is not demeaning toward women.
In the humor appreciation research discussed thus far, the jokes and
cartoons used as humor stimuli were classified on the basis of their con-
tent themes (sexual, hostile, etc.) as judged by the researchers them-
selves. However, factor analytic research casts doubt on the validity of this
content-based classification approach, demonstrating that, apart from sex-
ual content, humor appreciation is determined more by the structure than
the content of jokes and cartoons (Ruch 1992; Ruch and Hehl 1998). Ruch
and his colleagues have consistently found two factors relating to humor
structure (labeled incongruity-resolution and nonsense), and only one factor
relating to content (sexual humor). Research has shown that the enjoyment
of incongruity-resolution humor (jokes in which the humor arises from find-
ing a resolution to an incongruity, often by invoking a stereotype) is asso-
ciated with more conservative and authoritarian social attitudes. On the
other hand, the enjoyment of nonsense humor (more zany or “off-the-wall”
humor with no apparent resolution of the incongruity) is associated with
higher levels of sensation-seeking, openness to experience, and preference
for complexity. In general, older adults tend to prefer incongruity-resolution
humor, whereas younger adults prefer nonsense humor. These two catego-
ries have been found to apply to all humorous stimuli, regardless of the
content category (including sexual humor).
With regard to gender differences, Ruch (1992) examined data from a
large number of studies conducted in several different countries and found
no evidence that men and women respond differently to these two struc-
tural categories of humor. Although one study conducted in Italy did find
that women enjoyed incongruity-resolution humor more than men did
(Forabosco and Ruch 1994), this finding was likely due to an effect of age
rather than gender, because the women participants in this study happened
to be older, on average, than the men. Overall, then, there do not seem to
be any gender differences in the enjoyment of humorous stimuli categorized
according to their joking mechanisms or structure.
Overall, then, research on humor appreciation conducted in recent
decades indicates that, apart from female-demeaning forms of sexual humor,
men and women do not seem to differ in their average enjoyment of various
types of jokes and cartoons. However, it is important to note that research
on humor appreciation tells us very little about the ways people typically
engage in humor. In the daily lives of both women and men, jokes and car-
toons are a relatively unimportant source of humor and laughter compared
to the jesting and teasing, amusing anecdotes, and ironic statements that
arise spontaneously in ordinary conversation (Graeven and Morris 1975;

Martin and Kuiper 1999). Moreover, as noted previously, there is little rela-
tionship between humor appreciation and humor creation. The past focus
on humor appreciation, therefore, does not provide information about the
ways men and women actually produce and use humor in their daily inter-
actions with others (Crawford 1989; Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 1998). More
recent research on humor and gender has therefore moved away from a
focus on enjoyment of jokes and cartoons to investigations of the way men
and women express and use humor in everyday life, employing a number
of different approaches to conceptualizing and measuring individual differ-
ences in these aspects of humor.
2.2 Joke-Telling
In contrast to the large literature on gender differences in the enjoyment
of jokes and cartoons, very few studies have examined gender differences
in the tendency to tell jokes or the types of jokes that men and women
typically tell. There is some evidence that men are more likely than women
to tell “canned” or formulaic jokes in general. In a survey asking about
humor preferences, Crawford and Gressley (1991) found that men reported
a greater tendency to tell canned jokes, whereas women reported greater
use of anecdotal humor, such as recounting funny stories about things that
happened to themselves or others.
Johnson (1991) asked women and men enrolled in introductory psychol-
ogy courses to write down their favorite joke. The jokes were later classified
by research assistants as sexual, aggressive, both sexual and aggressive, or
neither sexual nor aggressive. Interestingly, no gender differences were found
in the frequency with which men and women told jokes that were judged
to be either sexual or aggressive, contradicting the view that women do not
enjoy these types of jokes as much as men do (and consistent with the recent
humor appreciation research described earlier). However, men told signifi-
cantly more jokes that contained both sexual and aggressive themes than did
women. Most of these could be described as sexist jokes that were demean-
ing toward women (although some also targeted gay men). This finding sup-
ports the view that women are less likely to enjoy sexual humor that is also
sexist in nature. In addition, women told significantly more jokes categorized
as neither sexual nor aggressive (e.g., puns, riddles, wordplay, non sequiturs).
Finally, significantly more women than men were unable to think of a joke,
supporting the view that joke-telling is more typical of men than women.
Overall then, the telling of canned or formulaic jokes seems to be pre-
dominantly a male activity. When they do tell jokes, women seem to be just
as likely as men to tell ones containing aggressive or sexual themes, although
they are less likely to tell sexual jokes that are demeaning to women and
gays and more likely to tell non-tendentious (neither sexual nor aggressive)
jokes involving humorous wordplay (for a qualitative description of the
types of sexual jokes told by women, see Bing 2007).

130 Rod A. Martin
2.3 Humor Creation Ability

A few studies have investigated gender differences in humor production
abilities, with mixed findings. This ability-based facet of humor is typically
assessed by asking participants to generate humorous responses to stimuli,
such as creating funny captions for cartoons, and these humor produc-
tions are then rated for funniness. Brodzinsky and Rubien (1976) presented
men and women with twelve cartoons from which the captions had been
removed. The participants were asked to create humorous captions for
each cartoon, and these were subsequently rated for funniness by male and
female judges. Overall, the mean funniness ratings of men’s humor produc-
tions were significantly higher than those of women, although the difference
was very small. Furthermore, this gender difference was only found with
the captions created for cartoons with overtly sexual or aggressive themes.
In another early study, Clabby (1980) asked undergraduate participants to
create witty responses on five items (e.g., create a funny presidential cam-
paign slogan), which were then rated for funniness. No significant gender
differences were found.
More recently, Edwards and Martin (2010) used two different tasks
to assess the humor production abilities of 215 undergraduate men and
women. In one of these, participants were asked to create funny captions
for five captionless cartoons. In the other, they were presented with descrip-
tions of five potentially frustrating situations and were instructed to imagine
experiencing each situation. They were then asked to record funny things
they could say about the situations when telling a friend about them after-
wards. The responses to both tasks were subsequently rated for funniness
by male and female raters. Analyses of the data revealed no significant dif-
ferences between men and women in either task.
In contrast to these findings, Greengross and Miller (2011) asked 200 male
and 200 female undergraduate students to generate captions for three cap-
tionless cartoons and found a significant gender difference in the mean rated
funniness of the captions. In particular, the men’s humor productions were
rated to be significantly funnier than those of the women. In addition, the
men produced a significantly larger number of humorous captions than did
the women. Overall, then, the research to date is inconclusive regarding
gender differences in the ability to create humorous responses “on demand”
in the laboratory, but the number of relevant studies is very small.
Samson and Huber (2007) took a different approach to studying gender
differences in humor production. They examined a large number of cartoons
published in newspapers and magazines from several different countries,
and compared the cartoons created by men and women on various formal
characteristics. They found that verbal elements played a greater role in the
cartoons drawn by women than those drawn by men. In particular, female
cartoonists created significantly more cartoons containing text, used more
words in those cartoons that did contain text, and had a greater number of

speaking characters. The authors suggested that these findings are due to the
greater verbal abilities that have been found in women, which appear to be
based on differences in brain lateralization (Kimura 2000). In addition, the
cartoons by women contained significantly more panels, whereas male car-
toonists more frequently drew single-panel cartoons. The authors suggested
that this may be due to women having a more elaborate narrative style in
telling jokes. Thus, although overall differences in humor production ability
between women and men are still uncertain, there may be differences in the
formal characteristics of their humor productions, which may in turn relate
to differences in general cognitive aptitudes. Further research is needed to
investigate these questions in greater detail.
2.4 Self-Report Surveys

Crawford and Gressley (1991) administered a sixty-eight-item survey to
undergraduate men and women, asking them about their perceptions and
typical experiences of humor involving a broad range of topics, styles, and
types of humor. Overall, men and women showed more similarities than dif-
ferences in their responses. No gender differences were found, for example,
for self-reported creativity in humor production; tendency to make sponta-
neous or “off the cuff” witty remarks; enjoyment of puns, wordplay, and
witticisms; tendency to laugh at oneself; enjoyment of cartoons and comic
strips in newspapers and magazines; and enjoyment of sexual humor. How-
ever, men reported greater enjoyment and creation of hostile (e.g., ethnic,
sexist, or racist) humor, a greater tendency to tell canned jokes, and greater
enjoyment of slapstick comedy. On the other hand, women reported greater
use of anecdotal humor, such as recounting funny stories about things that
happened to themselves or others.
When asked to describe someone they know with an outstanding sense
of humor, both men and women in this study were more likely to describe a
male than a female. On open-ended questions asking them to describe what
is meant by a good sense of humor, both women and men saw spontaneous
creativity, caring (using humor to cheer others up and alleviate tension),
and personal relevance (recounting funny real-life anecdotes about self and
acquaintances) as being important characteristics of a good sense of humor.
Overall, this survey suggests that there are many similarities in the way
women and men perceive their own sense of humor, although there are also
some differences, particularly with regard to aggressive or hostile forms of
humor and the telling of canned jokes versus humorous personal narratives.
2.5 Questionnaire Measures of Sense of Humor

Over the past three decades, a number of self-report questionnaires have
been developed to assess individual differences in various components or
aspects of the sense of humor. Several of these measures have been widely

132 Rod A. Martin
used in research examining associations between sense of humor and many
other personality traits and physical and mental health related variables (for a
review see R. Martin 2007). Most of these questionnaires have shown little
or no difference between men and women on the humor-related dimensions
that they assess. For example, no gender differences were found in research
with the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ; Martin and
Lefcourt 1984), which assesses the degree to which individuals typically
respond with smiling and laughter to a range of life situations (Lefcourt
and Martin 1986). Similarly, research with the Coping Humor Scale (CHS;
Martin and Lefcourt 1983) revealed no gender differences in the degree to
which individuals report that they use humor to cope with stressful life expe-
riences (Lefcourt and Martin 1986). In addition, men and women typically
obtain similar scores on the Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ; Svebak
1974), which assesses individual differences in sensitivity to humor, liking
of humor, and laughter expression. Moreover, in samples of American and
German adults, Ruch and Carrell (1998) found no differences between men
and women in scores on any of the eight subscales of the Sense of Humor
Scale (SHS; McGhee 1999), measuring enjoyment of humor; seriousness and
negative mood; playfulness and positive mood; laughter; verbal humor; find-
ing humor in everyday life; self-deprecating humor; and use of humor under
stress. On the trait version of the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI-T;
Ruch, Köhler, and Van Thriel 1996), these same authors found no gender
differences on scales assessing trait bad mood and trait seriousness, but they
did find that women scored significantly higher than men on the trait cheer-
fulness scale. This latter finding was due to higher average scores for women
than men on the self-reported tendency to laugh frequently and easily.
The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al. 2003) assesses indi-
vidual differences in four different styles or uses of humor in everyday social
interaction. Two of the styles (affiliative and self-enhancing) are assumed
to be potentially beneficial for well-being, whereas the other two (aggres-
sive and self-defeating) are thought to be potentially detrimental. Affiliative
humor refers to the use of humor to amuse others, to facilitate relationships,
and to reduce interpersonal tensions. Self-enhancing humor refers to the
tendency to maintain a humorous outlook on life in the face of adversity
and to use humor in coping. Aggressive humor is the use of humor for the
purpose of disparaging or manipulating others, as in sarcasm, teasing, or
ridicule. Finally, self-defeating humor involves the use of excessively self-
disparaging humor as a way of ingratiating oneself with others. A consid-
erable amount of research has demonstrated that these four humor styles
are differentially associated with measures of psychological well-being and
interpersonal relationship satisfaction in predicted ways (for a review, see
R. Martin 2007).
With regard to gender differences, in a sample of about 1,200 partici-
pants ranging in age from fourteen to eighty-seven years, Martin and col-
leagues (2003) found that men obtained significantly higher scores than

women on all four scales of the HSQ. However, the gender differences on
the two positive humor styles (affiliative and self-enhancing) were extremely
small, reaching statistical significance only because of the large sample size.
On the other hand, the gender differences for the two negative humor styles
(aggressive and self-defeating) were more substantial. Not surprisingly,
men reported a much greater tendency than women to engage in aggressive
forms of humor such as sarcasm, ridicule, “put-down” humor, and racist
and sexist joking, as indicated by higher scores on the aggressive humor
scale. Interestingly, men also reported a greater tendency to engage in the
excessively self-disparaging and ingratiating forms of humor assessed by the
self-defeating humor scale. On the surface, this seems inconsistent with ear-
lier qualitative research suggesting that women are more likely to engage in
self-deprecating humor (Crawford 1989). However, it is important to note
that self-defeating humor in the HSQ refers to excessively self-disparaging
humor that is associated with low self-esteem, whereas self-deprecating
humor can often reflect a lighthearted attitude toward one’s own shortcom-
ings while still maintaining a positive sense of self. Thus, overall, men seem
to use more of the negative aggressive and self-defeating styles of humor
than women do, whereas very little gender difference is observed in the
more positive affiliative and self-enhancing forms of humor.
Overall, then, research using standardized self-report scales measuring
various aspects of the sense of humor reveals many more similarities than
differences between men’s and women’s humor. There is very little difference
in the degree to which women and men report that they frequently perceive,
engage in, and enjoy humor; find it in their everyday lives; use it to enhance
relationships and cope with stress; and take a generally non-serious, playful
attitude toward life. However, men more than women consistently report
using humor in aggressive ways, such as teasing, ridiculing others, and tell-
ing racist and sexist jokes. In addition, men are more likely than women
to report using excessively self-disparaging humor, amusing others at their
own expense as a form of ingratiation.
3. OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES OF
CONVERSATIONAL HUMOR
The research reviewed thus far, which has approached individual differ-
ences in humor in terms of fairly stable general traits, suggests that, by and
large, women and men are quite similar in their sense of humor. A number
of researchers have argued that the role of gender in humor can best be
understood by means of naturalistic observational studies, examining the
ways men and women use humor in specific social situations, particularly
everyday conversations occurring in same-sex and mixed-sex groups
(e.g., Crawford 2003; Hay 2000; Kotthoff 2006a). Several studies of this
sort using quantitative methodologies have been conducted in recent years.

134 Rod A. Martin
In one of these observational studies, Hay (2000) analyzed the social
functions of humor occurring in eighteen tape-recorded conversations
among small groups of adult friends, including all-female, all-male, and
mixed-sex groups. The conversations took place in homes of group mem-
bers, and, although the participants were aware of being recorded, they
were not aware that humor was to be the focus of the study. A number of
different humor functions were identified in the conversations, and these
were classified into three broad categories: (1) power-based (e.g., aggressive
teasing), (2) solidarity-based (e.g., sharing humorous memories, friendly
teasing), and (3) psychological (e.g., using humor to cope with problems).
The data analyses indicated that women were much more likely than men
to use humor to create or maintain group solidarity, both in same-sex and
mixed-sex groups. This function of humor was over eight times more fre-
quent for women. In particular, women’s greater solidarity-based humor
involved humorous disclosure of personal information by telling funny per-
sonal anecdotes, which presumably allows the conversational partners to
get to know the speaker better and communicates a sense of trust.
Both friendly and aggressive forms of teasing were more likely to occur
in all-female or all-male groups than in mixed-sex groups, and teasing was
only slightly more frequent in groups of men. Thus, women were nearly as
likely to tease their female friends as men were to tease their male friends.
The use of humor for coping was also more common in same-sex groups
than in mixed-sex groups. However, a difference was found in the way men
and women tend to use humor to cope. Men were more likely to engage in
“contextual” coping (using humor to cope with an immediate problem aris-
ing in the context of the conversation), whereas women were more likely to
engage in “non-contextual” coping (using humor when talking about life
problems outside the conversational context).
In another observational study, Robinson and Smith-Lovin (2001) ana-
lyzed the use of humor in 29 six-person groups, including all-female, all-
male, and mixed-sex groups. Instead of informal conversations among
friends, this study looked at task groups composed of strangers who were
instructed to work together to solve a problem. The findings showed that,
in mixed-sex groups, men engaged in humor at higher rates than women
did, and men’s humor attempts more frequently led to laughter in the group
than did women’s. Interestingly, though, men’s tendency to use humor more
frequently was not seen in same-sex work groups. In fact, there was a sig-
nificantly greater frequency of humor in all-female groups than in all-male
groups. Thus, women initiated humor much more frequently when no men
were present, and even more so than did men in all-male groups. Accord-
ing to the authors, “evidently, women only joke when men are not around”
(2001: 139).
These authors also distinguished between two different types of humor,
based on their group functions: (1) cohesive and (2) differentiating. Cohe-
sive humor was defined as humor that builds cohesiveness in the group

(e.g., when the joke refers to the group as a whole or pokes fun at indi-
viduals outside the group). In contrast, differentiating humor was defined
as humor that calls attention to the separateness of group members, such as
when one group member teases another. This type of humor was viewed as
a technique for gaining status and building hierarchy within the group. The
results showed that cohesive humor was the most common type, used to an
equal degree by both men and women. However, differentiating humor was
used more frequently by men than women. Thus, although men engaged in
more humor overall than women in mixed-gender groups, the difference
was due to their greater use of differentiating rather than cohesion-building
humor. Overall, the authors concluded that humor serves as a mechanism to
establish and maintain relationships during the course of group problem
solving, with differences between men’s and women’s humor in mixed-
gender groups having to do with differences in status and hierarchy-building.
The findings from both of these observational studies seem to suggest
that men tend to use humor as a form of status competition, whereas
women use it to create solidarity and build intimacy. These findings have
been interpreted as being consistent with the way gender is expressed in
social interactions more generally. According to Tannen (1990), men and
women have somewhat different conversational goals: for women, the pri-
mary goal of friendly conversation is intimacy, whereas for men the goal
is positive self-presentation. However, Crawford (2003) argued that it is
overly simplistic to characterize men as only interested in status and women
as only interested in solidarity. Both men and women use humor for a vari-
ety of purposes, and these may change depending on the social context and
composition of the group.
A more nuanced picture of gender differences in humor emerges in recent
observational research by Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (2006). These authors
analyzed all instances of humor occurring in fifty-nine transcripts of casual
conversations in same-sex and mixed-sex groups of eighteen to thirty-five-
year-old university student friends taking place in informal settings. The
authors were particularly interested in what they called “risky humor.” This
included (1) teasing that made fun of another member of the group and
(2) joking comments in which speakers made fun of themselves in some way.
These were considered risky forms of humor because they can be easily mis-
interpreted as genuine insults or serious self-denigration if their humorous
intention is not recognized. The results revealed that, in same-sex groups,
men were much more likely than women to engage in teasing banter and
wordplay directed at other group members. In contrast, women in same-sex
groups were more likely than men to tell humorous stories making fun of
themselves, which seemed to be a method used by women to disclose per-
sonal feelings and experiences, and to seek a shared response.
However, a very different picture emerged in mixed-sex groups. With
regard to other-directed teasing, men teased much less in mixed-sex than
in all-male groups, whereas women engaged in more teasing in mixed-sex

136 Rod A. Martin
than in all-female groups. Moreover, women’s teasing in mixed-sex groups
was more likely to be directed against men in the group than against other
women. The opposite pattern was found for self-directed witty comments
and wisecracks. Women engaged in these self-directed forms of humor much
less often in mixed-sex groups than in all-women groups, whereas men
engaged in this type of humor more in mixed-sex than in all-male groups.
Moreover, in mixed-sex groups, men were particularly likely to engage in
self-directed humor after being teased by a woman. Thus, women increased
their teasing in mixed-sex groups and directed this teasing at men, whereas
men decreased their teasing and increased their self-directed humor in these
same groups, particularly when being teased by a woman.
One way of interpreting these findings might be that, in mixed-
sex groups, men adopt forms of humor that are more typical of females
(i.e., self-deprecation), whereas women adopt forms of humor that are more
typical of males (i.e., teasing). However, Lampert and Ervin-Tripp went
beyond this simple explanation, arguing that the observed patterns had to
do with an increasing sensitivity to feminist issues among the males in this
study. Rather than viewing other-directed teasing among men purely as a
means of competition and status-building, these authors cited evidence that
these seemingly aggressive forms of humor are more likely to be interpreted
by men as friendly and are often used in all-male groups as a means of deep-
ening relationships and building rapport (Keltner et al. 2001; Keltner et al.
1998). However, because cultural norms allow men to be more aggressive
toward other men than toward women (Harris and Knight-Bohnhoff 1996),
and recognizing that women view being teased more negatively than men do
(Keltner et al. 2001), men may be more hesitant to engage in these sorts of
friendly teasing with a female friend than with a male friend. Furthermore,
men may avoid teasing women friends because of sensitivity to power issues
and concerns about avoiding asymmetrical relationships. Consequently,
men may use self-directed joking in mixed-sex groups as an acceptable sub-
stitute for the teasing that they normally use in all-male groups as a means
of enhancing rapport and intimacy in the group. Conversely, women may
engage in more teasing with men than with other women as a way of assert-
ing their equal footing and solidarity in the group. When men respond to
this teasing with supportive self-directed humor, this further encourages the
women to continue teasing. Thus, the authors suggested that the chang-
ing patterns of “risky humor” observed in mixed-gender friendship groups
reflected changes in power dynamics and sensitivity to gender issues in this
post-feminist college population.
In summary, the findings from observational studies of conversational
humor occurring in naturalistic groups suggest that gender differences in
forms and functions of humor are quite variable, depending on the social
context. Differences between men’s and women’s humor that are observed
in all-male and all-female groups change quite dramatically when men and
women are interacting together in the same group, and the patterns of

changes are quite different depending on whether the groups are engaged
in casual conversations or task-oriented problem-solving. It is important
to mention that these observed patterns of humor use may not generalize
beyond contemporary European-American university students, who tend
to be sensitive to feminist concerns and power dynamics in interactions
between men and women. Very different patterns of humor use are likely to
be found in mixed-gender groups in different cultures, ethnicities, and age
groups. Thus, humor is a mode of communication that is used by both men
and women for a range of purposes in social interaction. Gender differences
in patterns of humor may shift and change depending on the context and the
particular social goals present in the situation.
4. BRAIN PROCESSES IN HUMOR

PERCEPTION AND APPRECIATION
Some early research suggested a gender difference in the degree to which the
right and left hemispheres of the brain are predominantly used in process-
ing humorous material. The right hemisphere is commonly thought to be
more involved in emotional, intuitive, and holistic processing, whereas the
left hemisphere is thought to be more involved in logical, analytical think-
ing. Cupchik and Leventhal (1974) cited an unpublished study by Caputo
and Leventhal indicating that women enjoyed jokes more when they were
presented to their left ear (and therefore processed by the right hemisphere
of the brain), whereas men enjoyed the same jokes more when they were
presented to their right ear (and therefore processed by the left hemisphere).
This unpublished finding was widely reported and often used as evidence
for biologically-based gender differences in the processing and appreciation
of humor. In particular, it was argued that women evaluate the funniness
of humorous material more subjectively, basing their funniness judgments
on their emotional responses (e.g., how much a joke makes them laugh),
whereas men tend to evaluate funniness more objectively, basing their evalu-
ations on cognitive properties of the joke rather than their own emotional
responses (Cupchik and Leventhal 1974).
However, a more recent study by Gallivan (1991) failed to replicate this
lateralization difference, casting doubt on the validity of these views. In this
study, sixty men and sixty women listened to excerpts from live comedy per-
formances presented to either their left or right ear and were asked to rate
them for funniness. Interestingly, there was a very small but significant effect
for ear of presentation, with higher funniness ratings for left ear than right ear
input, providing some support for the idea that, for both men and women,
judgments of humor appreciation may involve right hemisphere more than
left hemisphere processing. However, no difference was found between men
and women in this lateralization effect, casting considerable doubt on the
view that men and women process humor differently in the brain.

138 Rod A. Martin
Although men and women do not seem to differ in brain lateralization in
responses to humor, there is some more recent brain imaging research sug-
gesting that other parts of the brain may be differentially activated in men
and women when processing humorous materials. In particular, an fMRI
study by Azim et al. (2005) examined gender differences in brain activa-
tion in response to humorous and non-humorous cartoons. Although many
similarities were found between men and women, women showed stronger
activity in two particular brain areas in response to the humorous cartoons.
First, women showed greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex than did
men, suggesting that they engaged in deeper verbal analysis of the humorous
cartoons. Second, women had greater activation of the nucleus accumbens,
the well-known reward center in the limbic system of the brain, suggesting
that they derived more pleasure from the humor. In addition, women were
significantly faster than men in distinguishing between the humorous and
non-humorous cartoons. Although these findings need to be replicated with
other forms of humor, they suggest that women may process humor more
deeply, reject unsuccessful humor more quickly, and derive more pleasure
from successful humor, suggesting greater discrimination in their humor
appreciation as compared to men (Kaufman et al. 2008). As we will see in
the next section, these conclusions are consistent with recent evolutionary
theories of humor and gender.
5. HUMOR AND LAUGHTER IN COURTSHIP:

EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES
As we have seen, humor serves a variety of functions in social interaction.

One of these functions may be to attract a potential mate. Indeed, some
evolutionary psychologists have argued that many of the observed gender
differences in humor may potentially be explained by differences in mate
selection and attraction strategies. In particular, Geoffrey Miller (2000)
has suggested that sexual selection played a major role in the evolution
of humor in humans. According to this theory, a witty sense of humor,
like linguistic skills and creativity, is an indicator of superior intellectual
aptitude, which is a genetically-based trait that enhances one’s ability to
compete successfully for resources. Thus, humor is a “fitness indicator,” a
signal for “good genes,” increasing the individual’s perceived desirability as
a potential mate. Over the course of human evolution, the preferred selec-
tion of partners with a sense of humor would therefore have caused genes
involved in the formation of brain systems underlying humor creation and
appreciation to proliferate in the population. This theory accounts for the
well-replicated finding that a sense of humor is seen by people in all cul-
tures as one of the most desirable characteristics in a prospective mate
(Daniel et al. 1985; Goodwin and Tang 1991; Lippa 2007; Sprecher and
Regan 2002).

In addition, the theory would predict that men and women should value
different aspects of humor in potential mates and, correspondingly, should
display humor in somewhat different ways in seeking to attract mates. Evo-
lutionary researchers have noted that females of most animal species, includ-
ing humans, tend to be more selective than males in choosing a potential
mate, due to their greater investment of energy and resources in producing
offspring (Trost and Alberts 2006). In response to this female choosiness,
males of most species develop methods for advertising their genetic fitness
(e.g., large colorful tails in male peacocks):
if humor functions as a fitness indicator, and if females are generally

choosier than males, then males should invest more effort in humor
production, and females should show more overt humor appreciation
(to encourage male courtship attempts), accompanied by a more dis-
criminating covert humor appreciation (to distinguish which men are
truly amusing). (Kaufman et al. 2008: 248)
Some research findings support the view that women are more likely than
men to be sexually attracted to a person who produces humor. Cooper and
colleagues (2007) asked men and women to rate the degree to which they
thought a series of male “chat-up” or “pick-up” lines would be likely to be
successful. The results showed that, when chat-up lines contained humor,
women rated them as being significantly more likely to meet with success
than did men. Further evidence comes from an experiment by Bressler and
Balshine (2006) in which undergraduate men and women were presented
with photographs of two individuals (both either male or female) along with
statements that were supposedly written by them. The statement from one
of each pair contained humor, whereas the other did not. The participants
were then asked to rate these individuals on a number of perceived person-
ality traits and to select the one that was most desirable as a relationship
partner. The results revealed that women preferred the humorous over the
non-humorous men as potential partners, and rated them as more friendly,
fun, and popular, whereas no such preference appeared when men were rat-
ing women. Moreover, when participants of either sex were rating individu-
als of the same sex as potential friends, they did not show any preference for
the ones producing humor.
In a similar experiment by Lundy, Tan, and Cunningham (1998), male
and female college students were shown a photograph and a transcript of
an interview with a person of the opposite sex (the target person). The par-
ticipants were randomly assigned to conditions in which the photograph
depicted either an attractive or unattractive person, and the transcript either
did or did not contain a humorous comment supposedly made by the target.
The participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they would be
interested in a romantic relationship with the target. The results revealed
that men rated the more physically attractive female target as a more

140 Rod A. Martin
desirable partner, whereas their ratings of desirability were not affected by
the presence or absence of humor in the transcript. For female participants,
in contrast, the presence of humor in the transcript increased the desirabil-
ity of the male target if he was physically attractive, but had no effect if he
was less physically attractive. These results suggest that humor may increase
romantic attraction of women toward men, but only when other variables
(such as physical attractiveness) are favorable.
This research suggests that women value humor in a potential mate more
than men do. On the face of it, these findings seem inconsistent with other
research indicating little difference in the degree to which men and women
rate a sense of humor as being a desirable characteristic in a mate (Feingold
1992; McGee and Shevlin 2009). However, this apparent contradiction may
be resolved by the fact that a sense of humor in a potential partner may
mean different things for men and women. Women may think of a man with
a good sense of humor as someone who makes them laugh, whereas men
may think of a woman with a sense of humor as someone who laughs at
their jokes. A study by Bressler, Martin, and Balshine (2006) provided sup-
port for this hypothesis. When presented with descriptions of two individu-
als of the opposite sex and asked to choose which one was more attractive
as a potential romantic partner, female undergraduates were more likely to
choose the one who produced humor and made them laugh over the one
who appreciated their humor, whereas males were more likely to choose the
humor appreciator over the humor producer. Along the same lines, Provine
(2000) analyzed more than 3,500 singles ads placed by heterosexual men
and women in newspapers and found that women were more likely to
advertise their enjoyment of humor whereas men were more likely to adver-
tise their ability to make others laugh.
There is also some research evidence that women tend to laugh more fre-
quently than men in mixed-sex dyads or groups, suggesting that laughter in
these contexts may be used by women as a signal of sexual interest. Chapell
and colleagues (2002) observed small groups of people interacting in public
places such as shopping malls, university campuses, and restaurants, and
noted whether or not they were laughing. They found that women laughed
more frequently overall, and this was particularly true in mixed-gender
dyads. Similarly, Mehu and Dunbar (2008) observed groups of people in
bars and restaurants and coded the frequency of laughter as well as the gen-
der and estimated age of group members. They found no difference in the
overall laughter rates between men and women. However, women laughed
significantly more often when they were interacting in mixed-sex groups
than when they were interacting in same-sex groups, and this was particu-
larly true for younger women (who were more likely to be single) than older
women (who were more likely to have established sexual relationships).
In contrast, men did not vary their amount of laughter in same-sex versus
mixed-sex groups. The authors attributed this finding to a sexual advertise-
ment hypothesis, suggesting that young women’s laughter may be a signal

of interest in a potential partner, whereas laughter does not seem to be a
central component of men’s courtship strategies.
Similar findings were obtained in a laboratory study of undergraduate
students by Smoski and Bachorowski (2003) in which same-sex and mixed-
sex dyads were observed while engaging in several participatory activities.
The results showed no significant difference between men and women in
their overall frequency of laughter. However, women were more likely
to laugh in mixed-sex dyads. Again, the authors interpreted this finding
in terms of gender differences in the role of laughter in communication of
sexual attraction.
A study by Grammer (1990) provides further evidence that women’s
laughter, when they are interacting with men, is an indicator of sexual
attraction. These researchers coded the frequency of laughter during con-
versations between pairs of young men and women who did not previously
know each other, and then asked them to rate their sexual attraction and
interest in dating each other. The results showed that the amount of laugh-
ter produced by the women was more predictive of both sexes’ interest in
dating each other than was the men’s laughter. This suggests that both men
and women perceive the woman’s laughter as a signal of her sexual interest.
There is also some evidence to support the evolutionary hypothesis that
men may put more effort into generating humor, particularly in mixed-sex
contexts. For example, in the survey study by Crawford and Gressley (1991)
discussed previously, when college students were asked to describe someone
with an outstanding sense of humor, both women and men were more likely
to describe a male than a female. Additionally, the observational study by
Robinson and Smith-Lovin (2001) showed that men were more likely to
initiate humor in mixed-sex groups, even though women were more likely
to initiate humor in same-sex groups. Furthermore, a questionnaire study
by Myers, Ropog, and Rodgers (1997) found that male undergraduates
reported a greater tendency than females to initiate humorous attempts
(e.g., “I regularly tell jokes and funny stories when I am with a group”),
and men also rated their own humor as more effective than did women
(e.g., “People usually laugh when I tell a joke or story”).
In summary, although there is little evidence that men and women dif-
fer in their overall tendency to initiate humor and respond with laughter
across all social contexts, there is some support for the evolutionary the-
ory that humor production may be a strategy used particularly by men for
attracting potential mates, whereas women may use laughter as a means
of signaling sexual attraction in response to a man’s humor productions.
Earlier researchers studying gender differences in humor have been criticized
for concluding that, in the words of Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (1998: 235),
“when it comes to humor, men are more likely to joke, tease, and kid,
whereas women are more likely to act as an appreciative audience than
to produce humor of their own.” These sorts of generalizations have been
viewed as disparaging of women, implying that they have less humor than

142 Rod A. Martin
men. However, the evolutionary perspective suggests that there may be
some validity to this view, but only in the context of heterosexual mate
selection and attraction. Earlier overgeneralizations of these mating-related
gender differences to all areas of life may have been due in part to the fact
that most of the data on gender differences have come from studies of col-
lege students, an age group in which concerns about sexual attraction and
mate selection are predominant. In contrast, as we have seen, observational
research of older adults, as well as younger adults in same-sex interactions,
do not support a simplistic view of men as humor producers and women as
passive appreciators of humor. Finally, although a considerable amount of
research findings seem to be consistent with the evolutionary sexual selec-
tion theory of humor, it is important to note that there is little evidence to
date that the gender differences involved have a biological basis rather than
being products of socialization and cultural influences.
6. HUMOR IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
Humor is often seen as an important mechanism for establishing and main-

taining close relationships. Studies of dating and married couples have
shown that individuals who perceive their partner as having a better sense of
humor tend to be more satisfied with their relationship (Rust and Goldstein
1989; Ziv and Gadish 1989). In addition, researchers observing styles of
interaction between married spouses during discussions about problems
in their marriage have found that spouses who are more happily married
display higher levels of humor and laughter and more reciprocated laugh-
ter during these problem discussions (Carstensen, Gottman, and Levenson
1995; Gottman 1994).
However, there is also some research evidence suggesting possible gender
differences in the benefits of humor in close relationships. Bippus (2005)
surveyed undergraduate students to investigate the role of humor in con-
flicts between close friends. Participants were asked to complete a question-
naire about a recent time when they were having a verbal argument with
a friend and the friend used humor during the argument. The participants
also completed a measure of their general satisfaction with the friendship.
The descriptions of the friends’ humor productions were subsequently clas-
sified into benign humor (e.g., making fun of one’s own position or argu-
ments, self-deprecation, funny examples or claims, humorous compliments)
and malignant humor (e.g., teasing or disparaging the friend, denigrating a
third party, mocking a “straw man” argument). The results indicated that,
when the friend was female, the use of benign humor by a friend during a
conflict was associated with greater relationship satisfaction than was the
use of malignant humor. However, the opposite pattern was found when
the friend was male: malignant humor used by males during a conflict was
associated with greater relationship satisfaction than was benign humor.

These findings are consistent with other research indicating that men gener-
ally tend to use more aggressive forms of humor (e.g., Martin et al. 2003),
and suggest that this type of humor may actually have a positive effect on
relationship satisfaction, at least among college-aged male friends (although
it must be noted that the direction of causality in this correlational research
is unknown). As noted earlier, for males, seemingly aggressive teasing and
put-downs among friends may be a method of communicating acceptance
and enhancing closeness.
Although these seemingly aggressive forms of humor may be beneficial
in friendships among young adult males, there is also evidence that men’s
humor may have some detrimental effects in longer-term marriage relation-
ships. A study of married couples by Cohan and Bradbury (1997) found
that greater humor expression by husbands during a problem discussion,
when accompanied by higher levels of major stressful events in the cou-
ple’s life, predicted a greater likelihood that couples would be separated
or divorced eighteen months later. The authors suggested that husbands’
use of humor during times of stress may be a way for them to temporar-
ily deflect problems and avoid the anxiety associated with talking about
them, but without actively confronting and resolving them. Hence, humor
expressed by the husband in the context of major life stress might be asso-
ciated with less distress in the short term but not with longer-term marital
stability.
In contrast to this finding of negative effects of humor in husbands, a
study of married couples by Gottman et al. (1998) found that more humor
expression by wives during a problem discussion was predictive of greater
marital stability over six years, but only when the wives’ humor led to a
reduction in their husbands’ heart rate during the conversation. Since men
have generally been found to become more emotionally aroused and agi-
tated than their wives during discussions of marital problems, this find-
ing suggests that humor may be beneficial to marriage when it is used by
women in ways that are emotionally calming to their partners. Thus, while
husbands’ use of humor during times of stress may sometimes be a way
of avoiding dealing with problems, wives’ use of humor may be a way of
helping to calm their spouse emotionally while encouraging him to continue
dealing with the problems. In turn, these two different uses of humor by
wives and husbands can have different effects on the long-term stability of
the marriage.
Further research is clearly needed to investigate the role of humor in
the maintenance and stability of intimate relationships. However, the lim-
ited existing research suggests that, somewhat surprisingly, although humor
may be used by men as a means of attracting mates and women may be
particularly drawn to men who make them laugh, once they have estab-
lished a long-term relationship, women’s humor may be more important
for maintaining the relationship and men’s humor may even have some
detrimental effects.

144 Rod A. Martin
7. CONCLUSION
The author of a best-selling book on gender differences has famously

claimed that “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” (Gray 1992),
suggesting that the personality traits and communication styles of men and
women are so different that they may as well come from different planets.
However, research generally does not support this view. Although some psy-
chological differences between men and women are reliably found, these
tend to be fairly small, and many other variables show no differences at all.
As Dindia (2006) has quipped, it seems more accurate to say that “men are
from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.”
Our overview of empirical research comparing men and women on
humor-related variables is consistent with this view of many similarities and
a few differences between the sexes. When individual differences in humor
are measured using self-report sense of humor scales and tests of humor
appreciation and humor creation, we find more similarities than differences
between men and women. Very little difference is found, for example, in
self-reported tendencies to perceive, enjoy, and create humor in daily life;
make other people laugh; use humor to enhance relationships and cope with
stress; and maintain a playful outlook on life. Moreover, women and men
show little difference in their enjoyment of various categories of jokes and
cartoons. For example, women appear to enjoy hostile and sexual jokes
just as much as men do, although women, not surprisingly, are less likely to
enjoy sexual humor that is demeaning to women.
A consistent difference is found, however, in self-reported aggressive uses
of humor. Men are more likely than women to report using aggressive forms
of humor, such as teasing, ridiculing others, and telling racist and sexist
jokes. This is consistent with evidence that men generally tend to be more
overtly aggressive than women in interpersonal interactions (Bettencourt
and Miller 1996). In addition, men are more likely to report using exces-
sively self-disparaging humor, amusing others at their own expense. Thus,
men tend to report humor styles that are potentially more detrimental to
emotional well-being and interpersonal relationships, whereas little differ-
ence is observed in the more beneficial styles of humor. In addition, men
seem to be more likely to tell canned jokes, whereas women are more likely
to amuse others by relating humorous personal anecdotes.
Observational research examining the uses of humor in naturalistic con-
versations indicates that there does not seem to be any difference, overall,
in the frequency with which men and women engage in humor and make
others laugh. In conversations with friends, both men and women seem to
use humor as a way of facilitating relationships and enhancing group cohe-
siveness. However, men and women may use different forms of humor to
achieve these goals, and these uses of humor may differ depending on the
composition of the group. For example, women in all-female groups may be
more likely to tell funny personal anecdotes, revealing personal information

as a way of enhancing closeness. In contrast, men in all-male groups may
be more likely to engage in friendly teasing and witty banter as a way of
communicating mutual acceptance and building a sense of camaraderie.
In mixed-sex groups, however, men may reduce their frequency of teasing,
whereas women may increase their teasing, directing it particularly toward
men in the group. Gender differences in uses of humor also depend on the
social context, such as whether one is involved in an informal conversation
with friends or in a task-oriented work group. Whereas men may be more
sensitive to gender issues and avoid using humor to dominate over women
in friendship groups, they may be more likely to use humor competitively to
enhance status in task-oriented groups.
One particular domain in which women and men seem to differ is in the
use of humor to attract a potential mate. As we have seen, there is some
research support for the evolutionary theory that, at least in the context of
mate selection and attraction, women are particularly attracted to men who
produce humor and make them laugh, whereas men are attracted to women
who laugh at their jokes. However, it is still entirely unclear whether these
differences have a primarily biological or cultural basis. There is also some
suggestion that women’s humor may be more beneficial in the maintenance
of close relationships such as marriage, whereas men may be more likely to
use avoidant forms of humor that lead to greater relationship instability in
the long term.
It is important to point out several notable limitations to the existing
research. First, studies of gender differences in humor have almost exclu-
sively been conducted with samples of predominantly white, middle-class
university students in the US and other Western countries. It is very likely
that different patterns would be found in people from different cultural and
ethnic groups, ages, sexual preferences, and social classes. Thus, we need to
be careful about generalizing these findings to other cultures. Second, the
number of studies examining gender differences in most aspects of humor
is quite small. Although there is a fairly extensive research literature on
humor appreciation, we still have very few studies of gender differences in
humor production, little observational research examining styles and func-
tions of men’s and women’s humor in a range of different social contexts,
and few studies of potential gender differences in the role of humor in close
relationships. There is clearly a need for additional research on these top-
ics. Finally, the magnitude of the observed gender differences in humor is
generally unknown. Researchers have typically reported differences only in
terms of statistical significance rather than effect sizes, making it difficult to
know how large or small these differences are. A more comprehensive and
systematic meta-analysis of this literature is needed, converting significance
tests into standardized effect sizes.
In conclusion, it is overly simplistic to think about gender differences in
humor in terms of a unitary “sense of humor” concept. There is no sup-
port in the research for stereotypical views of women as having less humor

146 Rod A. Martin
than men overall (ct. Hitchens 2007). As we have seen, humor is a complex
phenomenon that can be expressed in many ways and used for many pur-
poses. Men and women show close similarities on many of these aspects of
humor, and differences on others. When we view it as a mode of interper-
sonal communication with a wide range of social functions, it is not surpris-
ing that both men and women use humor in ways that are consistent with
their general conversational goals in particular social contexts.

9 Gender and Humor in
Everyday Conversation
Jennifer Coates
1. INTRODUCTION
This chapter will look at humorous talk occurring in all-female and all-
male friendship groups. Although contemporary theories of gender chal-
lenge simple binaries and emphasize the plurality and variety of current
masculinities and femininities, there is evidence to suggest that women and
men enjoy different kinds of humor. In particular, men seem to prefer more
formulaic joking, whereas women share funny stories to create solidarity.
Drawing on a wide range of research data recorded in a variety of social
contexts, I shall argue that humor plays an important role in our construc-
tion of ourselves as masculine or feminine.
2. LANGUAGE AND HUMOR
Until recently, humor was largely ignored in analyses of spontaneous con-

versation. Suddenly, however, it is the focus of attention in a range of work
being carried out by social psychologists, sociolinguists, and conversation
analysts, and in a variety of contexts. It now seems to be widely accepted
that conversation is one of the key loci of humor and that shared laughter
nurtures group solidarity.
Many researchers have drawn on Bateson’s (1953) idea of a “play
frame.” Bateson argues that we frame our actions as “serious” or as “play.”
The notion of a play frame captures an essential feature of humor—that it
is not serious—and at the same time avoids being specific about the kinds of
talk that can occur in a play frame: potentially anything can be funny. Boxer
and Cortés-Conde (1997) distinguish between joke-telling (which involves
set formulae) and what they call “conversational joking” (which is what
I am calling conversational humor). They define conversational humor as “a
play frame created by the participants with a back-drop of in-group knowl-
edge” (1997: 278).
For a play frame to be established in talk, conversational participants
must collaborate with each other. As Holmes and Hay (1997: 131) observe,

148 Jennifer Coates
“Successful humour is a joint construction involving a complex interac-
tion between the person intending a humorous remark and those with the
potential of responding.” Collaboration is an essential part of playful talk,
because conversational participants have to recognize that a play frame has
been invoked and then have to choose to maintain it.
Humor often lies in the gap between what is said and what is meant.
When a play frame is invoked, we have the choice of joining in the play
and responding to what is said, or of reverting to the serious mode. Kot-
thoff (2003: 1408) compared ironic humor in TV discussions with ironic
humor in dinner-time conversations and found that, in the TV discussions
she analyzed, the speakers preferred to return to the serious mode, whereas
“in informal situations among friends, the preferred strategy is to continue
in the humorous key and respond to the said.” In other words, in relaxed,
friendly talk, speakers collaborate in talking about one thing while meaning
something else, thus maintaining a play frame. What is said often draws on
metaphorical language. One of the strengths of humor is that it allows us
to explore what we know in new ways, and even, by using other words, to
explore things that are difficult or taboo.
3. GENDER AND HUMOR
Until recently, claims that women and men differed in terms of humor
seemed to rest on stereotypes and androcentric ideas about what was funny.
As Crawford (1995: 149) remarks, “Women’s reputation for telling jokes
badly (forgetting punch lines, violating story sequencing rules, etc.) may
reflect a male norm that does not recognize the value of cooperative story-
telling.” In other words, women may be regarded as lacking a sense of
humor because their humor is being judged by androcentric norms.
But sociolinguistic research exploring gender variation in humor has
begun to delineate some differences between male and female speakers.
Using questionnaire data, Crawford and Gressley (1991) argue that male
and female speakers are more alike than different in their accounts of humor
preferences and practices. However, male participants scored higher on hos-
tile humor, jokes, and slapstick, whereas female participants scored higher
on anecdotal humor. Where men preferred formulaic humor—the set rou-
tines of jokes, for example—women preferred to tell funny stories.
Drawing on data from the US and Argentina, Boxer and Cortés-Conde
(1997: 284) discuss the use of self-denigrating funny stories to present a
positive self-image, a strategy used more by women than by men in their
data. They argue that gender “strongly conditions the type of verbal play
that occurs in everyday talk” (1997: 290) and summarize their findings as
follows: “We note clearly differences in the data between the male propen-
sity to use verbal challenges, put-downs and story telling [. . .] and female
attempts to establish symmetry” (1997: 290).

Gender and Humor in Everyday Conversation 149
Jennifer Hay (2000) explored the functions of humor in conversation. The
conversations came from eighteen New Zealand friendship groups. She found
that women were more likely to share funny personal stories to create solidar-
ity and that creating solidarity seemed to matter more to women than to men
in both single sex and mixed talk. Hay (2000: 733) comments that “appear-
ing witty seems more central to a male personal identity than to a female
identity.”
Looking at talk in the workplace, Holmes, Marra, and Burns (2001) found
some clear gender differences. First, women initiated more humor, especially
in all-female meetings; second, there was a strong correlation between the
number of women present at a meeting and the frequency of humor (i.e.,
the more women present at any time, the more humor); third, the gender
of the chair was significant: female chairs instigated more humor and also
instigated more collaborative humor; finally, women-only meetings involved
the most humor, whereas men-only meetings involved the least humor.
To summarize, there is evidence from both questionnaire data and spon-
taneous conversational data that there are differences in the humor typical
of women and men. In particular, men seem to prefer more formulaic jok-
ing, whereas women share funny stories to create solidarity. In the remain-
der of this chapter, I shall explore the correlations between the different
functions of humor and the gender of the speaker, and I will draw on a range
of research data to see what support there is for the sociolinguistic research
findings outlined here.
4. THE FUNCTIONS OF CONVERSATIONAL HUMOR
Humor is a highly significant part of everyday interaction and is a useful

tool for the speaker because of its multifunctionality. As Mary Crawford
(1995: 152) says, “Humour is a flexible conversational strategy [. . .] With
it [people] can introduce taboo topics, silence and subordinate individu-
als, create group solidarity, express hostility, educate, save face, ingratiate,
and express caring for others.” More simply, Jennifer Hay (1995) identifies
three main functions of humor: (1) to emphasize power differences; (2) to
provide self-protection—used in self-defense or to cope with a problem; and
(3) to create or maintain solidarity within the group. Using Hay’s three-part
distinction, I shall illustrate the different kinds of humor found in talk to
show how women and men have different preferences. I shall look briefly
at examples of the first two functions listed here, before devoting the rest of
the chapter to an exploration of the solidarity function of humor and the
contrast between men’s and women’s patterns of humorous talk.
4.1 Humor’s Role in Emphasizing Power Differences

The first example is taken from Griffin (1989). Four people are on a train
together: three are women who know each other well and work in the same

150 Jennifer Coates
field (they are all reference librarians). The only man is the companion of
one of the women. The women are talking about their work when the man
interrupts with a joke.
Example 1
What’s the difference between a feminist and a bin liner? A bin liner gets
taken out once a week.
This joke produced no laughter—on the contrary, the women became silent.
The man then started a new topic, a topic unrelated to the women’s work
talk, and took an active part in the ensuing conversation.
Example 2 comes from a very different context, a secondary-school
classroom. The pupils are participating in a problem-solving activity called
“The desert survival situation.” This brief extract comes from a discussion
involving the whole class.
Example 2
REBECCA: But it’s pointless trying to stay in one place. You have got
to try and survive. You can’t just stay in one place [general hubbub
as she speaks, some heckling from one boy]
TEACHER: Hands up everyone. Hands up.
REBECCA: Until someone will, might come long, you’ve got to at least
try. And without a compass, you don’t know where [you are going.
DAMION: [Yeah, but. . . . Yeah, but . . .
TEACHER: Damion
DAMION: I think that, sorry, just a minute [pretends accidentally to
fall off his chair. Everyone laughs.] (Baxter 2002: 91)
Damion is one of the most popular boys in the class, and here we see how
he uses humor to maintain his dominant position. Damion appears to
have something to add to the discussion but once he succeeds in gaining
the teacher’s and the class’s attention, he pretends to fall off his chair. His
clowning around interrupts Rebecca’s contribution and makes him the cen-
ter of attention. Baxter argues that disruptive humor of this kind is a key
strategy for dominant male speakers who want to stay in the limelight.
Both these examples show how male speakers can exploit humor to
assert power. In both cases the male’s disruptive humor means that he gains
the floor while other speakers (female in both these examples) are silenced.
4.2 Humor Used for Self-Protection

A second function of humor is to protect the self. I shall illustrate this func-
tion with two examples of talk produced in the context of a breast clinic
involving women patients and female radiology technicians in charge of

the mammography equipment. Having a mammogram (i.e., an x-ray designed
to check for tumors indicating breast cancer) is not exactly a pleasant
experience—the woman patient has to strip to the waist and have her breast
clamped in a machine to be x-rayed.
Example 3
TECHNICIAN: need your arm outta your right sleeve
PATIENT: sorry, I’m just standing here waitin’ for mother to tell me
what to do!
[both laugh]
Example 4
[patient to technician as she arranges her breast ready for mammo-
gram]
PATIENT: there’s not very much to put on there
[compression begins]
PATIENT: you’re going to squash what I have left!
[laughter] (DuPre 1998: 93)
In both these examples, the female patient says something humorous, which
results in laughter. The humor here performs an important face-saving func-
tion and reduces physical stress. DuPre (1998) argues that patients may be
anxious about a procedure that can reveal breast cancer; they often find the
procedure uncomfortable if not painful (which also causes stress); and some
patients are embarrassed at having to expose their breasts to a stranger.
Humorous exchanges like the ones reproduced here mitigate the discomfort
and the anxiety. The humor, of course, also functions to create solidarity
between the patient and the technician.
4.3 Humor and Solidarity

The creation and maintenance of solidarity is the main function of humor
in everyday conversation between equals. The main goal of most informal
talk in the private sphere is the establishment and maintenance of good
social relationships. The exchange of information—the main goal of most
interaction in the public sphere—is still important, but is relegated to a
secondary position. This being the case, it is not surprising that humor
emerges as an important component of conversational interaction between
friends.
Sociolinguists tend to see solidarity as something associated with women’s
talk, not men’s. It is argued that men pursue a style of interaction based on
power, whereas women pursue a style based on solidarity and support. Janet
Holmes (1998b) even raised the possibility that this pattern could be seen
as a sociolinguistic universal. Summarizing research on the links between

152 Jennifer Coates
gender and conversational discourse, Cheshire and Trudgill (1998: 3)
come to the following conclusion:
it seems clear that, other things being equal, women and men do have a
preference for different conversational styles. Women—in most western
societies at least—prefer a collaborative speech style, supporting other
speakers and using language in a way that emphasizes their solidarity
with the other person. Men, on the other hand, use a number of conver-
sational strategies that can be described as a competitive style, stressing
their own individuality and emphasizing the hierarchical relationships
that they enter into with other people. (my emphasis)
Although this claim may be true as a summary of conversational practices

in general, when it comes to the talk of good friends, creating solidarity
is clearly an important function of talk for men as well as for women. In
my view, Cheshire and Trudgill’s claim that women prefer a more collab-
orative style whereas men prefer a more competitive style does not entail
that women are more concerned with solidarity than men. As I shall show,
speakers in all-male talk often achieve solidarity through conversational
strategies that can be labeled competitive or adversarial.
4.3.1 All-Male Talk

“Having a laugh” is something that young males value very highly, to the
extent that it is claimed that it “is central to being acceptable as masculine”
(Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman 2002: 205). In the classroom, one of the ways
that boys “do” masculinity is by fooling around. Boys try to be cool and
to avoid the label of “nerd” or “geek.” Damion, the boy who falls off his
chair to make the class laugh in Example 2, is a good example of someone
who is “cool” and who knows how to have a laugh. Coupland, Garrett, and
Williams (2005) asked school students to evaluate certain boys as storytell-
ers in relation to seven dimensions that had emerged from observation of
and discussion with adolescent peer groups. One of these was “Do you
think this speaker is a good laugh?” The most popular boy was thought to
be “a good laugh,” and this boy’s use of the phrases “having a laugh” and
“taking the mick” in his talk “establish his community’s investment in non-
serious, non-literal interactional styles” (Coupland et al. 2005: 82).
A boy interviewed by Kehily and Nayak (1997) describes the everyday
classroom ethos as one where the “normal” student is saying “What can
we do for a laugh today?” This boy claims he has had to change to fit in
with this culture: “ ‘cos I was fairly quiet in the classroom and for a while
everyone was callin’ me gay” (Kehily and Nayak 1998: 83). Long-term
ethnographic research in London schools by Stephen Frosh and his col-
leagues (2002) revealed the pervasiveness of this ethos—having a laugh
and being cool make it very difficult for boys to engage seriously with
academic work.

Labov’s (1972) famous study of vernacular culture in Harlem examined
among other things the use of ritual insults among black adolescents and
pre-adolescents. In that culture, verbal dueling has evolved into a kind of art
form, with young male speakers demonstrating their prowess on the street
in what is known variously as “sounding” or “signifying.” Young British
males now engage in very similar rituals of verbal dueling, known as “cuss-
ing” or “blowing.” Many of the insults involve obscenity and a large pro-
portion insult the addressee’s mother. Example 5 is a (non-obscene) example
from Labov’s work, from the group known as the Cobras.
Example 5
C1: Your momma’s a peanut man!
C2: Your momma’s an ice-man!
C3: Your momma’s a fire-man!
C4: Your momma’s a truck driver!
C5: Your father sell crackerjacks!
C6: Your mother look like a crackerjack! (Labov 1972: 346–47)
Among grown-up males, too, talk often takes the form of an exchange of
rapid-fire turns, as in Example 6, collected by Jane Pilkington in a bakery in
Wellington, New Zealand. Sam and Ray disagree over whether apples are
kept in cases or crates:
Example 6
RAY: crate!
SAM: case!
RAY: what?
SAM: they come in cases Ray not crates
RAY: oh same thing if you must be picky over every one thing
SAM: just shut your fucking head Ray!
RAY: don’t tell me to fuck off fuck (. . .)
SAM: I’ll come over and shut yo-
JIM: yeah I’ll have a crate of apples thanks [laughingly using a thick
sounding voice]
RAY: no fuck off Jim
JIM: a dozen . . .
DAN: shitpicker!
[amused] (Pilkington 1998: 265)
Here we see Sam disagreeing with Ray, Ray disagreeing with Sam, Jim dis-
agreeing with Ray, and Dan criticizing Jim. But, as Pilkington stresses, the par-
ticipants here and in other similar exchanges seem to be enjoying themselves
and their talk contains much laughter. It is friendly sparring, not a quarrel.

154 Jennifer Coates
An example of verbal sparring from my own database involves two school
students arguing about whether or not another student speaks French (this
example also shows that research participants remember from time to time
that their talk will be listened to by a female researcher!).
Example 7
JULIAN: but the boy speaks French
HENRY: he does not. do you want this knife embedded in your face?
JULIAN: do you want that tape-recorder inserted up your rectum?
HENRY: <LAUGHING> she’d get some pretty interesting sounds then
JULIAN: yeah she would actually
Although these three examples come from very different contexts (a New
York street in the 1970s, a New Zealand workplace, and a British public
school), in all three we see all-male groups organizing talk in a stylized way
that seems to relish conflict and where speakers normally limit themselves to
a single utterance per turn. In all three, there is evidence from paralinguistic
and prosodic features such as laughter that this talk is perceived as enjoy-
able, as fun. These examples give support to Cheshire and Trudgill’s claim
that men prefer a more competitive style, but it is clear that such examples
show speakers constructing masculinity in a way that builds solidarity in
the group.
If we turn to the private talk of friends in pairs or small groups, compe-
tition is not so evident. The conversational data I have collected come not
from the street, the workplace, or the classroom, but from places where
friends meet in their spare time.1 In Example 8, two male friends have met
to have lunch together, and in their talk they play with the idea of a parallel
world in which Chris had become an academic rather than a solicitor.
Example 8
CHRIS: I would’ve been going down the shops for more. leather elbow
patches for my cardigan.
GEOFF: <LAUGHS> yes and you would’ve been running a 386
machine and gasping at the graphics that that would produce.
CHRIS: a 386! I would’ve had a Style Writer or something.
GEOFF: <LAUGHS> “what’s wrong with the old pen and paper?”
<OLD MAN’S VOICE>
The two friends here collaborate in mocking the idea of the unworldly aca-
demic, rather in the style of the Monty Python “sardine tin in the road”
sketch. Each contribution takes a more extreme position and Geoff’s laugh-
ter demonstrates their amusement at this sustained bit of joking. (Of course,
by mocking the technological naivety of academics, they position themselves

as technologically sophisticated.) Their ability to co-construct this joking
fantasy is evidence of their shared understanding of each other, and this
builds solidarity between them.
The next extract, “Jonesy and the Lion” (Example 9), is a third-person
narrative. It comes from a conversation involving three male friends in their
twenties and early thirties: Eddie, Geoff, and Simon. They are talking in
Simon’s flat about a man whom Eddie and Geoff used to know. Eddie is
the narrator (Geoff’s comments are in italics; Simon’s are in italic capitals).
Example 9. Jonesy and the Lion [MS02–1]

E: God that reminds me talking of lion cages d’you remember Jonesy?
G: oh yeah Jonesy yeah
E: well he lost his job at the um- he worked at an army camp but lost
his job there [. . .] but the one I was thinking of was when he was
at er- he worked at the zoo [. . .] and somebody said that they
needed some electrical sockets in the lion’s cage and they said that
that would be his next task to put some electrical sockets in the- in
the lion’s cage
but- <LAUGHS> but then <LAUGHS> what he did he just went and
picked up the keys from the office one day and he went IN to the
lion’s cage <LAUGHS>
[G laughs]
and started drilling and this lion . became sort of <LAUGHS> quite
aroused by the er- by this drilling
S: OH NO <LAUGHING>
E: and he ended up being chased around the cage by the- by the lion
S: OH NO
E: and then the- and well by this time there was quite a commotion in
the zoo generally
S: THERE WOULD BE <LAUGHING>
E: so the um head or- the head keeper discovered what was going on
so he was outside the cage you know doing um whatever er lion um
tamers do to keep the lion away from this guy and eventually they
managed to get him out of the cage so um-
S: HE WASN’T HURT?
E: no he wasn’t hurt so there you go he’s just mad <LAUGHS> and it’s
just a miracle really that he’s still alive but um he’s always <LAUGHS>
been mad like that
The story focuses on an eccentric character, Jonesy, whom Eddie describes

as “just mad.” The story gives an account of an episode when he acted
in a very eccentric, not to say dangerous, way. This portrait of someone
as different, as “other,” serves to construct solidarity: the three friends are
bonded by their shared amusement at the crazy behavior of Jonesy. They

156 Jennifer Coates
position themselves as an in-group clearly distinct from people like Jonesy,
and in so doing they reinforce their own group norms.
Like all speakers, men tell stories about themselves as well as about oth-
ers as part of conversation. But unlike women, whose first-person narratives
often contribute to sustained reciprocal self-disclosure (see Coates 1996;
Kalcik 1975), men’s storytelling is often more of a performance for humor-
ous purposes. The next example, “Closing Time” (Example 10), illustrates
this well. The story comes from a conversation involving three young men in
their twenties, talking over a drink at a pub in Somerset. The narrator is Rob.
Example 10. Closing Time [MJ03A-9]

ROB: Yeah, convinced the boss that it’s worth me opening until (.) um
(.) all day,
but but really I wasn’t gonna open all day,
I was closing up.
But the trouble is his wife walked past one day didn’t she.
“Where are you going?”
“Oh I’m just popping out for a bit”
“Why’ve you turned all the lights off?” and everything,
“Oh I’m gonna save electricity.” <LAUGHTER>
And she didn’t like her husband anyway.
So (.) I got away with that,
She never said nothing to him. <LAUGHTER>
This example is a typical masculine story in that it focuses on a lone pro-

tagonist who succeeds against the odds. What is salient here is how the
protagonist gets away with something (“I got away with that”), rather than
“how heroic he’s been.” In this respect, Example 10 belongs to that subset
of male achievement stories that paradoxically tell of things going wrong,
yet function as boasts. Rob simultaneously gets away with goofing off at
work (so getting one up on the boss), while quick-wittedly persuading the
boss’s wife of his innocence. Part of the humor of this story derives from
Rob’s ability to tell the story through dialogue: his creation of the voices
of himself and the boss’s wife makes for a vivid and concise account of
what happened. As his friends’ laughter testifies, this is a successful story,
a story that bonds the young men in their sense of laddishness. They are
not heroes, they get into scrapes of all kinds, but in the end they come out
on top.
4.3.2 All-Female Talk

Having a laugh is not such an overt characteristic of female subculture,
but having fun together is an aspect of friendship that women cherish. In
fact, one of the things that struck me very forcibly when I transcribed the

tapes that I collected of all-female conversations was the amount of laughter
involved.
In my interviews with women who participated in my research, several
mentioned fun. Sitting over a cup of tea or a glass of wine in a private
space was seen as a classic locus of good talk and was explicitly contrasted
with sitting around a table in a more public space such as a restaurant. The
extract in example 11 comes from an interview with three women friends.2
Example 11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUE: we have [gone out for a meal] but I don’t know that it’s the same =
ANNA: = no =
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUE: = I mean you can’t shriek with laughter can you
LIZ: = no it isn’t as relaxing =
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUE: when you’re out = = you |have to be very controlled = = yeah you
LIZ: = no = |well you CAN = you CAN =
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUE: can but you get chucked out
JEN: <LAUGHS>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This extract hints at other aspects of women’s talk and suggests that the
home is preferred because it is a place where women feel uninhibited about
expressing themselves. It also suggests that women’s behavior is still policed.
I asked participants in my research to tell me what talk with friends was
like. This was Mary’s answer:
We probably laugh a lot and find things that are in common . . . so

that you would, you would pick up on one thing and then the person
reinforced that by saying well the same thing happened to them, or
it happened in a different way, then you’d have a laugh because it’s a
shared thing.
Mary’s words make an explicit link between laughter and solidarity: she
claims that women establish common themes and take turns to tell stories
arising from these themes, and that this results in a sense of shared under-
standing. Laughter, she argues, arises directly from the sense of a shared
understanding.
To illustrate women’s sense of humor, let’s look at a few examples. Exam-
ple 12 is a third-person narrative; it is a story told by a woman to two
friends about her eccentric mother.

158 Jennifer Coates
Example 12. My Mother and the Jogger
She took- she’s got these two dobermans who are really unruly but very
sweet. / She took them for a walk on the beach one day, / and this was
at the height of the Rottweiler scare, / and this jogger’s running along
the beach at Liverpool,/ and Rosy, her dog that she can’t control, /
decided to run along after the jogger / and bit him on the bottom. /
And this man was going absolutely mad, / and my mother started off
by being nice to him / and saying, “I’m terribly sorry, she’s only a pup
and she was just being playful” and so on, / and he got worse, / so the
more she tried to placate him, / the more he decided he was gonna go
to the police station and create a scene / about it. / So she said, “Let
me have a look”, / and she strode over and pulled his- <LAUGHS>
pulled his tracksuit bottoms down, / and said, “Don’t be so bloody
stupid, man, there’s nothing wrong with you, / you’re perfectly all
right” / At which point he was so embarrassed he just jogged away. /
<LAUGHTER>
This story constructs solidarity among the three friends by focusing on

a non-present other, the narrator’s mother. The mother is presented as an
eccentric, a woman capable of doing the outrageous. The narrator implicitly
contrasts the eccentric mother with the three (sensible) friends. The narra-
tive positions the mother as “other,” whereas the three friends are bonded
as the in-group who are not like this woman. At the same time, the story
celebrates the mother as a woman who demonstrates agency who inverts
the normal order of things—at the end of the incident it is the man who is
embarrassed and the woman who is triumphant. This overturning of nor-
mal expectations is another reason the story is so funny. So humor here both
maintains notions of “normal” femininity, while at the same time subvert-
ing those norms by celebrating a woman behaving badly.
More commonly, women narrators tell funny stories about themselves.
Example 13 comes from a conversation involving four schoolgirls in their
early teens. The story is told to Hannah by Becky (with Claire’s help) about
an incident involving Becky, Claire, and the school librarian that took place
in school on a day when Hannah was not there.
Example 13. Knicker Stains

BECKY: It was so funny when you weren’t there one day. / Well we were
in the library, right? / and we were in that corner where all the erm
the picture books are. / Claire’s putting on some lipstick,
CLAIRE: I was putting on some lipstick,
BECKY: and and and they said “oh what are you doing in that corner?”, /
and she said we were smoking ((xx)),
CLAIRE: no I said we were checking for people who were smoking,

BECKY: and he said- and he said “are you sure you weren’t having a quick
smoke yourself?”, / and I said, “yes I must admit it”, / and I meant to
say, “Look at my nicotine stains”, / and I held up my fingers like that, /
and I said, “Look at my knicker stains”. / ((xx)) we were rolling about
the tables. / It was so funny.
Notice how the evaluative clause “it was so funny” frames this story,
appearing both as a prelude to the story and as the final line. The telling
of this story is followed by chaotic talk and laughter, with Hannah say-
ing that she had told the story to her mother, who had been reduced to
hysterics.
This story is about a funny (or embarrassing) slip of the tongue, and
depends for its impact on Becky telling us what she did not say, that is,
“Look at my nicotine stains.” The punch line, the words she actually said,
“Look at my knicker stains,” only has such an impact because we know
what she was trying to say. Overtly the friends treat this as yet another
ridiculous story that they can laugh over—it fits a tradition of women’s
funny stories in which a female protagonist finds herself in an impossible,
humiliating, or embarrassing position.
Example 14 comes from a conversation between three friends, all stu-
dents at Melbourne University.3 At this point in the conversation, Amanda
tells her two friends (Jody and Clare) that the mother of a friend of theirs is
proposing to marry the man she has been having an affair with for a month.
All three friends are horrified at the news, but they use humor to good effect
to express their critical view of heterosexual marriage, of the particular man
talked about, and by implication of men in general, and to have a laugh
about an earlier joke about Clare, sex, and the computer.
Example 14. It’s Probably Heterosexual

------------------------------------------------------------
J: oh yuk that’s gross/ I thought at least she could have come to her
------------------------------------------------------------
A: =mhm=
J: senses after a few weeks of whatever they do together=
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: =probably heterosexual for one thing/
J: =I hate to think=
C: <LAUGHING> =Jody!=
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: mhm/
J: he’s got a bloody mobile phone/ he wears it round his waist/
C: <LAUGH> well we KNOW what they do then
-------------------------------------------------------------

160 Jennifer Coates
A: you’re the
J: in his little pocket/ . little leather pouch for his
C: DON’T we?/
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: techno-sex guru Clare/ you can hardly talk/ <LAUGHS> --------→
J: mobile phone/ WHAT!? <LAUGHS>
C: <LAUGHS> -----------------------------------------→
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: <LAUGHS>
J: um this side of Clare hasn’t come out yet/ <LAUGHS>
C: <LAUGHS>
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: cyber |sex/ there’s nothing virtual about it
J: |virtual sex?
C: yeah/ <LAUGHS> no/
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: let me tell you/ <LAUGHS> [. . .]
J: <LAUGHS> [. . .]
C: <LAUGHS HYSTERICALLY> [. . .]
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: I mean the man has a mobile phone <LAUGHING> so |one thing
leads to
J: |he’s an architect/
C: <LAUGHS----------------->
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: another [. . .] <LOW LAUGH>
J: [. . .] would you want to marry this man?= would you want
C: =no
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: =would you want to bloody.
J: to be in the same room as this man?=
C: =no
-------------------------------------------------------------
A: |USE THIS MAN’S MOBILE PHONE? <LAUGHS>
J: |<LAUGHS----------------------------->
C: |yeah <LAUGHS------------------------>
-------------------------------------------------------------
Jody’s words “whatever they do together” are initially received with only
a minimal response from Amanda. But Jody chooses to re-focus attention
on the idea of “whatever they do together” by adding “I hate to think.”
This reframes the phrase: “whatever they do together” is now marked as
both humorous and sexual. Clare’s recognition that a play frame has been
introduced is marked by her laughing protest, while Amanda maintains the
frame with the joke “it’s probably heterosexual,” a joke that inverts the
normal pattern of heterosexual unmarked/homosexual marked.

Amanda’s joke is picked up with relish by the other two speakers: Jody
launches into a series of utterances about the man’s mobile phone, with
heavy sexual innuendo. Clare responds to Amanda’s comment in kind, with
the utterance “well we KNOW what they do then DON’T we,” in a mock-
patronizing reference to the act of sexual penetration—the implication
here is “boring!” ’ or “predictable.” At the same time, she cohesively ties in
Jody’s reference to mobile phones by saying, in effect, that what we imagine
them doing involves a mobile phone in some unspeakable way. This read-
ing is confirmed by Amanda’s subsequent teasing remark to Clare: “you’re
the techno sex guru, Clare, you can hardly talk,” in which the reference to
techno-sex can be understood only if Clare’s utterance has something to
do with techno-sex. The mobile phone joke recurs throughout their talk,
and the play frame is maintained throughout the succeeding conversation,
with the young women constantly sending up the normative discourse of
romantic love.
The final example (Example 15) shows how conversational participants
can draw on what has been talked about in a serious frame earlier in con-
versation. Sue tells her two friends that she has brought the school rabbit
home for the weekend. They talk briefly about the rabbit before the con-
versation moves on through other topics to a discussion of marriage and
relationships. Sue tells a story about a couple she knows where the wife
has forbidden the husband to play his guitar or even to have a guitar in
the house. This raises issues about obedience and appropriate behavior in
relationships, and after some more serious talk about the husband’s wild
youth and near-alcoholism, Sue re-introduces the rabbit theme. The exam-
ple below represents a very small part of the discussion of the obedient
husband.
Example 15. Relationships [final section]

--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA:
LIZ: oh |bless him = |he does|n’t have much of a life =
SUE: |he’s- = yeah |((he’s just))|
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA: = he doesn’t |by the sounds |of it/
SUE: = doesn’t real|ly/ <LAUGHING>|he’s like the RAbbit/
--------------------------------------------------------------
LIZ: |he is really isn’t he/ |she should
SUE: yeah <GIGGLE> I think |I should bring him- |I think I should
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA: |introduce them/
LIZ: get him- <GIGGLING> |I wonder why she doesn’t |get him a
RUN in
SUE: bring him home for |weekends/<LAUGHS>
--------------------------------------------------------------

162 Jennifer Coates
ANNA: introduce them |((then you’ll be able to-
LIZ: the GARden <GIGGLING----------→ |I’ll be all ((6 sylls))
SUE: ((xxxx)) bring
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA:
LIZ: ------------------ get him a few
SUE: him home at)) weekends and let him go out in a run/ yeah/
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA: <LAUGHS----------------------
LIZ: lettuce leaves/ he’d be quite happy/“thank you Ginny” [name of
wife]
SUE: <LAUGHS----
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNA: ---------------→
LIZ: <LAUGHS----------→
SUE: -----→ oh don’t/ poor thing <SOLEMN TONE>/
--------------------------------------------------------------
LIZ: it’s strange isn’t it the life some people lead/
SUE:
--------------------------------------------------------------
At the beginning of this extract, the three friends ponder on the obedient
husband’s life. Liz’s utterance “oh bless him he doesn’t have much of a life”
triggers Sue’s laughter as she responds “he doesn’t really.” The switch to a
play frame is achieved by the mocking, quasi-maternal tone that Liz adopts
in relation to the obedient husband. Sue then introduces a new dimension
with her simile, “he’s like the rabbit,” and warms to her theme, continu-
ing “I think I should bring him home for weekends.” Liz joins in with
the suggestion that the bossy wife should get the husband/rabbit a run in
the garden, while Anna suggests the two “rabbits” could meet. Liz fanta-
sizes that the husband/rabbit would be happy with a few lettuce leaves and
adopts an ingratiating voice to mimic the husband thanking his wife for
the lettuce. This is a very good example of Kotthoff’s (2003) claim that the
co-construction of humor relies on participants responding to what is said
(playing with the theme of rabbits, of bringing pets home for the weekend,
of making runs in the garden), rather than to what is meant (wives and
husbands should have a more equal relationship and should not order each
other round). The repetition of the rabbit theme makes the talk of these
friends textually cohesive. By reverting to the rabbit theme and using “rab-
bit” as a metaphor for “obedient husband,” these friends are able to play
with the parallels that this throws up and to say some pretty devastating
things about him.
In all these examples, we see how women achieve solidarity though the
sharing of funny stories and the co-construction of humorous talk. The cre-
ation of solidarity is an inevitable consequence of this kind of talk because

interactants who collaborate in humorous talk “necessarily display how
finely tuned they are to each other” (Davies 2003: 1362).
5. CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have argued (following Hay 2000) that humor has three
main functions: first, humor can emphasize power differences; second,
humor can provide self protection; and third, it can be used to create or
maintain solidarity within the group. I have shown how these three func-
tions do not seem to be evenly distributed between male and female speak-
ers: male speakers use humor as a way of exerting dominance, female speakers
use humor as a form of self-protection, and both male and female speakers
use humor to create solidarity.
As the examples we have looked at demonstrate, humor is used by
women and men as a tool of gender construction. Men constitute them-
selves as masculine by engaging in verbal sparring and insulting each other.
Competitive behavior of this kind counts as having a laugh in male subcul-
ture. Men’s humorous stories focus on non-present others who do idiotic
things (like going into a lion’s cage to fix a switch) or on their own laddish
escapades in which they managed to get away with something. These sto-
ries focus on actions rather than feelings and function as boasts. Women,
by contrast, constitute themselves as feminine through telling funny stories
that focus on people and on relationships between people. Their playful
talk explores the meaning of relationships and finds humor in embarrassing
experiences.
So it appears that humor, language, and gender are linked in multiple
and complex ways. Humor is a tool of gender construction for both women
and men. Paradoxically, the unique properties of humor also make it a
valuable tool of gender deconstruction. The strait-jacket of hegemonic gen-
der norms can be resisted in humorous talk. In their laddish tales of getting
away with things, men exploit the indirectness of humor to acknowledge
the possibility of vulnerability and failure. In their disclosure of personal
disasters and their reflections on the behavior of abnormal “others,”
women friends use humor to explore the problems of the gender order
and also to experiment with less “nice” selves. Behaving badly, if only in
fantasy, is one of the things that humor makes possible for female speakers
in informal friendly talk.
As Boxer and Cortés-Conde (1997: 293) have pointed out, “we all enjoy
a good laugh.” By exploring the linguistic features of humorous talk, my
aim has been to improve our understanding of what it means to have a good
laugh. In this chapter, I have argued that having a good laugh is important
to both male and female speakers, in particular because of its capacity to
construct solidarity. But what counts as a good laugh varies along gender
lines, to the extent that it can be claimed that conversational humor plays a

164 Jennifer Coates
key role in both the construction and the deconstruction of contemporary
masculinities and femininities.
NOTES
1. My database consists of spontaneously occurring conversations that were

audio-recorded with the participants’ agreement and subsequently tran-
scribed. Participants in all cases were friends (or family in the case of some of
the mixed talk). I am extremely grateful to all those who have allowed their
conversations to be recorded and analyzed as part of my research. Names have
been changed to provide anonymity.
2. The extract has been transcribed using stave notation. This means that all
participants’ contributions are to be read simultaneously, like instruments in
a musical stave. Any word, or portion of a word, appearing vertically above
or below any other word, is to be read as occurring at the same time as that
word. This system allows the reader to see how the utterances of the different
participants relate to each other.
3. The entire transcript of this humorous chunk of conversation can be found
in the Appendix to Coates and Jordan (1997). I would like to thank Mary-
Ellen Jordan, who collected the Melbourne data and collaborated with me in
analyzing it.

10 Funny, Feminine, and Flirtatious
Humor and Gendered Discourse
Norms at Work
Janet Holmes and Stephanie Schnurr
1. INTRODUCTION
Given that it is problematic for third-wave feminists to talk about “women”
as a group (Mills 2003: 240–41), and that the adjective “feminine” is gener-
ally considered a dirty word, this chapter sets itself a tough agenda. More-
over, because functional approaches to humor are regarded as outdated
from a poststructuralist perspective, the topic of this chapter could even
be seen as deliberately provocative. Nonetheless, we intend to explore the
ways in which gender and humor intersect in workplace interaction, and in
doing so we consider the discourse of women and men at work, as well as
the complex functions of humor in the workplace. In particular, this chap-
ter examines some of the interesting ways in which women in New Zea-
land workplaces use humor to “do femininity” in the workplace, without
undermining their professional identity (Holmes and Schnurr 2006), and we
explore ways in which some women use humor to further a feminist rather
than a feminine agenda in the workplace.
1.1 “Women” and “Men” Are Off the Sociolinguistic

Agenda, Aren’t They?
Following two decades of research establishing differences of varying
degrees in the ways women and men use language, the 1990s saw a reac-
tion both to the quantification of features and, more fundamentally, to the
idea that people’s sex or even their gender determined their ways of talking
(see Holmes 2006a). Fuelled by justifiable irritation at the overgeneraliza-
tions promulgated by books such as Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women
Are from Venus, some feminist linguists reacted by denying that generaliza-
tions about women’s and men’s speech were possible (e.g., Bing and Bergvall
1996). Generalizations were denounced as essentialist and deterministic,
and condemned for reifying stereotypes that obscured the complexities of
interpersonal communication (e.g., Freed 2003). Researchers even argued
that terms like “women” and “men” should be avoided because, it was

166 Janet Holmes and Stephanie Schnurr
claimed, they made unwarranted assumptions about shared characteristics
(Christie 2001; Mills 2003).
We, with our research colleagues, have also critiqued the oversimplifica-
tions disseminated by popularizations of language and gender research (see
Holmes 1997; Stubbe et al. 2000; Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003a), but we do
not believe that gender is irrelevant to understanding what is going on when
we talk. Rather we consider that gender is a “pervasive social category”
(Weatherall 2000: 287) that is always potentially relevant in social interac-
tion. Gender is an undeniable, ever-present influence on how we behave,
even if our level of awareness of this influence varies from one interaction
to another, and from moment to moment within an interaction (West and
Fenstermaker 1995; Stokoe and Weatherall 2002; Stokoe and Smithson
2002; Kitzinger 2002). As Weatherall (2000: 287) says:
The identification of a person as belonging to one of two gender groups

is a fundamental guide to how they are perceived, how their behaviour
is interpreted and how they are responded to in every interaction and
throughout the course of their life.
We are always aware, at some level, of the gender of those we are talking
to, and we bring to every interaction our familiarity with societal gender
stereotypes and the gendered norms to which women and men are expected
to conform. Questions about the different ways in which women and men
communicate constantly arise in everyday conversation; people make fre-
quent reference to gender-based norms and stereotypes. As the examples in
this chapter illustrate, we orient to norms: “they serve as a kind of organiz-
ing device in society, an ideological map, setting out the range of the possible
within which we place ourselves and assess others” (Eckert and McConnell-
Ginet 2003: 87). Following this line of argument, then, we explore in this
chapter the proposition that femininity is an issue for women at work and
that humor provides a flexible and dynamic socio-pragmatic strategy for
managing this issue.
1.2 Database
The interactions analyzed in this chapter are drawn from the database of
the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP). LWP researchers
have been investigating spoken communication in New Zealand workplaces
since 1996, with the aim of identifying characteristics of effective commu-
nication, diagnosing possible causes of miscommunication, and exploring
possible applications of the findings (see Holmes and Stubbe 2003a for a
more detailed description of the project).1
The objective of the methodological design has consistently been to
record data that is as close to normal workplace interaction as possible.
The result is a large corpus (currently comprising approximately 2,500

Funny, Feminine, and Flirtatious 167
exchanges from 500 participants in 22 workplaces) of naturally occurring
interactions representing a wide range of workplace talk, including interac-
tions involving Polynesian and Pakeha participants.
This chapter explores how humor provides evidence of stereotypes of
femininity and illustrates ways in which women use humor to enact conven-
tional femininity in the workplace. The final section analyzes how women
use humor to parody stereotypical feminine behavior at work, indicating
their awareness of the constraining effects of such stereotypes and subtly
contesting the validity of restrictively gendered expectations.
2. FEMININE STEREOTYPES AND HUMOR
In this section we first briefly discuss evidence that, contra the stereotype,
women use humor extensively in the workplace (see also Holmes 2006a: ch. 4;
Holmes, Marra, and Burns 2001), and then illustrate how some workplace
humor can be interpreted as reinforcing gender clichés, including sometimes
negative stereotypes of women.
2.1. Femininity and a Sense of Humor

A sense of humor is often regarded as a masculine trait. There is a wide-
spread perception, supported by some research, that women lack a sense
of humor—especially at work (for an overview, see Kotthoff 2006a; see
also Crawford 1995; Cox, Read, and Van Auken 1990; Crawford and
Gressley 1991; Tannen 1994; Decker and Rotondo 2001). Representations
of women in the media also often present women as humorless creatures.
Queen Victoria was famously “not amused,” and there is abundant evi-
dence from cartoons and other media sources that women are frequently
regarded as having no sense of humor.
Our LWP research challenges this negative stereotype. Using both a quan-
titative and a qualitative approach to the analysis of workplace humor, we
have demonstrated that the reality is much more complex and interesting.
Both women and men crack jokes, exchange jocular abuse, and tell funny
stories at work. Furthermore the amount of humor and type of humor that
occurs at work tends to vary according to a wide range of factors. Per-
haps most important is the workplace culture—the “tone” of the particular
community of practice in which people work. But there are many other
influences, too, as we have discussed elsewhere (Holmes, Marra, and Burns
2001; Marra 2003; Holmes 2006b).2
Nonetheless, it seems that gender, too, can be relevant in accounting
for both the amount and the type of the humor in a workplace. An analy-
sis of the humor in twenty-two meetings from organizations within both
the public and private sector indicated that, in this data set at least, the
women tended to initiate more humor overall than the men, and this was

particularly true for women in the role of chair of a meeting. In these work-
place business meetings, the average quantity of humor from the women
amounted to fourteen instances per 100 minutes. And this pattern of more
humor initiated by women than men was found both in the sixteen mixed-
gender meetings and the six single-gender meetings (see Figure 10.1). In
addition, there seemed to be generally more humor in meetings where there
were more female participants. Indeed, the presence of women tended to
correlate with a higher proportion of humor overall in these workplace
meetings. This analysis clearly provides no support for the stereotype of the
serious woman at work who lacks a sense of humor (see also Mullany 2004,
2007). Women typically contributed at least as often as men to workplace
humor (Holmes, Marra, and Burns 2001). Being funny and being feminine
are not mutually incompatible.
But, of course, more interesting and relevant to an evaluation of the inter-
action between humor and femininity is the issue of how different types of
humor are gendered. In the next section the focus is on overt stereotypes,
and we present some evidence that workplaces can be sites for reinforcing
negative and damaging stereotypes of women.
2.2 Gender Stereotypes Constructed Through Humor at Work

As has often been noted, humor is a double-edged sword. It allows people
to get away with saying things that would be unacceptable if delivered in a
serious key (Kotthoff 1999). In other words, humor can act as a legitimizing
strategy for unacceptable or contentious views and opinions (see Holmes
Figure 10.1 Amount of humor by gender (from Holmes, Marra, and Burns 2001)

2006a: ch. 4 for a full discussion of this point and further examples).
Humor can also provide a means of simply reinforcing conventional restric-
tive stereotypes. It is difficult to challenge a negative message about women
or men’s capabilities if it is packaged in a funny story. Even more difficult
to contest are underlying presumed shared assumptions that are incidentally
encoded in humorous anecdotes or witty parenthetical comments.
There are many examples of such uses of humor in our data. People
describe their mothers’ behavior, for instance, in stereotypical terms, con-
structing them as focused on family, food, and clothes. Men construct their
wives as nagging, controlling women whom they must not cross for fear of
repercussions. Conversely, women construct men as big bad tyrants control-
ling their behavior and especially their spending. In need of funding, a team
in one organization humorously suggested the professional women in the
local area run a cake stall. Because of limitations of space, we here provide
just one slightly more complex example. Three professional women in a rel-
atively feminine community of practice are discussing clothes and the prob-
lems for married women of managing spending on clothes without arousing
the ire of their husbands. Evelyn humorously suggests that Leila’s husband
is “the money monitor,” with Leila laughingly agreeing to this description,
and then Lisa goes on to describe her mother’s skill in managing her father
in this area.
Example 1
CONTEXT: Three women in a government department chatting over
morning tea in the office.
1. Lei: I think you know my cream linen trousers
2. that’s my second or third pair /that I’ve got at =
3. Lis: /mm I like those\
4. Lei: = the moment\ and I’ve got a black pair that’s actually
5. in the design that goes with this + that [name]
6. Lis: how long before John finds out
7. Lei: oh he finds out when they send the bills to him
8. Lis: oh that’s all right that’s not for a while yet /[laughs]\
9. Lei: /[laughs]\
10. Eve: is he the money monitor
11. Lei: (laughs): yeah he’s the money monitor: + no I got ( )
12. Lis: that’s the good thing about my mother
13. she is she’s [drawls]: so sneaky:
14. she’s great at shopping and then hiding it at my house for a
while
15. and then say oh for god’s sake Graeme I’ve had that forever
16. and [laughs]: h-: he doesn’t know
17. he gave up trying to figure it out years ago

Leila is here telling the other two women that she has bought a number
of pairs of trousers of similar design (lines 1–5); she receives supportive
feedback from Lisa, “mm I like those” (line 3), followed by a humorous
question, “how long before John finds out” (line 6). This question clearly
implies that Leila does not regularly inform her husband John about her
spending, that there is reason to think he might not approve, and that Lisa
knows all this. This presents a standard male stereotype, the husband who
disapproves of his wife’s spending on clothes, raised here even though the
woman concerned is a well-paid manager.
Leila’s response, “he finds out when they send the bills to him” (line 7),
conveys more information about how she represents the way the finances
work in this relationship. Their joint finances are apparently managed
by John who pays the bills, including his wife’s clothes bills. The male is
here constructed as at least controlling and, by implication, likely to be
censorious of his wife’s spending behavior, a construction that is made
even more explicit with the humorous label “the money monitor” (lines
10–11).
The interaction then proceeds to further develop the concept of the
manipulative female in a description of the way Lisa’s mother hoodwinks
her father by hiding clothes at her daughter’s house and producing them
later as clothes she has had “forever” (line 15). The mother is described
with admiration, implied by the phrase “the good thing about my mother”
(line 12), but also as “sneaky” (line 13). She has neatly solved a prob-
lem that, it is implied, many women face—namely, how to manage the
response to spending on items that may not be greeted with approval.
Lisa’s father in this miniature humorous vignette is constructed as gull-
ible, credulous, and bewildered: “he gave up trying to figure it out years
ago” (line 17).
This is just one example of the little anecdotes that crop up daily around
the edges of serious workplace talk, comprising subtle threads in the com-
plex weaving of stereotypes that work to reinforce the status quo and make
it more difficult for people to contest society’s picture of appropriately
gendered ways of behaving. We now consider how humor may form an
important component in the construction of an individual’s gender identity
at work.
3. DOING FEMININITY AT WORK
3.1 “Normative” Femininity

The social constructionist approaches that have dominated language
and gender research since the late 1990s focus on ways in which people
make use of linguistic resources to construct their social identity, includ-
ing their gender identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; for some examples,

see Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton 1999; Bergvall, Bing, and Freed 1996;
Crawford 1995; Mullany 2008; Weatherall 2002; Holmes and Meyer-
hoff 2003b). These resources include choice of lexical items, features of
pronunciation, and grammar, as well as more pragmatic devices and dis-
course strategies. Humor is one such strategy. Constructing one’s social
identity is an ongoing, dynamic performance, and one of the challenges
people face is the integration of superficially contradictory components.
For women in some workplaces, this takes the form of reconciling the
requirement to behave in a professional and authoritative way with the
expectation that, as women, they will behave in a normatively “feminine”
way. Humor is a useful device for achieving this reconciliation (see also
Schnurr 2008).
Doing femininity refers here to the performance of normative feminin-
ity. The discursive features associated with this performance have been
well documented by researchers in language and gender over three decades.
They include the use of verbally “polite” strategies, hedges, supportive
feedback, indirect requests, self-deprecation, and so on (see, e.g., Coates
1996 and Holmes 2000b for summaries).3 Previous articles (Holmes
2000b; Holmes and Stubbe 2003b) have provided detailed discussion of
how Leila uses self-deprecating humor to ameliorate the authoritative
behavior necessary to reach decisions and achieve workplace transactional
objectives. At one point in a workplace meeting, for instance, she describes
how she leaned out of her car window to read the phone number on a
van, depicting herself in a humorous and somewhat ludicrous light as she
recounts the episode. At the end of a meeting, discussing the skills needed
by people in a different section, she describes herself humorously and self-
deprecatingly as only good at making coffee. We have many other such
examples, where humor is used to “do femininity,” thus neatly playing
down status differences and re-establishing collegiality after a confronta-
tional interaction or one where it has been necessary to enact power and
behave authoritatively.
In the following example, Ginette, the team supervisor in a Wellington
factory, uses humor to soften the effect of her critical comments (see Stubbe
and Brown 2002).
Example 2
CONTEXT: Factory packing line. Ginette has noticed that Sam is not
doing the required visual check on the boxes of soap powder as they
come off the line, and she stops to demonstrate the correct procedure.
1. Gin: [picks up a box and pats it]
2. you know when you check these right
3. you’re supposed to look at the carton
4. to make sure it’s not leaking

5. not like this [pats box and looks away]
6. Sam: oh that’s that’s good checking
7. Gin: /you’re not going to see anything if you’re like this\
8. Sam: /that’s all right that’s all right\ that’s all right
9. Gin: oh my gosh [smiles]
10. Sam: [laughs] ++ [picks up a box and gives it a thorough shake]
11. Gin: and what’s with the gloves
12. Sam: [smiling] don’t want to get my hands dirty
13. Gin: don’t want to ruin your manicure
Ginette tells Sam that he is not checking the boxes correctly, “you’re sup-
posed to look at the carton to make sure it’s not leaking” (lines 3–4), dem-
onstrating explicitly what he is doing wrong, “not like this” (line 5), and
underlining why what he is doing is not acceptable, “you’re not going to see
anything if you’re like this” (line 7). Sam accepts the criticism, “that’s all
right that’s all right that’s all right” (line 8), and demonstrates nonverbally
that he has got the message (line 10). Ginette then goes on to soften her
direct criticism with some teasing humor, the basic currency of this fac-
tory team (see Stubbe 2000; Holmes and Stubbe 2003b). The banter over
Sam’s wearing gloves (lines 11–13) indicates that there are no hard feelings
and good rapport prevails. This pattern of re-establishing a more relational,
normatively feminine discourse style following the use of an authoritative,
direct, and stereotypically masculine style was evident in the talk of many
workplace leaders, and for women, in particular, it appears that humor
is a favored strategy for achieving this balance. For such women, humor
provides a valuable discursive resource for integrating the often conflicting
demands of professional identity and femininity.
A second means by which humor serves to do femininity in unmarked
ways is through the style of humor adopted in interaction. Holmes has writ-
ten extensively about the contrast between relatively supportive and rela-
tively contestive ways of doing humor in the workplace (Holmes 2006a,
2006b; Holmes and Stubbe 2003a), and suggests that contestive and chal-
lenging humor is generally perceived as normatively masculine in style,
whereas collaborative and supportive humor is typically considered as more
feminine. Such perceptions make humor available as a resource for enacting
gender in interaction.
We provide here just one (much-cited) example to illustrate this point.
In example 3, the participants perform or construct a stereotypical femi-
nine identity, reflecting and reinforcing patterns associated with women’s
behavior in New Zealand society more widely. The exchange draws on the
shared experience and attitudes of these three professional women, who
also appear in example 1. They are here discussing the problem that on any
particular working day they might not be dressed appropriately to “see the
Minister.”

Table 10.1 Cooperative vs Challenging humor: Content and style (Holmes 2006b:
Fig. 4.2)
Styles and Types of Humor

COOPERATIVE CHALLENGING
Propositional orientation
Supportive_______________________________________________________________ Contestive
proposition/content proposition/content
Stylistic orientation
Collaborative style _________________________________________ Non-collaborative style
Example 3
CONTEXT: Three professional women in a government organization
discussing the problems that arise when someone is unexpectedly
summoned to see the Minister.
1. Eve: I think we need a ministry suit just hanging up in the cupboard
2. /[laughs]\
3. Lei: /you can just\ imagine the problems with the length /[laughs]\
4. Eve: /it would have\ it would have to have an elastic waist so
5. /that we [laughs]\ could just be yeah
6. Lei: /[laughs] yes that’s right [laughs]\
7. Eve: bunched in for some and [laughs] let it out
8. Lei: /laughs\
9. Eve: /out for others\
10. Les: and the jacket would have to be /long to cover all the bulges\
11. Lei: /no I’m quite taken with this\
12. Les: /so\
13. Eve: /[laughs]\
14. Lei: /now that\ that is very nice (Holmes and Stubbe 2003b: ch. 6)
The three colleagues collaboratively construct a humorous fantasy sequence,
an imaginary scenario describing an all-purpose suit that could be used by
anyone unexpectedly summoned to see the Minister. This is normatively
feminine, supportive discourse because the three women clearly agree with
each other in terms of the overall idea and content of the excerpt. In addi-
tion to positive feedback explicitly endorsing the ideas proffered, such
as “yeah” (line 5), “yes that’s right” (line 6), “I’m quite taken with this”
(line 11), and “that’s very nice” (line 14), the content of each suggestion

constructively adds to, expands, and elaborates the initial concept (lines 3,
4, 7, 10). The collaborative style is equally “feminine,” with neat and coop-
erative latching of utterances between contributors: for example, Eve’s “let
it out for others” (line 9) is picked up and expanded by Leila with “and the
jacket would have to be long to cover all the bulges” (line 10).
This is also, of course, gendered discourse, in that it is concerned with
clothes and appearance—topics stereotypically associated with women. It
contributes, therefore, to reinforcing feminine stereotypes as well as enact-
ing femininity at work.
The same effect was achieved through numerous comments made
in response to our video cameras, which encouraged a degree of “ham-
ming it up” among participants, especially in the early stages of recording.
Although some comments were oriented to the acting potential of partici-
pants (“here’s your opportunity to get a Grammy”), there were also regular
references to appearance, and especially feminine aspects of appearance, as
illustrated in example 4.
Example 4
CONTEXT: Formal meeting of a team of professional women in a gov-
ernment organization.
1. Ruth: . . . [they have been asking about] the twelfth

2. whether we’d like to have that meeting videotaped
3. Bar: well that’s good that’s /given us lots\ of warning
4. Lei: /doesn’t worry me\
5. Kel: that’s /right we can get our hair/ =
6. Sta: /[laughs]\
7. Kel: = /done [drawls]: and: you\ know er you know [laughs]
8. Bar: /get our hair cut\
9. Sta: /[laughs]\
10. Bar: /buy a new wardrobe\ [laughs]
Stylistically, this is a paradigmatic example of the kind of all-together-now

talk (Coates 1996) that is associated with normatively feminine discourse.
Lines 5–10 illustrate canonical supportive, collaborative humor, with Kelly
and Barbara working together to construct a humorous sequence. Kelly
begins the phrase “get our hair done” (lines 5, 7), and Barbara chimes in
at the same time with “get our hair cut” (line 8) and follows up with the
syntactically parallel “buy a new wardrobe” (line 10). They are clearly on
the same wave-length here. In both style and content (appearance), then,
this brief humorous excerpt serves both to reinforce stereotypes and to enact
femininity in the workplace. Interestingly, comments such as these differed
from one workplace to another in terms of the degree of self-awareness as
manifested through a sardonic tone of voice. An ironic and even parodic

stance was, however, quite explicit in the examples discussed in the next
section.
3.2 Exploiting Stereotypes of Femininity

In this final section of the analysis, we examine a more complex aspect of the
interaction between humor and gender, namely, how women use humor to
send up, exploit, and perhaps even subvert stereotypical expectations about
feminine behavior at work (see Holmes and Schnurr 2006; Schnurr 2009).4
It has been suggested that the range of roles available to women in the work-
place, and especially to women leaders, is relatively constrained; women
are typically confined to a rather narrow range of stereotypical roles, and,
even as leaders, women are expected to conform to society’s expectations
of the ways in which women should behave (see, e.g., Martín Rojo 1997;
Martín Rojo and Esteban 2003; Sinclair 1998; Baxter 2003, 2010; Tannen
1994). The analyses we have undertaken provide some support for this view
(Holmes 2006a). Despite the success of many women in breaking through
the glass ceiling, the available positive models for powerful women remain
relatively restricted—the roles of mother and queen are among the more
obvious in Western society (see Baxter 2012; Fletcher 1999; Philips 2003;
Martín Rojo and Esteban 2003; Tannen 1994). Portraying oneself as a suc-
cessful leader is perhaps more acceptable in some workplaces if the images
exploited are reassuringly feminine as well as powerful. As mentioned in the
previous section, humor is a valuable means of reconciling such contradic-
tions. Exploited consciously in this way, an element of parody and potential
subversion of the norms often seems to creep into the interaction.
One example of this pattern is the recurrent instance in our data where
women humorously adopt or assign to other women a maternal, supervi-
sory role, as in example 5.
Example 5
CONTEXT: Formal meeting of a team of professional women in a gov-
ernment organization.
1. Lei: I mean one we’re gonna need Zoe um anyway
2. to do handing over with the other librarians when they come /on\
board
3. Ker: /yeah\
4. Lei: and I think that they’re probably going to feel
5. a need for a little bit of mothering
6. and I think Zoe will be good at that and the /other thing
7. she’s been\ really good with Kerry
8. Ker: /[laughs]\
9. Lei: I’ve watched her [laughs] I’ve seen her doing it
10. Em: mother librarian

11. [laughter throughout this section]
12. Lei: she’ll be sort of the great aunt librarian /[laughs]\
13. Em: /it’s a very old [ORGANIZATION NAME] way of approach-
ing things\
14. XF: yes yes yeah ’tis rather yes
Leila here identifies Zoe as a suitable person to induct new library staff.
She frames this responsibility in terms of a humorously nurturing role:
“the staff will need a little bit of mothering” (line 5). She then goes on to
pay Zoe a compliment about the way she looks after younger, less expe-
rienced staff by stating that she has “seen her doing it” (line 9), that is,
mothering Kerry. The point is echoed in Emma’s contribution, “mother
librarian” (line 10), and expanded by Leila, “she’ll be sort of the great
aunt librarian” (line 12). This brief exchange is clearly a teasing, some-
what tongue-in-cheek construction of Zoe as the best person to mentor/
mother the new recruits, suggesting that these women are well aware of
the irony of drawing on stereotypically domestic feminine characteristics
to better perform their professional roles in the workplace. In this exam-
ple, mothering is equated with supportive, nurturing behavior rather than
with stern authority, an alternative aspect of the role of mother, as Tannen
(1994: 161) has noted.
Adopting the role of queen is another effective strategy for combining
femininity and leadership, and this is exploited by Clara, a senior manager
in a big commercial organization. We provide just one example here (see
Holmes 2006a). Clara was nicknamed “Queen Clara” by her team, a good-
humored acknowledgment of the fact that they knew that in the hierarchi-
cally organized community of practice in which they worked Clara was the
boss and she expected people to do as she instructed. Indeed, team mem-
bers sometimes addressed her ironically and teasingly as “your royal high-
ness.” Clara was happy to exploit this queenly identity for entertainment
purposes at times, as the excerpt in example 6 illustrates. As background to
this excerpt, readers need to be aware that, at the time, the British Queen
Mother had recently damaged her hip.
Example 6
CONTEXT: Beginning of a regular project team meeting. Participants
have all arrived. Sandy is about to open the meeting.
1. San: how’s your mum?
2. Cla: sorry?
3. San: she broke her hip didn’t she?
4. Cla: my mother?
5. All: [laugh]
6. Cla: what are you talking about?
7. XF: [laughs]: the queen mother:

8. Dai: [laughs]: the queen mother:
9. Cla: oh
10. All: [laugh]
11. Cla: my husband and I [using a hyperlectal accent and superior
tone]
12. All: [laugh]
13. Cla: are confident that she’ll pull through
14. All: [laugh]
While Clara is initially taken aback (lines 2, 4, 6) at the apparent reference

to her personal life—which she generally does not bring to work—it is clear,
once she decodes Sandy’s reference, that she is happy to play along with the
charade and ham up her role as Queen Clara with a parody of queenly style:
“my husband and I are confident that she’ll pull through” (lines 11, 13).
This is typical: she consistently responds positively and collaboratively to
humor when appropriate, and the quick wit that is evident here serves her
equally well in more serious contexts. Clearly, the performance is infused
with irony, suggesting awareness of the strategic value of the queenly role
for integrating aspects of femininity and power. Indeed, this queenly identity
was clearly a very satisfactory resolution of the potential identity conflict
both from Clara’s perspective and from the viewpoint of her team, because
it provided not only a source of humor, but also a face-saving reason for
deferring to Clara and respecting the authoritative demeanor she used to
perform her role as manager.
Humor thus provides a valuable strategy for dealing with the profes-
sional–feminine double bind, a means of reconciling potentially conflicting
aspects of social identity, and an effective vehicle for reconciling the varied
and often competing demands of different aspects of women’s professional
roles at work.
The ironic and even parodic element often evident in Clara’s performance
is even more explicit in the gender performances of other women in our
data. On occasion, these women quite consciously enact stereotypical femi-
ninity in the workplace, and in doing so, we suggest, they exploit and subtly
challenge normative expectations about the way women should behave at
work (Holmes and Schnurr 2005, and esp. 2006). By parodying stereo-
typical feminine behavior they “trouble” gender categorizations, potentially
subvert gender boundaries (Bell et al. 1994: 31; Butler 1990; Jones 2000),
and concurrently stretch the concept of leadership to encompass more
diverse behaviors. In our data, this approach was especially evident in the
behavior of senior women who were secure in their professional identity.
Example 7 is taken from material recorded by Jill, a company director in
a small IT firm and the chair of its board. Jill appears to enjoy her position
as a woman in the predominantly masculine world of IT (Trauth 2002), as
is evident in many aspects of her behavior (see Schnurr 2009). Our record-
ings indicate that Jill makes use of a wide range of interactional strategies

and ways of talking, often constructing herself as feminine in conventional,
unmarked and unselfconscious ways, while drawing at other times on more
masculine strategies to exert authority. In example 7, however, Jill delib-
erately asserts her femininity in a self-aware and ironic fashion that both
exploits and parodies gender stereotypes (see also Holmes and Schnurr
2006 and Schnurr 2009).
Example 7
CONTEXT: Jill has had a problem with her computer and has consult-
ed Douglas, a software engineer, for help. She reports her experience
to Lucy.
1. Jill: [walks into room] he just laughed at me
2. Lucy: [laughs]: oh no:
3. Jill: he’s definitely going to come to my aid
4. but ( ) he just sort of laughed at me
5. Lucy: [laughs]
6. Jill: (and then) I’ve got this appalling reputation
7. of being such a technical klutz and / )\
8. sometimes look it’s not me +
9. Lucy: /[laughs]\
10. Jill: I work with what I’ve got + /( )\
11. Lucy: /I know\ it’s the tools you’ve been prov/ided\
12. Jill: /that’s\ right +++
In this exchange, Jill draws attention to her reputation as a stereotypi-

cal female, namely, as technically ignorant and incompetent, “a technical
klutz” (line 7), in the area of the organization’s specialization, computer
technology. She describes how her ignorance elicited laughter from the tech-
nical guy who was assisting her (lines 1, 4). There is also a subtly flirtatious
element in her description of her “performance.” Like Sir Galahad, the IT
expert agreed to come to her aid (line 3). Moreover, he found her predica-
ment amusing; Jill conjures up a picture of a helpless female being rescued
by an amiable, superior, amused, and condescending male: “he just sort of
laughed at me” (line 4). Although she laughingly refutes the implication
of incompetence, by blaming her tools (lines 8, 10), this excuse is clearly
tongue-in-cheek or ironic, because we have abundant evidence from her
recordings to support the fact that “technical klutz” is an identity she regu-
larly and willingly embraces, milking it for humor and playing up her role
as an incompetent ignoramus in the IT area.5
Rather than playing down and reducing areas of gender difference in her
male-dominated workplace, Jill here emphasizes her femininity, playing up
her helplessness and ignorance, though, importantly, with an ironic element

of self-parody, and effectively lampooning stereotypical features of gender
performance as a basis for humor. Her ironic tone supports this contestive
reading of her construction of an ultra-feminine identity. In other words,
rather than accommodating the predominantly masculine norms of her IT
community of practice, Jill here cleverly troubles them by asserting her femi-
nine identity in an unapologetic manner. By refusing to treat IT incompe-
tence as a serious matter, she implicitly raises questions about the validity of
a position that labels women who are technically naïve as “airheads.” Like
the American adolescent girls Eder (1993: 25) researched, Jill here parodies
“traditional norms about feminine behavior,” and, as a demonstrably intel-
ligent woman and competent manager, both exploits and implicitly contests
them, thus transforming their role as unquestioned and unquestionable ref-
erence points.
Clara (example 6) and Jill (example 7) could be regarded as challenging in
different ways the widespread expectation that workplaces (and especially
those concerned with technology and IT) should be regarded as uncompro-
misingly masculine domains (cf. Tannen 1994; Trauth 2002; Kendall 2003;
Schnurr 2008), where male patterns of interaction serve as the unmarked
model. Their secure attitude to the performance of their gender identity in
the workplace appears to free these women to enjoy and humorously exploit
stereotypical, and even hyperbolic, ways of doing femininity. Clara and Jill
seem to revel in semi-facetiously doing femininity in the more off-record,
peripheral aspects of their managerial roles, but they also enjoy behaving
discursively (and in other ways, such as the way they dress) in convention-
ally feminine ways. As women who are secure in their professional identi-
ties, it seems that they do not need to downplay the fact that they are female
in order to ensure they are taken seriously in the workplace. Perhaps these
are the new feminists: women who do not need to apologize for behaving
in feminine ways and can even do so on occasion without recourse to irony
(cf. Mills 2003).
4. CONCLUSION
This chapter has examined the ways in which humor interacts with gen-
der in the performance of femininity at work. Using quantitative data from
workplace meetings, we have challenged gendered stereotypes that portray
women as lacking a sense of humor. Our qualitative analysis has examined
how gender stereotypes may be constructed through humor, demonstrating
that humor provides a flexible resource for the enactment of gender in the
workplace. In particular, humor may be used to enact femininity through
self-deprecating humorous anecdotes, for instance, and by providing a means
to soften performances of power and authority in the workplace. We have
also explored ways in which women use humor to parody stereotypically

feminine behaviors and to question the restrictive gender norms that operate
in many workplaces.
The examples discussed in this chapter have illustrated that humor is a
valuable socio-pragmatic device in gender performance and especially in
enacting femininity. Humor facilitates the accomplishment of this ambigu-
ous, flexible, and dynamic process—a process that is realized in different
ways in different communities of practice. In addition, humor provides
a socially acceptable means of challenging established gender norms and
especially of troubling discourse norms that may limit people’s workplace
potential.
The line between humor used to enact normative femininity and the more
self-conscious and ironic use of humor to parody stereotypical femininity
is not always clear. And that perhaps is part of the appeal of humor for
intelligent women in the workplace. They can have their cake and eat it
too at times, enacting femininity normatively, provocatively, and/or ironi-
cally depending on the context. Whichever kind of construction is involved,
humor proves a flexible resource for doing gender at work.
LWP Transcription conventions:

[laughs] Paralinguistic features in square brackets, colons indicate start/
finish
+Pause of up to one second.
. . . /. . . . .\ . . . Simultaneous speech
(hello) Transcriber’s best guess at an unclear utterance
? Rising or question intonation
- Incomplete or cut-off utterance
. . . . . . Section of transcript omitted
( ) Untranscribable speech
XM/XF: Unidentified Male/Female
[comment] Editorial comments italicized in square brackets
turn/ = Turn latches with the next speaker
= \ latches
All names used in examples are pseudonyms.
NOTES
1. We would like to express gratitude to all those who allowed their workplace
interactions to be recorded and to other members of the Language in the
Workplace Project team, including Bernadette Vine (Corpus Manager), Mer-
edith Marra (Research Officer), and Maria Stubbe (Research Associate), as
well as the many research assistants and transcribers.
2. Factors that may influence the amount and type of humor at work include
the relationship between those talking; their personalities; the size of the
group; the kind of interaction, speech event, or activity type in which they are
engaged; its length; and even the particular point that has been reached in the
encounter.

3. Coates (1997) provides a discussion of more diverse discourses of femininity,
but we focus in this section just on the “core” concept.
4. This section draws on research we have been doing with Meredith Marra.
5. See Clift (1999: 543) on self-deprecating irony and also on “the affiliative
qualities of irony,” which are relevant to the discussion that follows. See
Holmes (2006b) and Holmes and Schnurr (2006) for further examples of flir-
tatious humor.

11 Power and Connection
Humor in a Cantonese Family
Jon S. Y. Hui
1. INTRODUCTION
Humor has long attracted the attention of social scientists, but it is only
since the 1990s that it has become a serious focus of sociolinguistic study.1
Researchers have identified many different types of humor and suggested a
range of different functions, as well as examining a range of social contexts
in which humor occurs (see, e.g., Norrick 1994, 2003; Boxer and Cortés-
Conde 1997; Hay 2000; Vaid et al. 2003; Brône 2008; Norrick and Spitz
2008; Norrick and Chiaro 2009). At the same time, gender research has
advanced to a broader and more comprehensive paradigm. Mutual benefits
to both fields have drawn researchers in sociolinguistics and pragmatics in
marrying the seemingly contested topics (Crawford 2003; Kotthoff 2006a;
Vine et al. 2009)
Data collection techniques have also become more sophisticated over
time, developing from the use of what could be regarded as less-reliable
methods, such as self-reporting and questionnaires, to the analysis of record-
ings of naturally occurring conversations. One pioneer study based on
spontaneous talk is Norrick’s (1994) investigation of the role of joking in
everyday interaction. He explored the relationships among involvement,
rapport, aggression, and politeness as expressed in conversational humor.
However, there is little information about the social features of his partici-
pants. Many studies have investigated the relationship between humor and
social variables based on natural conversation (see e.g., Hay 1995, 2000;
Holmes 2000a; Vine et al. 2009; Schnurr and Chan 2011).
Research on conversational humor among friends of equal power or
similar status reveals that gender plays an important part in the use of
personal humor. Hay (2000) finds that although men and women use
humor to perform similar functions, like exercising power and creating
solidarity, different strategies are deployed. For example, women are more
likely to share funny personal stories, whereas men highlight their shared
experiences to build solidarity within the group. Lampert and Ervin-Tripp
(2006) also found that gendered expectations of aggression, power, and
self disclosure relate to the interpretation of and subsequent reaction to

Power and Connection 183
the humor incident. Moreover, the initiation of high-cost humor in mixed
groups is more likely to be a “follow-up” of an earlier key humor inci-
dent. Humor is also a resource to establish relational identities and to
enrich pragmatic and cross-cultural knowledge among friends from differ-
ent cultures (Habib 2008). The focus of Habib’s study was disagreement
and humor. The data were extracted from casual conversation, in English,
among four female friends from four different countries (Syria, Portugal,
Greece, and the US).
The status situation among friends can be interpreted as equal or very
similar, and the building of solidarity can be taken for granted. However,
the same cannot be assumed in the workplace. Relative status and relation
building among co-workers tends to be more complex. There is a combi-
nation of power relationships at work: (1) asymmetrical power patterns
exist between superiors and subordinates; (2) equal-ranking staff members
jostle for control over one another; and (3) the building of “supportive rap-
port” among work team members could be a means to achieve certain goals.
The ways that people “do humor” in this asymmetrical power relation-
ship workplace environment is the subject of many studies, ranging from
humor’s influence in a more general workplace culture (Holmes and Marra
2002) to the relationships among leadership, gender, and humor (Holmes
2005; Marra, Schnurr, and Holmes 2006), and from pragmatic aspects of
humor and gender in the workplace (Holmes 2006c) to politeness, humor,
and gender (Holmes and Schnurr 2005). Gendered humor also features
strongly in Faulkner’s (2009) ethnographic study of three engineering com-
panies. She finds that the distribution of the type and style of humor very
much depends on the role of the interactants and the business of the com-
pany. Similarly, humor and style shifts have been observed in the context
of intercultural business meetings between native and non-native English
speakers (Rogerson-Revell 2007). The findings indicate that shifting style
and humor are strategically used to express power and solidarity, especially
by more senior Western male managers.
Asymmetrical power relationships can also be found in families. Fam-
ily interaction in relation to “power and connection” has been studied by
Tannen (2003, 2007). She suggests that power and solidarity work hand in
hand. Detailed analysis of linguistic data was provided to support, on the
one hand, that an utterance can be perceived as one speaker asserting power
over the other speaker, while, on the other hand, an utterance can also be
interpreted as a solidarity maneuver for the betterment of the family as a
whole (Tannen 2007). Kendall (2003) also examines the use of language
at home, but she links one woman’s voice in creating gendered identities
of authority at home as well as at work. Her subject constructs her role as
a manager at work and as a mother at home through linguistic expres-
sion of power (directives) and connection (supports). However, the focus
of these family interactions is not on humor. Some examples in Boxer and
Cortés-Conde’s (1997) humor studies are taken from family contexts but

184 Jon S. Y. Hui
the interactions are mainly between couples or siblings, where differentials
of power are not so pronounced.
Previous studies of humor in small groups have tended to draw on such
theoretical paradigms as superiority (Duncan 1984), solidarity theory (Col-
linson 1988; Hay 1995), and power (Holdaway 1988; Hay 1995). Recently,
Holmes (1998a, 2000a, 2006b) used politeness theory (Brown and Levin-
son 1987), augmented by a more developed concept of power, and a blend-
ing of discourse analysis and quantitative analyses to investigate humor in
the workplace (Attardo 2003). This is the model that underlies the research
in this chapter.
In general, there appears to be a lack of research on conversational
humor in a context of asymmetrical power of mixed gender participants
based on recordings of naturally occurring data. Further, only relatively
recently have two studies of humor based on Cantonese data been reported.
Schnurr and Chan (2011) compare two sets of data—New Zealand English
and Hong Kong Cantonese—on the subject of responding to teasing and
self-denigrating humor in the workplace. Mak, Liu, and Deneen (2012) ana-
lyzed interactional data of mixed English and Cantonese in a Hong Kong
company. The study of conversation humor outside the mainstream of
English language is also relatively uncommon. By focusing on types, func-
tions, and support strategies of conversational humor in a small group con-
text, this chapter attempts to fill this gap in humor research by answering the
following questions, using recordings of interactions in a small group where
the power relationships are asymmetrical: (1) what types of humor are used;
(2) what functions does this humor serve; (3) what are the patterns of, and
whether gender plays a role in, the production and support of humor; and
(4) to what extent power and connection are constructed through humor.
2. METHOD
This study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

A predominantly quantitative analysis was first carried out, in which
instances of humor were identified, categorized, and counted. The instances
were analyzed by type of humor and participant roles (initiator, support,
joint construction). A more qualitative discussion of the functions of humor
in the data was then undertaken. Examples cited in this study have been
translated into English and edited for ease of reading.
2.1 The Data

There were six participants in this study: a father and a mother, their son
and daughter, the mother’s younger brother (the uncle), and the son’s girl-
friend. This group represents a typical Hong Kong Chinese extended family
and all members are native Cantonese speakers.

The power hierarchy relationships in a Chinese family are generally
determined by age. Confucian doctrine teaches that elderly people should be
respected, particularly, but not exclusively, within a family ( Williams et al.
1997). Because it is rare for a woman to marry someone younger due to
social stigma, the father is usually the most powerful member within a fam-
ily, while the youngest member has the least powerful position. However,
reflecting the reality of the patriarchal nature of Chinese society, gender
sometimes plays a role in the power relationship among sons and daughters.
For example, even if the son is younger than the daughter, he may be higher
on the ladder of power within the family because sons are traditionally per-
ceived as more valued family members. This is particularly true when the
sons and daughters have reached adulthood.
In the family that is the focus of this research, the father is older than the
mother, and the son is older than the daughter, so the power ranking is fairly
straightforward. Father is the highest on the ladder of power, followed by
Mother, Uncle, Son, Daughter, and Girlfriend. Girlfriend is perceived as the
least powerful because she is only a couple of years older than Daughter,
and she is not “formally” a part of the family.
2.2 Data Collection

The recording was made at a family dinner that was organized around three
events: the return of Son and Girlfriend from a ten-day holiday to Japan, the
return of Uncle from overseas, and the belated celebration of Son’s birthday.
Casual conversation among family members was recorded prior to, dur-
ing, and after dinner. All conversation was in Cantonese, with occasional
English code-mixing. A tape recorder was placed on the top of a cupboard
near the dining area. Two and a half hours of audio recording were col-
lected. The recording was carried out in as natural and unobtrusive a man-
ner as possible. This resulted in some degree of compromise regarding the
quality of the recording, as competing noise from the television, cooking,
and dishwashing at times made it difficult, but not impossible, to transcribe
the conversation. Movement of participants between rooms also created
difficulty in continuity and led to an imbalance of member involvement at
times. In quantifying the data, these imbalances are taken into account in
the calculations.
2.3 Identifying Instances of Humor

There are many clues to assist in identifying instances of humor. Respon-
sive laughter is an obvious sign. Other indicators include a marked into-
nation contour or a sudden change of register of the speaker. In natural
conversation, instances of humor do not always occur in isolation; extended
jointly constructed humor is relatively common (Davies 1984; Glenn 1989;
Holmes 2000a). Sometimes the theme remains the same, and sometimes it

186 Jon S. Y. Hui
changes direction, which makes counting instances of humor more difficult.
Following Hay (1995), the method adopted in this analysis was to count a
sequence as one instance of humor if the central theme remained the same,
regardless of the number of exchanges. A separate instance of humor was
identified only if another theme or character was presented in a jointly con-
structed episode.
2.4 Categorizing Types of Humor

Categorizing different types of humor has regularly proved to be problem-
atic. Almost every study of humor seems to have developed a new taxonomy
(see Hay [1995] for a review of a wide range of different categorization sys-
tems, which have been adopted in this study), and attempts to use discrete
classification creates a number of problems. Overlaps between categories
(e.g., teasing, retorts, banter, anecdotes, etc.) made it difficult to distinguish
or isolate different types of humor.
The two-layer model that analyzes humorous interaction in this study is
illustrated in Table 11.1. The humor in question could be broadly divided
into humor that involved laughing at someone’s expense (either in-group
or out-group) or simply instances of generally funny or amusing remarks.
Layer 1 of the model is thus a broad categorization of three types of humor:
in-group humor, out-group humor, and other humor:
• In-group humor targets one or more participants, including self-

deprecatory humor as well as jocular abuse in which they tease and
make fun of each other but without malice;
• Out-group humor is targeted at someone or some social group other
than those present; and
• Other humor covers instances of humor that do not fit either of the
above categories.
These types of humor are realized in the ten forms listed in Layer 2 of the
model, which is developed from Hay’s (1995: 65) taxonomy of twelve types
of humor. Self-deprecation and jocular abuse constitute higher level, more
general categories in this model than in Hay’s, hence the reduction to ten
categories (see Appendix for Hay’s definitions of different types of humor).
In Table 11.1, any of the classifications in Layer 1 may be realized as any
of the Layer 2 classifications. This is where my model differs from Hay’s,
which treats jocular abuse and self-deprecation at the same level as anec-
dote, irony, and so forth. The data collected in this study suggest that the
types of humor identified in Layer 2 can be used for self-deprecation or
jocular abuse. Two examples will illustrate how this model can be used to
analyze the data.
Example 1 illustrates an instance of humor directed at Father and classi-
fied as in-group humor, jocular abuse, in the form of an anecdote.

Table 11.1 Types of conversational humor
Layer 1 Layer 2
1. In-group humor 1a. Jocular abuse Anecdote

1b. Self-deprecation Fantasy
2. Out-group humor Irony
Joke
Observation
Quote
3. Other humor Role-play
Vulgarity
Wordplay
Other
Example 1
UNCLE: we were in the same bus, he did not see me. [laughter]
In Example 2, the humor is not directed at any particular person or group

and is realized in the form of wordplay that reverses the word order
of the name of an apartment and in so doing creates a comical effect.
Therefore, this example is classified as other humor realized in a form of
wordplay.
Example 2
UNCLE: I read it somewhere, that a new apartment is quite affordable
in Fanling.
MOTHER: Is it Hin Chang Gan? (meaning “a place for true love”)
FATHER: Gan Chang Hin (meaning “a place for adultery,” also mixing
informal and poetic registers) [laughter]
2.5 Proportional Reporting

The participants did not sit around a table for the whole recording session,
but moved in and out of the recording zone, which resulted in an imbalance
of recording time for each person. To address this problem, the number
of contributions of humor by each member was calculated with respect to
the proportion of time they spent in the recording zone. A weighting fac-
tor was then assigned in order to express the figures as instances per hour.
Table 11.2 shows the weighting factor value for all members.

188 Jon S. Y. Hui
Table 11.2 Weighting factors based on proportion of time present
Family member Time (minutes) Proportional time Weighting factor
Father 105 0.7 0.57

Mother 120 0.8 0.50
Uncle 150 1.0 0.40
Son 150 1.0 0.40
Daughter 60 0.4 1.00
Girlfriend 150 1.0 0.40
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
There were fifty-three instances of humor identified in the data. Results in

types of humor, initiator of humor, distribution of in-group humor, audible
humor support, and gender distribution of humor support are discussed in
the following.
3.1 Types of Humor

Results show an even distribution of each type of humor at Layer 1 (see
Table 11.3). However, some interesting trends emerge when the categories
are further analyzed in terms of form (see Table 11.4). There appears to
be a strong tendency for in-group humor to be formulated as observations
(43%), whereas 50% of out-group humor takes the form of anecdotes.
Role-play appears to be the form in which self-deprecating humor most
often occurs.
3.2 Distribution of In-Group Humor

Uncle and Mother clearly initiated most of the humor, followed by Son (see
Table 11.5), whereas Daughter initiated no instances of humor.
Table 11.3 Distribution of types of humor: Layer 1
Humor category Occurrence Percentage
In-group humor jocular abuse 16 30

self-deprecation 4 8
Out-group humor 18 34
Other humor 15 28

6244-0279d-PII-1pass-011-r02.indd 189
Table 11.4 Distribution of types of humor: Layer 2
Humor category Anecdote Fantasy Irony Observation Role-play Wordplay Other
In-group humor jocular abuse 3 3 1 7 1 1 –

self-deprecation 1 – – – 3 – –
Out-group humor 9 3 1 5 – – –
Other humor 3 6 – 4 – 1 1
2/26/2014 7:22:06 PM
190 Jon S. Y. Hui
Table 11.5 Humor according to family status of initiator
Family member Actual score Instances per hour
Father 2 1.14
Mother 17 8.50
Uncle 22 8.80
Son 10 4.00
Daughter 0 0.00
Girlfriend 3 1.20
Table 11.6 In-group humor according to initiator and target
Total
Target Father Mother Uncle Son Daughter Girlfriend initiated
Initiator
Father 0
Mother 2 5 4 11
Uncle 1 1 4 2* 6
Son 2 1 3
Daughter 0
Girlfriend 0
The only family members who produced in-group humor were Mother,
Uncle and Son. Mother initiated eleven instances of in-group humor, two of
which were self-targeted, five targeted at Uncle, and four at Son, but she her-
self was never teased; Uncle teased Son twice as much as Son teased Uncle;
Girlfriend was only teased in conjunction with Son; and neither Daughter
nor Father was targeted at all. On three occasions, in-group humor took
the form of jocular abuse and self-deprecating humor (represented by the
shaded areas in Table 11.6). The asterisk (*) indicates that the two instances
of jocular abuse directed at Girlfriend are in fact examples of co-abuse, in
which Uncle teases Son and Girlfriend simultaneously.
3.3 Audible Humor Support

Audible humor support can be differentiated into laughter and verbal sup-
port, which takes the form of a further humorous contribution resulting in
a sequence of jointly constructed humor. Obviously support strategies such
as body language cannot be recovered from audio recordings. Table 11.7
provides a summary of the amount of audible support for others’ humor
provided by different family members.

Table 11.7 Audible humor support by different family members
Family member Actual score Instances per hour
Father 8 4.56
Mother 21 10.50
Uncle 21 8.40
Son 21 8.40
Daughter 4 4.00
Girlfriend 43 17.20
Table 11.8 Supportive laughter and verbal humor by family members with relative
proportions of each
Actual
Actual verbal Verbal
Family laughter Laughter Instances support support Instances
member score percentage per hour score percentage per hour
Father 0 0% 0 8 100% 4.57

Mother 17 81% 8.5 4 19% 2.00
Uncle 10 48% 4 11 52% 4.40
Son 9 43% 3.6 12 57% 4.80
Daughter 3 75% 3 1 25% 1.00
Girlfriend 37 86% 14.8 6 14% 2.40
The highest level of audible humor support was provided by Girlfriend;

her score accounts for more than one-third of the total, whereas Father and
Daughter were the least supportive of others’ humor in these data. Audible
humor support data are further differentiated into laughter and verbal sup-
port, which took the form of a further humorous contribution resulting in a
sequence of jointly constructed humor.
3.3.1 Laughter and Verbal Supportive Contribution by Gender

The amount of laughter produced by Girlfriend is considerably higher than
the proportion produced by the rest of the group; it constitutes more than the
combined total of the next two highest scores. Significantly, Girlfriend’s high
level of audible support consists predominantly of laughter, rather than ver-
bal support (see Table 11.8). On the other hand, males had the scores for
the top three contributors to humor support in the form of a further verbal
contribution.

192 Jon S. Y. Hui
The results reported in Table 11.8 suggest that women used laughter as
a support strategy more often than verbal support, whereas men scored
higher on further verbal contributions of humor as a support strategy (see
Easton 1994). However, because of the small sample size, the comparison
of the mean scores for women and men for the amount of humor sup-
port may not be reliable. Therefore, the proportion of laughter compared
to verbally supportive contributions is shown as a percentage of the total
number of audible support instances for each individual group member (see
Table 11.8).
3.4 Discussion
According to Duncan (1984), several studies have shown that patterns of
humor are related to the hierarchical structure or relative status of partici-
pants in small groups. These findings are consistent with superiority theory
(Keith-Spiegel 1972), which suggests that higher status individuals initiate
more humor, but are rarely the focus or target of humor. The pattern of
jocular abuse found in this study is at least partly consistent with this claim.
Jocular abuse was exclusively used among the three relatively high status
members of the group: Mother, Uncle, and Son. Mother, the highest status
of the three, initiated the most abuse, but received none. On the other hand,
Son, the lowest status of the three, was the most frequent target of jocular
abuse.
The other three family members, Father, Daughter, and Girlfriend, were
not involved in much jocular abuse. One possible explanation is that jocular
abuse serves as a strategy to express solidarity (Hay 1994). The participants
in Hay’s study of a friendship group, which featured a large amount of
jocular abuse, were all of roughly equal status or power. Jocular abuse was
directed most often at the most highly integrated or core group members. It
is possible that the power differences in the Chinese family used in this study
are unequally distributed, resulting in subgroups of family members. Per-
haps the power differentials among Mother, Uncle, and Son, for instance,
are smaller than those between this group and the other group members,
and thus they form a subgroup, or core group, within the larger family
group. In addition, it is possible that Mother, Uncle, and Son have a par-
ticularly close or highly integrated relationship. Their greater use of jocular
abuse may thus be an expression and construction of this greater solidar-
ity. This possibility highlights some of the problems with an approach that
ranks power or solidarity relationships linearly, in that it gives the false
impression of equal intervals between the power rankings of members, a
situation that is rarely the case.
Another plausible explanation for the situation is to view power status
as a dynamic variable. This approach provides for the possibility that a
more powerful or higher status person has the freedom to move “down”

the scale in order to build rapport or gain trust. In this interpretation,
Mother and Uncle could be regarded as effectively moving down by engag-
ing in jocular abuse. This is consistent with Duncan’s (1984) observation
that managers are not often joked about until they are accepted as friends.
The strategy of maneuvering oneself up and down the power continuum
is a very powerful one, as it allows high-status individuals to mediate con-
flicts within a family where a harmonious atmosphere is of the utmost
importance.
Examples 3 and 4 are just two of many humor instances that were used
to defuse tension within the family. Both repressive and contestive humor
play a major role in maintaining harmony within the group. In situations
where power is asymmetrical, humor often functions as an attenuation
strategy, used by superiors to disguise or soften attempts to control or direct
the behavior of subordinates (Holmes 1998a). In Example 3, Mother sweet-
ens her power assertion over Son with humor, by claiming that Son had not
been able to go to Singapore with the rest of the family because he had to
stay home to feed the dogs.
Example 3
(Capitals indicate strong stress)
SON: Singapore I didn’t go
MOTHER: he didn’t go
GIRLFRIEND: [incomprehensible]
SON: things to do, work, study, etc.
MOTHER: need to FEED the DOGS
[laughter]
Subordinates often use humor to mask a subversive challenge to someone of

higher status (Holdaway 1988). Holmes (1998a: 18) has called this “contes-
tive humour.” In Example 4, Son provides a humorous challenge to Uncle’s
proposed imposition.
Example 4
UNCLE: if too much luggage, I’ll send email so you guys can come
and help
SON: I’ll charge you three hundred dollars
[laughter]
In view of the fact that the airport bus stop is only a few hundred meters
from their apartment, the proposal to charge three hundred dollars for
assistance is patently absurd. However, Son’s contribution in the form of a
humorous fantasy serves as an effective and acceptable means of contesting
the assumption that Uncle can order him to provide assistance.

194 Jon S. Y. Hui
3.5 Out-Group Humor and Solidarity
When a hearer laughs in response to a speaker’s humorous utterance,
they signify that they understand and appreciate it, and suggest that they
share the speaker’s attitude on the relevant issue. The speaker and the
hearer acknowledge each other’s sense of humor, and the humor con-
tributes to a sense of solidarity, reinforcing the notion that they belong
to the same group. Another means of building in-group solidarity is to
attack another person or group (Austin 1990). Humor can be used for
this purpose, too. When humor is targeted at an out-group, it further
creates a division between “us” and “them,” strengthening the sense of
in-group solidarity.
In Example 5, Uncle recalls his queuing experience at the airport with
some of his former colleagues. Here the out-group is made up of Mainland-
ers, Chinese from mainland China, and the in-group consists of Hong Kong
Chinese.
Example 5
UNCLE: go overseas business trip, when I travel with mainland busi-
ness section colleagues
SON: mainlanders
[laughter]
UNCLE: they would queue separately. I guess they want to save time
but at the end of the day, we took the same airplane.
[laughter]
Not all out-group abuse functions purely to emphasize the distance between
the initiator and the target of the tease; it can also work inclusively at times,
as in the next example. In Example 6, Son and Girlfriend describe Girl-
friend’s mother’s apparently embarrassing ways of getting a bargain in the
market.
Example 6
SON: her mother has the thick skin to ask—compelled the hawker to
agree to a lower price
[laughter]
Son and Girlfriend are making fun of her mother, who represents the
older generation, defining her as an out-group member. Their humor at her
expense is a means of distancing themselves from these old practices, such as
bargaining prices with hawkers in wet markets. On the other hand, the very
fact that the future mother-in-law is brought into the conversation several

times suggests that Son and Girlfriend are attempting to reduce the social
distance between the two families.
3.5.1 Self-Deprecating Humor

Self-deprecating humor is often employed by speakers to extract them-
selves from potentially embarrassing situations. Applying politeness theory,
Holmes (1998a) has suggested that turning the source of embarrassment
into a subject of humor serves as a strategy for protecting the positive face of
the speaker. More recently, self-deprecating acts, sometimes through humor,
have been linked to power and solidarity (Holmes 2012). Managers or
supervisors in the workplace can build solidarity with their subordinates by
lowering their own status, hence reducing the social distance between them
and their subordinates. Also, gender seems to be a factor in the production
of self-directed humor. Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (2006) report that this type
of humor is more prevalent in female-only groups.
The instances of self-deprecating humor identified in the Chinese fam-
ily conversations support the first hypothesis offered by Holmes (1998a).
In Example 7, Son refers to the fact that he has bought a minidisc player
from Tokyo for less than it would have cost him in Hong Kong. However,
the power adapter has proved unsuitable, and so he has had to spend extra
money to have it altered. Hence, embarrassingly, instead of saving money,
the whole thing has probably cost him more.
Example 7
UNCLE: but the transformer will not work
SON: yeah, have to take it to Electric Street and FIX FIX it
UNCLE: FIX FIX it
[laughter]
Son’s humorous tone, together with his adoption of an unusual and playful
phrase, “fix fix it,” functions to reduce his embarrassment in recounting his
lack of success in getting a bargain.
3.5.2 Power and Solidarity

So far in the analysis, instances of humor relating to power and those relat-
ing to solidarity have been treated separately and it seems that they function
independently. However, further analysis in the following examples reveals
that power and solidarity can be expressed in the same instance of humor,
supporting Tannen’s analysis (2003, 2007) of power and connection phe-
nomenon in family interaction.
In Example 2 (section 2.4), humor of a sexual nature was initiated by
Father. Sexual joking, however harmless, is a risky move in mixed gender
company and is usually directed by a person of a higher power hierarchy to

196 Jon S. Y. Hui
people in the lower power level. Sometimes it verges close to sexual harass-
ment in the workplace (Kotthoff 2006a). Father being at the top of the
power ladder can say whatever he likes and his action can be seen as assert-
ing his power over the others.
On the other hand, Father breaking the code of taboo in bringing up the
subject of adultery can be interpreted as a solidarity move. Although the
wordplay is not targeted at anyone and it is fairly mild and harmless, it is
still risky as sexual matters are rarely mentioned among intergenerational
members of a Chinese family. This is particularly sensitive for the dating
young couple, Son and Girlfriend (Daughter was in another room out of the
audible range). The only logical explanation is that the young couple is now
being treated as mature adults, part of the grown-up members of the family.
Similarly, in Example 3 (3.4), Mother exercises her power over Son but
also constructs a potential connection between the two families. She inter-
rupts Son’s explanation of not being able to make the family trip to Sin-
gapore by saying that he needs to stay home and “feed the dogs.” While
declaring her power over Son through evidence of directives, two more
effects are achieved by Mother’s humorous interjection: (1) rescuing Son out
of a potential embarrassing situation, and at the same time (2) construct-
ing a positive image of a responsible young man who is willing to sacrifice
an overseas trip for the greater good of the family. Humor is used here to
attenuate the power assertion. The responsible young man will become a
responsible and caring husband. This works well with the potential daughter-
in-law, Girlfriend, as the prime audience. Negotiating a closer connection
between the two families seems to be the order of the day, and both power
and solidarity are expressed in this humorous instance.
The complex relations of power and solidarity cannot be seen as mutually
exclusive or opposing forces. Both Father and Mother seemingly use power
to assert their authority and use solidarity devices to build connections with
the audience. The exploration reveals the multifunctional nature of humor.
However, this cannot be achieved without an “intimate” knowledge of the
participants and the “contextual cue[s]” that are vital to unpack the deeper
messages beyond the surface meanings of the interaction (Gumperz 2001:
221; Cameron 2001).
3.5.3 Gender and Humor Support

At first glance, laughter seems the most appropriate support for humor.
However, there are many other strategies of humor support, and research
that relies solely on laughter counts may be misleading (Hay 2001). This
study examined other forms of humor support, such as echoing, contrib-
uting more humor, or commenting further on the topic. Instances of such
audible moves to support the humor of others are tabulated under the “ver-
bal support” category (see Table 11.8). Although a wink or a smile may also
serve as forms of humor support (Hay 2001), it can be argued that audi-
ble responses, including laughter and verbal responses, may be perceived

by the interlocutors as the most explicit and obvious means of indicating
support.
In general, the female participants in this study provided significantly
more audible support than their male counterparts, apparently confirming
the claim that women tend to be more linguistically supportive in interac-
tions (Holmes 1995). There was also some evidence of gender variation in
the type of support strategies adopted. Women tended to use more laughter,
while men more often provided a verbally supportive comment. Although
this analysis provides an interesting gender contrast, the small sample size
and the asymmetric power relationships mean that it would be unwise to
generalize these results to other populations or settings.
4. CONCLUSION
Humor is a complex subject. Dissecting power, solidarity, and gender in

humor research presents many challenges. This study indicates that there
is no universal theoretical framework that can satisfactorily account for all
types of humor and the functions that they serve. However, the two-layer
model proposed in this chapter serves to highlight the importance of humor
in maintaining in-group versus out-group relationships. Humor serves not
only to construct and reinforce in-group/out-group boundaries, but also to
strengthen and nurture relationships within a group. Humor serves to express
in-group solidarity and to emphasize social distance between groups. It also
serves to defuse tensions and maintain harmony within a group such as the
family where unequal status relationships and power differentials can cause
friction. Differentiating between in-group and out-group humor thus reveals
some interesting linkages—not only among types, forms, and functions of
humor, but also between humor and various theoretical paradigms.
When there is a power differential between interlocutors, the repressive
and contestive humor that can be observed is best accounted for by a theory
such as superiority theory, which focuses on the relationship between humor
and power. Thus the jocular abuse pattern identified within the family was
most usefully analyzed using superiority theory. Self-deprecating humor,
on the other hand, serves to protect the positive face of the speaker. Out-
group humor mainly serves as a social group boundary marker and is best
explained by solidarity theory. The complex relations of power and solidar-
ity can also be further explored through detailed analysis of the multifunc-
tional nature of humor. Finally, it has been demonstrated that gender plays
a role in the production and support of humor in this family. Self-directed
jokes seem to occur more often with female participants, and the analysis of
support strategy patterns provides further evidence for claims that women
tend to be more linguistically supportive than men, claims that have been
variously interpreted as supporting dominance versus difference approaches
in language and gender research (Holmes 1995).

198 Jon S. Y. Hui
Because of the small size of the sample used in this analysis, these reflec-
tions on the functions and distribution patterns of humor must, however,
be tentative. Yet, the analysis has perhaps suggested the usefulness of inte-
grating different theoretical approaches in exploring the way humor is used
in family interaction. More similar research on the subject of the produc-
tion, support, and response of humor in relation to gender can certainly
expand the field further. The study also perhaps serves as a small step in the
exploration of gender and humor beyond the English-speaking world. And,
although the results of this small study can only be indicative, they neverthe-
less further demonstrate the richness and complexity of the ways in which
humor is used in conversation.
APPENDIX
[AU: Is this
correct--Table Table 11.9 Ten types or forms of humor (Modified from Hay 1995)
11.9?
Apparently it 1 Anecdote narrative of personal or other person’s experience
wasn't marked 2 Fantasy constructed imaginary scenario or event
in the
manuscript and 3 Irony ironic and sarcastic remarks
comp inserted 4 Joke canned jokes
this table
5 Observation quips or comments about the environment or events that
number]
are happening now
6 Quote line from a TV show or movie
7 Role-play adoption of another voice or persona for humorous effect
8 Vulgarity sole source of humor is crassness
9 Wordplay source is meanings, sounds, or ambiguities of words
10 Other none of the above
NOTE
1. This chapter is dedicated to my late sister Siu-ying. Also, I would like to thank
Janet, Brian, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Section III
Part III
AU: Make this Part III ???
6244-0279d-PIII-1pass-012-r02.indd 199 2/26/2014 7:21:38 PM

12 Humor and Contemporary
Product Design
International Perspectives
Sheri R. Klein
1. INTRODUCTION
Women and design are synonymous. Historically, women have fashioned

objects for the home and domestic life. Product designs (furniture, light-
ing, and objects) have even been named after notable women (Morello,
Volli, and Annicchiarico 2002). It was not until the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, however, that women in the US and Europe gained formal
access to established design training, education, guilds, and employment.
Influential art and design schools in the US “adapted British models of
curriculum and teaching materials to American purposes” (Kirkham and
Walker 2000: 51). The synergistic events of the women’s suffrage move-
ment and growth of applied arts movements in the UK and US “stimulated
and re-galvanized design education for women.” As a result, many schools
of design for women were created with the aim of preparing them for posi-
tions within industry as designers in the areas of stained glass, sewing,
embroidery, wallpaper, jewelry, metalwork, china and ceramic painting,
decorative painting, textiles, and interior design. The historical roots of
women in design centered on the design and application of decorative arts,
furnishings, and the embellishment of interior spaces. As the nineteenth
century proceeded, more opportunities became available to women, yet
handicraft and decorative and applied arts remained dominant areas for
women designers.
Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century and the emergence of Bau-
haus design principles that influenced design to embody both form and
function (Stahl 2005: 10), and not just pure decoration. Toward the mid-
twentieth century, women designers “ventured out of occupations associ-
ated with the feminine” (Kirkham and Walker 2000: 62) into areas such as
automobile interior design, industrial design, and furniture design; growth
in more male-dominated areas was spurred by wartime contracts and
opportunities.
The growth of industrial design, or product design,1 programs paralleled
the growth of mass production, industry, and technological advances across

202 Sheri R. Klein
America and Europe. Although industrial design was still very male domi-
nated,2 women designers began to have greater presence in these areas and
the “concepts of ‘women’s work’ and ‘women designer’ were redefined and
extended” (Kirkham and Walker 2000: 62).3 According to the Industrial
Designers Society of America (IDSA), industrial design (ID) is
the professional service of creating and developing concepts and spec-

ifications that optimize the function, value and appearance of prod-
ucts and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer
[. . .] The role of the industrial designer is to understand psychological,
physiological and sociological factors that influence and as perceived
by the user are essential industrial design resources. [. . .] Industrial
designers also maintain a practical concern for technical processes and
requirements for manufacture; marketing opportunities and economic
constraints; and distribution sales and servicing processes. (Industrial
Designers Society of America n.d.)
Women designers in the field of product design are, however, breaking

down boundaries between art, engineering, and design, and engaging
in work that is “innovative with regards to their fabrication, materials,
and concept” (Stahl 2005: 10).4 Stahl (2005: 10–11) writes that the quali-
ties of contemporary product design by women include the “personal,
narrative, witty, conceptual, responsive and unrestrained [. . .] self-
produced.”
The recognition that contemporary product design may be witty or
humorous is significant. Design and designers, like art and artists, take
themselves very seriously. The paucity of scholarship on humor and design,
other than graphic design (see Heller 2002), toy design, or fashion design,
however, may also account for the fact that humor, or amusement, is not
seen as a direct or main outcome for design. As a result, design critics, design
historians, and design curators have not openly discussed humor; matters
of sustainability and accessibility remain dominant in contemporary design
discourse.
However, postmodern industrial design (design created 1990s–present)
has intellectual and emotional appeal, and not just sensual or aesthetic
appeal, which was the focus of modernist design. The role of emotion, that
is, feeling good, safe, or happy in the presence of or through interaction
with designed objects, cannot be underestimated in the design of products
for home and office, and with young and old users (see Norman 2005).
Humor can assist positively in managing one’s emotional life and designers
are beginning to realize that products can be both useful and appealing on
a visceral and emotional level. In fact, toy designers have long recognized
the power of humor through design, use of color, and form in attracting
consumers. Toy designer Illman (n.d.) confirms that “[t]oy design owes little

Humor and Contemporary Product Design 203
to conventional design principles and far more to an eye for parody, humor
and story telling.”
One particular genre of product design that has embraced humor (par-
ticularly satire and parody) is the mass-produced mug that parodies the
work of famous artists or includes funny sayings. These have high com-
mercial appeal and are produced in high volume. In recent years, architects
have ventured into product design, with Michael Graves as the most notable
architect/designer(see Patton 2004). Graves has designed a line of home,
kitchen, and bath products for Target Corporation, and although the aim
of his designs may not be amusement, many of his products, particularly his
teakettle designs, could be described as whimsical, fanciful, and amusing in
their anthropomorphic qualities.
There is a wide range as to what may constitute contemporary prod-
uct design for home and office use; there are mass-produced objects, mass-
produced but designer/architect-designed objects, and one-of-a-kind designer-
produced objects. Not all product designs are humorous, nor perhaps should
they be. Finally, given all these different genres of product design, there may
be specific examples within each that could illustrate the point that humor
does exist in contemporary product design.
The scope of this chapter, however, will focus on one aspect or dimen-
sion of contemporary product design—products created by contemporary
women designers who either consciously or unconsciously embrace humor
as a component in their designed work. The various kinds of humor associ-
ated with contemporary product design, such as pun, irony and paradox,
will be discussed, as well as how designers create incongruities that result in
these forms of humor. Humor theory may help to explain what makes incon-
gruities amusing, and several theories are discussed to illuminate the work.
Finally, this chapter focuses on the work of female industrial or product
designers so that we may better understand how gender and humor intersect
in contemporary product design, and what makes their work unique at this
time and place in history.
2. HUMOR THEORY
Incongruity theory may best explain the root cause for all humor. Blaise
Pascal first proposed the theory of incongruity in the 1600s, saying, “Noth-
ing produces laughter more than a disproportion between that which one
expects, and that which one sees” (quoted in Nilsen and Nilsen 2000: 183).
Further along these lines, Hutchenson, Kant, and Schoepenhauer made
similar statements that support that humor is a result of the unexpected.
According to Schopenhauer (2010), laughter results from the fact that we
hear or see something that we are not expecting. Of course, the unexpected
cannot be threatening, and as John Morreall (1983: 49) explains, it is a

204 Sheri R. Klein
pleasant jolt in thinking that is made possible through our recognition of
the surprise. Humor arises via a process of acknowledging what seems to
be out of sorts, that is, surprise, in a way that undoubtedly gives us some
pleasure. With respect to three-dimensional designed objects, Geke Lud-
den et al. (2012) acknowledge that sensory incongruities may exist in the
look and feel of objects, and these incongruities may also be perceived as
humorous.
It should be noted that a sense of humor is the ability to recognize
the ludicrous, or the incongruities presented to us, and, of course, find
them funny. A sense of humor is critical to appreciating the incongruities
made apparent by designers; however, although designers may intention-
ally create incongruities for a humorous response, they may also unin-
tentionally arouse laughter. Furthermore, viewers may or may not find
such incongruities amusing, or they may find them amusing in varying
degrees.
2.1 Types of Humor Associated with

Contemporary Product Design
The major kinds of humor associated within contemporary product design
include puns, paradox, and irony. Parody and satire are forms of humor
that rely on imitation, mocking of, and “attention to social norms, stan-
dards, morals and human foibles” (Klein 2007: 10). These kinds of humor
are typically not present in design products perhaps because parody and sat-
ire may be too edgy and not appealing to consumers of products. Although
the purpose of humor is to force new connections or associations, forms of
humor that can do so without alienating may be better suited for product
design.
A visual pun can be described as an image or object with two or more
concurrent meanings, resulting in the understanding of the image or object
on more than one level. Visual puns are typically created through the jux-
taposition of an image with text or through the merging of two different
forms to create a hybridization. Irony is a leading form of humor, particu-
larly in postmodern design, and is enabled through using words or a combi-
nation of words and images to express something completely different from
the literal meaning of the word or object. The purpose of irony is to awaken
our capacity to see subtle contradictions in images and within language so
that we may “read between the lines,” and not take everything on its face
value. Paradox is incongruity achieved through the noticeable and unusual
juxtaposition of image, forms, or, in the case of design, form and materials.
Paradoxical images or objects elude logic and rational explanation, but at
the same time intrigue and fascinate us. The purpose of paradox is to pro-
mote fantasy, acknowledge absurdity, and foster appreciation and tolerance
for contradictions.

2.2 Devices for Triggering a Response of Laughter
Designers may consciously use a variety of techniques or devices to trigger
responses of laughter and create sensory incongruities that may result in
puns, paradoxes, and irony—and amusement. These techniques include
association, transposition, transformation, exaggeration, disguise, and
appropriation (see Roukes 1997). A designer who combines two seem-
ingly different images, forms, or materials together within one object uses
juxtaposition to create new associations. The new associations are a result
of incongruity and thus can create the necessary element for surprise and
laughter. Transposition involves relocating an image or form into a new
context or environment with which it would not typically be associated;
transposition is often used to create paradox. Transformation is the alter-
ing of a form or the merging of two or more forms to create a new hybrid-
ization, typically associated with puns. Exaggeration of form is achieved
through changing or distorting an object’s size or scale; making objects
bigger or smaller can result in a comic effect because one’s expectation
of scale is violated. Exaggeration is a device commonly used in parody
and satire, and may also be used in combination with transformation.
Contradiction is created through setting up compositions or relationships
of words, images, forms, or objects that appear to have opposing mean-
ings, and is often used in paradox and irony. Disguise is the concealing
or masking of a form or materials with the intent to hide the identity of
the form or object, and is commonly used in satire. Finally, appropriation
is the technique of borrowing forms, shapes, or images from art, other
designs, popular culture, and historical sources with the aim to place a
new meaning on the image or object. Images or objects that are appro-
priated are often transformed, exaggerated, contradicted, and transposed
to create a comic effect. All of these humor-evoking techniques may be
found in designed images and objects in varying degrees and combina-
tions; however, within contemporary product design, the techniques of
contradiction, transposition, transformation, and appropriation appear to
be dominant.
2.3 Humor in Contemporary Product Design

Postmodern product design often uses the juxtaposition and contradiction
of materials, appropriates historical design references (e.g., the design of
Michael Graves), uses transformation and the anthropomorphic hybrid-
ization of forms (e.g., Alessi’s “corkscrew women”; see Figure 12.1), and
relies on transposition to give designed objects new meanings (e.g., designed
objects in art museums). Although humorous design is not the sole domain
of female designers, it is a quality in many contemporary product designs by
women, including lighting, chairs and furniture, and home and office work
systems.

206 Sheri R. Klein
Figure 12.1 Alessi, “Corkscrew woman.” Alessi s.p.a., Crusinallo, Italy.
3. HUMOR, GENDER, AND PRODUCT DESIGN
A review of design by female product designers (Stahl 2005) suggests that

female designers value and consider relationships when designing, such as
the relationship among users, materials, personal values, and human activi-
ties, as well as broader issues of global concern (sustainability, safety, etc.).
One woman designer writes, “the difference between the work of female

and male designers lies in the ways that they operate. The feminine way of
thinking is rarely linear or direct” (Moroso 2005: 84). Similarly, another
designer writes that her “creative process is hermeneutic” in that it allows
her to examine and apply theories to her own life and work (Hermann
2005: 130). In this sense, the work of female product designers while techni-
cal, aesthetic, and theoretical, is also highly personal and creative, and has
allowed the humorous impulse to emerge in imaginative ways.
For example, Inna Alesina (2005: 22) creates pillows using a painting
technique to give the illusion of stones; her “multifunctional or transform-
able objects [appear . . .] more than what they seem” and are an example
of a visual pun. Dutch designer Nicholette Brunklaus (2005: 44) creates
lighting and curtains, utilizing new technologies and appropriating photos
of realistic landscapes and images of hair on vinyl. Her objects take on
surreal qualities as she juxtaposes three-dimensional images onto both two
and three-dimensional forms. “Images are [her] language instead of text”
(Brunklaus 2005: 45) and create visual paradox through contradiction and
juxtaposition. Juxtapositions of materials and form that result in humorous
incongruity are found in Danish designer Louise Campbell’s (2005: 50) fur-
niture. Her metal frame chairs covered with angora wool recall the surreal-
ist work of Meret Oppenheim, who covered a cup and saucer with fur, and
are an example of visual paradox. Campbell (2005: 51–52) creates lamps
“to remind you of light” and, by “taking the small things around [her]
seriously,” she creates visual poetry in design that is both paradoxical and
ironic. The designs of French designer Florence Doleac (2005: 77) also focus
on “the poetic, conceptual and the improbable,” and in doing so she creates
works that are paradoxical and fanciful. She admits to “providing incongru-
ous solutions,” and her ceramic fruit and vegetable holders recall the visual
puns found in the sixteenth-century paintings of Arcimboldo.
Because postmodernism blurs the lines between art and design, artists
now design, designers exhibit work in major art museums, and designers
arrive at designing from many paths. The work of Spanish designer, Anna
Mir is such an example. Mir (2005: 155) writes that she considers herself
both an artist and an industrial designer who is “specifically interested in
objects and materials that are in direct contact with the body.” Her stated
intent is much in keeping with the aims of humorists: “I subvert associations
[people] have with the objects that surround them and create a new situa-
tion” (Mir 2005: 155). Such is the case with her fabric necklace made out of
human hair or her white ceramic bath tiles with images of hair (black linear
elements) printed on them. These are both examples of the use of techniques
of contradiction and association, which create irony and paradox.
3.1 Humor, Product Design, and Public Spaces

One example of how product designers have interfaced with industry in
the public domain is at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan,

208 Sheri R. Klein
Wisconsin).5 There you will find a program affiliated with the Kohler Com-
pany (maker of sinks and tubs) where the line between art and design blurs
and has resulted in the creation of humorous public installations, known as
the washrooms.
There are several washrooms that were commissioned between 1999 and
2004, with work by female designers. As the John Michael Kohler Arts
Center website page (n.d.) for The Washrooms indicates,
The washrooms were one of the few public spaces where permanently
installed works of art would be considered, serving to uphold the Arts
Center’s philosophy that art can enliven, enrich, and inform every facet
of our everyday lives. [. . .] Community members from factory associ-
ates to preschool children informed the design, content, and fabrication
of these works.
These washrooms utilize humor techniques of appropriation of images

into new settings and the juxtaposition of images with materials and forms
(bathroom toilets, sinks), which result in the transformation of a washroom
space. Although many of the commissioned artist/designers have degrees
in painting and sculpture, versus product design, they appear to have an
interest in the transformation of product design and painting on three-
dimensional forms. In Anne Agee’s Sheboygan Men’s Room (n.d.) you will find
[tile] with rich cobalt blue and white, deliberately reminiscent of Delft
and Staffordshire ceramics [. . .] the lavatories, urinal, toilets, and coun-
ter with intricate patterns inspired by historic motifs and with imagery
devoted to the subject of water, particularly how it touches the lives of
Sheboygan-area residents.
In a women’s washroom in the east wing, Emptying and Filling (n.d.),

US designer Merrill Mason’s room “quietly contemplates the boundaries
between public and private through personal objects and procedures that
prepare one for public presentation.” Upon entering, one will find “cast-
iron objects that are set into marble-lined niches. [. . .] Mason collected
these perfume bottles, lace-edged and embroidered linens, gloves, lipsticks,
hand mirrors, and hair combs and re-created them in iron” (Emptying and
Filling n.d.). The incongruity of impermanent, nonprecious, and feminine
objects replaced with dark, hard objects creates a pleasant jolt that may be
experienced as amusing. In addition, within the inner space of the restrooms
there is printed text that reads “emptying and filling” and “swirling, swirl-
ing, around and around and down.” As one does not expect to find beau-
tiful script in a washroom, especially of a poetic sort, this is also another
humorous component that could be explained as a pun (i.e., the ceramic
surface of a bathroom sink as journal page) or ironic in its contradictions
resulting from the marriage of the poetic and the mundane and functional.

The work of contemporary product designer Monica Nicoletti (Italy/
USA) closely resembles the work of Mason. Nicoletti prints realistic images,
such as lace tablecloths, Victorian lamps, and clocks onto two- and three-
dimensional everyday surfaces. For example, her images of Victorian
white lace printed on black rubber and table and lamp images printed on
cardboard boxes exploit the techniques of association, contradiction, and
appropriation of historical images in design and women’s work. The objects
function technically and in illusion, and exploit and exaggerate the lines
and spaces between feminine/masculine, decorative/utilitarian, handwork/
industrial object, past/present, and serious/amusing.
4. CONCLUSION
In a study by Ludden et al. (2012: 18), the researchers concluded that “prod-
ucts with appropriate incongruities were appreciated (liked) more and were
perceived as more amusing.” This study has some important implications
for understanding, appreciating, and using product design: contemporary
product design involves cognitive, visual, tactile, and often auditory sensa-
tions; it requires user/object interaction, and through the interaction with
objects, users may be surprised and indeed amused on a variety of levels—
conceptual/intellectual, physical/sensual, and emotional.
The appreciation of the incongruities present in product design may
result from touch, sight, and hearing. Surprise from an unexpected use of
materials, forms, or images, or an unexpected context for the work, appears
to be a key feature in all the product designs discussed in this chapter.
The works by contemporary female industrial designers discussed here
may be described on one level as humorous as they all enlist some ele-
ment of pleasant surprise and incongruity, in various combinations of
idea, image, materials, form, or context of work. The designers discussed
here appear to make objects that (1) are highly personal, as expressed
through scale, materials, imagery, and user focus (e.g., women, children);
(2) engage viewers on a sensory, emotional, and conceptual level; (3) utilize
metaphor and poetic thought; (4) are well crafted, as expressed in dura-
bility of materials and techniques; and (5) are playful and humorous, as
noted in the range of forms of humor (pun, irony, paradox) and humor-
evoking techniques, such as contradiction, transposition, transformation,
and appropriation.
Many female product designers have gravitated toward the design of
public spaces, as in the example of the Kohler bathrooms; however, many
designers also work in small scale and limited production. UK designer Lau-
ren Moriarity (2005: 165) writes, “I take a lighthearted approach toward
designing products [. . .] they should sometimes be beautiful and intricate,
sometimes functional and fun, and sometimes funny and clever.” Similarly,
Nicoletti (2005: 170) claims that “every design is a journey of personal

210 Sheri R. Klein
discovery.” US designer Paige Smith (2005: 176) adds that “many of the
designs have related to love, attraction, comfort and softness.”
We need to acknowledge that the work of many contemporary female
product designers is the result of their varied and complex life experiences,
and that “women [still] tend to be active in certain areas of design [. . .] nota-
bly design for the home and design related to the body (Clark 2005: 157).
The designers discussed here do consider the “practical, but also the com-
forting, the relaxing, the sensual and the playful” (Clark 2005: 159), and
these qualities appear to be embraced by small-scale work. The strength of
these designers is that they stand at the intersection of a variety of fields (sci-
ence, art, design), living in a culture of globalization and new technologies,
intimacy and marketability, imitability and uniqueness, crossing boundaries
between modern and traditional, manufactured and self-produced, mascu-
line and feminine. This can only supply an impetus for innovation and the
emergence of surprise, play, and humor in design.
From this analysis of a select group of contemporary female product
designers, it would not be safe to conclude that female designers are creating
more humorous designs than their male counterparts. However, it is clear
that many female designers are drawn to a smaller, intimate scale for cer-
tain practical or aesthetic reasons; this may stimulate the manipulation and
contradiction of materials and ideas that can result in humor, which would
not be possible in the production of large-scale works or in corporate-driven
design work.
As we continue to interrogate the meaning of objects and things, casually
or systematically, through looking at design, purchasing or collecting prod-
uct designs, or merely admiring objects from afar, we need to remember that
we desire things around the house or office, not just because they perform
a specific function, but also because of the way we feel around them. It is
precisely the way objects make us feel that is important to understanding
design. Through humor, intended or unintended by the designer, product
designs can make us feel amused, delighted, happy, and joyful. To have
these experiences requires that one is open and aware to the designed world
around us and willing to be delightfully surprised by design. The genre of
product design created by women designers internationally offers us the
opportunity for quiet surprises and pleasant jolts to our expectations about
design.
NOTES
1. Stahl (2005: 11–12) writes, “Industrial design[,] a term reserved for power-
driven and masculine machinery, now pertains to a variety of systems.”
2. ID, historically, has been male dominated (Walker 2010). According to Per-
kins (1999), ten percent of IDSA membership is female and twenty-five per-
cent of all industrial design students are female.

3. In spite of advances, Kirkham (2005: 13) notes that “women of color are few
and far between in industrial design” and other design fields.
4. The field of industrial design has made progress, with notable contributions
along the way, such as the launching of I.D. magazine by Jane Thompson and
Deborah Allen in 1954 (Lasky 2005: 126) and designers such as Eileen Gray
and Ray Eames. However, by and large, female product designers have been
“shut out of male bastions such as automotive design and blocked by glass
ceilings” (Lasky 2005: 128).
5. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center website (n.d.) indicates artists “spend
two to six months working in Kohler Co.’s Iron and Brass Foundries, Pottery,
and Enamel Shop [. . .] working side-by-side with industrial craftsmen and
women with years of hands-on material expertise.”

13 Being Bovvered and
Taking Liberties
Female Performance and Female
Identities in The Catherine Tate Show
Sharon Lockyer
1. INTRODUCTION
A large body of literature exists that explores the roles and representations of
women on television situation comedies (Gray 1994; Andrews 1998; Akass
and McCabe 2004; Chambers 2005; Henry 2007; Kypker 2012). However,
little work exists on women’s roles and representations on television sketch
shows. The “sketch show” is an increasingly popular type of programming
that recently has dominated British television schedules. Although a num-
ber of these sketch shows have been written and performed primarily by
men, for example, Little Britain (BBC, 2003–06), more recently a num-
ber of successful British sketch shows have been written and performed by
women. One notable example is the one-woman, award-winning, satirical,
character-based sketch show The Catherine Tate Show (BBC, 2004–07;
henceforth TCTS), written and performed by comedienne Catherine Tate.
This chapter examines the treatment of different female identities in this
female-based sketch show. Two main characters are analyzed—“chav” “Am
I bovvered?” teenage schoolgirl Lauren Cooper, and Joannie “Nan” Taylor,
the foul-mouthed cockney racist grandmother. The analysis focuses on their
physical characteristics, their language use, their character “defects,” and
the narratives in which they are embedded. The chapter examines the extent
to which characters in TCTS challenge and subvert stereotypical ways in
which women have been represented in television comedy, and explores
how the constructions of feminine identities intersect with other spheres of
identity, such as social class and age.
2. SITUATING THE SKETCH SHOW
The television sketch show seems to hold a position of inferiority in aca-

demic debates about television comedy. Although there are numerous
books specifically focused on the television sitcom (for example, Cook
1982; Morreale 2003; Mills 2005, 2009), the television sketch show has
received relatively scant regard. Where sketch shows are considered, it is

Being Bovvered and Taking Liberties 213
often in short book chapters (see Wilmut 1980; Wilmut and Rosengard
1989; Neale and Krutnik 1990), rather than books devoted to sketch shows
per se (for an exception, see Lockyer 2010a). This may possibly be due to
the sitcom traditionally being the most popular comic format on television
(Crisell 2006).
Sketch comedy is, however, an established cultural form in British broad-
casting. A range of different types of sketch show exist—from the politi-
cally motivated, such as That Was The Week That Was (BBC, 1962–63)
and Bremner, Bird and Fortune (Channel 4, 1999–2010), to those com-
menting on social mores, values, and cultural relations, such as Goodness
Gracious Me (BBC, 1996–2001), to parodies of other program types and
format, such as The Fast Show (BBC, 1994–97). Other programs fuse the
sketch format with situation comedy, such as The League of Gentlemen
(BBC, 1999–2002), or with stand-up material, such as Victoria Wood as
Seen on TV (BBC, 1985–87), Jo Brand Through the Cakehole (Chan-
nel 4, 1994–96), and more recently Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (BBC,
2009–present).
Recognizing its performance roots in nineteenth-century theater and the
minstrel show, Neale and Krutnik (1990: 192) note how the distinguishing
features of sketch comedy include “characters, fictional setting (a specified
‘elsewhere’), dialogue, and some kind of casual event to set a conversation
or an action in motion.” Julian Hall (2006) argues that successful sketches
often employ specific comedic devices, including catchphrases, improvi-
sation, surrealism/juxtaposition, and cross-dressing (due to the gendered
nature of much comedy, this cross-dressing often involves men dressing as
women). A number of different types of sketch have been identified, from
what Wilmut (1980: 198) calls the “format sketch,” which takes the “for-
mat of something like a television quiz program or discussion—or indeed
anything with a strong and recognizable style of presentation—and then
empties the content out of it, replacing it with something ludicrous,” to
what Neale and Krutnik (1990: 202) refer to as the “well-made sketch,”
where the sketch “sets out consistent diegetic parameters, introduces a cause
or premise, and develops to end in a climax and punchline.”
Although many successful British television sketch shows have been writ-
ten and performed by men—such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC,
1969–74), The Two Ronnies (BBC, 1971–87), A Bit of Fry and Laurie
(BBC, 1989–95), The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer (BBC, 1993–95), Little
Britain, That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC, 2006–10), Harry and Paul
(BBC, 2007–present), and Horne & Corden (BBC, 2009)—some contempo-
rary sketch show offerings have been written and performed by women. The
“queens of sketch comedy,” Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (French
and Saunders, BBC, 1987–2007; see Hole 2003), have been joined by Doon
Mackichan, Fiona Allen, and Sally Phillips, creators of and performers in
Smack the Pony (Channel 4, 1999–2003), by Jocelyn Jee Esien, the creator
of and performer in Little Miss Jocelyn (BBC, 2006–08) and co-creator and

214 Sharon Lockyer
co-performer in 3 Non-Blondes (BBC, 2003), and by the female-led sketch
series Tittybangbang (BBC, 2005–07) as significant players in, and examples
of, female-led sketch comedy. This is in addition to the focus of this chapter,
Catherine Tate, the creator and performer of TCTS. TCTS is firmly placed
in what Hall (2006) calls the “golden age” of British sketch shows, which
spans the past fifteen years and includes other television sketch shows, such
as The Fast Show and Little Britain.
3. THE CATHERINE TATE SHOW
Written by Catherine Tate and Derren Litten, produced by Geoffrey Per-

kins, and directed by Gordon Anderson, the first season of TCTS appeared
on British television screens on BBC 2 in early 2004, and was also shown
worldwide through the BBC. The second series appeared in mid-2005, and a
Christmas special was shown on December 20 of the same year. With view-
ing figures of 5.3 million, this Christmas special was one of BBC 2’s biggest
successes of 2005 (Gibson 2005). The third and, to date, final season was
broadcast in the autumn of 2006, and another Christmas special was aired
on Christmas Day 2007 and was viewed by 6.4 million (Plunkett 2008).
This is in addition to a number of Children in Need (2005) and Comic
Relief (2005, 2007) charity sketches, and Tate performing in character at
the 77th Royal Variety Performance (2005). Guest appearances across the
series and specials include comedian Peter Kay, pop icon George Michael,
and the tenth Doctor in Dr. Who (BBC, 1963–89, 2005–present), David
Tennant.1 This character-based sketch show has won two Royal Television
Society Awards, two British Comedy Awards, and a National Television
Award. A range of merchandising accompanies the show, including scripts
of the show, DVDs, key-rings, talking pens, t-shirts, calendars, and posters.
Through a series of unrelated characters, performed primarily by Tate,
the show satirizes everyday life and has produced an array of sharply
observed and forensically considered (see Viner 2006) characters from
across the sociocultural spectrum—from Bernie, an Irish incompetent nurse
who comes close to being sacked in every sketch due to her behavior, such
as making inappropriate remarks to patients or flirting with her male col-
leagues, to the upper-middle-class “Aga Saga Woman,” who has difficulty
dealing with the most mundane situations, such as nearly running out of
olive oil, to Margaret, the “Frightened Woman,” who screams at everyday
noises, such as her own hiccups and a telephone ringing. Tate uses a range
of comedy catchphrases, from Northern couple Janice and Ray’s “The dirty
bastards!,” which they repeat when describing the “disgusting” meals they
been served in restaurants, to fund-raiser Geordie Georgie, who repeatedly
asks her colleague, Martin, to sponsor her for various charities and encour-
ages him to sponsor her by claiming “Every 38 minutes . . .” and backing
up her claims with “If you don’t believe me then log on to the website.”

Crisell (2006: 112) notes how the use of catchphrases is “a concise way of
revealing their [characters’] idiosyncrasies.” This comedic technique is fused
with other established sketch comedy traditions, including the use of cari-
catures (through the use of wigs, make-up, accents, and props), grotesque
exaggeration, and satire, all of which are united in their ability to convey the
character’s physical, psychological, and emotional dimensions in an efficient
and economical manner.
3.1 Tate’s Female Characterizations

Television sketch comedy is particularly important given comedy’s signifi-
cant sociopolitical role. Comedy character types and characteristics need
to be easily recognizable and understandable to enable viewers to appreci-
ate the jokes—this is salient in sketch comedy given the fragmented nature
of the genre, the short duration of each sketch, and the rapid movement
from one sketch to another. It is necessary for characters to be clearly
and immediately recognized in order for the comedy to work. Comic fail-
ure is likely to result if too much thought is required to understand the
joke or sketch (Palmer 1994). Stereotypes, as a representational strategy,
are often used in television comedy to ensure immediate recognition of
groups and individuals (Medhurst and Tuck 1982; see also Bowes 1990;
Crisell 2006). Thus comedic characters often draw on wider sociocultural
beliefs and assumptions about specific people and individuals. Changing
comedic representations reflect social and attitudinal developments across
time. This was clearly illustrated in the anti-racist and anti-sexist shifts in
social attitudes that led to the rise of Alternative Comedy in the late 1970s
and early 1980s (Littlewood and Pickering 1998; Wilmut and Rosengard
1989). It is in this sense that Medhurst (2007) describes comedy as a “cul-
tural thermometer.”
3.1.1 The Teenage Chav—The Case of Lauren Cooper

One area within British society where the cultural temperature has been
rising steadily since the beginning of the new millennium is in relation to
conceptualizations of class identities and class struggles. Despite claims
of the “death of class” or that Britain is a “classless society” (Clark and
Lipset 1991; Holton and Turner 1989; Pakulski and Waters 1996), the
gap between the richest and poorest in British society is the widest that
is has been in forty years (Dorling et al. 2007), and social mobility is
declining (Blanden, Gregg, and Machin 2005). Increasing anxieties and
tensions resonate around class differences and class relations. As a result
a new social class vocabulary has emerged in the past seven to eight years
(Tyler 2008). The term “chav” has become “a ubiquitous term of abuse
for white working-class subjects” (Tyler 2008; see also Lawler 2005). The
Oxford English Dictionary now includes an entry for “chav,” describing
him or her as “a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish

216 Sharon Lockyer
behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usu-
ally with connotations of a low social status.”2 Limited intelligence, poor
language use, and poor pronunciation are also characteristics of chavs
(see Tyler 2008). The importance of economic capital in class distinctions
has been supplemented by cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) and the sphere
of consumption. Chav discourses focus “not on the inability to consume,
but on the excessive participation in forms of marked-oriented consump-
tion which are deemed aesthetically impoverished,” and the “problem”
with chavs is that “they consume in ways deemed ‘vulgar’ and hence lack
in ‘distinction’ by superordinate classes” (Hayward and Yar 2006: 14;
emphasis in original). In addition to wearing the “wrong” types of cloth-
ing—sportswear—chavs wear too much jewelry (e.g., large gold hoop ear-
rings, too many sovereign gold rings) and listen to the “wrong” kind of
music (e.g., rap music).
This new terminology has resulted in the “emergence of the grotesque
and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media”
(Tyler 2008: 17). One significant vehicle through which characterization of
the chav has been mobilized is television comedy. Comedy chavs include
teenage delinquent Vicky Pollard in Little Britain (see Tyler 2008; Lockyer
2010a and b), the Gallagher family in the dramedy Shameless (Channel 4,
2004–13), and of particular interest to this chapter, chav Lauren Cooper in
TCTS. Lauren is probably one of the most popular and prominent of Tate’s
characters, and she has obtained sociocultural resonance: her “bovvered”
catchphrase won the “Word of the Year” award in 2006 (Phillips 2006),
and during a Comic Relief charity sketch in 2007, Tony Blair, then the Brit-
ish Prime Minister, repeated the “bovvered” catchphrase.
Lauren Cooper (full name: Lauren Alesha Masheka Tanesh Felicia Jane
Cooper) is a comprehensive school teenager played by Catherine Tate.
Lauren’s appearance, characteristics, and behavior symbolize the chav as
described here. Lauren is usually dressed in her school uniform, with her
tie loosely and scruffily knotted; numerous gold rings, bracelets, and large-
hooped earrings,; and her ginger hair tightly scraped back in a ponytail
(colloquially known as a “Croydon facelift”).3 If not dressed in her school uni-
form Lauren can be seen wearing the chav signature sportswear—matching
tracksuit trousers and jacket. In the Lauren Cooper sketches we see her
interacting with her best friends—Liese Jackson (played by Niky Wardley)
and Ryan Perkins (played by Matthew Horne)—and (middle-class) author-
ity figures, such as teachers, train conductors, and gym instructors. Lauren
has an angry and loutish attitude, and her catchphrases include “Am I bov-
vered?,” “Do I look bovvered?,” and “Are you disrespecting me?,” which
she usually uses when embarrassed or annoyed. These catchphrases suit-
ably reflect her brash persona. Lauren repeats these catchphrases time and
time again so that those with whom she is interacting have almost no space
in the conversation, and they become increasingly exasperated by her. For
example, in the “Christian” sketch (Season 2, Episode 1), Lauren criticizes

the clothes worn by a female teacher. A long exchange ensues that finishes
with the teacher becoming increasing frustrated:
LAUREN: Look at my face. Bovvered . . .

TEACHER: Don’t . . .
LAUREN: Miss . . .
TEACHER: Look . . .
LAUREN: Bovvered . . .
TEACHER: Don’t make . . .
LAUREN: Bovvered . . .
TEACHER: Me . . .
LAUREN: I ain’t bovvered!
TEACHER: Right! Lauren, you are not going on this trip. You can sit
there and get comfortable, it’s going to be a very long afternoon.
LAUREN: Am I bovvered though?
TEACHER: Not another word.
Dodd and Dodd (1992) highlight how a symptom of “middle class anxi-
ety” of working-class women in the nineteenth century was a fixation with
working-class mouths in terms of appetite and their modes and types of
speech patterns. Focusing on Lauren’s language use (and perceived misuse)
extends this dominant pattern in lower-class representations.
Lauren’s lack of education is often the target of the humor. For example
her friends Liese and Ryan mock her when she says “Bing Bing” instead of
“Bling Bling” (“Bing Bing,” Season 1, Episode 1) and refers to rapper Diz-
zee Rascal as “Naughty Rascal” (“New Top,” Season 2, Episode 2). Liese
corrects Lauren when she says “Bonnie and Clive” instead of “Bonnie and
Clyde” (“Tattoo,” Season 2, Episode 4). Her teachers also allude to her lim-
ited intelligence. For example Lauren’s history teacher notes that Lauren is
“well on [her] way to coming bottom of [her] whole year” and later in the
same sketch mocks her for not knowing where Bristol is located (“Teacher,”
Season 2, Episode 5); another teacher exclaims, “You don’t even know what
homophobic means,” following Lauren’s accusation that he is gay (“Gay,”
Season 2, Episode 6). Such characterization is symptomatic of other comedic
portrayals of lower social groups. For example, in his analysis of US television
comedy representations of social class, Butsch (2003: 576) argues that the few
portrayals of working-class individuals that exist on television comedy con-
vey them as “dumb, immature, irresponsible, or lacking in common sense.”
However, there are moments across the Lauren sketches that resist the
chav stereotype and proffer a more progressive characterization. For exam-
ple, there are occasions when Lauren demonstrates intelligence and insight.
For example in season 3, episode 4, despite being inattentive in her science
class she surprises her teacher when she unexpectedly answers correctly a
number of questions he asks about the periodic table, and she continues to
answer questions correctly from the corridor as she is ejected from class.

218 Sharon Lockyer
Further, in the same season, in episode 5 (“French Class”), despite refusing
to speak French during the oral examination, she asks her French teacher,
“Regardez mon visage. Suis-je bovvered? Est-ce-que vous appelez ma mère
une Pickey?”4 Finally, during the Comic Relief sketches (2007), despite
claiming that “reading is for losers” when challenged by her new English
teacher, Mr. Logan (played by David Tennant), Lauren uses Shakespearean
vernacular and, to the surprise of Mr. Logan, is able to recite completely and
correctly Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the
sun”) before slapping the top of her desk and saying “Bite me, alien boy!”
Stereotypes of female chavs are often based on sexist class disgust, with
emphasis placed on the promiscuous behavior of young women (Tyler 2008).
Female chavs are characterized by their excessively reproductive body and
“sluttish” behavior—having multiple pregnancies during their early teenage
years, with their children fathered by different men from different ethnic
backgrounds—as is the case with comedy chav Vicky Pollard in Little Brit-
ain who has twelve children by numerous men (see Lockyer 2010a and b).
Discussing the appeal of Vicky Pollard, journalist James Delingpole (2006)
argues that she captured the public’s imagination
as she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges
of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hor-
monal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant
as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their
knickers in the blink of an eye.
Catherine Tate’s teenage chav characterization is sexually inactive. Although

Lauren accuses one male teacher of being gay (“Gay,” season 2, episode 6),
she rarely, if ever, discusses her own sexuality, and her on-off relationship
with Ryan seems to be one of innocence and is less serious than Lauren per-
ceives—it is largely based on her imagination. For example, in the “Tattoo”
sketch (season 2, episode 4) Lauren shows Liese her “Ryan and Lauren”
tattoo on one arm and the “Face of Ryan: tattoo on the other. When Lauren
asks a shocked Liese whether she has “got beef with that?” Liese exclaims,
“No, I just didn’t know you [Lauren and Ryan] was doing it.” On arrival
to the scene Ryan explains to Lauren, “Listen, I was thinking we shouldn’t
see each other no more. I need to concentrate on my MC’ing and stuff.” As
soon as Ryan is out of earshot Liese shouts, “On my God! You have got tat-
toos of him all over your body and he’s just chucked you!” to which Lauren
replies with her “Am I bovvered” routine. Rather than being promiscuous,
Lauren’s relationships with boys are limited in number and duration.
3.1.2 The Older Woman—The Case of Joannie “Nan” Taylor

According to Cohen (2002: 599), “To be old in our [Western] society is
be devalued. To be old and female is to experience double oppression.” A
large body of work exists that suggests that Western media offer a limited
number and range of images of older women, which serves to perpetuate

sociocultural stereotypes about older women (see Cohen 2002; Harwood
and Giles 1992). When older women do appear in television programs and
commercials, they are often portrayed as “being helpless, unknowledge-
able, disoriented, or in some other unfavorable fashion” (Peterson and Ross
1997: 425). Mrs. Emery (played by David Walliams) in the British sketch
show Little Britain is a case in point. Mrs. Emery is an incontinent old
woman who urinates uncontrollably (and unknowingly) in public places,
from libraries to supermarkets, much to the horror of observers and passers-
by.5 Such portrayals are especially important given television’s influential
role in forming young and old viewers’ perceptions of the role and value of
older people in everyday life (see Roy and Harwood 1997). These are likely
to become increasingly important as Britain’s aging population grows and
concerns are raised about increased demands on health and social care pro-
vision (Travis 2008). Other research demonstrates that negative portrayals
of older women as eccentric and irrational are being replaced and resisted
by increasing positive portrayals of older people as powerful, healthy,
active, and sexy (Bell 1992). One notable example examined by John Bell is
The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–92).6 The sitcom The Golden Girls focused
on the lives of four 50-plus-year-old women (Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and
Sophia) who, due to divorce or widowhood, lived together in Miami, Flor-
ida. It was the first television program in which all of the main characters
were female and over fifty years old. The sitcom was “framed, at least ini-
tially, in terms of increasing the visibility, and likeability, of the elderly on
prime time” (Harwood and Giles 1992: 405) and thus provided a welcome
relief to the negativity that dominates the representations of older women
in humorous television programming (e.g., see Barrick, Hutchinson, and
Deckers 1990). However, Cohen (2002: 609) argues that The Golden Girls
simultaneously “challenges and reinforces stereotypes about older women.”
These include the following:
• “older women dwell in the past and are old fashioned in their thinking,
dress and behavior”;
• older women are “set in their ways” and talk mostly about the
past versus discussing current events, issues, and concepts, such as
homosexuality;
• “older women lose interest in sexual activity”—they are sexless and dis-
interested versus sensual, talking about sex, and interested in sex;
• “older women are cared for by their families and give nothing in re-
turn”—they nurture the self, versus nurturing others;
• “older women are invisible”—they are discounted and minimized, ver-
sus in a central position in conversations and situations. (see also Har-
wood and Giles 1992)
Turning attention to TCTS, the main characterization of the “older

woman” takes the form of Joannie “Nan” Taylor (performed by Catherine
Tate). Nan is a foul-mouthed cockney racist pensioner. It is reported that

220 Sharon Lockyer
Nan was inspired by Tate’s visits to old people’s homes during her drama
college days (see Gilbert 2004) and that her voice was motivated by one
that Tate heard used by an audience member during one of her earlier
stand-up shows (Tate 2005). Nan typically dresses in a dowdy patterned
dress, a knitted cardigan, tan tights, and fur-trimmed carpet slippers, and
is often seen holding a screwed-up, well-used facial tissue that is sometimes
stuffed into her cardigan pocket. Epitomizing Bakhtin’s (1984) grotesque
aging body, Nan has graying wiry hair; a weathered and wrinkled face,
conveying a life of hardship and worry; and a loud piercing cackle—which
we hear her make as she slaps her right thigh and throws her head back
with her mouth wide open, sitting with her legs spread in her dull, floral-
patterned arm chair. Nan’s numerous and frequently used catchphrases
include “What a fucking liberty!,” “What a load of old shit!,” and “Fuck
off!” The Nan sketches repeatedly involve her being visited by her grand-
son, Jamie (played by Matthew Horne), a well-spoken and well-behaved
university student. Nan is usually pleased to see Jamie and grateful for his
efforts, often responding to his entrance with “Eer ‘e is! You come up and
see me? Come up and see me ain’t ya? I noticed that!” and telling him that
he is a “good boy. You are a darling child” (“Charles Manson,” season 1,
episode 2)
Each Nan sketch proceeds with the same narrative structure: although
Nan initially presents herself as having a pleasant persona, the situation
usually changes and results with Nan making unfavorable and offensive
comments. These might be made toward Jamie. For example, although a
university student in Nan’s eyes he “ain’t got a job” (“Television,” season 2,
episode 1; “Hospital,” season 2, episode 3), and despite Jamie repeatedly
mentioning he has a girlfriend, Nan often questions his sexuality—“I can’t
make him out. I mean, you’d think a boy of his age’d be interested in girls,
but no” (“Meals on Wheels,” season 1, episode 4). Neighbors, other family
members, and home help assistants are equally vilified. For example, the
first time we are introduced to Nan in “Home Help” (season 1, episode 1)
we hear her explain to Jamie about why she does not like her Polish home
help assistant:
NAN: Yeah, well I don’t like her and that’s it.

JAMIE: Oh God.
NAN: I said to her, “look, darling, I’m not being funny, I don’t mean
nothing by it, but I don’t want you coming up here no more if you
don’t mind”.
JAMIE: Oh Nan, you didn’t.
NAN: She said to me, “Mrs Taylor, you mustn’t be so proud.” I said,
“what you talking about?” She said, “d’you not want me coming up
here no more because you feel your independence slipping away?” I
said, “no, I don’t want you coming up here no more because you’re
a fucking thief?”

JAMIE: Nan, she’s not stealing from you.
NAN: What you talking about? Of course she is. I watch her when she
thinks I ain’t looking. ‘Andfuls of gear she take.
Visitors to Nan’s flat are treated in a polite and courteous manner, and with
respect, but as soon as they leave her flat, she caustically criticizes them. In
the “Television” sketch (season 1, episode 1) Nan’s television needs repair-
ing and dutiful Jamie organizes a television engineer. The engineer refuses
payment for the repair as it was simply a matter of changing the fuse, how-
ever Nan insists that he takes fifty pounds for his trouble, which he reluc-
tantly takes. Once the engineer has departed Nan retorts, “Huh! What a
fucking liberty! Fifty pound?! Fifty pound?! He weren’t here five minutes!
Greedy little bastard! He nearly took me fucking hand off! Mugged in me
own front room.”
Although many sketches are based in Nan’s small high-rise flat, others
occur in other such locations as a discount store, a doctor’s office, a hos-
pital, and an older people’s day center. For example in the “Hospital”
sketch (season 2, episode 3), Nan is in hospital, during which she accuses
“lovely” nurse Anita of stealing from her, explaining to Jamie who has come
to visit, “As God is my judge, she’s had the lot. She’s had the lot. She’s had
the pension book, the gift vouchers, all me loose change, not to mention
eighty pound in cash. Gone, finished, done, in cold blood, that’s your lot.”
She complains about other patients—“Glory be, it’s like a fucking circus in
here”—and following consultation of the hospital menu retorts, “Oh no, I
couldn’t eat Chinese food, son, their faces make me feel sick.”
The Nan character proffers a complex combination of idiosyncrasies that
simultaneously reinforce and resist Western stereotypes about older women.
The representation of Nan reflects the older women stereotype—“older
women are cared for by their families and give nothing in return”—identified
by Cohen (2002). Nan is reliant on her family and others for her physical,
emotional, and psychological well-being. Jamie often arrives at Nan’s flat
with shopping Nan has requested (e.g., Madeira cake, shoe polish, tights);
when Nan is in hospital, Jamie delivers a change of clothing and specifically
requested foods; Jamie assists Nan when she attends a doctor’s office and
various social events; and Jamie makes sure is he present in Nan’s flat to com-
fort her when she returns from a neighbor’s funeral. Nan is fully aware of her
reliance on others, saying to Jamie, “Oh, I don’t know what I’d do without
you, sweetheart, really I don’t. I mean, I’d be dead on me fucking back if I
had to rely on these sorry bastards [hospital nurses]”’ (“Cheryl,” season 2,
episode 4). Interestingly, such recognition of dependency and praise is thus
used as a vehicle to criticize others and the social care system.
Reinforcing the stereotype of older women as sexually inactive, Nan’s
appearance and topics of conversation suggest she lacks interest in and has
few, if any, sexual relationships with others. Her loose-fitting floral dresses
serve to desexualize her aging body, and when sexual relationships are

222 Sharon Lockyer
mentioned by Nan, it is usually in a derogatory manner and about other
people’s relationships, especially Jamie’s assumed homosexuality.
Nan simultaneously reinforces and challenges the stereotype that “older
women are invisible” (Cohen 2002). Although Nan is often excluded from
parts of conversations, takes longer to respond to questions, or responds
“inappropriately” to questions due to mishearing or misinterpreting names,
places, and other details, at other times she adopts a central position in
conversations. This central position is usually a result of her “unruly,” inap-
propriate, and unfavorable language and phrases—“What a fucking lib-
erty!”; “What a load of old shit!”—which are visibly shocking to others
involved in the conversation. Thus, although adopting a central position in
situations and conversations, this centrality is not related to her positive or
insightful contributions, but due to her transgressive behavior through her
sharp, coarse tongue and her use of foul language. Although directness and
coarseness is often perceived as characteristic of older people (see Dillard
et al. 1990), few British comedic television portrayals exist of older people
swearing so profusely. For example, although pensioner Victor Meldrew
(played by Richard Wilson) in One Foot in the Grave (BBC, 1990–2000)
is sharp-tongued, he does not swear. As Schopenhauer usefully outlined,
laughter results due to perceived incongruity between a concept and reality
(see Morreall 1987). In Western society the use of foul language may be
contrary to how many people would stereotypically expect older women
to talk, or they certainly would not expect to hear older women swearing
in a BBC television sketch show. Thus this perceived incongruity (Morreall
1987; Koestler 1964) is further exacerbated when Nan’s foul language and
racist, sexist, or homophobic views are juxtaposed with Jamie’s considered
response and neutral language, which he uses when attempting to repair
Nan’s transgressive behavior. For example, in the “Hospital” sketch men-
tioned earlier, in response to Nan’s criticism of other patients, Jamie replies,
“All right, Nan, don’t be rude,” and at the end of the sketch retorts, “Nan,
that’s enough. Look around you. This ward is full of vulnerable people suf-
fering with dignity. It’s about time you started to have a little consideration
for those less fortunate than yourself.” As is the case in Absolutely Fabulous
(BBC, 1992–2012), where the mother-daughter roles are reversed, with stu-
dent-daughter Saffron looking out for her mother Edina (played respectively
by Julia Sawalha and Jennifer Saunders; see Kirkham and Skeggs 1998), in
the Nan sketches we see the younger generation serving to reduce or prevent
further transgressions by older women.
Nan’s swearing was partially responsible for the British communica-
tions regulator, OFCOM, investigating Tate’s show following viewer com-
plaints in relation to Tate’s 2007 Christmas Special. This was deemed by
some viewers as the “most offensive program ever broadcast by the BBC
on a Christmas Day” (The Skimmer 2007) due to Nan Taylor’s excessive
use of expletives (N. Martin 2007).7 The BBC defended the sketch show
explaining that the pre-transmission announcement warned of the strong

language used and that Tate’s characters are “so over the top as to be
almost cartoon-like and this is where her genius lies [. . .] her comedy is
never meant to offend” (N. Martin 2007). OFCOM cleared Tate’s show
of breaching broadcasting regulations, stating “overall this episode was
typical of The Catherine Tate Show and would not have gone beyond the
expectations of its usual audience” (see Plunkett 2008; BBC News 2008;
O’Shea 2008).
Nan reinforces the stereotype of older women being “set in their ways”
of thinking, dressing, and behaving, and talking about the past (Cohen
2002). Nan often talks about the past and reminisces about old friends who
have died (e.g., “Funeral,” season 2, episode 5; “Tommy Upson,” season 2,
episode 6). The act of reminiscence according to Harwood and Giles (1992:
419) is possibly the “component par excellence of the elderly communica-
tive stereotypes.” Nan’s age is also identified by referring to events, issues,
and features of times past. For example, in the “Pound Shop” sketch (sea-
son 1, episode 5), Nan converts current currencies into their historical
equivalent. When told that everything in the shop is priced at a pound,
she exclaims, “What, twenty shillings? Oh that’s scandalous money, this is,
innit?” Nan has difficulty accepting and understanding individuals who are
different from herself in terms of sexuality, nationality, and physical appear-
ance. For example, in the “Meals on Wheels” sketch (season 1, episode 4),
Gavin, a homosexual Meals on Wheels worker, is referred to as “that bow-
legged, humpty-backed freak show,” and she goes on to mention, “Oh they
want shooting, they really do.” In the Christmas Special (2005) a larger
female volunteer is described by Nan as “having a head the size of a pig,”
and a man with a prosthetic hook is referred to as “Metal Mickey.”8 In the
“Charles Manson” sketch (season 1, episode 2) Nan describes one of her
neighbors, Jean, in the following way:
Oh she is a size. Great big walloping article. Oh, you seen it? She looks
like an elephant walking along the street. Great big fat arse hanging off
her. What a liberty. I shouldn’t have to look at that. She’s got a fat back
an’ all, ain’t she? She’s got a fat back, the woman. Great big fat hairy
sweating back. Oh no, terrible, innit? Oh that is very unfeminine on a
woman.
Nan’s character has stylistic similarities to a popular and controversial fic-

tional comic character in the 1960s sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (BBC,
1965–75). The central character, Alf Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell),
was a selfish, angry, foul-mouthed, white working-class racist bigot, misog-
ynist, and anti-Semitic from the East End of London. Alf Garnett’s family—
his wife Elsie (played by Dandy Nichols), daughter Rita (played by Una
Stubbs), and her boyfriend Michael (played by Anthony Booth)—were often
on the receiving end of Alf’s anger and frustration—just as Nan’s grandson in
TCTS. Features that would be removed from serious discourse—ambiguity,

224 Sharon Lockyer
contradictions, and interpretive diversity—are fundamental features in com-
edy (Mulkay 1988; Fine 1983; Koestler 1964). Diverse interpretations were
made of the comedy character Alf Garnett. Although comedy writer Johnny
Speight argued that Alf Garnett ridiculed the stupidity and ignorance of
bigots, some viewers interpreted the program, and the character Alf Gar-
nett, as celebrating racism (Husband 1988). Mary Whitehouse (founder and
first president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association) was a
staunch critic of the sitcom due its coarse language. Pickering and Lockyer
(2005: 16–17) refer to these differing responses as the “Alf Garnett Syn-
drome,” where “what is being satirized becomes a source of celebration
among at least a section of the audience.” The criticisms made by viewers in
response to Nan’s bigotry and foul language suggest that the “Alf Garnett
Syndrome” applies to some audience members. Whereas for some viewers
Nan’s exaggerated and over-the-top behavior and language serves to ridi-
cule and critique homophobia and bigotry, the ambiguity of interpretation
evident in comedic discourses may result in some viewers interpreting Nan
as reinforcing and vindicating homophobic and bigoted views.
4. CONCLUSION
Gender politics continues to be symbolically exercised in television comedy

in complex ways. Catherine Tate’s characters in TCTS offer a number of
representations of gender in contemporary British society. This chapter has
examined the ways in which comedy is manifest in two of Tate’s main char-
acters—Lauren Cooper and Joannie “Nan” Taylor. Each of these “unruly”
(Rowe 1995) female characters includes a complex mix of personal idio-
syncrasies and behavioral traits, and is embedded in comedic narratives
that simultaneously reinforce and destabilize predominant female stereo-
types in contemporary Western society. Tate’s characters behold ambiva-
lence, contradictions, and complexities, which, according to Henry (2007:
274), have been the central features of women’s lives due to “real changes
in women’s lives and the shifts in theoretical perspectives since the height of
second-wave feminism.” The generic features inherent in the comedy sketch
show—short fragmented sketches with differing characters—permit diverse
and complex gender representations—more so than sitcoms, which can be
discursively limited due to what Neale and Krutnik (1990) refer to as the
circular narrative conventions.
Lawrence Mintz has argued that successful comedy depends on a sense of
cultural community between the audiences and comedian, where the come-
dian acts as “our comic spokesperson, as a mediator, an ‘articulator’ of
our culture, and as our contemporary anthropologist” (1985: 75; emphasis
original). Further, Medhurst (2007: 112; see also Bowes 1990) identifies
that comedy “thrives at flashpoints of cultural nervousness, offering sooth-
ing balm for such ideological ailments whilst rubbing salt into the very same

wound.” Tate’s comedic women are much more than their bodies, appear-
ances, and idiosyncrasies. The two main characters examined in this chapter
are clearly caught up in a number of changing sociopolitical conditions.
Lauren may be viewed as a manifestation of concerns and anxieties sur-
rounding class distinctions and class-based relationships in contemporary
Britain, which draws on wider sociopolitical unease regarding the failure of
the British education system, education standards, and teenage girls’ norms
and values. Nan may be regarded as representing British societal concerns
regarding the increasing older population and articulating apprehension
related to growing demands for ensuring the emotional, physical, and psy-
chological well-being of the increasing older population. In this sense televi-
sion comedy is an important lens through which questions, uncertainties,
and anxieties about gender across the ages in contemporary British society
are constructed and deconstructed.
NOTES
1. Catherine Tate appeared in the 2006 Christmas special of Dr. Who as Donna
Noble, and later became Dr. Who’s companion in season four in 2008.
2. “Chav” was 2004’s word of the year (Burchill 2005). The etymology of the
term is largely contested (Skeggs 2005). Some believe that the word is based
on an old word for child in Romany/Gypsy (Devereux 2007), a community
that has experienced marginalization and social exclusion (Hayward and Yar
2006), whereas others believe the word is derived from a combination of
characteristically lower-class names, Sharon and Trevor (Shar/vor) (see Nayak
2006).
3. A “Croydon facelift” is an English colloquial term used to describe a hairstyle
where hair is tied back in a bun or ponytail in such a tight manner that the
perceived result is similar to a facelift—skin on the forehead and face pulled
up and back. The hairstyle is often associated with young women from lower
social classes (particularly “chavs”) and from social and economically dis-
advantaged areas (such as Croydon, South London), and is often used as a
derogatory term.
4. The English derogatory term “pickey” refers to travelers and gypsies. In recent
years it is also used to refer to people from lower social classes.
5. The Mrs. Emery character was criticized by Incontact, an incontinence charity
that regarded the characterization as “offensive and in poor taste” (BBC News
2005). Similar concerns of “inappropriateness” were raised by Age Concern
and The Royal College of Physicians (Sheppard 2005).
6. The British remake of The Golden Girls was called Brighton Belles (ITV,
1993–94) and was less successful than its US counterpart, lasting only two
seasons.
7. This Christmas special was also criticized for perpetuating Irish stereotypes
through a Northern Ireland family depicted as terrorists (N. Martin 2007).
8. Metal Mickey was a fictional robot who first appeared on The Saturday
Banana (ITV, 1978) and then later had his own sitcom, The Metal Mickey
Show (ITV, 1980–83).

14 Little Miss Sunshine and
the Avoidance of Tragedy
Gail Finney
“Dysfunctional families are still all the rage.” Thus claimed Princeton alum-
nus Ted Taubeneck in arguing that Eugene O’Neill deserved inclusion in a
2008 list of the top twenty-five most influential Princeton alumni of all time
(Bernstein 2008: 25). Similarly, film critic Jette Kernion (2008), attempting
to compile a list of nondysfunctional movie families, observes, “It’s a lot
more difficult to find seven movies with happy-but-not-sappy families than
it is to find the screwed-up kind, especially if you are looking for something
more interesting than the Cleavers.” Although in my view the term “dysfunc-
tional” has been so overused as to be virtually meaningless, its implications
are not. I prefer to speak of the more concrete and more specific “family
trauma.”1 Because the family is the first social unit with which most of us
interact, family trauma can be characterized as primal trauma. The classical
Greek tragedians, well aware that all that is necessary for a tragedy is a fam-
ily, based many of their plays on transmitted myths about doomed families,
above all the House of Atreus. It is my contention that the cinema today, as
an organ of popular culture of mass proportions, plays a role in our culture
analogous to that which the theater played for the ancient Greeks: both
media possess enormous cathartic power, especially when portraying family
trauma—for example, radical alienation between family members, addic-
tions of all kinds, child and spousal abuse, child molestation and parent-
child incest, sibling incest, loss of one’s child, suicide, and murder.
I have coined the term “family trauma cinema” to refer to US fiction films
dealing with these subjects. This term was conceived independently of, but
has affinities with, Janet Walker’s (2005) “trauma cinema,” her designa-
tion for documentary films about the Holocaust and incest. Walker employs
theories of memory and post-traumatic stress disorder in analyzing nonfic-
tion accounts of these two types of traumatic experience that are especially
likely to produce memory distortion. Walker’s discussions of documentary
films and television movies that demonstrate the ways in which experiences
of incest provoke fantasies or are misremembered or “disremembered”
(Walker 2005: 3–29) parallel on the analytic level a prominent structural
feature of family trauma cinema: the actual depiction of traumatic events is
often displaced—projected onto other characters or situations, sublimated,

Little Miss Sunshine 227
or portrayed symbolically—in order to make these films more palatable to
viewers. In an extreme case, although probably not immediately recognizable
as such, family trauma is displaced by humor. Little Miss Sunshine (LMS)
(2006), the indie hit written by Michael Arndt and co-directed by Jona-
than Dayton and Valerie Faris, follows the fortunes of the Hoover family—
Richard and Sheryl, their seven-year-old daughter Olive, Sheryl’s teenaged
son Dwayne, Sheryl’s brother Frank, and Richard’s father Edwin—as they
travel in a dilapidated Volkswagen bus from their home in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, to Redondo Beach, California, so that Olive can compete in
the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant. The film was so successful that
it now, according to Amy Taubin (2007: 62), “confirms the [Sundance Festi-
val’s] status and functions as a Holy Grail” for filmmakers and buyers alike.
In fact LMS flirts with family trauma as a subject but does not yield to
it; the film peers over the edge but does not take the leap. The Hoover fam-
ily, in which a son from Sheryl’s previous marriage lives together with her
daughter by Richard and includes Richard’s father, is typical of what Stacey
(1996: 1–2) calls the “postmodern family.” Stacey is opposed both to the
retrograde celebration of the traditional, nuclear, or “modern” family and
to the concomitant notion that the breakdown of the family is at the root
of US society’s problems today, an idea at the heart of the “rhetoric of fam-
ily values,” which she finds to be ubiquitous in the late twentieth century.
Stacey (1996: 7, 9) writes that the more open and flexible term “postmod-
ern family” signals the “contested, ambivalent, and undecided character of
our contemporary family cultures,” yet she also believes that “postmodern
changes in work, family, and sexual opportunities for women and men do
open the prospect of introducing greater democracy, equality and choice
than ever before into our most intimate relationships.”
Significantly, the turn of the millennium—the same historical moment at
which Stacey locates a burgeoning of the rhetoric of family values—marks
a distinct rise in the incidence of films treating family trauma, the num-
ber of which appears to have been increasing since the early 1990s. The
rhetoric of family values implicitly focuses its energies on combating the
threats embodied in these films. Hence I would add a third category to Sta-
cey’s dichotomy between the modern family and the postmodern family: the
traumatic family. The Hoovers can be read as a postmodern family on
the manifest or surface level and a traumatic family on the latent level. In the
Hoovers’ drive from New Mexico to California and in their breathless race
to arrive in time for the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty contest, LMS offers
an Americanized, westward-directed version of the universal, mythic theme
of the quest; the characters’ offbeat features, such as Olive’s pudgy, unfash-
ionable appearance, Dwayne’s rebellious nature, and Grandpa’s foul mouth,
heroin habit, and obsession with sex, ally them with the type of the Roman-
tic outsider. In quintessentially American fashion, the outsider triumphs:
although Olive fails miserably as a beauty queen, the shocked audience
reaction to her striptease inspires her family to rally around her, and the

228 Gail Finney
concluding shot of the Volkswagen van driving down the highway toward
home provides a visual analogue to the note of familial harmony marking
the film’s final spoken scenes. Yet the description of the Hoovers on the
dust jacket of the DVD as “one of the most endearingly fractured families
in comedy history” points to the dual nature of this family constellation as
well as to the comic mechanism by which its darker side is subverted.
Because we are dealing with an artistic representation, if not a literary
one, of a mixed mode, the film’s juxtaposition of comic elements and darker
ones can be elucidated by a look at the genre of tragicomedy—dark comedy,
or comedy with tragic implications. Tragicomedy is not found in classical
theater, which tends to adhere to the strict separation between the modes of
tragedy and comedy as prescribed by Aristotle. According to Hirst (1984),
tragicomedy as a hybrid genre was first overtly discussed by the neoclassical
critics and dramatists of the Renaissance. High points of the mixed genre
prior to the twentieth century include seventeenth-century Italian and English
pastoral drama, as well as Victorian melodrama, the latter of which, in
Hirst’s view, has a significant impact on the theater of Shaw and Chekhov.
But it is in the post-World War II era that tragicomedy, now often called
black comedy, comes into its own; in fact it can be said to be the dominant
mode of later twentieth-century drama. Tragedy depends on a shared code
of values whose meaning is universally accepted. Without this there can be
no common recognition of tragic transgression, guilt, retribution, or punish-
ment, and hence catharsis. In the wake of two global wars, the Holocaust,
and atomic destruction, this shared code of values is often replaced by a
conception of the universe as meaningless or malevolent. This development
and its ramifications are discussed by thinkers such as Karl Jaspers (1952),
George Steiner (1961), and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose Problems of the
Theater (1964 is especially illuminating for the consideration of tragicom-
edy as a dramatic mode. As Dürrenmatt (1964: 31–32) writes:
Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense

of responsibility. In the Punch-and-Judy show of our century, in this
back-sliding of the white race, there are no more guilty and also, no
responsible men. It is always, “We couldn’t help it” and “We didn’t
really want that to happen.” [. . .] But the tragic is still possible even if
pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can
bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly.
In his essay “Note on Comedy,” Dürrenmatt (1976) suggests that the grotesque
is the only appropriate response to the horrors of the twentieth century—
the destruction wrought by two world wars and the atomic bomb. Again
reflecting his dialogic sensibility, he emphasizes that the grotesque is char-
acterized by the cruelty of objectivity, without being the art of the nihilists,
but rather that of the moralists.
Karl Guthke (1966: 59) pithily captures the bivalent character of tragi-
comedy: our response as audience members is to “laugh with one eye and

weep with the other.” This definition is appropriate for LMS, the driving
force of which film critic Smith (2006: 65) has identified as black comedy.
Elements such as Frank’s suicide attempt and the death of the grandfather
(which the film invites us to regard as an accidental or intentional heroin
overdose, because the last time we see him alive he is taking out his drug
paraphernalia), would be out of place in the purely comedic genre. Yet oth-
ers refer to the film simply as a comedy or satirical comedy (see, for example,
Calhoun 2006; Cooper 2006; Vineberg 2006; Marcks 2008), and, as sug-
gested above, any rifts between family members appear to have been mended
by the film’s conclusion. In what follows I intend to study the ways in which
the film displaces the traumatic potential lying just beneath its sunny surface.
The process by which traumatic experience is supplanted or suppressed
by comedy in LMS can be illuminated through the mechanism of displace-
ment that Sigmund Freud views as operative in jokes and dreams. In Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious ([1905] 1960), Freud undertakes
a detailed analysis of the mechanisms, unrecognized by the average teller
or hearer of a joke, that he views as responsible for the amusing, pleasing
character of jokes—what he calls the joke-work. He identifies displacement
as one of the most important of these techniques. The German term for
psychological displacement, Verschiebung, graphically reflects the degree of
shifting or diversion involved in this technique, insofar as the German prefix
ver- often signals, as here, the intensification or completion of the verb it
precedes—in this case schieben, ‘to push.’ Displacement, then designates the
“complete pushing aside” of one thing in place of another—in Freud’s view,
the supplanting of something unacceptable by something more palatable to
the individual or social group. The essence of displacement, Freud writes
(1960: 51), “lies in the diversion of the train of thought, the displacement of
the psychical emphasis on to a topic other than the opening one.” Further
refining and differentiating his terms, Freud (1960: 53–54) states:
In the case of double meaning a joke contains nothing other than a

word capable of multiple interpretation, which allows the hearer to
find the transition from one thought to another—a transition which,
stretching a point, might be equated with a displacement. In the case of
a displacement joke, however, the joke itself contains a train of thought
in which a displacement of this kind has been accomplished. Here the
displacement is part of the work which has created the joke; it is not
part of the work necessary for understanding it.
Freud’s theoretical discourse includes ample examples. As an illustration of

“facetious questions” (1960: 153) using the technique of displacement, he
offers the following:
What is a cannibal who has eaten his father and mother?

An orphan.
And if he has eaten all his other relations as well?

230 Gail Finney
The sole heir.
And where will a monster of that kind find sympathy?
In the dictionary under “S.”
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious was published just five years
after Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams ([1900] 1965), and as the title of
the later work suggests, Freud sees parallels between the mechanisms of jokes
and the workings of the unconscious, above all as manifested in dreams.
Although he points out that jokes are social in nature, whereas dreams are
an asocial mental product, he believes that the elements structuring jokes
are similar to those involved in the dream-work—the mechanisms by which
the elements at the root of dreams are transformed into the manifest dream.
With regard to displacement, for example, Freud (1960: 88, 163–64) writes
that “[d]isplacement is responsible for the puzzling appearance of dreams,
which prevents our recognizing that they are a continuation of our waking
life” and that
things that lie on the periphery of the dream-thoughts and are of minor
importance occupy a central position and appear with great sensory
intensity in the manifest dream, and vice versa. This gives the dream
the appearance of being displaced in relation to the dream-thoughts,
and this displacement is precisely what brings it about that the dream
confronts waking mental life as something alien and incomprehensible.
The primary link between the dream-work and the joke-work in this con-
nection is the presence of an “inhibitory force”: “The effort made by jokes
to recover the old pleasure in nonsense or the old pleasure in words finds
itself inhibited in normal moods by objections raised by critical reason; and
in every individual case this has to be overcome” (Freud 1960: 171). Yet
the displacements in dreams are more comprehensive than those in jokes,
remote enough from the objectionable thoughts that the censoring mecha-
nisms will allow them to pass:
Among displacements are to be counted not merely diversions from a

train of thought but every sort of indirect representation as well, and
in particular the replacement of an important but objectionable ele-
ment by one that is indifferent and that appears innocent to the censor-
ship, something that seems like a very remote allusion to the other one.
(Freud: 1960: 171)
The technique of displacement that Freud believes to be operative in jokes

and dreams serves as the basis for two further types of displacement that
are illuminating in connection with LMS: critical displacement and cultural
displacement. Critical displacement, referring to the reception of works of
art, signifies not an unconscious but a conscious, aesthetic strategy aimed at

thwarting the subversive intentions of the work under evaluation because of
fear of censorship and other conservative impulses.2 Critical displacement
can manifest itself in the distortion of elements of gender, sexuality, class,
or artistic genre, for example devaluing nontraditional elements in drama
by women by characterizing them as “feminine” (Finney 2003). Angelika
Bammer (1994: xi) calls attention to the profound importance of a kind of
shift that can be termed cultural displacement:
The separation of people from their native culture either through physi-
cal dislocation (as refugees, immigrants, migrants, exiles, or expatriates)
or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture—what I am calling here
displacement—is one of the most formative experiences of our century.
Noting the term’s evocations of both Freud and Derrida, Bammer (1994:
xiii) makes a crucial observation about Freud’s mechanism of displacement
and Derrida’s concept of différence:
In both cases, that of Freud and Derrida, what is displaced—dispersed,

deferred, repressed, pushed aside—is, significantly, still there: Displaced
but not replaced, it remains a source of trouble, the shifting ground of
signification that makes meanings tremble.
The same can be said about cinematic displacement in LMS. The disturbing
experiences displaced by the film’s sunny surface are at least as provoca-
tive as the overt events. If one were to tweak the comic treatment of the
film’s dark themes just a bit, LMS would emerge as a serious portrayal of
family trauma that would align it with a body of films of this type whose
number has been on the rise for some two decades. One of these themes is
the marital conflict between Richard and Sheryl. Friction between spouses
is of course an age-old subject of comic drama and fiction, found as early
as the theater of Aristophanes and especially prevalent in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century English literature. Sheryl and Richard bicker constantly,
even to the point of screaming at each other, but one of the principal sources
of Sheryl’s irritation with Richard is his obsession with the nine-step self-
help program he is attempting to promote, called “Refuse to Lose.” Sheryl
appears especially repelled by the program’s philosophy, which Richard is
fond of touting in connection with Olive’s participation in the “Little Miss
Sunshine” contest, that people are either winners or losers and that winners
do not give up. Sheryl seems to advocate a spirit of community rather than
the ethic of competition that is embodied in both Richard’s program and in
the beauty pageant. During the family’s road trip, she insults Richard and
even suggests that the two of them try living apart. But the darker implica-
tions of this state of affairs are countered by the following comic scene, in
which Richard bribes a teenager to lend him his moped so that he can ride

232 Gail Finney
it, on the side of the highway, to Scottsdale to confront the business associ-
ate who has attempted without success to secure a book deal for Richard’s
program.
Richard and Sheryl’s mutual hostility, reciprocal deprecation, and fre-
quent lack of communication gesture toward serious treatments of mari-
tal friction in recent US cinema, such as Sleeping with the Enemy ( Joseph
Ruben, 1991), The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005), and Lit-
tle Children (Todd Field, 2006), to mention only a few. In Sleeping with the
Enemy, an obsessive-compulsive man beats his wife when she fails to main-
tain his fanatical principles of order in the household; after she escapes him
and assumes a new identity, he tracks her down until she ultimately kills
him in self-defense. The Squid and the Whale offers an unusually graphic
anatomization of a divorce and its destructive effects on a couple and their
two young sons. In Little Children, marital incompatibility takes the form
of emotional and sexual immaturity, which is echoed in a child molester
whose self-castration ultimately restores order to the neighborhood, ren-
dering him a symbolic scapegoat. In LMS, however, marital harmony is
restored when Richard, apparently rejecting the principles of competition
and winning at the foundation of his self-help program, leads the family in
supporting Olive in her moment of ostracization during the “Little Miss
Sunshine” contest.
A second potentially traumatic theme that is comically displaced in LMS
is homosexuality. In one of the film’s first scenes, Sheryl drives to the hos-
pital to pick up her brother Frank, a Proust scholar who has slit his wrists
because his chief academic rival was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.
This was the last straw in a series of setbacks for Frank: after his gay lover,
a graduate student, had left him for the same rival, Frank behaved inap-
propriately and hence lost both his job as a professor and his apartment.
Frank’s mental state is still so precarious that his sister keeps him under
suicide watch. But a potentially tragic turn of events is averted by the road
trip he takes with his family. Attention to his vulnerable psyche is displaced
by comedy. In one of the film’s most hilarious scenes, Frank confronts his
former boyfriend in a roadside gas station, desperately trying to hide both
his bandaged wrists and the pornography magazines he has bought for
Grandpa as country music plays in the background.
Whereas the potentially traumatic results of Frank’s thwarted affections
are comically displaced in LMS, in other contemporary films homosexuality
and homophobia incite domestic violence, even murder. In the award-winning
American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999), for example, the repression of
homosexual desire on the part of a rigid military man has homicidal conse-
quences for the main character. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) depicts
two paradigmatic responses to the trauma of homosexual molestation in
childhood: one boy is constantly reminded of his traumatic experience and
becomes a gay hustler, whereas another represses the memory so deeply that
he does not retrieve it until well into adulthood.

Parent-child conflicts constitute some of the most powerful traumatic
themes in contemporary US film. In LMS, fifteen-year-old Dwayne Hoover
has not spoken to anyone for nine months at the outset of the film, commu-
nicating by means of a pad he keeps in his pocket, and even tends to avoid
eye contact with other members of his family. Driven by his goal of becom-
ing an Air Force test pilot and thus literally flying the coop of his household,
he does not appear significantly different from countless actual teenagers,
alienated from their families and in particular from their parents. The film
gives his alienation a humorous cast through his scribbled interjections to
Frank, such as “I hate everyone!!!” and “Welcome to Hell” (Arndt 2006:
11, 28). In the case of parent-child conflicts as well, then, in LMS comedy
displaces the potentially traumatic consequences that other films in the US
explore today. One memorable example is Affliction (Paul Schrader, 1997),
which explores the relationship between a cruelly abusive father and the
tortured adult son who has inherited his angry, destructive temperament. In
Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998), the principal character’s parents, already
indifferent to their son, barely remember him when he returns home follow-
ing a five-year prison sentence and are unfamiliar with even the most basic
facts of his life. In The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999), a dark satire
on both Catholicism and life in suburbia, a religious mother’s overzealous
attempts to protect the virtue of her five beautiful blonde teenage daughters
provokes the suicides of all of them. Monster’s Ball ( Jocelyn Moorhouse,
2001) inflects the theme of parent-child conflict with the dimension of race,
depicting three generations of prison guards in provincial Georgia whose
attitudes toward blacks progress from rabid racism in the grandfather to
solicitude in the grandson. Before the father undergoes an education in tol-
erance in the course of the film, his blunt admission to his son that he has
never loved him prompts the son to shoot himself on camera.
Dwayne’s rebellion against his parents in LMS, although displaced by
humor from such dark, traumatic treatment, is fueled by a thinker whose
seriousness is uncharacteristic of much of the film. When we first glimpse
Dwayne’s bedroom, it is impossible to miss a large bedsheet painting of Fried-
rich Nietzsche hanging on the wall. When Frank asks his nephew Dwayne
why he refuses to speak, Dwayne points to the painting. Frank’s response,
“Far out” (Arndt 2006: 10), reflects an incipient affinity between Dwayne
and Frank, the significance of which transcends their familial link. Frank’s
status as a leading Proust scholar and Dwayne’s reverence for Nietzsche sug-
gest that these two characters together represent a European antipode to the
American philosophy of superficial optimism embodied in the “Little Miss
Sunshine” pageant and in the self-help program touted by Richard, whom
Grandpa at one point calls “Mr. Happy.” This dichotomy is illuminated by
the observation of Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco that “America lives
under a dictatorship of happiness” (quoted in Cooper 2006: 22).
If Grandpa’s role in the film is that of self-medicator, Sheryl often func-
tions as a mediator between the viewpoints of Richard on the one hand and

234 Gail Finney
Frank and Dwayne on the other. To cite two examples, when Olive asks
Frank at dinner how his “accident” happened, he has no objections to an
honest answer. But when Sheryl goes on to tell Olive that Frank had tried to
kill himself, Richard interrupts to object that this is an inappropriate sub-
ject for a young child. Similarly, at the diner the following day, when Frank
tries to explain to Olive the definition and etymology of the expression
“à la mode,” Richard tells him to shut up and proceeds to warn her about
the dangers of fat in ice cream. Sheryl repeatedly attempts to silence him.
The tendency to penetrate to the sometimes disturbing depths of life
rather than remaining on its surface characterizes the thinking of Frank
and Dwayne throughout the film. It is evident as well in the book Dwayne
reads at every opportunity, described as his “dog-eared copy” (Arndt 2006:
27) of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
(1883–84, 1892). Hence a closer look at this book is elucidating in connec-
tion with the behavior of Dwayne and, by association, of Frank as well. As
an aside, it should be noted that this masterful work of lyrical philosophy
is Nietzsche’s most popular book but that it is ironically, as editor Walter
Kaufmann writes (in Nietzsche 1982: 103), “the work of an utterly lonely
man.” Because Dwayne appears to have been influenced by the book’s glo-
rification of solitude, its elitism, and its rejection of God and traditional
religion, it is worth discussing the text’s elaboration of these ideas. Thus
Spoke Zarathustra begins with the statement that at the (critical) age of 30,
Zarathustra (a persona created by Nietzsche) ascended into the mountains
to enjoy his solitude for ten years. The narrator observes that Zarathus-
tra “liked to walk alone” (Nietzsche 1982: 186). Zarathustra speaks of his
“ultimate loneliness” and exhorts the reader to, “Flee, my friend, into your
solitude!” (1982: 266, 163). He even apostrophizes solitude: “O solitude!
O my home, solitude! Too long have I lived wildly in wild strange places not
to return home to you in tears” (1982: 295). Nietzsche expresses Zarathus-
tra’s self-chosen isolation in spatial terms, associating him with height and
flight: “Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light, waves with his wings,
ready for flight, waving at all birds, ready and heady, happily lightheaded”
(1982: 406). It is not difficult to imagine how such imagery might inspire an
early twenty-first-century teenager to take to the clouds himself—as an Air
Force test pilot.
The extent to which Thus Spoke Zarathustra has in fact appealed to ado-
lescent readers for more than a century is prefigured in a dialogue between
Zarathustra and a young man, which concludes with Zarathustra’s exhorta-
tion to him: “But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away
the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!” (1982: 156). This
quotation in particular points to the other side of the coin of solitude that
Zarathustra appears to celebrate, elitism, a notion that would be at home
with Dwayne Hoover’s misanthropy. Zarathustra’s elitism is epitomized
in his concept of the “overman” (Übermensch). In a century that glorifies
democracy, we find Zarathustra (1982: 213) claiming,

I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of
equality. For, to me justice speaks thus: “Men are not equal.” Nor shall
they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke
otherwise?
Rather than equality, Zarathustra advocates hierarchy (1982: 226–27):
That the weaker should serve the stronger, to that it is persuaded by its
own will, which would be master over what is weaker still: this is the
one pleasure it does not want to renounce.
Zarathustra’s anti-democratic stance occasionally erupts into outright ego-

ism (1982: 3003):
And whoever proclaims the ego wholesome and holy, and selfishness
blessed, verily, he will also tell what he knows, foretelling: “Verily, it is
at hand, it is near, the great noon!”
In Zarathustra’s eclectic philosophical system the concept of the overman

is linked not only to the demise of equality but to the death of God. “Dead
are all gods: now we want the overman to live,” he proclaims (1982: 191;
emphasis in original). Zarathustra’s explanation, which he ascribes to the
devil, is typically nontraditional: “God is dead; God died of his pity for man”
(1982: 202). Zarathustra’s claim that “God is a conjecture” (1982: 197)
has the same ironic flavor as the statement on Dwayne’s t-shirt: “Jesus Was
Wrong.” Zarathustra’s system seeks to subvert Christian ethics: “There is
an old illusion, which is called good and evil,” exhorting his readers to
“break the old tablets!” (1982: 13, 314). He presents the ethics of Christi-
anity as subjective and relative: “Good is only what little people call good”
and, taking this thinking to an extreme, declares that “Nothing is true, all is
permitted” (Nietzsche 1982: 378, 386).
Complementing the correspondences between Zarathustra’s philosophy
and the world view of Dwayne Hoover are elements of Nietzsche’s book
that implicitly attack the facile optimism embodied in Richard Hoover’s
nine-step program. Zarathustra asserts, for example, “Verily, I also do not
like those who consider everything good and this world the best. Such men
I call the omni-satisfied” (Nietzsche 1982: 306). Similarly, he criticizes those
who possess a “doctrine of happiness and virtue. For they are modest in
virtue, too—because they want contentment. But only a modest virtue gets
along with contentment” (281). As a logical result of his denigration of con-
tentment, Zarathustra celebrates suffering. Addressing “the few, the long,
the distant,” he claims,
You do not yet suffer enough to suit me! For you suffer from yourselves,
you have not yet suffered from man. You would lie if you claimed oth-
erwise! You all do not suffer from what I have suffered. (401)

236 Gail Finney
Nietzsche’s promotion of suffering is paralleled by the philosophy of the
twentieth-century French writer Marcel Proust, on whom Frank considers
himself to be the nation’s foremost expert. When Frank and Dwayne flee the
“Little Miss Sunshine” pageant and take to the ocean at Redondo Beach,
Frank expounds on the subject of his life’s work:
Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent
twenty years writing a book almost no one reads. But [. . .] he was also
probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down
to the end of his life, he looks back and he decides that all the years
he suffered—those were the best years of his life. Because they made
him who he was. They forced him to think and grow, and to feel very
deeply. And the years he was happy? Total waste. Didn’t learn anything.
(Arndt 2006: 94)
Much of Proust’s life was spent in isolation, and his fiction is intensely intro-
spective, concerned with the workings of human perception and memory.
The veneration of solitude and introspection, the appreciation for suffering,
and the questioning of traditional moral values found in the thought of both
Nietzsche and Proust stand in direct opposition both to the ethic behind
Richard Hoover’s “Refuse to Lose” program, with its facile emphasis on
winning, and to the competitive spirit of the “Little Miss Sunshine” contest,
with its focus on pleasing a crowd by means of superficial beauty. The larger
significance of the film’s title is articulated by Dwayne during this scene on
the pier:
Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another.
School, then college, then work. Fuck it. Fuck the Air Force Academy.
Fuck the MacArthur Foundation. If I want to fly, I’ll find a way to fly.
You do what you love and fuck the rest. (Arndt 2006: 95)
The gravity and depth of the thought of Nietzsche and Proust and the belief
that winning is not everything, that it is also important and valuable to
experience failure, appear to command the admiration of the film, whereas
US institutions like self-help programs and beauty pageants are clearly sati-
rized. Yet the theoretical valuation of suffering, like its actual depiction in
episodes of family trauma, is displaced by the film’s comedy, left to peek out
from underneath.
The film’s displacement of potential family trauma by comedy occurs visu-
ally, situationally, and even audibly. To cite a few examples: perhaps most
obviously, it is no accident that the Hoovers’ Volkswagen bus is yellow—a
visual analogue to the metaphorically sunny title for which Olive is compet-
ing and which gives its name to the film. As the family prepares for bed on the
first night Frank is with them following his suicide attempt, Dwayne writes
him the message, “Please don’t kill yourself tonight” (Arndt 2006: 28)—

giving a comic tinge to an immensely serious matter. Early in their trip the
Hoovers pass a road sign that reads “Carefree Highway,” clearly an ironic
comment on their state of mind. When the family stops at the gas station
where Frank encounters his former lover and Richard desperately continues
trying to reach his business associate, everyone is so preoccupied with their
own problems that they inadvertently leave Olive behind. While Sheryl tells
her children how much she loves them as the family sits in the hospital
waiting to hear news of Grandpa’s condition, a television screen in the back-
ground features a man advertising a fifteen-pound turkey. A more extended
instance is the broken horn on the Volkswagen bus, which serves to under-
cut the seriousness of scenes occurring in and around the van. Perhaps the
most dramatic example is the depiction of Dwayne’s intense psychological
pain when he learns that he is color-blind and therefore ineligible to become
a pilot. Running out of the bus and down a hill, he feels no inhibitions
about offering his honest diagnosis of the Hoover family: “I hate you fuck-
ing people! I hate you! Divorce! Bankrupt! Suicide! You’re losers! You’re
fucking losers!” (Arndt 2006: 75). But in the background we see a billboard
proclaiming, “United We Stand,” the irony of which moderates the viewer’s
sense of Dwayne’s desperation. He is then quickly comforted by Olive, and
the family is back in the bus for the final stage of their quest, the truth of
Dwayne’s pronouncement displaced by the upbeat goals incorporated in the
“Little Miss Sunshine” contest that impels them forward.
Even the film’s soundtrack functions subliminally to counteract its darker
implications. The music of DeVotchKa, an indie group from Denver that
combines elements of Western rock and punk, Eastern European melodies,
and compositions for the circus, heightens the upbeat dimension of the film,
as do the songs’ lyrics. The relationship of this optimistic spirit to the plot of
the film is especially clear in the song “Till the End of Time”: “And it’s been
such a lovely day / Let’s not let it end this way [. . .] Like sisters and brothers
we lean on each other.”
The process by which potentially traumatic behavior in LMS is displaced
by the comic mode is epitomized in Olive. The entire film is propelled
toward her competition in the beauty pageant intended to crown the next
Little Miss Sunshine. Whereas the other little girls, glamorously costumed
and made up in a grotesquely adult fashion, demonstrate conventional abili-
ties such as singing, dancing, and gymnastics, the pudgy Olive performs a
(partial) striptease.
The early formation of these young girls as beauty contestants can be
illuminated by recent feminist theory on the body. Elizabeth Grosz (1994: x)
emphasizes the extent to which the body—and perhaps especially the
female body—is a cultural construct: “the body, or rather, bodies, cannot
be adequately understood as ahistorical, precultural, or natural objects in
any simple way; they are not only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social
pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the
very social constitution of nature itself.” In identifying the challenge of

238 Gail Finney
theorizing the female body, Kathy Davis (1997: 15) calls attention to its
duality: “It is necessary to focus on the systematic features of domination as
enacted through the female body [. . .], but also to uncover the myriad ways
that women engage in subversion, in and through their bodies.” In writing
about women’s fashion, Joanne Finkelstein (1997: 156) further points up
the nuances of this duality: “at the very moment when women are depicted
as self-producing, what they are often constructing is the constrained and
subjugated image of the heterosexually desirable female.”
The stylized female bodies of the beauty contestants in LMS represent
this dualistic conception of femininity in miniature and in caricature. It is
worth noting that this segment of the film was only partially staged: the
contestants are not actors but were participants in an actual beauty pageant,
as was the audience (Calhoun 2006: 20). The highly made-up, elaborately
coiffured, and provocatively dressed prepubescent girls competing against
Olive in the pageant are inevitably reminiscent of the infamous JonBénet
Ramsey. JonBénet’s mother and aunt both were beauty queens, and her
mother entered her in many pageants, several of which she won—such as
“Little Miss Sunburst.” In 1996 the discovery of her dead body at the age
of six in her Boulder, Colorado, home set off a sensational murder case
that is still unsolved. Familiarity with the story of JonBenét Ramsey likely
heightens the discomfort with which spectators view this scene of LMS. Fur-
thermore, in light of the dichotomy the film establishes between European
and US attitudes toward suffering and happiness, it should be noted that the
song sung collectively by the young contestants is “America the Beautiful.”
Although both Olive’s striptease, shocking to the other contestants and
their families, and the Hoovers’ alienation from the “Little Miss Sunshine”
contest seem to undermine the “sunny” values embodied in such beauty
pageants, the family members’ protectiveness of Olive binds them together,
bringing even Richard into the circle of familial harmony. But this perspec-
tive overlooks the fact that Olive was trained in this number by her grandfa-
ther; as he had proudly exclaimed, “I coached her! I showed her the moves!”
(Arndt 2006: 24). This is the same grandfather who was thrown out of his
retirement village for snorting heroin, constantly uses obscene language, is
obsessed with sex, tells Dwayne to “fuck a lot of women,” and asks Frank
to buy him some “really nasty” pornographic magazines (Arndt 2006: 29,
42). A drug-addicted, sex-obsessed, foul-mouthed grandfather teaching his
seven-year-old granddaughter how to perform a striptease?
Without comic displacement, this plot element would be at home in the
cinema of family trauma. Incest, or familial sexual molestation, has received
serious treatment in a number of recent American films. To mention two
prominent examples, in A Thousand Acres (Jocelyne Moorhouse, 1997),
based on Jane Smiley’s modern recasting of King Lear in her novel of the
same title, it is revealed in analytical fashion that the prosperity of a Mid-
western farmer conceals his molestation of his two older daughters when
they were teenagers, an experience from which they still suffer as adults.

The moral corruption in the family is symbolized by images of pollution
beneath the surface beauty of the extensive grounds. The ensemble film
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) depicts many types of family
trauma, although most are connected by the theme of knowledge on the part
of children coupled with ignorance or repression of the children’s knowl-
edge on the part of adults. In every case this pairing manifests a warping or
damaging of children by parents. In one such example, it is intimated that a
game show host’s estrangement from his grown daughter, who has numer-
ous psychological problems, stems from his earlier molestation of her, which
he claims not to know about.
To reveal the somber portrayal that a film might have offered serves little
purpose, however. For it is precisely in glossing over or bypassing the serious
implications of these potentially dark aspects of family trauma with humor
that the success of Little Miss Sunshine lies: the only one of the family trauma
films mentioned above that enjoys a comparable popularity is the Oscar-
winning American Beauty, which also employs a good deal of humor and
would undoubtedly be a less successful film without it. What this analysis
reaffirms is that the American movie-going public, when given the choice,
far prefers sunshine to clouds.
NOTES
1. Although I am aware that in trauma studies “family trauma” refers to the

anguish experienced by relatives indirectly involved in traumatic events (see
Kaplan 2005: 1), in this chapter I use it to refer to a wide range of distressful
events, including alienation, abuse, molestation, and so forth, suffered within
dysfunctional families.
2. “Critical displacement” is not to be confused with the term “displacement”
associated with poststructuralist theory, particularly deconstruction. “Criti-
cal displacement” designates a conservative, defensive process, whereas the
deconstructionist usage signifies virtually the opposite. On the process of dis-
placement in poststructuralism, see Krupnick (1983).

15 “What’ya Mean I’m Funny?”
Ball-Busting Humor and Italian
American Masculinities
Fred Gardaphé
This chapter explores four scenes from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990)
to show one of the ways that Italian American men use humor in their inter-
actions with other men to establish their position in male-to-male relation-
ships. My reading of these scenes focuses on the act of rompere i coglioni
or “ball busting.” Ball busting, as I see it in Italian American culture, is a
regular, if not ritual, communication between men in which one man tests
another’s ability to endure insult. The act of ball busting consists of two men
engaged in a dialogue through which one man attempts to gain the upper
hand on another through the use of language. Often this act occurs with an
audience of other men, but this is not always necessary. The rules of engage-
ment include the right to insult each other with the understanding that the
exchanged insults be taken more figuratively than literally; that is to say that
each man enters the contest with the understanding that what is said should
not lead to any type of physical retaliation. The man being tested, that is,
the one who receives the first verbal parry, fails if he gets angry or shows
aggression toward the man who is busting his balls. There are a number of
conscious and subconscious purposes at play in these exchanges and they
all concern the performance of one’s masculinity through quick and witty
parries and retorts. Traditional notions of omertà deign that, to be a man,
one must be able to maintain self-control in all situations. Thus, ball busting
becomes a test of a man’s ability to control oneself in a potentially humili-
ating situation. The ball busting ends when the initiator stops or when the
recipient gives up, peacefully or not. Similar interactions can be found in
African American culture’s playing of “the Dozens,” the Scottish game of
“flyting,” and what the English call “banter.” Because there is very little
written on ball busting, I want to turn to the work that the late cultural
critic Anthony Easthope (1992) has done on banter.
Easthope (1992: 88) describes banter as “aggressive, a form in which the
masculine ego asserts itself. Inwardly, however, banter depends on a close,
intimate and personal understanding of the person who is the butt of the
attack. It thus works as a way of affirming the bond of love between men
while appearing to deny it.” He attributes (1992: 92) the effectiveness of
its style to its operation of a “double bluff”: “Because it is comic and relies

Italian American Masculinities 241
on the joke form it seems to be genial, permissive and open. It is not in
fact genial because it actually supports the aggression of the masculine ego.
And it is not open because it sets out to protect the male bond—sublimated
homosexual desire—and exclude women.” As we will see, these are the ele-
ments that come into play in the ball-busting act as well. My discussion
involves the relationship between irony and humor and shows how both of
these concepts figure into the development of Italian American masculini-
ties. To set up a theoretical context for reading the Goodfellas scenes, I turn
first to some background information on Italian American masculinities and
then to one of the most interesting readings of contemporary performances
of Italian masculinity.
The Italian American man is the result of the interaction of centuries of
Italianate masculinities coming into contact with the variety of masculinities
that make up the American man. The results of this encounter are more var-
ied and complex than the stereotypical art and media representations of the
Latin lover, the brutish bully, and the flashy gangster that have dominated
American culture since the early 1920s. A quick look at history reveals the
Italian roots of these masculinities and helps us understand their evolution
from Europe to the United States.
Descriptions of Italian masculinity go back as far as ancient Roman
times. The writings of Cicero and Tacitus tell us that men were expected to
protect the honor of the family and preserve their public esteem by moni-
toring the purity of their wives and daughters. Any instance of dishonor, or
injuria, required that the offended man take responsive action, often violent,
against the woman (daughter, wife, or sister) and the man who had led her
into dishonor. Such action was not only expected but, until recently, sanc-
tioned by Italian law.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italian manhood became an ever-
changing distillation of all the cultures that invaded and occupied the Ital-
ian peninsula. Codes of Italian manhood as they developed by the sixteenth
century were outlined in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier
(1528) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), both originally designed
for nobility but eventually influential at all levels of Italian society. Accord-
ing to these works, a man was expected to handle his problems with cool-
ness and detachment and to control his public behavior. This idea meant not
simply looking good in public but keeping strangers from knowing what
was going on in one’s mind.
The concept of figura—one’s “public figure”—stemmed from the need to
protect oneself from one’s enemies. Self-control had to be achieved in such
a way as to appear effortless—an achievement called sprezzatura. Another
imperative of Italian manhood was omertà, or silence—a term said to be
derived from ombredad, the Spanish word for “manhood.” Italian men have
been expected to express their manhood through actions rather than words.
An Italian saying is, Le parole sono femmine and I fatti sono maschi: words
are females, actions are males. Masculine action was to be displayed publicly.

242 Fred Gardaphé
Because Italy was constantly invaded and ruled by foreign powers, Ital-
ians found social stability through l’ordine della famiglia (the order of the
family), in which the father was patriarch and the rest of the family deferred
to his authority. The mother, who ruled within the home, set up a relation-
ship with her male children that was quite different from those of other
cultures. Responsible for socializing the children, the Italian mother used
her sons as buffers between home and the outside world. Through devoted
attention extending into adulthood she exacted unconditional and unwav-
ering loyalty, resulting in the son’s perception of having incurred an unpay-
able debt requiring constant attention to the family’s and her needs. The
model for this relationship is that between Mary and Jesus as she prepared
him for public life. This mother–son interaction is evident in religious as well
as secular representations. Mass emigration during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries would threaten this longstanding order of the family
and bring Italian notions of masculinity into contact with those of the US.
Most Italian immigrants to the US were men who came to make money
and return to Italy. Many of these men lived with fellow Italian workers or
boarded with Italian families. Those back home thought that the absence
of women’s refining influences and traditional social control would leave
immigrant men susceptible to corruption and inclined to turn their corrupt-
ing behavior toward American women. Similar concerns among Americans
generated literary and media characterizations of Italian immigrant men as
dark, dirty, and dangerous strangers.
Newspapers and other popular accounts frequently associated Italian
immigrants with urban crime and disorder. In the late nineteenth century,
Henry James depicted Italian workers in Boston as physically intimidating;
film images of the 1920s and 1930s emphasized the exotic, oversexed sen-
suousness of Rudolph Valentino and criminality of Rico Bandello in Little
Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931); the news of the 1920s offered sensationalized
accounts of presumed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
and of the dapper lifestyles and defiant masculine behavior of such gangsters
as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Frank Costello. Through these accounts,
the American media used the Italian American man—and especially his
body—to symbolize hypersexuality, crime, and other breaches of status quo
civility.
Public displays of homosocial physical affection among men—including
greetings with hugs and kisses on the cheeks and sometimes even on the
mouth—were common in Italy and continued in the US. Considered entirely
compatible with heterosexual masculinity in Italian and Italian American
culture, such gestures further fueled suspicions of Italian Americans’ man-
hood among non-Italian Americans, especially in the context of rising
concerns over homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. This public behavior was often displayed during religious festivals
as the men who shared the burdens of carrying statues and sometimes huge
platforms and towers would hug, kiss, and cry in one another’s arms at
the culmination of rituals. With roles for men and women separated, these

events revealed the order of the community and served as opportunities
for gender training. Young boys selected to participate demonstrated their
manliness by enduring Christ-like pain and suffering with other men.
In spite of public displays of often intense affection among men, a great
deal of homophobia exists within Italian American male culture, though not
to the same extent as found in other ethnic American cultures. Homosexu-
ality, although more accepted in the Greco-Roman-based culture of Italy
than in the US, represents a threat to the family order because it does not
contribute to the strengthening of the family though procreation. Still, many
Italian American homosexuals have gained acceptance from their families,
who become supportive of their sexuality and invite their contributions to
the family.
This connection to the family order remained as central to Italian Ameri-
can manhood as it had been to Italian manhood. Similarly, the traditional
Italian gender dichotomy, by which the world outside the home was con-
sidered a manly domain, whereas the domestic front belonged to women,
survived during the earliest immigration to the cities of the US. Because
movement outside the home raised the potential danger of moving into
neighborhoods controlled by other ethnic groups, Italian women were more
likely to bring work into the home than to work outside the home, while
men publicly displayed their manhood by protecting the home turf from
external threats. Young Italian American men sometimes formed street
gangs for this purpose. This expression of traditional Italian manhood in the
American city soon attracted the attention of sociologists interested in such
urban problems as juvenile delinquency, and the resulting studies reinforced
stereotypical associations of Italian American men with criminality.
During and after World War II, Americanization increasingly trans-
formed traditional Italian manhood and drew Italian American men from
the margins of American life to positions of public fame and middle-class
respectability. During the war, nearly 500,000 Italian Americans—a higher
proportion than in any other ethnic group—sought to prove their mascu-
linity, their dedication to the American way of life, and their loyalty to the
US by serving in the armed forces, and traditional male/female divisions
of domain and labor began to break down as women started taking jobs
traditionally held by men. Increasingly, public images of Italian American
manhood, based on the examples of men who succeeded economically and
in popular culture, became more positive: Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra,
for example, brought the Italian bella figura into the national spotlight for
emulation by American men. As increasing numbers of Italian American
men joined the exodus from ethnic urban neighborhoods to suburbia and
work took the fathers away from the home, weakening the foundations of
the old world patriarchy, Italian family dynamics changed dramatically.
Recent developments in Italian American manhood have occurred as
proponents of feminism, gay liberation, and men’s liberation have increas-
ingly challenged male monopolies on economic opportunity by calling on
men to become more domestically engaged, urging them to become more

244 Fred Gardaphé
sensitive and emotionally expressive, and suggesting that breadwinning and
heterosexuality do not define all the possibilities for male identity. Many
Italian American men continue to evince the traditional European patriar-
chy while also adjusting to changing American models of manhood. The
idea of using violence to establish and maintain honor persists even as the
efficacy of patriarchy is disappearing.
Popular culture representations of Italian American masculinity continue
to stereotype it, but they nonetheless provide useful windows on ethnicity
and masculinity in contemporary American culture. Such 1970s figures as
Don Vito Corleone (The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Rocky
Balboa (Rocky, John G. Avildsen, 1976), and Tony Manero (Saturday Night
Fever, John Badham, 1977)—all defined through physical power and aggres-
siveness, criminality, or overt sexuality—can be seen as attempts by Holly-
wood filmmakers to marginalize troublesome characteristics of traditional
patriarchy under feminist attack by associating them with old world ethnic
cultures.
In earlier work (Gardaphé 2011) I have identified what I have called an
irony deficiency in Italian American culture, which most often occurs in the
generation of children of immigrants. This deficiency contributes to the lack
of development of a tradition of humor in Italian American culture that is
observable in most other American ethnic groups.
Irony deficiency comes from ignorance, fear, and the inability to detach
oneself from that which can be ironized, and leads to the disease of literal-
ism, evidenced by the inability to figure out, or outfigure, attempts to be
humorous. A recent site for observing this disease is in many of the responses
of individuals and organizations to such programs as The Sopranos. More
unified acts by Italian Americans have been launched against fictional por-
trayals of the mafia than were ever mounted against the real mafiosi in the
US. The complete opposite is true in Italy, where people have risked and lost
their lives in pursuit of reality.
Franco La Cecla (2000: 39), in his study of Italian manhood, Modi bruschi
(“rough manners”), provides one of the most useful approaches to the study
of contemporary Italian masculinities:
One becomes a man only by strenuously working to escape maternal

influence. Adolescent males face an extremely difficult and painful pas-
sage. They must erase from their bodies the “effeminate” influence of
their mothers and the other women of their community, replacing them
with “rough manners.” (my translation)
Thus, the rough play of childhood gives way to the tough work of man-
hood. La Cecla theorizes that because the state of grace is perceived as femi-
nine, the young man must find a way to be, in a sense, “disgraced”; this state
of disgrace, according to La Cecla (2000: 44), must be achieved alongside
and in front of other men. In brief, masculinity is a public performance, and

until a young boy displays his manhood through disgrace, he is considered
to be a boy. La Cecla (2000: 39) elaborates:
In the absence of a clear and easy distinction, men avail themselves of

rough manners. Males, in order to show that they are real men, must
produce rowdy noise and make scenes—the roar of a Harley-Davidson,
popping wheelies on a Vespa, a certain tone of voice. Otherwise, their
“sex” remains invisible, dangerously neuter. Machismo, from this point
of view is a “negative” construct. As a Mexican proverb points out,
either you are a macho or you are nothing: El macho vive mientras
el cobardo quiere; “the Macho lives while the coward wishes he could.”
This is to say that there is no zero degree of masculinity; it is always
excessive, hypertropic, emphatic. Machismo, then, is the only way that
men can be seen.
The public show of machismo, I would argue, becomes a game of one-

upmanship that begins in humorous play but often transforms into the
threat of violence, and sometimes into violence itself. To better understand
this we need to dig up the roots of machismo. La Cecla suggests that its
origins can be found in Mexican culture. Chicana scholar and writer Ana
Castillo (1995: 66) tells us, “The word macho means to be male or mascu-
line. Machismo then is that which is related to the male or to masculinity.
Machismo, as associated with Mexican culture for the social scientist, is the
demonstration of physical and sexual powers and is basic to self-respect.”
As I see it, these are the very powers that Scorsese’s rough boys struggle to
demonstrate—to achieve not just self-respect, but also the respect of others—
and in Goodfellas these powers are expressed in ball busting. However, the
more the boys exercise these powers, especially when not following the guid-
ance of a wise man, the further they separate themselves from the possibility
of achieving a healthy maturity. In almost all cases the rough boys must
separate themselves from the world of women in order to achieve the label
of “man,” and yet once they enter this world of men, they seldom develop
skills that would move them beyond settling solely for simple survival in a
material world. This limited development manifests itself in the growing
distance between men and their feelings. Castillo (1995: 82) sees this separa-
tion reflected in social division throughout the world: “When we speak of
machismo, we immediately refer to a division of power between male and
female, between a world power and colonized nations.” She elaborates:
Machismo has divided society in half. It divides the world into the haves
and the have-nots, those with material power and those who are ren-
dered powerless. It has divided our behavior into oppositions, our spiri-
tuality regards Catholicism in dualistic terms of good and evil, and an
economic world politic based on brute might. The feminine principle is
not the opposite of machismo. “The feminine” may be generally termed

246 Fred Gardaphé
as the absence of machismo—all the qualities that have been negated,
denied, denigrated, and made to be essentially valueless by our society.
Machismo has served to distort our perceptions of humanity, which
includes the feminine. (82)
Castillo (1995: 71) traces Mexican machismo back to Arab influences on

Spanish culture: “The ancient culture of the Maghreb originated in North
Africa, spread throughout the Mediterranean, and as a consequence of
the conquest of the Americas via the Spaniards, to the Southwest United
States, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” Castillo locates the notion of
women as a man’s property, male honor, and “vendetta” in the Maghreb
culture:
What is the purpose of the vendetta? Usually to save family honor, that
is, to regain some material loss; women are counted as a man’s mate-
rial property. The male members of a family are responsible for a ven-
detta; in the case of an absent father, the task usually falls on the eldest
brother. (75)
When this notion of manhood is tied directly to a capitalist economy, it

makes it nearly impossible for a young boy who wants to be considered a
man to avoid acquiring capital at any costs.
Being a man requires becoming what the Italians call furbo, “sly” or
“slick,” and one of the things that separates the “boys” of the suburbs (con-
sidered in contemporary times to be domesticated space) from the “men”
of the city (today considered to be more untamed space) is the ability to tell
the believable lie, and of course, to determine when a lie is being told. It is
through the sins of lying and stealing that rough boys fall sufficiently from
grace to be called men in their world. These are also the same skills that will
come into play during the act of busting someone’s balls. More and more
it can be seen as a way of separating one’s self from the female sphere and
inscribing a place for one’s self among men.
La Cecla (2000: 41) helps us to see this need for separation when he
speaks of masculinity in Sicily during his youth:
Masculinity at that time and in that place [. . .] expressed itself as a

strange combination of boldness and isolation. [. . .] One became a
male “jerkily,” reacting to and never escaping the physical embarrass-
ment of adolescence. A real male is a bit awkward, rough, tough with his
body. If he remains graceful—Peter Pan, who could fly—or rounded in
his movements, then he would remain in sweet childhood, dream in his
mother’s lap. He must lose that “grace”; he must become “graceless,”
“disgraceful.”
Peter Pan then is a boy who fantasizes his masculinity but never tries to
prove it in the real world; an inversion of this can be applied to the gangster

figure who is the subject of these ball-busting scenes; the gangster, ultimately,
is the boy who tries to realize his masculinity through his fantasies.
Those fantasies are played out in spaces containing men, often spaces
in which “respectable” women are denied entry, such as bars, men-only
clubs, strip joints, and so forth. The neighborhood in Goodfellas is run by
the Cicero boys: Paul, the boss, and Tuddy, his brother. The real function
of these men, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) soon learns, is to provide “protection
for people who can’t go to the cops.” They create a system for organizing
the neighborhood and proceed to teach Hill his place in that system. Hill
is instructed in the ways a man in this neighborhood should carry himself
and behave; he is warned to “Never put your name on anything!” (Pileggi
1985: 17). He is shown that what is important in life is to earn the respect
of others, and one does that by finding his place in the system and staying
there. This is one of the keys to understanding ball busting: there are those
who can and those who cannot bust someone’s balls, and the outcome of
these interactions very much depends on the balance between the two men
in terms of social standing.
Being a wiseguy, he learns, is not so much about using violence as it about
“getting over” on other people or tricking them out of what they have. Often
this comes through thievery and using stolen credit cards for nights out on
the town. This act is reflective of the trickster aspect of the gangster figure, as
thievery through trickery is more acceptable than is thievery using a weapon.
As Hill explains, “if you knew wiseguys, you would know right away that
the best part of the night for Paulie came from the fact that he was getting
over on somebody” (Pileggi 1985: 25). Hill learns that the two rules of wise-
guy life are “Never rat on friends” and “Always keep your mouth shut”—in
fact these two dicta are the foundation for the scenes I discuss here. Hill
proves to the gangsters that he is worthy of trust, and worthy of being called
a man, when he is jailed and still keeps his mouth shut. Jail acts as a ritual of
manhood, and when Hill exits the courthouse after his trial, he is greeted by
the other gangsters with “You broke your cherry,” a phrase usually referring
to a woman’s loss of her virginity. This female reference does not threaten
the boy’s masculinity, and in fact marks his transition into manhood. It is
through acts like this that Hill achieves a balance with other gangsters.
There are a number of other instances in which we see men challenging
each other’s masculinity through the act of busting one’s balls. The charac-
ter this is best seen through is Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci. Tommy
is constantly trying to prove his manhood, perhaps because he is shorter
than other men, and as La Cecla (2000: 41) explains, a young boy is often
pushed to limits to prove his manhood: “Aggression, ridicule, physical con-
tact on the brink of homosexuality, as if to push the others to the extreme
limit—where it is up to them to escape embarrassment; all of these things
serve to ‘roughen’ young men, to teach them manners that would clearly
show that they were not female.” This, I would argue is the lesson that one
learns during the act (and possibly art) of ball busting.

248 Fred Gardaphé
In one scene Tommy DeVito is ridiculed by Billy Batts, a gangster who
has just served time in jail and is celebrating his return to the neighborhood.
Batts is a “made” member of the mob, as he has been formally inducted
into the Mafia. He recalls Tommy as a boy who used to shine shoes. Tommy
cannot take the teasing and eventually beats Batts to death, all the result of
Tommy’s inability to take the ball busting that Batts delivers. [Transcription
by author.]
TOMMY: Just don’t go busting my balls, Billy, okay?

BILLY BATTS: Hey, Tommy, if I was gonna break your balls, I’d tell you
to go home and get your shine box. [to his friends]
BILLY BATTS: Now this kid, this kid was great. They, they used to call
him Spitshine Tommy.
TOMMY: No more shines, Billy.
BILLY BATTS: What?
TOMMY: I said, no more shines. Maybe you didn’t hear about it,
you’ve been away a long time. They didn’t go up there and tell you.
I don’t shine shoes anymore.
BILLY BATTS: Relax, will ya? Ya flip right out, what’s got into you? I’m
breaking your balls a little bit, that’s all. I’m only kidding with ya.
Billy Batts is older than Tommy and feels that the younger man needs to
show him some respect, especially because he, and not Tommy, is a “made
man” and is in the company of friends who have gathered to celebrate his
release from prison. But Tommy, a man himself, believes that he is being
unnecessarily ridiculed in front of his friends. Not lost on this reader, but
perhaps on much of the film’s audience, is the play on the word “shine”
(urban slang for African Americans), an insult that adds to Batts’s busting of
Tommy’s balls, and this makes Tommy especially sensitive especially given
the fact that his girlfriend, among other people, is in the audience.
TOMMY: Sometimes you don’t sound like you’re kidding, you know,
there’s a lotta people around.
BILLY BATTS: I’m only kidding with you, we’re having a party, I just
came home and I haven’t seen you in a long time and I’m breaking
your balls, and you’re getting fucking fresh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to offend you.
TOMMY: I’m sorry too. It’s okay. No problem.
BILLY BATTS: Okay, salud.
Because Tommy considers himself an equal to Billy, he lets go of offense

he might have taken, but not without letting Batts know that he is tough
enough to stand up to it. However, Batts takes the ball busting up a notch
by breaking the agreed upon truce: “Billy Batts: [takes a drink] Now go
home and get your fuckin’ shinebox.” Tommy, who had been walking away

from Batts, turns and charges toward him, only to be stopped by his friends
before he can attack Batts. He yells at Batts:
TOMMY: Mother fuckin’ mutt! You, you fucking piece of shit!

BILLY BATTS: [taunting] Yeah, yeah, yeah, come on, come on, come on!
TOMMY: Motherfucking . . . He bought his fucking button! That fake
old tough guy! You bought your fucking button!
TOMMY: You mother fuck . . . Fuck! Keep that motherfucker here,
keep him here!
Tommy returns later and, with the help of his friends, kills Billy Batts. He
shows that he cannot take the ball busting and that he takes literally that
which was presented metaphorically. Tommy reacts similarly in a ball-busting
situation that he initiates during a card game when he is being served drinks
by a young boy nicknamed Spider (played by Michael Imperioli). When
Tommy feels he is not shown the proper respect by Spider, who is serving him
his drink during a card game, he elevates the ball busting from the metaphoric
to the real and shoots Spider’s foot. Later, when Spider again is serving drinks
and limping around the table, he decides to return Tommy’s ball busting,
much to the amusement of Tommy’s friend Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro):
SPIDER: [hesitating] Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Tommy?

[stunned silence]
JIMMY: Whoa! Can’t believe what I just heard. Hey Spider, here. This
is for you.
[tosses money on the table]
JIMMY: Attaboy! I got respect for this kid. He’s got a lot of fucking
balls. Good for you! Don’t take no shit off nobody.
[Tommy’s friends laugh at him; Tommy pulls out his gun and kills
the boy.]
JIMMY: What’s the fuckin’ matter with you? What—what is the fuckin’
matter with you? What are you, stupid or what? Tommy, Tommy,
I’m kidding with you. What the fuck are you doin’? What are you, a
fuckin’ sick maniac?
TOMMY: How am I meant to know you’re kidding? What you mean,
you’re kidding? You breaking my fuckin’ balls?
JIMMY: I’m fuckin’ kidding with you! You fuckin’ shoot the guy?
HENRY: He’s dead.
TOMMY: Good shot. What do you want from me? Good shot. Fuckin’
rat anyway. His family’s all rats. He’ll grow up to be a rat.
Tommy rationalizes his action, and even turns it into self praise, for his
ability to use a gun accurately and for getting rid of someone who might
be a potential snitch simply because he comes from a family known for
snitching.

250 Fred Gardaphé
A third example of the use of ball-busting humor as a way of referring
to masculinity comes in what is probably the most often referenced scene
of this film. Tommy is sitting at a table in a cocktail lounge telling the other
men a story of how he stood up to a cop who had arrested him and did not
reveal anything about what he was doing before he got arrested. The story
makes all the guys laugh, and Henry speaks first:
HENRY: You’re a pistol, you’re really funny. You’re really funny.

TOMMY: What do you mean I’m funny?
HENRY: It’s funny, you know. It’s a good story, it’s funny, you’re a
funny guy.
[laughs]
TOMMY: What do you mean, you mean the way I talk? What?
HENRY: It’s just, you know. You’re just funny, it’s . . . funny, the way
you tell the story and everything.
TOMMY: [it becomes quiet] Funny how? What’s funny about it?
ANTHONY: Tommy, no, you got it all wrong.
TOMMY: Oh, oh, Anthony. He’s a big boy, he knows what he said.
What did ya say? Funny how?
HENRY: Jus . . .
TOMMY: What?
HENRY: Just . . . ya know . . . you’re funny.
TOMMY: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe
it’s me, I’m a little fucked up maybe, but I’m funny how, I mean
funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I’m here to
fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am
I funny?
Tommy keeps pushing Henry about his use of the word “funny.” He is refer-
ring here to the possible connotations of the word “funny” —a word often
used in the Italian American community to refer to homosexuals, something
that Henry does not pick up on right away. Tommy is also anxious about his
own position among these men and is worried that they might be laughing
at him, rather than with him. Hill does not catch on to the fact that Tommy
is busting his balls:
HENRY: Just . . . you know, how you tell the story, what?
TOMMY: No, no, I don’t know, you said it. How do I know? You said
I’m funny. How the fuck am I funny, what the fuck is so funny about
me? Tell me, tell me what’s funny!
Tommy pushes Henry into a corner that Henry escapes only when he
looks Tommy deep in the eyes and sees a hint that Tommy might be kidd-
ing him:

HENRY: [long pause] Get the fuck out of here, Tommy!
TOMMY: [everyone laughs] Ya motherfucker! I almost had him, I almost
had him. Ya stuttering prick ya. Frankie, was he shaking? I won-
der about you sometimes, Henry. You may fold under questioning.
The role of the ball busting here is to test the manliness of Henry and, indi-
rectly, his ability to take the ball busting like a man, one who will hold onto
the traditional sense of manliness that requires not giving into the emotional
results of this public ridicule. Henry is also being tested for his ability to
maintain his cool while under pressure, something that could easily hap-
pen if he is ever arrested and questioned by the police—an attribute that
Tommy just showed he possesses (by way of the story he told that opened
the exchange between him and Henry). It is interesting to note that this is a
test that Tommy fails time and again, and the failures lead to his own death
when he is executed by the very gangsters he believed had accepted him into
the inner sanctum of their organization. Tommy proved, through his inabil-
ity to take it as well as he gives it, that he was not worthy of being a man in
this circle of gangsters.
One final example of ball busting in Goodfellas comes to us in a more
subtle way than we have previously seen, a way only those who know Sicil-
ian culture could really appreciate. Scorsese uses humor about sex to refer
to masculinity. This happens when Tommy brings Henry Hill and Jimmy
Conway to his mother’s house to get a knife. We learn that ball busting
can also occur between a man and a woman. In the scene that takes place
in Tommy’s mother’s home, his mother comments on Henry’s silence at the
dinner table by asking him why he’s so quiet. He responds that he’s just eat-
ing, and the mother pushes him a bit by telling the story of a man she knew
from her past who was always quiet.
As she serves the guys a meal, the mother (played by Scorsese’s own
mother) tells a story of a man whom everyone referred to as cornuto con-
tento, or the “contented cuckold,” a man who knew that his wife was
cheating on him, but never said a word to anyone about it; he was always
very quiet around others. One day someone made a comment about his
silence, and his wife responded that he never says anything. The cuckold
then said, “What am I supposed to say, that my wife is two-timing me?” His
wife responded, “Shut up, you’re always talking.” The story is funny only
to Tommy and his mother, so they both try to explain it to Hill and Con-
way. Beyond the humor is the comment that life is sometimes better when
certain things are left unsaid. The cuckold exposed himself by talking, pub-
licly acknowledging his emasculated status. Henry does not get offended
by the comparison as he does not read it as ball busting. The moral of
this story is that those who talk too much risk losing masculine reputa-
tions, and for our purposes, Tommy’s mother’s ball busting of Henry Hill
serves as another reminder that it might just be better if he remained silent.

252 Fred Gardaphé
He is the one who later speaks to the FBI and sets up the fall of the other
gangsters.
As we have seen in these examples, Italian American masculinity is per-
formed through humor based on the subjects of violence and sexuality. The
humor found in ball busting serves the purpose of (con)testing a man’s abil-
ity to balance himself between the overly feminine (talking too much) and
the under-manly (talking too little); it also challenges him to take the insults
like a man (something that Tommy fails to do, and Henry, more often than
not, succeeds in doing). These subjects are the fundamental cornerstones
of an Italian American male humor that has not evolved in the same ways
other ethnic American male humor has to encompass larger aspects of its
ethnic culture.

16 “A Woman, a Wog and a Westie”
Monica Pellizzari’s Critical Humor
from Down Under
Alessandra Senzani
Describing herself as a “woman, a wog and a westie,” Monica Pellizzari

provocatively points to her multiple marginalization because of gender, eth-
nicity, and class; raised in the Western working-class suburbs of Sydney, this
Italian-American girl was confronted early on with ethnic discrimination
and machismo both in her ethnic community and in Australian society at
large. Realizing that she “could not feel totally comfortable in Italy, nor
in Australia” (Pellizzari 1993: 140), Pellizzari developed a critical perspec-
tive on Australian society and identity politics that led her to undertake a
career as filmmaker in order to give voice to the many stories left untold in
dominant Australian cinema and media (“Il Cinema” 1991: 24). Through
her films, Pellizzari wished to “address [her] reality as a bi-cultural Austra-
lian” and the difficulties of growing up “ethnic” in a country that did not
welcome diversity (quoted in Colbert 1997: 23). Speaking from the fringe of
Australian society, Pellizzari faced further marginalization as a filmmaker,
first of all because she is a woman in a male industry, but also because she is
Australian in a Hollywood-dominated field and, even at the antipodal fringe
of filmmaking, because she is a hyphenated and accented filmmaker from a
working-class background.
Pellizzari has responded to these multiple forms of marginalization with
humor, which in her texts becomes a critical tool for challenging dominant
discourses on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. Her female protago-
nists follow in the tradition of the “unruly woman” described by Kathleen
Rowe (1995: 10) as “an ambivalent figure of female outrageousness and
transgression.” According to film critic Jo Litson (1989) such a style well
reflects Pellizzari’s own personality, whom she describes as “a larger-than-
life character, outspoken, irreverent, opinionated and fiercely committed to
her filmmaking, yet with a warmly brusque sense of humour.” Most critics
agree on the centrality of humor in Pellizzari’s texts, which as Rose Capp
(2001) observes, range “from the bittersweet irony of Rabbit to the sly,
wry humour of Just Desserts.” Anna Maria Dell’Oso (1990: 17) stresses
that Pellizzari is “able to move easily between humour and pathos.” In all
her films, the gritty and tragic realities of marginal, working-class Italian-
Australian women inspire Pellizzari to mix a dreamy pasticcio of material

254 Alessandra Senzani
conflicts and contradictions sweetened by the visionary, humorous voices of
her unruly women.
As the reviews already point out, in the films of the Italian-Australian
director, humor constitutes a structuring principle that allows her to pursue
aesthetic innovation in her reinvention of Australian national cinema while
tackling the national and masculinist discourses reproduced by that cinema.
For these reasons, I speak of “critical humor” in her texts, where humor is
understood as an umbrella term for such different forms as parody, satire,
farce, and irony, and their many hybrids.1 By employing the attribute “criti-
cal,” I wish to emphasize, first, the crucial role that humor plays in her films
as a suprasegmental feature that affects the text as a whole and, second, the
critical function that humor can serve, a property already recognized by sat-
irists like Aristophanes and Menippos in ancient Greece. Pellizzari employs
critical humor as a signifying practice that plays with cinematic codes and
with the combinatorial rules of shots;2 given its structural play with cin-
ematic language, Pellizzari’s humor can be read through the lenses of Luigi
Pirandello’s description of umorismo, as a tool that “decomposes” the text.
As Manuela Gieri (1995) has pointed out, Pirandellian humor translates
well to cinema studies because it allows juggling multiple planes, intersect-
ing in cinematic space, without privileging verbal over visual humor. On
the contrary, the Pirandellian framework views cinematic language as the
raw skeleton with which filmmakers play to fashion humorous reflections,
frames, memories, and sensations.
For Pellizzari, humor functions as a means to defy generic and discursive
boundaries between avant-garde and mainstream forms, between genres, and
between the serious and humorous mode. She moves within the dominant
tradition of cinema d’auteur and of Australian national cinema, but makes
them both hybrids. In terms of auteur cinema, she engages in a formal experi-
mentation with cinematic conventions, but questions the male auteurist tradi-
tion with what film critic Ruby Rich (1994) defines as a feminist Medusan
humor, a reappropriation of the laughing Medusa myth. In terms of Aus-
tralian national cinema, Pellizzari works within the tradition of the Austra-
lian state-sponsored “quality cinema,” which she learned to appreciate as an
assistant of renowned Australian director Peter Weir.3 Yet, she inflects Aus-
tralian film conventions, narratives, and imagery with regional and ethnic
accents, questioning dominant ethnic representations and voicing subjugated
knowledges rooted in Italian traditions and women’s experiences—culinary,
musical, religious, and pagan. Necessarily, the multiple dimensions of Pelliz-
zari’s identity, and the diverse histories of marginalization that inform them,
intersect and at times clash; without ignoring these intersections, it is possible
to look at Pellizzari’s filmmaking and her cinematic humor for an insight into
a feminist, humorous decomposition of masculinist discourses as they are
reproduced in cinema.
Indeed, using humor to decompose cinematic language in its basic units,
Pellizzari forces the audience to reflect on its linguistic competence and on

“A Woman, a Wog and a Westie” 255
the extent to which language is saturated by relations of power. Such a
critical function performed by humor goes to the heart of feminist critiques
of the structuralist theorization of language from Saussure to Lacan and
its application to feminist film studies, as in Laura Mulvey’s (2000) analy-
sis of the male gaze. Pellizzari’s humor challenges the gender relationships
inscribed in cinematic language by fragmenting the composition of the film
text (in an art where editing and assembling are cornerstones of the narra-
tive construction), by questioning its looking relationships (for a medium
predicated on the power of vision), and finally by relying on masquerades
(in the masterful masked ball of cinematic artifice). These humorous tech-
niques theorized by Pirandello in L’umorismo (1908)—decomposition,
critical reflection (as a distorting mirror), and masquerade—structure all of
Pellizzari’s films, although their relationship is differently balanced in each.
In her first short, Just Desserts (1993), for instance, Pellizzari seems mostly
concerned with the humorous decomposition of the film shot; as an early
endeavor, the short understandably foregrounds the research of a new cin-
ematic syntax that could challenge the language of the fathers.
Just Desserts depicts the sexual coming-of-age of a young Italian-
Australian girl, Maria Stroppi, through a continuous juxtaposition between
her experiences and the Italian culinary specialties prepared by her mother.
The short is divided in five segments, each named after a Venetian dish; con-
trary to the title, only one section actually refers to a dessert, which could
in itself be an ironic commentary on the bittersweet memories and experi-
ences of growing up Italian and a woman in Australia. The titles for each
segment already give a sense of the humorous associations constructed by
Pellizzari; “Broth/Brodo” deals with menstruation, where bodily fluids and
boiling hens serve to mock the abjection of the woman’s body; “Venetian
Fritters/Frittole Venete” depicts Maria’s search for her own clitoris and the
crispy climax of her first orgasm, while her mother fries sugary Italian treats
in the shape of small vaginas; “Cornmeal/Polenta” represents Maria’s timid
lesbian kiss and awakes the ghost of an Italian lesbian aunt from the smoke
of a boiling polenta; in “Dumplings/Gnocchi,” Maria experiments with
heterosexual sex, and the phallic but flabby rolls of potato dough deliver
a satiric blow to notions of virility and heterosexual romance. Finally, the
last installment, “The pizzas are sleeping,” signifies the possibility of find-
ing spaces of dissent in the interstices of dominant discourses and practices.
The bilingual titles of each segment thus already inscribe a satirical element
into the film text: on the surface, the titles simply denote the Italian specialty
being cooked in each segment, but through connotation they actually com-
ment on Maria’s experiences.
Critique and humor serve indeed as the defining features of a short
that accomplishes its aims through continuous visual splits. Just Desserts
is constructed through either cross-cutting between the parallel worlds of
Maria and her mother, or through a split screen, where the left half depicts
Maria’s adventures in black and white, and the right half shows the process

of cooking the Italian delicacies in vivid colors. Continuously juxtaposing
the worlds of the mother and daughter, Pellizzari establishes a movement
beyond the single frame that gives a semiotic significance to their relation-
ship, which Pellizzari exploits for satirizing Freudian psychoanalytic dis-
courses. In the episode “Dumplings/Gnocchi,” for instance, Maria is shown
having her first sexual intercourse atop a surfboard on a white Australian
beach. Pellizzari mocks here the most advertized signs of Australianness,
turning its white splendid beaches and blue skies gritty through a neoreal-
ist black-and-white cinematography. Furthermore, Pellizzari heightens the
sexual innuendoes in this short by counterpointing each stage of the sexual
act with the every step in the making of the gnocchi. Foreplay, penetration,
deflowering, and male orgasm are statically represented from a detached
high-angle perspective of subdued black and white, whereas the juxtaposed
colorful close-ups in split screen serve as dynamic and sensual connotations:
from burning expectations to bitter disillusion. Our senses are thus titillated
by the hot, smoking potatoes, the mother’s careful peeling off of the potato
skins, and the slow motion breaking of an egg yolk in the white flour. As
Justin, her lover, continues to override Maria’s vain protests, the mother
replicates, beat by beat, his back and forth movements, while squeezing the
dough into nicely formed gnocchi rolls, which at the moment of Justin’s
climax, she energetically cuts into pieces. After the symbolic, satirical cas-
tration of Justin, Pellizzari restores the full screen to reveal an unsatis-
fied Maria, who appropriates the gaze and stares at the viewers, mocking
the virile Justin, whom she swears not to “taste” ever again, just like the
gnocchi.
Beyond decomposition of conventional cinematic syntax, Pellizzari
employs humor to challenge the looking relations of dominant cinema,
which have long been attacked by feminist film scholars. As Gieri (1995: 57)
points out, Pirandellian humor resonates with Lacanian notions of the gaze
on which symbolic language rests. Pellizzari, through humor and the dis-
torting “reflection” it enacts, addresses the laden politics of the gaze and
questions the objectification of women in cinema. As women filmmakers
such as Maya Deren and Dorothy Arzner have long proved, the objectifying
male gaze has always implied the possibility of reasserting subjectivity by
disrupting the power dynamics implied in the unidirectional gaze.4 In Just
Desserts, Pellizzari proceeds to perform such disruption; mother and daugh-
ter continuously defy the contained cinematic world of the frame and gaze
beyond its borders: either beyond to the viewers, or out into parallel frames/
worlds. In the first segment “Broth/Brodo,” Pellizzari stages the first con-
frontation between the daughter’s and mother’s worlds, when Maria has her
first menstruation while trampling her father’s grapes. As she looks between
her legs at such a novelty, Maria is promptly rebuked by the mother shout-
ing, “Chiudi” (“close your legs”). Juxtaposed on the split screen, the eyes of
mother and daughter meet at the center of the frame and Pellizzari humor-
ously forces the mother and the viewers to look at Maria’s disruption of

patriarchal norms and heteronormative sexuality. Similarly, in “Venetian
Fritters/Frittole,” Pellizzari parodies cinematic voyeuristic looks: here it is
the mother who looks through the keyhole and catches Maria in the act
of pleasing herself with the encouragement of her Anglo-Australian friend
Mona. In this scene, the mother as voyeur does not control the daughter as
prey of the look; indeed, Maria stares back through the keyhole at her vexed
mother biting lustily into one of her frittole.
By decomposing cinematic language to fashion new meanings and multi-
plying the looking relationships structuring conventional cinema, Pellizzari’s
critical humor opens up a space to reproduce, disassemble, and distort the
masks of dominant discourses, submitting them to critical reflection. In
this sense, Pellizzari displays humor’s ability, as theorized by Pirandello,
to denudare, in other words, to divest us of our robes of conformity, not
so much to unveil a true essence beneath them, but to multiply the masks
that we can put on, hence challenging the accepted roles we are required
to perform (Roic 1988: 83). Pellizzari’s play with masks and masquerad-
ing also connects to feminist theories of the grotesque and of the unruly
woman.5 Rowe (1995: 36) retraces the trope of the unruly woman pan-
ning through such figures as Ursula the Pig Woman, from the seventeenth-
century play Bartholomew Fair by Ben Johnson, to modern-day unruly
women like muppet Miss Piggy and Roseanne Barr. Such female unruliness
can best be understood through the Bakhtinian (1973, 1984) rediscovery
of the grotesque realism of medieval and Rabelaisian folk humor and its
subsequent theorization within feminist studies, as in Julia Kristeva’s (1980,
1982) theories of abjection, Hélène Cixous’s (1975) reappropriation of the
monstrous Medusa, and Mary Russo’s (1994) theorization of the “female
grotesque.”6 The sensuousness of Pellizzari’s cinema directly stems from
this ambivalent and contradictory history of bodily laughter and grittiness,
which provides the Italian-Australian filmmaker with the tropes to undo
the masks of patriarchally determined womanhood.
Thus, her films are replete with controversial imagery of female abjection;
in Just Dessert’s opening segment “Broth/Brodo,” for instance, Pellizzari
confronts viewers with the onset of menstruation paired with the crushing
of fruit (grapes). The provocative director wishes here to stress the ridicu-
lous fact that “fifty-two per cent of the world is made up of women, yet it
is such a taboo to talk about periods” (Anderson-Ribardeneira 1993: 49).
As a response, she chooses to satirize the myths connected to menstrua-
tion in Italian folk culture, which invariably associate it with the ability to
cause the degeneration of plants, wine, and all that thrives. In a humorous
crescendo, Pellizzari uses a split screen to contrast the abject Maria’s legs,
tainted by menstrual blood, with the feet of a dead hen her mother cooks
for the Italian brodo. As every Italian knows, gallina vecchia fa buon brodo
(“an old hen makes good broth”); Pellizzari seems here to be playing on
the ambivalence between the degenerative and regenerative properties of
the grotesque as they are inscribed onto the female body, from its first sign

of birthing potential to its ultimate degradation. Pellizzari reinforces such
association with the cautionary tale of the old spinster aunt who had spoiled
a batch of tomato sauce by visiting when she had her period. The abjected
figure of the vecchia gallina, however, is recuperated when in the third seg-
ment, “Cornmeal/Polenta,” she turns out to be the unruly paternal aunt
who disgraced the family with an act of lesbian vengeance when she killed
her husband with an ax.7 Like the Bakhtinian senile hag, Pellizzari shows
us the vecchia gallina, if not laughing, smiling with the young Maria in a
bond suggesting that uncontainable female bodies will always threaten the
borders of dominant discourses.
With her first feature film, Fistful of Flies (1997), Pellizzari moves deeper
into the tradition of grotesque realism, serving to her viewers many uncom-
fortable spectacles of bodily excess. In the film, Pellizzari enters the world
of the adolescent Mars, who, like Maria in Just Desserts, stubbornly clashes
against the frames of patriarchal and religious hyphenated Italian cultures.
The title, Pellizzari explained while making the pitch for her first feature
film after the success of her shorts, comes from the Italian saying un pugno
di mosche. She said, “basically it means that any girl who follows her wild
spirit will end up with a fistful of flies,” a stereotypical view she wished
to debunk (quoted in Roach 1993). Pellizzari packages her attack in “a
black comedy with a surrealist edge and underlying serious themes,” as she
describes it in the film’s press kit (1996). Critics agree that the feature is
marked by “stylistic surrealism and comedic excesses” (Capp 2001), coupled
with “moments of simple humor peppered liberally throughout the angst
and frustration” (Zolanius 1997: 4). The visually monochrome film oscil-
lates in tone from the funny to the satiric, to the blasphemous, then serious,
and eventually tragic.8
In a reminder of the grotesque’s predilection for the body’s apertures and
convexities, Pellizzari repeatedly presents Mars in an improper and pro-
vocative posture with spread legs; in these scenes, the director often employs
a bird’s eye view, which seems to emphasize Mars’s defiance of norms, con-
fronting the world from the bottom up and claiming the whole space of the
frame with her extended body. At times, Pellizzari even more provocatively
centers the eye of the camera in between Mars’s legs, usually reinforcing her
acts of humorous unruliness. Furthermore, as in Just Desserts, Pellizzari
evokes the taboo of menstruation when, derided in her desire to become
a lawyer (because too much education will not get her a husband), Mars
shows off her self-crafted earrings to the shocked screams of all invited.
Proudly hanging on her ears are white tampons that stand in stark contrast
with the “agricultural” proper dress her mother was hoping could subdue
Mars’s unruly tomboy character.
Interestingly, the grotesque jewelry also serves to introduce us to Eno,
the Italian-Australian boy who seems to represent a promising new gen-
eration of hyphenated Italian men, gravitating away from the dominant
machismo of the community. With no outraged sign of disgust, the young

boy deflates Mars’s angry spectacle by simply asking, “Aren’t they meant
to be bloodened?” Eno’s lack of revulsion seems to recognize the normalcy
of female menstruation in the bodily cycle. His appreciation of the female
grotesque, meaning of both Mars’s abjected body and unruly subjectivity,
stands in stark contrast to Mars’s abusive father who is pitilessly scrutinized
by the camera and made the target of the film’s most abrasive humor. Pelliz-
zari seems to re-code the destructive side of grotesque realism by represent-
ing the degeneration of the male body through the giant pimples Maria’s
mother is forced to burst open on her husband’s back and through the crass
satire of masculinity in the mother’s dictum that “men are all like toilets,
either all engaged, or pissed off, or full of shit, so just be nice to them, ok?!”
The two opposing images of Italian masculinity are again juxtaposed at
the end through a symbolic play with bodily signs of virility: menacing her
father with a rifle, Mars forces him to let go of his pants, turning the male
body into a public spectacle for the community’s ridicule. Reinforcing the
symbolic castration of patriarchy through its satiric degeneration, Mars also
shoots off the gigantic genitals boasted by the proudest of the dwarfs sto-
len from her mother’s garden. Yet, Pellizzari does acknowledge a different
masculinity, not only in Eno’s standing by Mars’s side, but in her younger
brother, who, in the concluding scene of the film, bonds with the evicted and
unruly nonna. The final scene suggests that the new generation of hyphen-
ated males will be raised in a matriarchal family that will do away with the
myth of the Italian stallion, as the satiric image of the young boy shaving an
undressed plastic Ken seems to suggest.
Beyond the grotesque male body and humorous reappropriation of the
female abject, Pellizzari’s humor is further embodied in her play with the
taboo of female sexual gratification; from the first scene of Mars’s voyeuristic
curiosity to her avid experimentation in front of a mirror to the sound of
rock music, Pellizzari relentlessly exploits the pursuit of “sexual bliss” as a
source of conflict and laughter in the community. Here, like in Just Desserts,
the girl’s free experimentation, once again heightened by Pellizzari’s use of
a floating bird’s eye view, is juxtaposed with the repressed sexuality of the
older generation of Italian women who catch her in the act of masturbating
on the day of the Immaculate Conception. If this first blasphemous contrast
ends in tragedy with an outburst of male violence, Mars’s resilience in play-
ing with her “triggerbutton,” as the mother calls it, offers the pretext for
many comic sketches and ultimately leads the mother to rediscover her own
abjected body and sexuality. However, such regeneration must first degener-
ate into the tragically grotesque. The mother is complicit in the disciplining of
Mars’s sexuality throughout the film; she calls a doctor to make sure that her
“onion” will not “become abnormal if she keeps touching it,” and she turns
into the object of the woman doctor’s satire when the doctor responds, “You
mean, will the world freak out because she’s discovered her treasure palace?”
The mother’s repressed sexuality turns from the comic to the humorous
when she asks if her “onion” will “shrivel up if it doesn’t get used,” and is

juxtaposed with images of her beloved dog running around with a ridicu-
lous plastic muzzle. The mother’s transition from an enabler of patriarchy
to an unruly woman is probably best represented in Pellizzari’s satire of the
phallic mother, of whom Mars dreams after her first beating: through an
oneiric blue haze, we see the father cleaning a long rifle held by the mother
in such a position as to transform her into the bearer of the phallus, the
enforcer of the social order. After such phallic imagery, however, the body
of the mother is increasingly degraded: she is shown urinating in front of
the camera and puts on a public display in front of the whole community
when she raises her skirt to ask her adulterous husband and their complicit
neighbors what is wrong with her onion. This ultimate act of unruliness
and the public abjection of the female body are, however, displaced by the
contemporaneous satiric degeneration of the male body of the father. In
the end, three generations of Italian-Australian women come together, after
having each stood up to reclaim the pleasures of their bodies and their inde-
pendence. Once again it is the vecchia gallina, in the person of the wise and
uncontainable nonna, who irons out her wrinkles in an aluminum mirror,
who has endured domestic violence and the abjection from the community
because she was accused of not being a virgin, and who gives Mars the cour-
age to laugh back. As the nonna explains, women “spend the first half of
[their] life not knowing what’s between [their] belly button and [their] knees
and the second half watching babies walk through it.” The new generation
of hyphenated Italian women, instead, has learned to reclaim the pleasures
and impurities of the female grotesque.
Pellizzari thus reveals the wealth of humorous means available for ques-
tioning cinematic language and its constitutive relation between image-
maker, text, and spectator, chipping away at the perceived objectivity and
visuality of the cinematic medium in order to challenge the reproduction of
masculinist discourses. Her dissociations, distorting reflections, and masks
humorously target our looking habits and incite us to pierce through the
two-dimensional and framed space of the screen that for too long has muted
the third, historical dimension of women’s experiences and marginalization.
Critical humor thus proves an effective instrument for Pellizzari in order
to target the patriarchal definitions of feminine identity in terms of purity,
sexual containment, and whiteness, affirming instead an irreverent, Medu-
san feminist counter-tradition.
NOTES
1. Humor has become the privileged umbrella term across disciplines as varied
as linguistics, literature, media studies, sociology, medicine, psychology, and
education. I employ the adjective “critical” to emphasize the function of cul-
tural criticism that the humor analyzed in this study performs. As a last termi-
nological caveat, I privilege “humor” over “the comic” because I rely on Luigi
Pirandello’s Umorismo, in which he details the differences in his approach
between humor and the comic.

2. There is now a consistent body of work on the reception and translation of
humor on screen (see Vandaele 2002; Chiaro 2005) and on the genre of film
comedy (see Mast 1979; Horton 1991; King 2002). Yet, most of these studies
focus on either verbal humor, as expressed in dialogues and scripts, or visual
humor. My analysis, while touching on both these aspects, instead under-
stands cinematic humor within a conception of cinema as a language follow-
ing Christian Metz’s (1974: 95) theorization of a grand syntagmatique, which
illustrates how cinema has created a “body of specific signifying procedures,”
relying on the combinatory rules of shots.
3. See Dermody and Jacka (1987) and O’Regan (1996) for a discussion of state
support for the Australian film industry and of its main genres.
4. It is also important to note that thanks to her hyphenated and working-class
background, Pellizzari eschews the inherent essentialism of feminist theories
of écriture feminine and of the male gaze, pointing to the fact that women and
subaltern others have both been subject to the Lacanian objectifying gaze.
5. Pirandello’s emphasis on masks and performance also resonates with femi-
nist theorizations of performative identities and subversive repetitions like
Judith Butler’s parody and Mary Ann Doane’s (1992: 235) masquerade, which
“flaunting femininity holds it at a distance.”
6. See Natalie Davis Zemon (1975: 151) for a further discussion of the “unruly
woman” and its grotesque features as they relate to medieval carnival tradi-
tions; Davis clearly points out the ambiguities in such a tradition, which to an
extent “confirmed subjection throughout society, but also promoted resistance
to it” on the part of the women. It should also be pointed out that Australian
national humor seems to draw from such a repertoire of grotesque woman-
hood, as Jones (1993: 163) suggests, and contemporary Australian women
artists “have achieved interesting results through challenging or subverting
traditions in which they are either ridiculed or ignored. Creating humour from
the edge sharpens one’s jokes.”
7. Maria retells the story, reciting the rhyme “she killed a man with forty wacks,”
which provocatively refers to Lizzie Borden, who has been the inspiration for
many Gothic stories, a genre that strongly influenced Pellizzari. For a discus-
sion of the Borden legend and its place within feminist and gender debates see
Charles and Louise Samuels (1983) and Ann Schofield (1993).
8. Interestingly, Pellizzari’s satire in Fistful of Flies seems to have struck an
uncomfortable chord with many critics; in spite of the enthusiastic reception
at the Venice Film Festival (Hessey 1997: 15), the film was widely criticized for
having gone too far, either by being “too angry” or by pursuing a “Freudian
surrealism” “beyond her abilities” (Thomas 1999), ultimately ending with an
“unrealised vision” (Roach 1997: 40). Hall (1997: 14) seems to be alone in
extolling the film’s “grotesque jokes” and “earthy humour.”

17 Gender and Grotesque Humor in
Contemporary Italian Literature
Language, Culture, and Translation
Brigid Maher
1. INTRODUCTION
Through its juxtaposition of entertaining, amusing elements and the shock

factor of negative emotions, the grotesque is a literary mode that challenges
and questions our perceptions about comedy and tragedy, about what
should provoke laughter and what should provoke tears. As an interpreta-
tion of and response to the complexity of human interaction in all its beauty
and ugliness, grotesque humor often brings with it a preoccupation with
the body that can permit a compelling, though also confronting, examina-
tion of gender roles and sexuality. The present analysis focuses on three
contemporary Italian literary works that use grotesque humor to explore
themes related to sexuality and the body and to comment critically on rela-
tions between the sexes. The works are Paese fortunato by Rosa Cappi-
ello (1981), translated by Gaetano Rando as Oh Lucky Country (2003);
Ti prendo e ti porto via by Niccolò Ammaniti (2004), translated by Jona-
than Hunt as Steal You Away (2006); and Occhi sulla graticola by Tiziano
Scarpa (2005), as yet untranslated. I examine the way in which the authors
extend the themes and subject matter of their novels beyond the plot and
into their books’ very language and literary style, and look also at the impli-
cations this has for the translation process. Translation is central to the
global spread of ideas, cultures, and literary styles, and by discussing the
question of the translation of these texts, I aim to shed light on the way
grotesque and, in particular, Rabelaisian effects can be rendered crosslin-
guistically and crossculturally even when language-specific means are used
to evoke them. Although they contain significant culture-specific content,
all three texts under consideration here can provide meaningful insights for
Anglophone readers, in part because of the shared European cultural and
literary history of grotesque humor, in part because of Anglophone read-
ers’ prior familiarity with many of the gender imbalances and injustices
explored in the texts, and in part because of the efforts of the translators to
understand and convey these novels’ grotesque underpinnings.
Scholars within the (relatively new) field of translation studies have found
a number of fruitful ways to engage with questions of gender and to use

Gender and Grotesque Humor 263
the framework of gender studies in approaching translation. These include
investigations of the gendered metaphors widely used to describe the act of
translation (Chamberlain 2004), analysis of strategies in “feminist” transla-
tion (von Flotow 1997), and comparative studies of differences between the
way women and men translate (e.g., Leonardi 2007).
Sherry Simon noted a number of years ago that translation and cultural
studies have a lot to learn from each other. Identity, including sexual identity,
is often hybridized, and a discourse of self-translation is not uncommon in
analyses of gender identities, which are now seen as characterized by mobil-
ity, giving translation the potential to be a useful addition to the analytical
scene, especially given the importance of language and register to questions
of gender (Simon 1996: 134). Similarly, Martín (2005) has explored some of
the possible areas of overlap between gender and translation studies, research
areas that—just like humor studies, in fact—are characterized by interdisci-
plinarity. It is also worth pointing out that translation has always played a
key role in the international exchange of feminist theories and the develop-
ment of a range of approaches to gender studies around the world (Brodzki
2011). Thus it will prove fruitful, in the present analysis, to look at grotesque
representations of gender and sexuality through the lens of translation and
translation studies. The discipline’s focus on language and culture specificity
opens the analysis up to insights into shared cultural heritage and the inter-
play between form and content in complex humorous texts such as these.
2. GROTESQUE HUMOR
According to Philip Thomson (1972), the central feature of the grotesque

is the conflict created by the combination of strong negative feelings, like
horror, pity, or disgust, with a sense of the comic. Although elements of
exaggeration or imagination are usually present in grotesque writing, the
setting must be a real and familiar one—rather than a fantasy world entirely
remote from everyday life—in order for the grotesque to have its full, unset-
tling effect (Thomson 1972: 8). Thus, in the novels examined here, read-
ers encounter a larger-than-life, exaggerated version of what is essentially a
familiar world.
Humorous and amusing elements are central to the grotesque as it appears
in the novels examined here. Unlike some purely comic forms of humor,
where buffoonery, slapstick, and physical exaggeration provoke laughter, the
grotesque hinges upon a sense of horror or discomfort; because of its ambiv-
alent and disturbing nature, it can polarize readers. Whereas some might
appreciate the blackness of this humorous style as a fitting response to the
inescapable tragedy and comedy of human existence, others might find that
those negative feelings overwhelm any ability to find amusement or enjoy-
ment in a given situation. I argue that, regardless of the response of any
individual to this particular conjunction, the grotesque can nevertheless be

264 Brigid Maher
considered a variety of humor, because an element of humorous or comical
incongruity is always present.
The grotesque has a long tradition within European artistic production;
indeed Bernard Mc Elroy (1989: 182–84) traces its antecedents all the way
back to Paleolithic cave art. One key element in the European literary tradi-
tion of grotesque visions of the body and sexuality is the work of Rabelais,
whose “grotesque realism,” as Mikhail Bakhtin (1984: 19) calls it, with its
focus on the reproductive organs, the belly, the genitals, and the buttocks,
elevates the body to “grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” proportions.
The Italian commedia dell’arte, too, draws on grotesque presentations of
the body, with key characters often defined by exaggerated physical traits,
and zanni or servant figures like Arlecchino (Harlequin) obsessed with hun-
ger and bodily functions (Marinetti 2005).
Focusing in particular on modern examples of the satiric grotesque, John R.
Clark (1991: 7, 17–25) argues that this mode has become especially impor-
tant and appropriate as a form of literary expression in the twentieth century,
as “man’s troublous inner life” has become the object of much reflection.
On a similar note, for Mc Elroy (1989: 184), modern grotesque writing is
an expression of powerlessness and fear, as it focuses on “the predicament
of the besieged and humiliated self in its struggle with the brutal and bru-
talising other.” The three Italian works analyzed here can be seen as fit-
ting into this centuries-old tradition that today explores such contemporary
concerns as power imbalances, gender issues, sexual relations, and identity.
Thomson (1972: 11) notes that the grotesque can serve to reflect feelings of
disorientation, and in the work of Cappiello, Ammaniti, and Scarpa, it is
indeed used to express a sense of disenfranchisement and resentment on the
part of characters who feel socially ignored, undervalued, or misunderstood.
This disenfranchisement often comes about as a result of social, linguistic,
or financial disadvantage, and is manifested in the protagonists’ inability
to identify with, or failure to live up to, predominant gender roles in their
society.
In the Italian literature of the last fifteen to twenty years, there has been
something of a trend toward the grotesque interpretation of the body and
sexuality, especially in the work of those labeled pulp writers or cannibali, to
whose ranks some critics have added both Scarpa and Ammaniti, though the
authors themselves do not necessarily agree with this categorization (see, e.g.,
Lucamante 2006). Cappiello’s novel, written during her time in Australia,
where she migrated in the 1970s, has been slotted by critics—also some-
what awkwardly—into the canon of Australian migrant literature. It, too,
uses grotesque humor to satirize and critique gender roles, both in Anglo-
Australian culture and in migrant cultures. Although its structure, content,
and tone set it apart from most migrant memoirs, Ivor Indyk (1992) finds
that its humorous style, which he terms “the comedy of excess” because of
its tendency for exaggeration, recurs in a number of texts by migrants to
Australia, who use it to invert existing power relations in the host society.

The grotesque humor and exaggerated plot twists that Cappiello, Amman-
iti, and Scarpa use to explore these themes are further emphasized by a cer-
tain grotesque quality to the novels’ language, genre, and narrative structure.
They feature a mix of languages or voices; linguistic registers that include
coarse language, colloquialisms, elevated language, and highly descriptive
passages; shifts in perspective, including ironic judgments from the author or
narrator about the characters; and an overall tendency to expressive excess
that mirrors some of the excesses of the characters’ lives. Thus the novels’
grotesque characteristics extend from the macro level of plot and theme
right down to the micro level of language and narrative voice, and all these
juxtapositions and disjunctions, although potentially disruptive, add humor
to the text. This tendency to play with normative literary form, includ-
ing conventions regarding language and plot, has been identified by Clark
(1991: 51–76) as a key feature of modern satiric grotesque. In a crossling-
uistic and translation context, these textual manifestations of the grotesque
can pose a notable challenge for translators. As formal and linguistic mani-
festations of an overarching theme, they are examples of the way form and
content—or text and context, as Harvey puts it (2004: 421)—may be inex-
tricably linked in a literary work, with each requiring the translator’s care-
ful analysis and attention. Harvey’s example is “gay writing,” in which any
translation analysis demands at least as much attention to the wider subcul-
ture of readers and writers in the gay community (in both source and target
cultures) as it does to the detail of the particular linguistic markers of gay
identity that appear in the text. In the present case, attention must be paid
both to the plot and its commentary about gender relations and to the way
the highly disruptive and critical satire comes through in the texts’ language.
Although one might say that ideally all grotesque features of language, style,
and structure should be retained in translation in order to preserve the
overall character of a text, in practice, differences among languages, audi-
ences, and literary systems can make this difficult to achieve. In the present
analysis, I do not seek to evaluate translations of the Italian texts in question;
rather I present some instances in which translators have used such tech-
niques as compensation, “negotiation” (see Eco 2003), and language play to
(re)create grotesque effects in their translations. In so doing, I hope to show
that, despite the challenges inherent in all forms of humor translation, gro-
tesque humor—even when language- or culture-specific—can travel beyond
the confines of its context of origin, thus allowing an author’s perspective on
questions of gender, power, and sexuality to reach new audiences.
3. DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND DISILLUSIONMENT:

CAPPIELLO’S PAESE FORTUNATO
Cappiello wrote Paese fortunato (1981) after migrating to Australia from

Italy (where she later returned). She wrote the novel in Italian; three years

266 Brigid Maher
afterward, it was translated into English by Italian-Australian academic
Gaetano Rando (Cappiello 2003). It is an autobiographical novel about the
character Rosa’s experiences as a migrant in Sydney, a setting depicted as both
beautiful and exploitative, where the fortune of the title seems to elude her.
Back-breaking work, when available, provides little fulfillment, and friend-
ships are depicted as largely self-serving. The plot is picaresque and lacks a
strong narrative thrust, reflecting the narrator-protagonist’s own direction-
less existence. Rosa is an exaggerated, larger-than-life figure, and not at all
the stereotype of the submissive, virginal, hard-working, and uneducated
southern European Catholic migrant. The book highlights both Rosa’s own
culture’s double standards, as well as those of Anglo-Australian culture. The
unequal power relations between marginalized women migrants and domi-
nant Anglo men enjoying a position of centrality in the community are often
presented in a grotesque frame that rejects pathos, sympathy, or complete
realism, embracing instead a complex mix of exaggeration, rage, humor,
irony, and self-pity.
Within the novel, characters’ personal situations often have dramatic
physical manifestations. Rosa and her friends struggle with the demands of
a hypocritical society, one that looks down on women who are not virgins
(inducing some of Rosa’s acquaintances to get “patched up” before mar-
riage), yet at the same time seeks to take advantage of everything they have
to offer. As a migrant and a woman, Rosa is repeatedly exploited, insulted,
and misunderstood by those around her, whose behavior she in turn sati-
rizes viciously. Grotesque representations of the body convey her almost
visceral rejection of the society of which she is seeking to become a part.
Early on in her time in Australia she “fall[s] ill because of emigration rejec-
tion” (Cappiello 2003: 2)—the very process of migration provokes in her a
physical reaction, like the rejection of a transplanted organ.
Within the group of misfits that forms Rosa’s main social circle there is no
room for sisterhood or female solidarity. Her friends and acquaintances are
never presented in a wholly sympathetic or realistic light; rather their plight
is exaggerated to the point where it becomes comically absurd even as we
acknowledge its tragic grounding in real-life struggles and situations. When
Sofia, a young woman, goes missing, Rosa and her friends suspect she has
committed suicide, possibly out of shame after an undignified (but comical)
episode at a dinner party during which, after fending off a man’s advances,
her wig fell into her soup (Cappiello 1981: 160; 2003: 120). Yet even in the
face of this apparent tragedy, the women’s main preoccupation is deciding
who among them will now have to “assume the difficult task [previously
handled by Sofia] of simulating abortions and suicides in order to bludge a
few dollars” (2003: 118; 1981: 158).
Cappiello does not shy away from depicting the “migrant’s inferno”
(2003: 3), in which for women in particular, the body and sexuality rep-
resent both a liability and one more unfulfilled need. Yet at the same time,
nothing is taken entirely seriously. Sofia, it transpires, is not in fact dead but
has run away with the man from the dinner party. Later in the novel, she

ends up with another boyfriend, the jealous Nicola. He is depicted as abu-
sive and deluded, but in her exaggerated, weepy response to his aggression
and his attempts to limit her freedom, she comes across as manipulative and
insincere:
quando infine riusciva ad agguantarla per la coda viscida, lei erompeva

in saltellanti singhiozzi, i più bestiali e teatrali singhiozzi che fosse dato
di udire. Pentimento, lacrime, giuramenti, lacrime, promesse, lacrime,
pianto chilometrico che formava un laghetto artificiale con lei nel mezzo
a navigare nella barchetta di carta. Più il pianto s’allungava, più il lago
s’allargava diventando fiume, e il fiume correva al mare immenso.
L’immensità di Sofia. E lì io ci annegavo. (Cappiello 1981: 181)
***
When at last he managed to seize her by her slimy tail she would break
out in whooping hiccups, the most bestial and theatrical type you
would ever hear anywhere. Making up, tears, troth-plighting, tears,
promises, tears, miles of tears forming an artificial lake with her sailing
in the middle of it in her little paper boat. The longer the tears lasted,
the bigger the lake became, turning into a river which flowed down to
the immense ocean. The immensity of Sofia. And I would drown in it.
(2003: 137)
This grotesque Rabelaisian (over)reaction, mixing comedy with deep pain,

is mirrored in the emotional discharge of the narrator herself at the end of
the book. In that scene she explains that, due to her subordinate position,
“all social strata have been pissing on [her] from a great height”; she claims
she has stored up so much of it that she could “piss down from the top of
the wall for centuries on end and unleash a second flood of biblical propor-
tions” (Cappiello 2003: 168; 1981: 220). A Rabelaisian response appears to
be the only defense the novel’s female protagonists have against their own
exploitation by more powerful elements in society.
Cappiello’s narrative style is unconventional and combines colloquial-
isms and swearing with more literary language. The Italian original, or
“source text,” is peppered with English words, reflecting the common ten-
dency among many Italian-Australians to borrow from the language of
their host country, particularly in those areas where straightforward Italian
equivalents of everyday Australian concepts are not available, or where the
English term is a more frequent part of their daily life, and in particular
their working life; examples from the novel include suburbs, hostel, fish
and chips, backyard, cleaners, overtime, wages, factory, and compensation.
This juxtaposition of registers and languages often serves to convey irony
(cf. Mizzau 1989: 57–62), as well as the narrator’s conflicted and com-
bative attitude. The ironic contrast between colloquial structures, higher-
register Italian vocabulary, and a commonplace English word appears in the

268 Brigid Maher
following example. Afraid of Sofia’s jealous boyfriend, her friends Victoria
and Beniamina
non uscivano di casa al mattino se prima la vecchia inserviente non

andava in avanscoperta, brandendo il mop. (1981: 168)
***
did not go out in the morning if the old cleaning woman did not go
ahead of them first brandishing her mop. (2003: 126)
In this example, the tragic aspect of the women’s quasi-imprisonment and

their fear of male violence is given a blackly humorous turn by the imagery
and language used, combining the dramatic and dashing “brandire” (bran-
dish) and “avanscoperta” (reconnaissance) with the prosaic, housewifely—
and English—“mop.” In the absence of gallant knights, Rosa and her friends,
themselves a far cry from the virtuous damsels of fairytales, must seek what-
ever protection they can find. Indeed it often seems as though irony is one of
Rosa’s few weapons in her daily struggle against poverty and alienation.
As well as contributing to the novel’s ironic tone, this unconventional and
at times incongruous style enhances its grotesque and humorous qualities,
capturing the narrator’s disadvantaged linguistic and cultural position as a
migrant who has a great love of writing but a low level of formal education.
This can be difficult to convey in translation, because it requires a similar mix
of registers in order to create a similar effect. It also requires, on the part of
the translator, a willingness to write “badly” at times, using vocabulary and
constructions whose literary effect comes not necessarily from their elegance
or refinement, but from the mixture of strong sensations and emotions—
comedy, incongruity, pity—that characterizes the grotesque. Rando fre-
quently achieves this style in English through a combination of registers
that parallels that of the source text. In the example above, he retains “bran-
dish” and chooses “did not” over the more colloquial contraction “didn’t”;
this contrasts with expressions like “the old cleaning lady,” which is rather
informal. Overall, the image remains humorous, even though the juxtaposi-
tion of two different languages—Italian and English—is lost.
Just as Rosa’s organism seems to “reject” the foreign body that is Aus-
tralian life, her friends—migrant women from Italy and elsewhere—also fall
physically ill as a result of their lifestyles and the demands of their work. In
the middle of the night, Rosa overhears talk of
prolasso genitale, flora batterica, bacilli di Doderlein, funghi e para-

funghi, trichomonas, acido lattico, muco secco, vulve surriscaldate, bat-
teri, parassiti, pneumococco, stafilococco. (Cappiello 1981: 146–147)
***

genital prolapse, bacterial flora, Doderlein’s bacilli, fungus and para-
fungus, trichoma, lactic acid, dry mucus, over-heated vulvae, bacte-
ria, parasites, gonococco, streptococco, pneumococco, staphylococco.
(Cappiello 2003: 110).
Here we see an instance of the translation conveying not only the gro-
tesque content of the source text—a decidedly unappealing list of inter-
nal and external ailments—but also using an intriguing linguistic resource
to enhance it. Rando’s unconventional translations of the bacteria reflect
the Italian nomenclature rather than the “correct” English terminology,
whereby the names would end in -coccus rather than -cocco (gonococcus,
etc.). This translation decision enables Rando to retain the subsequent word-
play, in which Rosa states, upon overhearing her friends’ conversation, that
the names of these diseases make her thirsty, so that she gets out of bed to
get a drink, unsettling her friends talking in the other room. She adds par-
enthetically in the English translation that “cocco is Italian for coconut”
(2003: 110). This choice of Italian medical terminology and the insertion
explaining the pun underscores the fact that Rosa lives in two languages.
It also retains the source text’s link between illness and food or drink, a
reference that would otherwise have been lost along with the Italian pun.
This is a theme that appears elsewhere in the text; for example, Rosa is
not only ill but unable to eat when she arrives in Australia (1981: 2), and
the physical health of Anglo-Australians has grotesque gastronomic over-
tones, as they are depicted as resembling and smelling like the food they
eat—greasy fish and chips, hot dogs, coca cola, and butter (1981: 28). By
keeping the Italian names for the bacteria and thus retaining the wordplay,
Rando is able to avoid depriving Anglophone readers of an important indi-
cation of Rosa’s biculturality and playfulness with language, as well as her
flippant and unsympathetic response to her friends’ unsavory medical con-
ditions.
In spite of such efforts on Rando’s part to instill in his translation some of
the linguistic unpredictability and unconventionality of the source text—or
perhaps because of those efforts—reviewers’ responses to the narrative style
of the novel in translation, as well as to its characters and content, were
not always positive. It was the grotesque elements of language, plot, and
characterization that puzzled or even disgusted some Australian reviewers
when the translation appeared. Because of grotesque humor’s dependence
on horror or shock value, responses of this kind are not uncommon. Helen
Brown’s (1985: 18) assessment is particularly damning: “Her writing has
strength and vitality, I’ll grant, but the images are unrelentingly disgusting,
both physically and morally” (see Maher 2008a: 149–52). As noted earlier,
the element of physical disgust, shock, or disruption that grotesque humor
hinges upon can, for some readers, overpower any humorous effect. Thus
Rando’s efforts to convey this text’s strident social critique in all its com-
plexity may have led to negative reactions from part of the readership. It

270 Brigid Maher
seems likely, from his preface to the translation and comments he has made
elsewhere (e.g., Rando 1995: 64), that this was a risk he was well aware
of, given his familiarity with the cultural, indeed bicultural, context of the
source text and with its confronting Rabelaisian poetics.
4. MALE VIOLENCE AND DISRESPECT TOWARD WOMEN:

AMMANITI’S TI PRENDO E TI PORTO VIA
In Ti prendo e ti porto via, too, relations between the sexes are fraught, and
this has grotesque bodily manifestations in the characters’ lives (Amman-
iti 2004). The setting is Ischiano Scalo, a small, fictional town in central
Italy, whose inhabitants have few opportunities and many prejudices, as
well as a very provincial outlook on the world. The novel’s colorful, often
comical, cast includes the womanizing musician, Graziano Biglia, who ends
up in a relationship with the repressed teacher, Flora; a slightly unhinged
policeman, Bruno Miele; his aggressive father, Italo, caretaker at the local
school; and a group of teenage bullies who torment young Pietro, a timid
twelve-year-old who is terrified of his abusive father. Although most are
decidedly unpleasant individuals, the novel is very funny because the dif-
ferent characters’ perspectives and opinions are woven into the narration
to ironic effect, and both plot and characterization provide many comic
moments. Readers’ amused reactions are overlaid with feelings of pity, how-
ever, due to the ultimately tragic fates of both Flora and Pietro at the hands
of aggressive and violent men within the Ischiano community. The language
of the novel is complex because of the presence of several different voices
in the forms of narration, dialogue, interior monologue, and free indirect
discourse.
Although the setting and social milieu are very different from those of
Paese fortunato, the characters likewise have marginal status in society, and
many live lives marked by inarticulateness, dissatisfaction, and occasional
violence. The male characters, in particular, struggle to deal with their emo-
tions and with conflict, so that their anger and resentment at their personal
situation are often expressed with an exaggerated physicality. For example,
at the culmination of a feud with his neighbor, Pietro’s father—a particularly
aggressive and abusive character—catapults a donkey onto the neighbor’s
roof, narrowly missing the family watching a television variety show in their
lounge. The scene is comic yet also disgusting, as pieces of Poppi the donkey,
“guts and bones and shit and hairs” (“budella e ossa e merda e peli”), adorn
every corner of the bloodstained upstairs bedroom (Ammaniti 2006: 255;
2004: 291). The black humor is compounded by the fact that the device
Signor Moroni uses to launch Poppi skyward was built in collaboration
with his sons in what might—in a less-dysfunctional family—have seemed
like a healthy moment of father-son interaction. Instead, the enterprise turns
into a fiasco of the worst kind. Any chance of male bonding is lost, and the

father’s exaggerated masculinity and aggression simply serve to alienate his
somewhat eccentric sons even further.
Throughout the novel, inequality in power relations between the sexes is
expressed through the grotesque. After he “charms” the virginal Flora with
the aid of a date-rape drug, Graziano Biglia takes her to the spa at Saturnia,
where moments of slapstick comedy are overlaid with sexual violence. By
the end of the novel, as a jilted Flora lies decomposing, even before her
death, in a bathtub, the fate of this character has well and truly moved from
comedy to tragedy. The disjunction between the comedy of some of these
scenes and their ultimately tragic consequences is reflected in the language
in which they are related. Graziano’s and Flora’s thoughts and judgments
are alternated with the voice of the omniscient narrator, so that readers are
constantly reminded of the simultaneous, and rather disturbing, co-presence
of tragic and comic perspectives on their relationship.
Confusion about how to treat women is also a feature of the school care-
taker Italo Miele’s life. Despite being married, he meets every week with
Alima, an African prostitute, for dinner and sex, until one evening he tricks
her into eating pork, which he knows is forbidden by her strongly held reli-
gious beliefs (2004: 107–12). Her furious reaction to her half-eaten plate of
ragù is somewhat comic—she yells at Italo in broken Italian (broken English
in the translation) and then storms out of the restaurant as the other diners
look on “fish-like” (2006: 92)—yet also moving, because the strength of her
personal conviction inspires admiration and pity for the way her circum-
stances force her to make a living: in spite of her commitment to her religion,
“she couldn’t not be a prostitute, because she sent the money to her children
in Africa” (2006: 91).
The novel’s interplay of voices and perspectives means that the transla-
tor’s choice of words and expressions is crucial to conveying its colorful
personalities, as well as its humorous content and the way it shines a criti-
cal and satirical light on commonly accepted gender roles. Some of Hunt’s
translation choices, while not at first glance providing close equivalents of
source text expressions, help to reinforce certain grotesque elements of the
text. For example, when muttering to himself about the debacle with Alima
and the ragù, Italo refers to the brothel as “lo Zoccolificio” (2004: 108),
roughly, “the whore factory,” combining “zoccola,” a derogatory word for
“prostitute,” with the suffix -ificio, meaning a factory that specializes in the
manufacture of a particular product. Hunt translates this as “Meat Mar-
ket” (2006: 89). This expression, catchy in a manner similar to the original
word, effectively conveys Italo’s unconcerned acceptance that he is select-
ing and “buying” a woman churned out to meet consumer demand. More-
over, through the appearance of the word “meat,” this choice creates a link
back to the pork ragù incident cited earlier, a link that is not present in the
source text. Further interplay of this kind occurs when, annoyed at Alima’s
angry reaction, Italo refers to her—in the English translation—as “a pig-
headed bitch.” The pig reference is not present in the source text, nor, for

272 Brigid Maher
that matter, is any derogatory term equivalent to “bitch”; rather, the Italian
Italo just says “Certo che ha proprio un carattere” (2004: 116), meaning
“she sure has a temper.” Because this is Italo’s voice, the stronger English
expression is not inappropriate given his frequent swearing elsewhere in the
novel, as well as his obvious insensitivity toward Alima; indeed, the inclu-
sion of “bitch” here can be seen as compensating for the loss of the term
“zoccola” earlier on and is in keeping with Italo’s sexist attitudes. The
choice of the epithet “pigheaded” further enhances the grotesque character
of the scene and adds an extra reminder of the offence Alima has suffered.
Because the presentation of Italo is satirical and critical of his misogyny
(reader sympathy lies ultimately with his victim, Alima), translating this
scene would presumably present the translator with none of the internal
conflicts that Luise von Flotow (1997: 25–27) has described in her discus-
sion of translators working with texts that contain non-playful instances
of machismo, sexism, or misogyny, texts that cause the translators them-
selves moments of personal ethical discomfort. Thus, the translator has been
able to highlight, through two seemingly minor decisions at the lexical or
micro level, one of the thematic and stylistic concerns of the text at the
macro level.
Interestingly, this is one of very few cases in which Hunt adds swear-
ing that was not present in the original. The overwhelming tendency one
finds throughout his translation, upon close comparison with the source
text, is in fact a reduction in the occurrence of swearing (see Maher 2012).
Because much of the swearing that is lost in translation is related to the
body and sexuality—constructions centered on words referring to the male
anatomy, such as “cazzo” and “coglione”—its replacement with weaker
or even non-taboo expressions has the effect of attenuating somewhat the
grotesque and violent tone of the novel, as well as reducing the intensity
with which the male characters express their desire for sexual power over
women. The selection of expressions like “pigheaded bitch” and “Meat
Market” can therefore be considered instances of compensation for this
overall loss.
5. LITERARY EXPERIMENTATION AND PASTICHE: SCARPA’S

OCCHI SULLA GRATICOLA
Like Ammaniti, Scarpa, too, is often labeled a cannibale writer. Much of

his work, from his poetry and fiction to his essays and autobiographical
pieces, uses a grotesque style of humor to explore themes related to sexu-
ality and the body. Indeed, Venezia è un pesce (Venice Is a Fish), his quirky
guide to his hometown, presents the city entirely through the sensations
of different parts of the human body wandering its streets and bridges
(Scarpa 2006, 2008).

Scarpa’s first novel, Occhi sulla graticola (2005), also set in Venice, is
the fragmented story of a love affair never quite begun. Rabelaisian scatol-
ogy brings the protagonists together when Carolina Groppo is struck with
diarrhea on a vaporetto water-boat on the Grand Canal. In a parody of
the typical boy-meets-girl scenario, the city’s picturesque waterways, nor-
mally seen as quintessentially romantic, are polluted by the young woman’s
intestinal discharge as she is pursued by her ardent suitor, Alfredo, who
hopes they will be joined together in what the novel’s subtitle terms “[un]
duraturo vincolo affettivo” (“an enduring bond of devotion”; my transla-
tion). This grotesque meeting takes on tragic overtones later in the novel,
when we learn that Carolina’s dramatic bout of diarrhea was caused by a
yogic purge she undertook upon ending an incestuous relationship with her
grandfather. In an interview, Scarpa has spoken about his effort to mix the
tragic and the comic in Occhi sulla graticola so that the reader feels unsure
whether to laugh or cry at what could be, for Carolina, either a good expe-
rience finishing badly, or a bad one finishing well (Scarpa 1999: 125). The
exploitation of the young by the old is a recurring theme in the novel, and is
again expressed in a grotesque, sexualized frame in the story of two young,
male students who supplement their rent payments to their elderly landlady
with daily doses of semen for her to use as part of her age-defying beauty
regime.
Another manifestation of grotesque humor in the novel is art student
Carolina’s part-time job. She is employed by the publisher of Japanese
erotic manga in Italian translation to draw in the genitalia that the origi-
nal artists had intentionally omitted. This is in keeping with the magazine
editor’s belief that his Italian audiences prefer as much titillating detail as
possible, regardless of the skill of the original Japanese manga artists in
conveying intense emotion and sexual arousal without breaking taboos sur-
rounding the depiction of certain body parts and sexual acts. Thus Carolina
and several other sexily pseudonymized employees of KissManga magazine
spend their days painstakingly embellishing the comics with the required
genitalia.
Scarpa’s own narrative style throughout the text displays a similar open-
ness to graphic detail as he resolutely resists any temptation to tone down
the playful and grotesque language; this is a style of writing where nothing
is hidden, where narrative “endowments” are on full display. So although
it is very different from the Cappiello’s and Ammaniti’s novels discussed
here, Occhi sulla graticola shares with them the feature of grotesque narra-
tive style, as it mixes voices, registers, and even genres, including academic
writing, personal notes, treatises, jargon, and diary entries. Just as ancient
Roman grotesque art mixed animal, vegetable, human, and architectural
elements (Thomson 1972: 12), so a number of different and seemingly
incompatible linguistic and stylistic forms co-occur in Scarpa’s text, all to
humorous effect.

274 Brigid Maher
Because the narrative style often takes on grotesque forms in playful
response to the storyline, it is important for the translator of a work like
Occhi sulla graticola to be aware of the way in which micro and macro con-
siderations interact. Thus, in the scene in which Alfredo swims after Caro-
lina in the Grand Canal, his first-person narration displays a kind of verbal
diarrhea to match her intestinal complaint. It would be unfortunate if the
translator ended up, even inadvertently, “censoring” the novel’s linguistic
and stylistic incorporation of its grotesque plot and theme by, for example,
tidying up or normalizing its language. At the same time, however, target
language rules and conventions necessarily shape the translator’s decisions
and strategies, requiring constant negotiation, as Umberto Eco (2003) terms
it, between the translator’s interpretation of the source text and the audi-
ence’s needs and expectations. In my own translation of an excerpt of the
novel (Maher 2008b: 178–96), I found that the challenge in the canal scene
was to recreate the protagonist’s long-winded, excessive style in English—
preserving the rambling sentences, for example—while at the same time
adapting the translation to some of the conventions of English grammar and
punctuation, in keeping with the English language’s greater resistance to
long sentences lacking a strong structural organization. Paradoxically per-
haps, there appears to be a need for greater reflection, consideration, and at
times even moderation on the translator’s part when dealing with texts that
appear to show little moderation and that revel in excess and over-the-top
language and style. Ultimately, the instability and confusion of the novel’s
language reflects the challenges faced by the characters as they seek to nego-
tiate the complexities of the contemporary “dating game” in circumstances
that are far from ideal. As such, this linguistic effect, above and beyond the
actual plot, is essential to reproducing the novel’s humor in translation.
CONCLUSION
My brief case studies show how grotesque humor can provide a productive,
if controversial and complex, way of exploring questions of gender, sexual-
ity, power, and the body. In spite of their differences, the works by Cap-
piello, Ammaniti, and Scarpa all draw on the shocking and disruptive—yet
also comical—exaggeration of the grotesque to challenge and critique
the position of the marginalized in society, particularly women, but also
the young, the vulnerable, and the disadvantaged. A preoccupation with the
body, including bodily functions and sexuality, renders the texts’ comments
on contemporary society especially striking and at times confronting. In
addition, these texts illustrate how language and narration can be used for
humorous effect, manifesting grotesque forms corresponding to the grotes-
queries occurring at the level of storyline.
A common cultural heritage can, to some extent, attenuate linguistic and
cultural difference, and grotesque humor is certainly part of Europe’s shared

literary history. This means that grotesque content, in spite of its confront-
ing nature, can in some ways be more straightforward to translate than the
grotesque experimentation with or subversion of language and form, which
is necessarily language-specific. Yet grotesque writing styles can also remain
meaningful in translation: a number of instances have been presented in
which translators maintain the source text’s link between form and content
through the use of such strategies as compensation, the recreation or addi-
tion of wordplay, the mix of styles and language varieties, and the negotia-
tion of a delicate balance between the competing demands of source and
target languages.
Indeed, the process of translation, as well as the analysis of literary trans-
lations, can have a hermeneutic value in that it draws our attention to the
way an author deploys language and literary style, including humorous
styles such as the grotesque. Translation involves not just a simple mechani-
cal transfer of meaning, but rather a full re-evocation of the way a text
incorporates a particular literary mode. By virtue of being one of the closest
forms of reading and literary analysis, translation can, as my examples seek
to show, elucidate the interaction between the macro level of themes and
plot, and the micro level of language and style, ultimately shedding light on
new meanings and new ways of describing and critiquing power relations
and, in the examples presented here, gender relations.

18 Queer Humor
Gay Comedy between
Camp and Diversity
Rainer Emig
Even before homosexuality became established as a cultural concept in the

late nineteenth century, men who were erotically attracted to other men and
men who failed to show sufficient interest in women had become staples in
art, literature, and drama.1 Women less so, according to feminist and lesbian
scholarship tells us, because female sexuality remained a marginalized and
often simply disputed area—disputed of course largely by men. Even today,
lesbians face a harder struggle for recognition, which is linked with visibility
(see Wilton 1995). The representation of men who have failed to live up to
ideals of masculinity and men with same-sex interests, however, has long
been categorized in three broad groups: the dangerous pervert, the tragic
pervert, and the comic pervert.2 The first category includes characters as
diverse as seducers and mass murderers; the second anyone from the melan-
choly loner to the modern AIDS victim.
It is the third category that the present chapter is concerned with: the
male deviant as a figure of fun. Is this the least problematic representation of
male homosexuality? Does it offer opportunities for increased understand-
ing, tolerance, or sympathy, because humor is frequently associated with
the creation of group identity and membership and often taken to be the
opposite of exclusion and aggression? The present chapter will ask these
questions in the context of contemporary “queer” comedy on stage, film,
and television. Its examples will be drawn from Anglo-American comedy,
with some excursions into its various other cultural counterparts.
The most common representation of what we would nowadays call a gay
man is that of the hysterical, over-the-top effeminate “sissy,” “queen,” or
“faggot” (all terms are late nineteenth century, and the last especially seems
to have emerged in the US; see the Oxford English Dictionary [OED]). That
not being a “real” man equals being “like” women (or rather: like a carica-
ture of women) is telling and has been analyzed and criticized by feminist
scholarship. For gender scholars this represents clear evidence of the fact
that the dislike and hatred of gay men by other “normal” men, the attitude
called homophobia, is structurally related (or indeed the same as) misog-
yny, the dislike and hatred of women on which many patriarchal structures

Queer Humor 277
of inequality are based (see Duncan 2006). Already in Geoffrey Chaucer’s
famous Canterbury Tales (1973: 152) from the late fourteenth century we
encounter a character like the Pardoner, a man of the church who sells for-
giveness for people’s sins, in the typical shape of the “faggot”:
This pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex,

But smothe it heng, as dooth a strike of flex;
By ounces henge hise lokkés that he hadde,
And therwith he hise shuldres overspradde;
But thinne it lay, by colpons, oon and oon. [. . .]
Swiche glaringe eyen hadde he as an hare. [. . .]
A vois he hadde as smal as hath a goot.
No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholdė have;
As smothe it was as it were late yshave.
I trowe he were a gelding or a mare.
Long hair could also be a sign of masculinity at the time, but its descrip-
tion as both blond (traditionally a feminine beauty ideal) and thin betrays
any association of stalwart masculine physicality. In the same category fall
his hare-like eyes, hares representing timidity; his unattractive high-pitched
voice; and especially his lack of a beard, the biological marker of mature
masculinity. The clearly derogatory verdict by the narrator that calls the
Pardoner a gelding (a castrated male horse) or even a mare makes it clear
that the description is not only that of a physically grotesque character, but
of one whose sexual proclivities tend toward passive anal sex. “Sodomy”
was a loose term in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and could mean
all kinds of sexual and moral misdemeanors. Yet its closest association was
with “buggery,” anal intercourse, especially between men (according to the
OED, the former is recorded in English since the late thirteenth century
and the latter since the early fourteenth century). In gay German slang even
today a “mare” is the passive recipient in this arrangement. Making the
Pardoner a ridiculous yet harmless pervert is a critical strategy in Chaucer,
critical mainly of the hypocrisy of the Church, but also of those who would
be willing to buy salvation from it.
The cliché, an established cultural concept or icon that can be reproduced
and recognized without any effort, is a double-edged affair. It safeguards
communication and also the feeling of community, because understanding
clichés is, like understanding jokes, a sign of successful participation in a
cultural sphere. Yet clichés and stereotypes also cement perceptions and
make the recognition of difference and change difficult. They therefore act
as conserving and conservative devices and can create or promote prejudice
(see Emig 2000: 4).
Humor, on the other hand, is often taken to embody playfulness and
therefore flexibility, and also the creation of community through inclusion

278 Rainer Emig
in the joke. Yet those who are the butt of jokes are not always integrated
into the community. Indeed, they can become permanently excluded from
it—when forming the object of jokes turns them into outsiders. This is
where the joke meets the cliché and stereotype again. Thus jokes and humor
have the potential to be conservative as well as subversive. Mikhail Bakhtin
(1984) is the theorist who advocated that humor and comedy are intrinsi-
cally subversive. Yet when reading his treatise on the carnivalesque, one
quickly notices that the late-medieval scenario he describes is as much affir-
mative of cultural norms and rituals as its temporary subversion ultimately
serves the upholding of the cultural and political status quo.3 This is the rea-
son why clichés and comedy are so intimately linked in both structural and
ideological ways. They both rely on repetition and thus assume the stability
of a shared cultural code and context.
Yet why would comedies and comedians in the supposedly liberated,
fragmented, and decentered late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
still employ the same “faggot” cliché? The answer might lie in the uses,
advantages, and disadvantages of the cultural concept that embraces this cli-
ché, that of “camp.” The term was invented by Christopher Isherwood and
popularized in theoretical discourse by Susan Sontag. In his 1954 novel The
World in the Evening, Isherwood (quoted in Cleto 1999: 51) has a character
argue in favor of campness as both the basis of high art and a homosexual
mark of distinction:
“You thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed
in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich?
Yes, in queer circles, they call that camping. It’s all very well in its place,
but it’s an utterly debased form—” Charles’ eyes shone delightedly.
[. . .] “What I mean by camp is something much more fundamental. You
can call the other Low Camp, if you like; then what I’m talking about is
High Camp. High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for
example, and of course of Baroque art.”
In her ground-breaking essay “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” from 1964, Sontag (1996:

232) claims that camp has been a rarely named and not yet discussed con-
cept and defines it as “not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such.
Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exag-
geration” and as “something of a private code, a badge of identity even,
among small urban cliques” (see also Butler 1990: 135–36).
What both Isherwood and Sontag stress is largely the aesthetic quality
of camp. Gay men would certainly approve of the definition of camp as a
sophisticated lifestyle. Yet, as Sontag concedes, camp is also clearly a social
mark of distinction, and one that works in two ways. On the one hand
it facilitates self-recognition of gay men by gay men. It is thus a marker
of a shared group identity. At the same time it is a demarcation against
the straight world. A camp person signals to the heterosexual mainstream

Queer Humor 279
that he is not fully part of it. But why would he do this, if identification as
homosexual brings with it a range of disadvantages and discriminations—
some of which are even visible in Sontag’s spirited defense of camp when
she calls it in love with the “unnatural”? The reason is that being identified
as camp, as we could already see in the medieval example of the Pardoner,
adds to the problematic label of deviance—that of harmlessness. The camp
character may be different, but he will eventually be nonthreatening. This
is why cultures and societies where male homosexuality is still a highly
problematic question are happiest with camp stereotypes of gay men—and
least happy with any that are not easily distinguished from heterosexual
clichés of masculinity. On a trip through Cuba, for example, I encountered
the camp “screaming faggot” cliché at every single cabaret show that was
offered in several hotels that I stayed at. Other representations of homo-
sexuality, however, were conspicuously absent. It is also telling that in Ish-
erwood’s example from the second half of the twentieth century the same
clichés are in place that were on display in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century
one: a man who looks like a woman (artificially blond and effeminate).
What Isherwood’s example stresses, moreover, is that performance (here as
an imitation of Marlene Dietrich) is part and parcel of camp, a feature that
relates it to comedy.
Part of the harmlessness of the camp gay man is indeed his humor, or
rather, his comedy potential. In the same way that black people have to live
up to the racist stereotype that they all “got rhythm,” gay men constantly
have to prove that they are capable of witty repartee and funny one-liners.
Oscar Wilde is here, of course, the most famous historical example, and one
who helped to cement the cliché (see Bergman 1993). Yet even in suppos-
edly critical postmodern media depictions of male homosexuality, such as
the very successful British TV series Queer as Folk, the cliché is perpetuated
and even spelled out.4 When Vince, a closeted character who is not out to
his workmates, is persuaded in Episode 2 to meet them in a straight pub,
he reports his impressions on entering this alien environment via his mobile
phone to his friend Stuart:
It’s all true. Everything we’ve ever been told. Oh my God! Everything
but the flocked wallpaper. Ah, and the people! There are people talking
in sentences that have no punchline, and they don’t even care!
This self-perpetuated stereotype of male homosexuality links the cultural

perception of the character to figures such as court jesters—whose social
and often physical differences were tolerated (and even rewarded) if coupled
with entertainment qualities. Even today the few openly gay TV person-
alities in Britain and elsewhere are commonly comedians, such as Graham
Norton, Alan Carr, Julian Clary, or Paul O’Grady (formerly known as his
incarnation, the foul-mouthed transvestite Lily Savage) on British TV, or
the recently deceased Dirk Bach (overweight, undersized, and dressed in

280 Rainer Emig
clownish costumes) and Thomas Hermanns (the ever-grinning presenter of
the stand-up comedy show Quatsch Comedy Club) on German TV. None
of them is associated with eroticism or danger. Several of these characters
cross-dress or, as in the case of O’Grady, have an alter ego as a transvestite.
Thus even harsh verbal routines are tempered by associations with clichéd
femininity. This particular kind of blunt and obscene talk is called “bitch-
ing.” The link with both effeminacy and misogynist notions of femininity is
again evident.
Tempering alterity, making it palatable and tolerable, is largely the func-
tion of camp representations of gay men in the modern media.4 That this
need not be a purely negative thing can be seen in early shows at times when
open male homosexuality on TV and elsewhere would have been scandal-
ous and indeed liable to prosecution. One must not forget that male homo-
sexuality only became legalized in England and Wales in 1969 (and only
in 1980 in Scotland and in 1982 in Northern Ireland)—and in then West
Germany in 1969 (yet only for men over twenty-one years of age; further
changes followed in 1973 and 1994).
The TV comedy Are You Being Served set in the clothes section of a
British department store, contained much sexual innuendo in its dialogue.6
It also contained the character of Mr. Humphries (his full name was the
camp concoction Wilberforce Claybourne Humphries), whose shrill atti-
tudes contributed to the show’s long-term success. The actor John Inman,
who played Humphries, eventually made a living out of this camp cliché
and ended his career as a pantomime dame (i.e., cross-dressing). Yet he
also reports on negative reactions to his character, interestingly by the gay
community:
In man reported that four or five members of the group Campaign

for Homosexual Equality picketed one of his shows in protest as they
believed his persona did not help their cause. Inman said that “they
thought I was over exaggerating the gay character. But I don’t think
I do. In fact there are people far more camp than Mr. Humphries walk-
ing around this country. Anyway, I know for a fact that an enormous
number of viewers like Mr. Humphries and don’t really care whether
he’s camp or not. So far from doing harm to the homosexual image,
I feel I might be doing some good.” Both Inman and David Croft stated
that the character was “just a mother’s boy,” and that his sexual orien-
tation was never explicitly stated. (“John Inman”)
Inman himself was homosexual, yet only entered a civil partnership with
his long-term partner two years before his death, in 2005. His cagey atti-
tude was typical of homosexual actors and comedians until very recently.
Another British example, Kenneth Williams, camp star of twenty-six Carry
On films from the 1950s to the late 1970s, publicly insisted that he was
celibate—rather than opting for the more typical Carry On-style innuendo.

Queer Humor 281
Inman’s somewhat contradictory statements about his version of camp as
exaggerating and normalizing are interesting in connection with what has
been discussed earlier. The camp cliché is indeed alive—on stage and screen
and in the streets. Doing some good for ideas of male homosexuality here
clearly means making it acceptable, albeit only in a comedic framework, to
the heterosexual mainstream. Part of the strategy, as one of the series’ script-
writers, David Croft, also stresses, is, however, effectively downplaying the
camp character’s sexuality and thus the source of his deviance. Making him
a “mother’s boy” removes both the threat of deviance and any aspirations
to a competitive mature masculinity that might irritate and challenge het-
erosexual and especially male heterosexual viewers.
That male homosexuality is a challenge and threat to male heterosexuals
is evidenced by homophobia and its attendant discriminations and aggres-
sion, something that is still rampant and seems to be on the increase among
a by-no-means-enlightened younger generation. One way of meeting this
conflict is by removing the threat and turning it into the cultural Other of
the cliché of the masculine mature male—as effeminate and childish, that
is, the funny camp guy. Another was chosen by Queer as Folk, a series that
made its central gay protagonists attractive and successful. By giving them
the lifestyle that gay and straight men desire (flashy cars, luxury flats, good
looks, promiscuous sex), the series managed to appeal not only to gay men
and straight women, but also straight young men who are generally averse
to open displays of male homosexuality but were apparently seduced by the
characters’ potential as hedonist straight role models (see Emig 2001). Yet
can the straight-gay bias and its attendant homophobia only be overcome by
cliché, a cliché that, in the case of the funny and witty camp gay man, also
works very well as part of comedy? Is there no subversion possible other
than co-opting “straight” ideals into a new “metrosexual” mainstream?
Looking at more recent representations of male homosexuality in TV
comedy might give one the impression that an escape from the camp cli-
ché is indeed futile. The runaway success of the British TV comedy show
Little Britain resulted largely from its incessant breaking of taboos—against
elderly people and the handicapped, but also homosexuals.7 One of its many
camp characters that featured in the series is the aide of the British Prime
Minister, Sebastian Love. Already his clichéd name, which echoes that of
the “patron saint” of male homosexuals, his floppy hairstyle, public-school
accent, and camp mannerisms clearly mark him as an example of the come-
dic camp character. The storyline actually revolves completely around his
unrequited love for his boss. Petty jealousies when it comes to competing for
the Prime Minister’s time and attention with the his wife or a good-looking,
black assistant make up all of the sketches. There is apparently not a single
new element in Sebastian Love. Only in the very last, third season of the
series does his ineffective bitching turn into more serious consequences—
and success for himself: when the Prime Minister has to entrust him with
a political secret, he asks for a favor in return. As a result we see the Prime

282 Rainer Emig
Minister in a leather jockstrap brandishing a feather duster doing some
nearly-nude cleaning for Sebastian. Only in this one episode is the camp
cliché reversed, or rather doubled: Sebastian becomes the camp “bitch,”
while the Prime Minister adopts Sebastian’s previous servile camp attitude,
albeit reluctantly.
That Little Britain is not a mindless reiteration of old camp clichés, despite
the impression that the Sebastian Love sketches might generate, is shown
by the Emily Howard sketches. Emily Howard is introduced as “Britain’s
worst transvestite,” and indeed her disastrous appearance and appearances
confirm this. Her make-up is all wrong, her clothes are nineteenth-
century, and her idea of femininity is using badly pronounced French
expressions and doing “lady things” “like playing with kittens.” She regu-
larly fails to be taken for a woman and is often addressed as “mate” or
“sir,” although interestingly enough not one heterosexual person, male
or female, shows disrespect for her. When from season 2 onward she is
joined by fellow cross-dresser Florence, who sports a little moustache, it
becomes even more evident that the point of the sketches is not making
fun of homosexuals or transvestites, but of the limited gender options at
the disposal of both straight and gay men. Clichéd masculinity meets cli-
chéd femininity, and no third or further option is available. As a result,
these sketches are already examples of camp clichés being exposed as such,
although they are not generally subverted.
Another such exposure happens in the sketches around Daffyd Thomas,
the self-declared “only gay in the village” of Llanddewi Brefi. Combining
two marginal identities, being Welsh and being gay, is not enough for him.
He makes a living out of fighting against the oppression of male homosexu-
ality. Yet his environment is shown as much more open toward deviance
than he is himself. The local vicar permits him to place an advert offering his
services as a rent boy in the church newsletter, the elderly female newsagent
not only sells but also reads Gay Times, and the ever-sympathetic barmaid
Myfanwy informs him about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activi-
ties in the village and nearby. Daffyd, who is played by Matt Lucas, who
is himself gay, overweight, and Jewish, is dressed in a totally exaggerated
gay male clubbing outfit—with revealing shorts and tops, usually skin-tight
and often made of leather, rubber, or plastic in garish colors. Yet, again,
none of the heterosexual characters in the sketches ever shows him any
disrespect. It is Daffyd himself who generally denigrates gay men, hates the
sight of them when they enter the pub, and even scares them away. What
Daffyd represents is gay self-hatred, a feature frequently observed by gay
men among themselves. Yet is Daffyd not also correct? Would a real Welsh
village show as much understanding and tolerance of male homosexuality
as Llanddewi Brefi in Little Britain? This element of unease adds subver-
sion to the otherwise over-the-top humor of the Daffyd Thomas sketches.
Without it, they would be completely in the tradition of the camp gay man
as a freak show.

Queer Humor 283
Although Little Britain can at best be said to expose clichés of camp
gay men in established comedy formats, it is hard to argue that the series
is really “queer.” Queer emerged in the course of the 1980s as a strategic
term signaling a farewell to integrationist tendencies that simply asked for
tolerance and visibility of gays and lesbians. This had been the aim of the
struggle of the gay and lesbian movement since its emergence in the 1960s.
It led to the establishment of gay and lesbian spaces and areas in many cit-
ies. San Francisco’s Castro district is the most famous of these. London’s
Old Compton Street and Manchester’s Canal Street are smaller versions of
this. They also signal the price to be paid for this supposed tolerance: gay
life is reduced to nightlife and commerce. During the daytime and especially
at work, gay men are largely supposed to be invisible. They are acceptable
as consumers, yet are not granted equal rights in spheres of daily life (see
Degele 2008: 41–55).
Queer thinking started from the seemingly inevitable binary that was
observed earlier, in which transvestites as much as camp gay men only have
one choice when it came to saying farewell to masculine stereotypes: opt-
ing for feminine ones. Judith Butler (1997) sees this binary not as the basis
but as the consequence on our culture’s privileging of normative hetero-
sexuality. In order for the heterosexual couple to function as a norm (and
to produce citizens, consumers, soldiers, etc.), traditional binary roles of
masculine and feminine behavior have to be promoted, upheld, and repro-
duced. These in turn require a supposed anchoring in “natural” (i.e., bio-
logical) sex. Contrary to the traditional narrative that sees biological sex
as the root of gender attitudes and normative heterosexuality as the logical
and again “natural” outcome of the two, Butler (1997: 306–7) reverses the
order and views all three as constructed and ideologically reiterated in acts
of performativity:
Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated,

theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of
impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no
original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of
imitation for which there is no original [emphasis in original]; in fact,
it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as
an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. [. . .] In other words,
heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximat-
ing its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely
because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavours to succeed, the project
of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself.
Performativity, the repetition of symbolic acts, is of course the link between

comedy, gender, and sexual roles. Especially in comedy, repetitions of cli-
chés are the staple of most jokes. Again, this is not in itself lamentable.
Shared jokes, as was pointed out at the start of the present chapter, are

284 Rainer Emig
crucial when it comes to shaping and maintaining community. Yet if the
clichés at the core of these jokes cement the identities of members of this
community for good and thus deprive them of the opportunity to diver-
sify and develop, something problematic is at work. This, in fact, is true as
much for homosexual roles and clichés as it is for those of heterosexual men
and women. Only very rarely, however, are such clichés tackled in popular
media formats, such as comedy. The reason for this is a double emphasis on
consensus: for comedy to function, an implicit understanding of the joke is
required; that is, humor can never be too subversive, or it would become a
misunderstanding or an irritation. At the same time, modern media formats
require success with the viewers. Expensive TV formats such as prime-time
comedies, as much as theater shows on stage, rely on viewers, and their
numbers are checked all the time. If a show proves unsuccessful, it is quickly
cancelled.
This perhaps explains why a very subversive comedy act that tackles the
common perceptions of masculine and feminine, gay and straight, mani-
fested itself in Britain in the shape of a one-person show. Requiring little
background investment in stage, props, co-stars, and technology, an act like
Eddie Izzard could and did flourish on TV and on stage, because there was
little financial risk involved. Izzard is an interesting character who uses a
rambling and often surreal verbal routine of meandering storylines, often
interrupted by questions or responses to the audience. For many of his
routines, he also dresses up in women’s clothes and make-up, although he
identifies himself neither as gay nor as a regular transvestite. His current
entry in Wikipedia (see “Eddie Izzard”) is evidence of the confusion that
this attitude creates:
Izzard describes himself as an “executive,” “action” and “professional”

transvestite, as “a male tomboy” rather than a drag queen or a “weirdo”
transvestite (he cites J. Edgar Hoover and Hermann Göring as examples
of the latter). In the past he regularly cross-dressed on and off stage but,
since gaining success as a television and film actor, has decided to stay
in “boy-mode” for the last several years. While there are those who sus-
pect Izzard’s cross-dressing was simply a comedic device, his stance is
that cross-dressing is neither part of his performance nor a sexual fetish.
He remarks in his show Unrepeatable [1994], “Women wear what they
want and so do I.” According to Izzard, “Most transvestites fancy
women” [Dress to Kill 1999]. He dismisses claims that he is a male
homosexual, saying he is “a straight transvestite or a male lesbian”
[Rampton 2004]. He has also described himself as “a lesbian trapped in
a man’s body” [BBC News 2004], transgender [Garfield 2001], and “a
complete boy plus half girl” [Rampton 2004].
As a show person, Izzard can cross-dress without being identified (or iden-
tifying himself) as either a traditional transvestite or a homosexual. Yet

Queer Humor 285
as what does he identify himself? The “weirdo” transvestite à la J. Edgar
Hoover, the former FBI director and notorious communist witch hunter, is
clearly not his model, although he hardly represents an abnormality, since in
the 1950s, when Hoover lived, most male transvestites practiced their cross-
dressing in secret. That, by contrast, Izzard’s transvestism is “professional,”
however, is unquestionable, because he practices it in sold-out shows and
in front of millions of TV viewers, as well as apparently in private. That he
claims the same “rights” as women when it comes to dressing up and wear-
ing make-up is interesting. On the one hand, it reverses the common femi-
nist idea that women are generally granted fewer options by the patriarchal
system. Yet it also naively (or in a typically “laddish” fashion) ignores that
women’s “options” in this respect are limited to their looks.
Looks, however, are also what determine masculinity, and effeminate
looks, dress, and make-up have been traditionally used to deflate and erase
masculinity—for example to make deviance palatable. In the case of Izzard,
a burly man whose punch line runs “I am two lesbians trapped in a male
body,” this hardly works, because even in a dress and with lipstick, he still
resembles a prize boxer more than a woman. He plays with sexual roles, or
rather with their labels, by claiming to be a lesbian, something that, as a bio-
logical male, he cannot be by definition. That the authors of the Wikipedia
article take this joke seriously, however, is proof of how deeply traditional
gender ideas have come under attack by the concepts of gender studies and
queer activism. As a transgender male, Izzard could theoretically be a les-
bian. Yet he refuses to identify as transgender and instead opts for the tradi-
tional male and masculine cliché of fancying girls.
Izzard not only confuses the audience in his long, surreal monologues.
He also confuses them through his looks, which refuse to permit them a
firm categorization of his character as gay or straight (see Izzard’s “Homep-
age”). He offers his audience his biological maleness, yet subverts it at the
same time with the trimmings not of traditional femininity, but of its cli-
chéd stereotype, the transvestite. He then, however, cuts off the possibility
of recategorizing him as a “known” and clichéd deviant, the unsuccessful
transvestite à la Emily Howard or the closeted homosexual à la Sebastian
Love. This makes his act the most subversive one in terms of gender and
sexual identity encountered in the present chapter. It is subversive because it
exposes deviance, thematizes it at the same time, and then, most radically,
refuses to categorize it neatly into either joke or seriousness, gay or queer
activism or heterosexual carnival. In fact, in many of his routines, there is no
connection at all between Eddie Izzard’s strange outfit and make-up and the
stories that he tells. This makes the package even more disturbing.
In a typical example, a verbal routine on the imagined goings-on in the
canteen in Star Wars’s “Death Star,” he wears a zip-up leather outfit, make-
up and lipstick, and stiletto boots. The routine, however, contrasts Darth
Vader’s authoritarian attitudes from the famous science fiction films and the
routine bureaucratic attitudes of a typical English office canteen. No gender

286 Rainer Emig
or sexual elements are present. Yet Izzard’s “persona” is—and adds to—the
exchanges of “peas or no peas.”
In another sketch, Izzard does an imitation of the American actor
Christopher Walken, who is known for playing cool, macho men. In the
sketch, Izzard-as-Walken butchers Shakespeare’s famous lines from Ham-
let by performing them in the style of an American gangster film. Izzard
adds to this defamiliarization by performing his imitation in a glittering
low-cut dress and, again, high-heeled boots and full make-up. A third
example of many is a sketch about Christmas and Easter and how their
symbolism does not always make sense—a cultural and religious analysis
that Izzard performs in a kimono and again full make-up.
Andy Medhurst (1998: 285) rightly argues in an essay on sexuality in the
media that
stereotypes of sexuality strive so vigorously to create two, polarized

sexualities, hetero and homo, and to insist with such obsessive reduc-
tiveness that people who belong to those poles are easily identifiable—
hence the recurring presence across media texts of the screaming queen
(so obviously gay).
In the case of Izzard, gender and sexuality clearly refuse to remain invisible.
Yet their visibility does not lend itself to the creation or repetition of familiar
clichés and polarized identities. On the contrary, on the one hand, Izzard
makes jokes with the audience in the sense that he relies on common grounds
(through popular films and actors, and a shared cultural heritage). He does
not make jokes at the expense of individuals or groups (as is the case with
many “bitching” gay comedians, such as Lily Savage). Not even the harm-
less imitation of Walken is intended to damage his reputation. Yet, on the
other hand and at the same time, there is a subversive element in Izzard that
exceeds the innuendo of camp comedy and even the taboo-breaking of Little
Britain. When Izzard makes a transvestite narrator—who is not even try-
ing to impersonate a believable woman—a storyteller whose stories do not
revolve around gender and sexuality, he does something much more radical
for gender and sexuality than its mere thematizing could achieve: he forces
his audience to accept diversity, the shifting of roles that leaves no certainty
about gender and sexual identities. By making the audience members enjoy
the process, he turns them into willing participants in it—rather than guinea
pigs or victims of ideological manipulation. By making them share the jokes
with him, Izzard participates in the creation of a new community, here of
viewers of the mass medium television or the more select crowd of theater
goers.8 This community will leave the theater or get up from their sofas
much better equipped to handle diversity and the instability and flux of roles
and their representations than those who enjoy camp clichés or supposedly
radical taboo-breaking.

Queer Humor 287
NOTES
1. “[H]omosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was

transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a
hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration;
the homosexual was now a species” (Foucault 1979: 43).
2. The notion of perversion is, of course, also in danger of anachronism, because
it was established by nineteenth-century psychology; earlier periods used terms
such as “sodomite,” “boy lover,” “effeminate,” or “degenerate.”
3. Bakhtin (1984: 10) famously talks about “a temporary suspension, both ideal
and real, of hierarchical rank [. . .] permitting no distance between those who
came in contact with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and
decency imposed at other times.”
4. Script by Russell T. Davies, directed by Menhaj Huda and Charles McFougall,
UK, Channel 4, 1999, which spawned an even more successful US spin-off.
5. “Operating from under the cloak of invisibility, the queer knows his/her signi-
fying practices will be, must be appropriated. As a product of queer agency, it
is the process of Camp that selects and chooses which aspects of itself will be
subsumed into dominant culture” (Meyer 1994: 17).
6. Script by Jeremy Lloyd, David Croft, et al., directed by David Croft et al.,
BBC, 1972–1985.
7. Script Matt Lucas and David Walliams, directed by Mike Christie, UK, BBC,
2003–2006.
8. For an interesting comparison with the French-speaking world, see Quemener
(2011). For an approach to US–American TV, see Conway (2006). On the
issue of mainstreaming, see Feuer (2001).

19 Petite Flower, Giver Goddess,
and Duchess of Discipline
Sexual Nonconformity, Play, and
Camp Humor in the Performance
of Judy Tenuta
Giovanna P. Del Negro
A self-proclaimed “fun feminist,” stand-up comic Judy Tenuta usually

greets her audience with a growly, “Hello, pigs.” An accordion toting
“petite flower” and “giver goddess,” this “Duchess of Discipline” refers
to men as “stud puppets” and frequently appears on stage with flowing
satin gowns and an exotic flower tucked in her long dark mane. Born on
Mount Olympus to the God and Goddess of Boxer Shorts and a graduate of
St. Obnoxious of Bondage, Tenuta regales her fans with parody songs and
brings a unique blend of surreal lunacy to her comedy. Equal parts slapstick,
burlesque, and Borsht Belt, her routines are a venue for her own brand of
religion, known as “Judyism” (Tenuta 1991), and she orders her love slaves
to be properly worshipful. Grounded primarily in an analysis of her career-
defining 1987 album Buy This, Pigs (recorded live at Caroline’s nightclub
in New York City), this chapter will examine the distinctive ways in which
Tenuta uses costume, verbal comedy, and music to construct a ludic realm of
possibilities, where gender norms and sexuality are up for grabs.1
In her various comedy routines, the mantle of demure femininity that
Tenuta dons clashes dramatically with her dominatrix persona, who lives to
tell insults and abuse her devotees. Referring to herself as “tender blossom,”2
she is known for her glamorous costumes and exaggerated markers of tra-
ditional femininity—elegant gowns, Aphrodite dresses, feather boas, gauzy
capes, coiffed hair, and formal footwear. Despite her attire, the “Queen of
the Cosmos” (she goes by many designations) is far from a wilting maiden.
For example, Tenuta frequently opens her shows by spitting gum into the
crowd and commanding the audience, “Crawl for it.” A regal, power hun-
gry, Kaliesque-figure, she instills fear and admiration in her loyal subjects,
and as the self-appointed “Princess of Panty Shields,” she can absorb any
mortal within her orbit. On any given night, Tenuta can be found address-
ing her audience with a blasé remark, such as “It’s a pleasure to be here,”
and then bending over to strap on her accordion, which she calls her intra-
uterine device. In her growly, overbearing voice, she confesses, “I want to
meet a sensitive guy. One kinda like you—but with a pulse.” Rolling her

Petite Flower, Giver Goddess, and Duchess of Discipline 289
eyes she adds, “Well, to tell you the truth I was looking for someone a little
closer to the top of the food chain.”
The resistant and indomitable attitude that Tenuta brings to her quirky
stage persona is best expressed by her catchphrase, “No, you cannot pos-
sess me,” delivered with a faux East European accent made to sound like a
crazed “Gypsy” fortune-teller or a deranged, aging starlet à la Norma
Desmond (the Hollywood diva character played by Gloria Swanson in Sun-
set Boulevard). Tenuta cannot be contained or domesticated by middle-class
decorum or mainstream gender expectations. If, after every episode of the
classic American sit-com I Love Lucy, the screwball housewife played by
Lucille Ball goes back to the safety of her home, the persona of Tenuta’s
routines continually escapes into intergalactic space to develop her own
Judy-centered cosmology. In her carnivalesque playground, there is no Desi
Arnaz to return her to the rule-bound world of normalcy. She revels in
chaos, mayhem, and transgression—sexual, sartorial, and mannerly. And
like an experienced ring-leader in a circus, she gets people to play along.
Perhaps the most notable feature of Tenuta’s comedy is her voice. She
typically sneers at the crowd in a working-class dialect of her native Chi-
cago, and when delivering her aggressive, Borsht Belt–style one-liners and
insults, she affects the voice of an ill-mannered tough. Although Tenuta has
a small repertoire of fat jokes, her humor is mostly concerned with ridicul-
ing men, not women. Poking fun at an obnoxious male passenger who is
trying to put the moves on her, she tells the following anecdote:
So today, I’m on this plane to Europe—[it] could happen—and there was

this guy sitting next to me. He looked liked a squid dressed in stretch
pants. So you know [in a sarcastic tone], I was ready to spawn [accor-
dion padding]. Yeah [in a nasal tone]. So this squid in stretch pants is
trying to make me talk to him, just ’cause he paid [with emphasis] for
my trip [accordion padding]. How much can I give, I ask you, stud pup-
pets? [accordion padding]. And then [with emphasis], he starts puffing
on a cigar the size of God’s ego [accordion padding], and he is blowing
cigar smoke in my petite flower face. I said, excuse me, excuse me, if
I wanted to shorten my life [extension], I’d date you. Okay, Sasquatch.
The vintage Tenuta jokes about “dating the Pope to get to God” or rep-
resenting her brother Bosco’s severed arm to her mother as “a bad paper
cut” are usually followed by the throaty remark, “[it] could happen,”
which humorously highlights the implausibility of the situation in which the
speaker finds herself. Her seemingly ridiculous observations project a blend
of dimwitted cluelessness and beguiling optimism that is at the core of the
bizarre world that Tenuta has created. Here, the ability to conceive of dif-
fering ways of being and possibilities that defy the rules of logic are only as
narrow as one’s imagination. Unlike fantasy or science fiction writers who
seek to seduce audiences into accepting their fictional universes by making

290 Giovanna P. Del Negro
them internally consistent, Tenuta constantly breaks the frame and reminds
her fans of the very ludicrousness of the scenarios she is proposing. Indeed,
on her live albums, Tenuta can often be heard laughing at her own machina-
tions and enjoying light-hearted banter with her audience.
The signature falsetto that Tenuta uses throughout her performance is
another important part of her theatrical repertoire. Uttered in a staccato
fashion, the pseudo-ladylike warble, “Let’s go back in time,” serves as the
auditory equivalent of a wavy screen in a cinematic flashback and allows
Tenuta to transition from one part of her routine into another. The use of
a chime sound effect in this context affectively evokes the sublime, other-
worldly realm from which this mythical creator hails. Likewise, the breathy
quality that one hears in Tenuta’s stock line, “Come closer, come closer to
the goddess,” which is sometimes accompanied by Tinker Bell–like cooing
and ululating, also points to the etherealness of the deity herself and the inti-
mate rapport she shares with her followers. Tenuta’s macho bellowing and
demure warble reflect what Gillian Rodger (2004: 20), writing about the
equally transgressive singer Annie Lennox, observes is the “extreme range
in [the] female voice from richly dark deep chest tones to piercingly clear
high falsetto.” Building on the work of Elizabeth Wood, Rogers (2004: 20)
notes that shifts in the female voice “produces what [Wood] calls a sonic
cross-dressing: a merging of rather than a splitting of ‘butch’ authority and
‘femme’ ambiguity, an acceptance and integration of male and female.”
Although the sonic cross-dressing in both Lennox and Tenuta problema-
tizes gender norms, Tenuta does not do so by way of a display of technical
virtuosity as Lennox’s singing does; rather, Tenuta shifts between voices in
order to construct a frame of play and possibility, one in which gender, like
everything else, can be changed and renegotiated.
Like the skilled music hall performers of the early twentieth century,
Tenuta relies on voice, costumes, gestures, and music to evoke a motley
crew of familiar, almost cartoonish character types. Tenuta’s characters
are both male and female—the unattainable flawless beauty, the unhinged
aging starlet, whimsical fairy godmother, ill-tempered male ogre, irresist-
ible femme fatale, or extra-terrestrial cult leader who inflicts pain on her
disciples—and most of her humor stems from the incongruity between her
traditionally feminine appearance and outrageous stage behavior. The bipo-
lar shifts in personalities, melodramatic scenes, and tongue-in-cheek songs
are the central motif of Tenuta’s bewildering and surreal brand of comedy.
Absurdity, incongruity, and exaggeration reach great comedic effect in
her parody songs about the Pope and her uncouth dad. In the fourth track
of side one from Buy This, Pigs the Goddess reveals that she is having an
affair with the pope. Explaining how she met the fashion-plate pontiff, she
explains how the pope whined to her, “ ‘Jooody, can I come over to your
house and touch your velvet painting of Elvis that cries?’ I said, ‘Suffer!’
So we astral projected and we went to Texas and I wrote this song for
the Pope.” The country waltz that follows places romance, the Catholic

Church, and cowboy imagery alongside one another. Casting the pope in a
love ballad is absurd enough, but depicting him as a lasso-throwing cowboy
who cavorts in the Crack House Saloon makes her song even more farcical
and ridiculous. Whereas the first verse of the song loosely depicts the God-
dess pining for her man, the second verse reveals a less pliable, more feisty
woman. Singing in exaggerated southern twang with extended country
phrasing and accordion vamps, and using a vocal timbre that is alternately
gruff and brilliant, Tenuta has the pope ducking guns and wearing a long
white slinky dress. Here are excerpts from “The Pope Song”:
I just want a cowboy to ride me home [. . .]

I just want cowboy whose gold-plated soap
Yeah I just want a cowboy named John Paul the Pope [. . .]
I met him one day in the Crack House Saloon, “It could happen.”
He lassoed a pickle from clear across the room, he said “Hey little
kolachkie, you’re supposed to kiss my ring.” I said, “If I wanna
see your bathtub, I’ll learn how to sing.”
“My Dad,” Tenuta’s song about her father, portrays him as a well-meaning
but loutish man who lacks fashion sense and is equal parts silly and self-
centered. Setting up the song, Tenuta tells the story of her Dad’s penchant
for making hot dog soup. In an excited, almost childlike way she asks, “Do
you know what that [hot dog soup] is?” Using her slightly crazed, growly
voice, she explains, “He would boil the hot dogs, and we would drink the
juice.” The lyrics of “My Dad” humorously combine the 1950s nobody-
loves-me-like-my-father song genre (exemplified by Marilyn Monroe’s
performance of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”) with the
confessional style of adult children of abuse narratives such as Christina
Crawford’s tell-all about her mother, Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest
(1978). Drawing together 1980s pop rock with torch singer themes and pop
psychology confessionals produces a set of contradictions that is quintes-
sential Tenuta. Here are excerpts from the lyrics of “My Dad,” from the last
track of side one of Buy This, Pigs (1987):
My dad, my dad.
Oh, I want a guy, just like my dad, who worships plaid
A guy who hikes up his boxer shorts up to his neck, [. . .]
I want a guy, just like my dad, who is real rad, a stud who orders den-
tures through the mail and makes lasagna with his feet and takes
great pride [pause] that his eye brows meet.
Oh my dad, my dad.
The style of the music to which these lyrics are set is mid-1980s American
pop-rock, loosely reminiscent of Madonna or the song “These Dreams” by
the band Heart. Although Tenuta references gross features of the genre, she

does not elaborate or develop the tradition as a songwriter or arranger of
the style might seek to do. The piece captures enough of the genre’s musical
features that the listener can get the musical references and that the song
can function as a piece of music. Her voice, for example, is predominantly
clear, and raspy or breathy timbres are occasionally used for dramatic
emphasis. At the end of melodic phrases, she frequently glides into the final
pitch, reduces the dynamic level, and shifts to a breathy timbre with a wide
vibrato, as many singers in the style do. Tenuta’s vocals are accompanied by
a recording of a full band. The bottom layer of the accompaniment is held
down by a string of staccato eighth notes and occasional rhythmic orna-
ments played on synthesizer with a distinctively 1980s-style timbre; simi-
larly period-specific flute-like chordal pads fill the midrange, and repeated
patterns played by a marimba-like synthesizer patch fill the upper register.
In the bridge section, a stop-time break supported by a synthesized angelic
chorus rounds out the period arrangement devices. Characteristic of the
genre but in no way distinctive, the musical devices do not “say something”
in Ingrid Monson’s (1996) sense of the term, forming distinctive meanings
beyond the general ones associated with the genre. Rather, the “saying
something” here comes in the contrasts among the literally generic music,
the bizarre world that Tenuta’s lyrics invoke, and her occasionally frame-
breaking stand-up comic delivery.
The zany songs and jokes that Tenuta performs in her stand-up can only
be fully understood by examining the role of the accordion in her comedy.
The accordion is a portable and highly adaptable instrument; in the US
context it often serves as nostalgic icon of white, working-class ethnicity
and invokes images of intense sociability, pleasure, and jesting (Keil, Keil,
and Blau 1992). On stage, Tenuta always appears clutching her accordion,
which not only displays her name in mother-of-pearl inlay but references
her Polish and Italian heritages. Her style of performance is energetic and
occasionally frenetic, and it is key to spreading her special brand of good-
humored, Polka-inspired party madness. Indeed, the acid tongued comic
often attacks her instrument with vigor and forcefulness to punctuate her
most biting or outrageous one-liners—calling Madonna “Ortho cream in
a bra,” referring to Senator Bob Packwood (an American politician who
resigned from office after his sexual harassment of women became public
knowledge) as “a bedpan on legs,” and advising men who seek to please
their female partners to “lick us, and then watch ESPN.” The punch lines to
Tenuta’s multi-lined jokes are typically punctuated by a sustained note on
her accordion. In other contexts, she uses the instrument to provide chordal
pads behind her jokes or to build and parody dramatic cadences in the style
of radio soap operas.
In a similar way, her costumes and stage demeanor merge older styles
of performances and film genres from the past with contemporary fashion
trends from the period. With her glittery costumes, bawdy repartee, and
seductive stage presence, Tenuta brings to mind torch singers, such as Billie

Holiday and Peggy Lee, and the red-hot mama from the vaudeville stage,
such as Sophie Tucker and Mae West (see Del Negro 2010). Whereas the
big skirts, leggings, tight bodices, lamé pantsuits, and gossamer accesso-
ries reference the popular sensibility of 1980 MTV videos by Cindy Lauper
and Madonna, the goddess’s sadistic thirst for hostility shares an uncanny
resemblance with the calculating femme fatales of 1940s film noir and the
rage of victimized heroines in female revenge fantasy movies such as Carrie
(Brian De Palma, 1976) and Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) (see also
Franco 2004). A walking shrine to popular culture, Tenuta fills her perfor-
mances with entertainment industry allusions and genre references that are
piled one on top of the other with such speed that the effect can be quite
bewildering. To the uninitiated, Tenuta’s show may be disorienting, as it
departs dramatically from both the traditional stand-up comedy style (with
its standard joke format of set-ups and punch lines) and the character-driven
monologue form (see Gray 1994), which tends to present well-known social
types—Lily Tomlin’s Trudy the Bag Lady character; Whoopi Goldberg’s
wise junkie Fontaine—in more discrete and followable ways.
Tenuta mixes and matches personae with extraordinary skill. Although
the identity that she adopts on stage clearly takes pride in her irresistible
powers of seduction, she does not sing about unrequited love, unlike the
torch singers that her costumes and hair corsage evoke (see Jones 2002).
As the “Queen of Bondage,” Tenuta is the instigator of heartbreak, rather
than its recipient. As her performances on various video compilations make
clear (HBO’s Women of the Night, Funny Ladies), however, the warmth and
adoration that the Goddess elicits is similar to the adulation that the torch
singer receives from her acolytes. The fans of the elegantly dressed diva are
eager to please, and they take to heart her invitation to misbehave. Going
to one of Tenuta’s shows is in many ways like listening to an adult-oriented
bedtime story, in which the performer’s narratives transport the listeners to
another world; rather than lulling her audience to sleep with her tales, here
the storyteller and the audience egg each other on to ever-greater flights of
fancy. Acknowledging the excitement in the house, Tenuta snarls, “You are
sassy tonight,” and responding with equal enthusiasm, the audience play-
fully chants her trademark, “Jooody, Jooody.” At the end of her live shows,
Tenuta frequently selects a male audience member from the crowd, “makes
him get on all fours, mounts him and waves a whip in the air” (quoted in
Mills 1991: 1). Members of the audience can be heard joyfully surrendering
to Tenuta’s playful demands to “promise to be [her] sex donkey love slave”
(quoted in Mills 1991: 1), and her most ardent fans bring special offerings—
soup cans—which they place at her feet.
The bawdy, raunchy humor that Tenuta brings to her comedy also refer-
ences the red-hot mama of the vaudeville stage and musical revue, a charac-
ter type defined by its strong personality and assertive sexual appetite (Belle
Barth, Eva Tanguay, and Bette Midler). Forwarding this tradition, Tenuta’s
persona is the queen of her own domain and, although she is not the zaftig

(large, full bosomed) Sophie Tucker or the imposing Bessie Smith, the Petite
Flower’s diminutive size does not prevent her from exhibiting the author-
ity, erotic power, and self-possession of her legendary foremothers. Indeed,
the carnal desire and strength of Tenuta’s creation knows no bounds. She
lusts after men with great abandon and celebrates her ability to turn the
most hunky “burrito of a man” into her very own personal “studsicle.” In
her brass-band, dominatrix voice, feminine frailty is replaced with female
potency; the damsel in distress or victim is transformed into the victimizer.
She is defined by her own voice, not another’s, and like the red-hot mamas
that Peter Antelyes (1996: 219) discusses, she transforms the traditional
role that women inhabit on the American stage, changing it from “object
to subject, from sung about to singing, and singing to [sometimes] scream-
ing.” The words Sophie Tucker sang in the era of vaudeville apply equally
well to Tenuta: “I’ve got no weed in my patch, no eggs to hatch/ My heart’s
unattached, my door is unlatched/ But I’m not taking orders from no one”
(quoted in Antelyes 1996: 233).
By mimicking and mocking traditional discourses of female subordina-
tion, Tenuta reveals the constructed nature of gender and “makes visible
by the effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible”
(Irigaray, quoted in Hubbell 2002: 56). In juxtaposing the idealized love-
goddess image with the aggressive, over-the-top dominatrix persona, we
discover that play acting, no matter how ludicrous, can provide a terrain
for interrogating issues of gender, power, and sexuality, and give those who
do it an opportunity to think beyond predetermined social categories. With
her penchant for prom-queen glamour—frilly satin dresses, big hair, and
tiara—and a desire for rage and revenge reminiscent of the 1976 film Carrie,
Tenuta pokes fun at well-established feminine stereotypes and exposes the
seething anger that lies beneath the façade of female conformity. The humor
and techniques of feminist music videos that emerged in the mid-1980s are
an important historical backdrop for understanding Tenuta’s stylistic taste for
exaggeration, parody, and pastiche, and her political engagement with a wider
cultural project of gender criticism that was popular among female singers
of the period (Tina Turner’s “Typical Male” [1985], Roxanne’s “Roxanne’s
on a Roll” [1985], and later Jill Soboule’s “I Kissed a Girl” [1994]; see
discussion in Roberts 1990). Indeed, it is difficult to watch Tenuta perform
her madness on stage without thinking about Tina Brown’s music video
spoof, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” ([1985] 1996), which fea-
tures a “prim and proper homecoming queen [. . .] who goes on a mur-
derous rampage” (Roberts 1990: 176). The disparity between the facets of
Tenuta’s stage identity (the demure petite flower and the ill-tempered diva)
shares a great deal in common with the “incompatibility of [the] sweetly
attired [. . .] homecoming queen with an American symbol of machismo,
a gun” (Roberts 1990: 175) found in Brown’s video. What is particularly
interesting here is that both Tenuta and Brown make light of the ludicrous-
ness of prescriptive gender roles, and as such, they exhibit a “superiority

in relation to the characters” (Roberts 1990: 176), mindsets and attitudes
that they humorously embody and play up for laughs. As Nancy Walker
(1988: 25) has observed, by drawing on this “stance of superiority the
comic can point to the incongruity and absurdity of the world that others
are accustomed to accepting, [and in so doing] work from a position of
privileged insight.”
By bringing an aggressive stage persona together with a celebration
of non-normative sexuality, melodramatic shifts in demeanor, and genre-
blurring homage to popular culture, Tenuta constructs a unique stage act
that subversively calls into question any linear, orderly, and rational view
of the world that rests on sharp distinctions between the real and imagined.
Judging by the enthusiastic audience responses to Tenuta’s live shows, her
fans are all too eager to participate in her flights of fancy and welcome the
chiding insults the Petite Flower sends their way. Indeed, unlike the self-
deprecating female comic who jokes at her own expense, Tenuta directs
her put-downs toward others, and in keeping with what Joanne Gilbert
(2004: 113) describes as Tenuta’s comedic “bitch posture,” she singles out
specific groups of people and societal norms (e.g., arrogant men or the belief
in women’s innate desire to reproduce) to ridicule and criticize. Like the
female psychopaths from revenge films who enforce their own brand of
vigilante justice (Franco 2004), the fearless goddess exempts no one from
her wrath, and in so doing, celebrates women’s power to take their destiny
into their own hands. In this symbolic realm of self-expression and social
license, Tenuta achieves what Frances Gray (1994), drawing on the work of
Hélène Cixous, claims is the accomplishment of the best women comics: she
restores to her fans the pleasures of laughter and jouissance.
The power relations of gender are closely tied to those of sexuality, and
Tenuta’s comedy speaks broadly to these concerns as well. Though she
frequently performs in mainstream venues, gay men are among her most
devoted followers. Indeed, the persona that Tenuta has created for the stage
exhibits all of the features of a gay icon. Glamorous, flamboyant, and saucy,
this raunchy diva not only dishes out put-downs like the best drag queens,
she also exudes an irresistible strength of will and power, which, accord-
ing to Georges-Claude Guilbert (2002), is necessary for any celebrity who
seeks to attain this special status.3 Early in her career she began to perform
at LGBT events, and her 1994 release, Attention Butt Pirates and Lesbitar-
ians, recorded live at the CSW Gay Pride Festival in Los Angeles, cemented
her reputation in gay and lesbian circles. Over the years, Tenuta has been
an outspoken advocate of gay, lesbian, and transgender rights, even per-
forming same-sex marriages.4 For a community that historically has been
the victim of discrimination and constantly told to suppress its difference,
Tenuta’s celebration of all that is unusual, odd, and queer can be viewed
as liberating and empowering. In her live performances, all forms of the
abject—anything that mainstream society views as perverse, obnoxious, or
pathological (see Limon 2000)—are given free reign by Tenuta and coaxed

forth by the audience. All that is alien, eccentric, and outlandish is valorized,
and the stigma associated with any form of marginalization becomes a sign
of grace. In this ludic sphere, the gender myths of heterosexual society are
exposed and gender identity is flexible. By chanting and playing along with
Tenuta, spectators can perform their membership in the cult of Judyism
and, by extension, a particular vision of gay culture, which Jeffrey Escoffier
(1992: 141) argues entails a camp “recod[ing of] the sexual significance of
the dominant definitions of gender [. . . and] promulgates[s] the idea of gen-
der roles as performances.”
Typically understood to favor an emphasis on irony, exaggeration, and
parody (Sontag 1982), as well as a heavy reliance on references to popular
culture, camp is central to Tenuta’s humor, and I would suggest that she
adopts a campy aesthetic to expose the “artifice of what passes for natural”
(Cleto 2000: 164) in US culture. Whether sending up male-centered models
of beauty and feminine perfection or ridiculing the US obsession with the
male libido—“Ruminating about the possibilities of female Viagra she asks,
‘What would that give us? A wide one?’ ” (Tenuta quoted in Brownstein
2002: 4)—Tenuta prods her audience to think beyond the constraints of
fixed social identities and embrace a world that allows for greater sexual
and gender nonconformity. In the reflexive and liminal atmosphere of the
club, her signature remark, “[It] could happen,” serves as an invitation to
ponder the richness of human existence in all of its glorious quirkiness and
absurdity. Ultimately, it is only by surrendering to this performer’s unique
brand of lunacy that one can truly enjoy her bizarre, intergalactic ride. By
immersing oneself in the world of this tender blossom with the brassy voice,
queers of all kinds—gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or, more broadly,
anyone with a non-normative gender performance—can bask in the loving
glow of the maternal goddess and joyously perform their difference without
fear of reprisals or judgment.
NOTES
1. The only girl in a family of seven brothers, Tenuta was raised in Oak Park, Illi-
nois, by a Polish mother and an Italian father. Although she graduated in the
late 1960s with a degree in theater from the University of Illinois in Chicago,
it was a course in improvisation at Second City that stimulated her comedic
aspirations. In the late 1980s, she opened for George Carlin, starred in a vari-
ety of cable specials, and recorded her debut album. Her star rose rapidly after
her appearance in a series of Diet Dr. Pepper commercials, becoming the first
stand-up ever to win Best Comedienne at the American Comedy Awards ( Judy
Tenuta’s homepage). In 1994, she recorded Attention Butt Pilots and Lesbitar-
ians, which solidified her cult following in the gay community, and her 1995
album In Goddess We Trust was nominated for a Grammy. Today, Tenuta
continues to appear in nightclubs, but her career has expanded to include
film roles such as Sam Rottweiler in the 1996 movie Butch Camp. She has
appeared in episodes of the animated comedy series Dr. Katz: Professional
Therapist on the Comedy Central cable television network and Space Ghost

From Coast to Coast on the Cartoon Network, and served as correspondent
for Entertainment Tonight.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Tenuta are from Buy This, Pigs
(Tenuta 1987a).
3. In his work on the singer Madonna, Guilbert (2002: 222) maintains that gay
icons “usually belong to one [of two] types of female stars: either the very
vulnerable or suicidal star or the strong female idol whom nobody or nothing
can resist.”
4. As a recently ordained minister in California, Tenuta performs same-sex mar-
riage in a ceremony that is part of her eponymous religion, Judyism. Here,
couples must “promise to say, ‘I love you’ once a day, hold hands, and if they
go to bed angry, they must have really hot hate sex to make up” (Wireless
Flash News 2008).

20 Humor and Gender, Directions
for Future Research
Where Do We Go From Here?
Raffaella Baccolini and Delia Chiaro
This volume has brought together authoritative scholars from different dis-
ciplines, each with an interest in how humor crosscuts the concept of gender.
Taking advantage of different viewpoints coming from diverse disciplines,
we have decided to close this collection of essays by gathering a few of the
contributors together in a virtual round table to discuss how each sees direc-
tions for future research.
This forward looking glimpse offers a fitting conclusion to the book—
after all, we thought, what better way of closing than a with a think-tank in
which to explore the diverse ideas our writers had to this regard.
DELIA CHIARO
One element that has emerged from several studies in this volume regards
the way males and females “do” verbal humor: the type of jokes they tell
and how they tell them. How can these findings be further strengthened?
Rod, as the only contributor coming from the so-called harder sciences,
working in labs and with questionnaires, your chapter provided us with
many strong findings backed up by robust facts and figures. Quantitative
research seems to make a lot of sense, but is it sufficient or do you feel a need
to supplement it with more qualitative-based data?
ROD A. MARTIN
The general pattern that emerges from past research is that men are more
likely than women to tell “canned” jokes (“A priest, a rabbi, and a minister
walk into a bar . . .”), whereas women are more likely to relate humorous
personal anecdotes, telling funny stories about themselves or other people.
However, this conclusion is based on very limited research, mostly using
self-reporting questionnaires. This is a topic that needs to be investigated
in more detail, using observational methods in naturalistic settings. Besides

Directions for Future Research 299
examining possible differences in the forms of humor used by men and
women, researchers should investigate the degree to which these vary across
situations (e.g., in same-sex versus mixed-sex groups). In addition, more
information is needed about the content themes (e.g., sexual, aggressive,
etc.) of men’s and women’s humor productions.
DELIA CHIARO
And, of course, much—or even possibly most—research seems to be limited

to respondents who are English-language speakers. If we were to add the
data regarding the huge number of other language-speakers out there in the
world, I suppose we are looking at a gargantuan task.
JENNIFER COATES
Absolutely. As a linguist, I think that recording and analyzing naturally

occurring speech to examine gendered patterns of humor remains a valid
way forward. In fact, in the 1980s and early 1990s, research focusing on
mixed talk in a variety of social contexts (in schools, public services, the
workplace, etc.) revealed asymmetrical patterns, with men’s greater usage
of certain strategies being associated with male dominance in conversation.
But, as Rod quite rightly says, the variables we need to examine are truly
abundant, and observational methods have their limits, but I do think we
are heading in the right direction.
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI
I suppose the answer lies in the middle. We need research based on qualita-
tive observational methods, and at the same time we also need quantita-
tive data to give us the numbers we need. However, let’s be mindful not to
throw out the baby with the bathwater. As a gender scholar I am very much
in favor of the good old liberal arts and scholarship based on thought and
reasoning.
JANET HOLMES
Indeed. Issues regarding gender and humor are directly related to essential-
ist presuppositions that regard differences between how women and men
interact that were exposed and challenged by feminist scholars in the early
1990s. At that point language began to be seen as a vital resource for con-
structing gender roles and gendered social identities.

300 Raffaella Baccolini and Delia Chiaro
JENNIFER COATES
But we mustn’t forget that feminists in the past wrote about and carried
out research on language and gender with the aim of exposing inequalities
between women and men. More recently, there has been less research in
this area as a result of the tension between the idea that “woman” cannot
be treated as a uniform social category and the continuing awareness that
gender relations are power relations. Now, in the first half of the new cen-
tury, there seems to be a re-assertion of feminist goals. It is important that
we feel able to appeal to the notion of “woman” or “man” without being
accused of generalizing or “essentializing”—otherwise, how can patriarchy
be challenged?
JANET HOLMES
Many researchers have challenged the binary nature of social conceptions

of gender and even of biological sex, pointing to the arbitrariness of such
distinctions in some cases and to the evidence from cultures that recognize
more than two biological categories, as well as more than two sociocultural
and linguistic categories. The emphasis has moved to an appreciation of the
continuum of experience and the fuzziness of social boundaries, including
gender boundaries, and to a greater awareness of the diverse, dynamic, and
context-responsive ways in which people do gender (among other identities)
in different situations, and even from a moment within a situation. Linguis-
tic features associated with “women talk” that you, Jen, noted in inter-
actions can occur between men in some contexts, while settings in which
women used the discourse of power and authority or adopted the emotion-
ally inexpressive interactional style widely associated with masculinity has
been documented in female talk.
JENNIFER COATES
But we still know very little about the actual speaking practices of women
and men insofar as they relate to humor. As Rod says, it seems that men
are more likely than women to tell jokes that follow a well-known format,
whereas women are more likely to relate humorous personal anecdotes. But
our evidence for this is still slight. As corpora of spoken language become
more accessible, research can be carried out to investigate humorous talk in
the conversational data included in them. At the same time, it is to be hoped
that other researchers will continue to do what I and researchers such as
Jennifer Hay and Janet Holmes have done, which is to explore speakers’
use of humor in spontaneous informal talk with friends. It is much easier to
collect and analyze humor in more public talk, because by definition such

talk is publically available and does not present the ethical problems that
the recording of private talk does. But we must surely all agree that that we
cannot extrapolate from the talk of politicians or TV pundits to the talk
of ordinary women and men in private to establish how humor is done in
everyday talk.
RAINER EMIG
However, we do seem to be focusing along the binary of male–female.

Humor theory and queer theory share their organized yet also subversive
challenging of norms. As Foucault points out in connection with homosexu-
ality, the supposedly deviant is required in order to establish and stabilize
the notion of the norm. Very similar mechanisms take place in carnival,
comedy, jokes, and humor, as Bakhtin famously posits in his seminal study
on Rabelais. It remains interesting to see, though, if these mechanisms sim-
ply continue ad infinitum (in which case, they would themselves form a
conservative model), or if the challenges of globalization, universal media
presence, and diversification lead to a modification of both humor and of
dissident sexualities and their studies.
DELIA CHIARO
So far, so good, but can we get back more specifically to issues of gender
and humor? Lately “happiness” and “positivity” have become buzz words
in the media. Studies suggest that laughter is good for us—not that it makes
us live any longer, but that it certainly makes us live better. Presumably we
should all be engaging in as much humor as possible and if any gender is
more dominant or more skilled in humorous matters, then someone could
well be losing out health-wise.
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI
It seems to me that one common reflection that is emerging from this virtual
discussion is that we need to “complicate” our analyses—in what is very
much a well-established tradition of feminist and gender studies. In light of
this, what do you think may be the contribution of literary scholarship to
humor research?
I would like to say that the contribution that traditional literary and perfor-
mance studies can make to humor studies is not well understood. Admittedly,

302 Raffaella Baccolini and Delia Chiaro
the comic as opposed to the tragic has always suffered the stigma associated
with all things non-serious. And yet humor in art, architecture, and design
occurs just as frequently as on the stage or page. But comedy is, in terms of
humor studies, what many people turn to every day for entertainment and
relaxation. Their preferences about it and the time and money they spend
on it must surely be worth investigating.
DELIA CHIARO
I quite agree, there is a good case for testing gender preferences regarding
comedy, as well, of course, as giving more acclaim to that which is humor-
ous rather than considering it subject matter that is unworthy of serious
study.
SHARON LOCKYER
Which brings us to the importance of examining the complex and contradic-

tory ways in which women are represented in TV comedy. It will be impor-
tant in the future to examine the activities and decision-making processes in
terms of TV comedy program commissioning. Questions to consider in the
future will be, How do specific TV comedy programs get commissioned?
Why do some TV comedy programs only run for one season whereas other
TV programs run for numerous seasons? How does the gender of the com-
missioning editor impact on the commissioning process? How does the gen-
der of the comedy program writer impact on the commission process? How
does the gender of the characters or actors involved in the comedy program
impact on the commissioning process?
Research by Giselinde Kuipers has shown that there are group as well as
individual differences in appreciation of humor as entertainment, for exam-
ple, for TV comedy shows, types of joke, and stand-up comedy performers.
She labels these (following Bourdieu) high-brow, low-brow, and middle-
brow humor taste. To me, apart from furthering the investigation of gen-
der and humor, her methodology is the obvious way forward, focusing on
real-life choices and preference to deepen our understanding of humor and
gender differences and similarities.
If comic styles or flavors can be reliably pinpointed more broadly and
perhaps across all kinds of humor—verbal, visual, and performative—
interesting insights into both taste-culture preferences and leisure habits
should result. Such analysis might also produce a more reliable selection of

sample test materials, not only for lab-based humor tests (where stimulus
selection at present is almost always based on topic or format, ignoring
issues of style and personal taste), but also in surveys of real-life consumers
of humor. This has the potential to further cross-cultural humor research as
well as to deepen within-culture understanding.
SHERI KLEIN
The way forward for research in the field is to embrace all possible paths for
inquiry to more fully understand the complexity of meanings and purposes
of humor in all its varieties and contexts, including the arts, material and
visual culture, and social practices.
RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI AND DELIA CHIARO
One way to conclude our think-tank is to wish for more studies that take
into consideration the ways we “do” humor, “complicating” the analyses
in the ways our contributors have pointed out. Despite remaining a funda-
mental category of analysis, gender cannot and should not be reduced to the
binary male–female, nor should future studies be confined to Western inves-
tigations. We think that the lesson of interdisciplinarity that is ingrained in
gender and women’s studies can only benefit research in the field of humor
studies.

Contributors
Raffaella Baccolini is Professor of English and Gender in the University

of Bologna’s Department of Interpreting and Translation. She has pub-
lished extensively on women’s writing, dystopia, science fiction, poetry,
modernism, and trauma. She is the author of Tradition, Identity, Desire:
Re-visionist Strategies in H.D.’s Late Poetry (1995) and co-editor, with
Tom Moylan, of Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian
Imagination (2003) and Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social
Dreaming (2007). She is currently working on the impact of 9/11 on
American science fiction and popular culture.
François Bouchetoux holds a PhD from the University of Leicester (UK)

and has taught marketing both there and at the University of Reading.
He currently teaches entertainment management at I-Shou University
(Taiwan).
Janet Bing is Professor at Old Dominion University where she teaches pho-
nology, women’s studies, communication across cultures, and the history
of English. Her published research includes English intonation, grammar,
humor, language and gender, Krahn (spoken in Liberia), and the use of
prosody in narrative. She is a co-author with Victoria Bergvall and Alice
Freed of Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Prac-
tice (1996). Her current research is on prosodic and discourse cues to
units in spoken narrative.
Delia Chiaro is Professor of English Language and Translation in the Uni-

versity of Bologna’s Department of Interpreting and Translation. She
has published extensively on various aspects of humor and language, as
well as on screen translation. She is a member of the editorial board
for HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, and her books
include Humor in Interaction, with Neal Norrick (2009), Translation,
Humor and the Media, and Translation, Humor and Literature (2011).
Her first book, The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play (1992),
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306 Contributors
has been recently revisited for the new millennium as The Language of
Jokes in the Digital Age (2014).
Jennifer Coates is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at

the University of Roehampton, London. Her chief research interests are
language, gender and sexuality, conversational turn-taking, and conver-
sational narrative. Her published work includes Women, Men and Lan-
guage (1986; 3rd ed. 2004); Women Talk: Conversation Between Women
Friends (1996); Men Talk: Stories in the Making of Masculinities (2003);
The Sociolinguistics of Narrative (edited with Joanna Thornborrow,
2005); and Women, Men and Everyday Talk (2013). A second edition of
Language and Gender: A Reader appeared in 2011. She has given lectures
at universities all over the world and has held visiting professorships in
Australia, New Zealand, the US, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain,
and Italy. She was made a Fellow of the English Association in 2002.
Jessica Milner Davis is an Honorary Associate in the School of Letters, Art

and Media at the University of Sydney and co-ordinates the Australasian
Humour Studies Network. She has been a visiting scholar at Bristol
University, Stanford University, All Souls College at Oxford University,
University of Bologna, and Clare Hall at Cambridge (of which she is a
Life Member). She researches history and theory of comedy and cross-
cultural humor and laughter. Her books include Farce (1978; rev. ed.,
2003) and two co-edited studies of humor Chinese culture, as well as
Understanding Humor in Japan (2006), which won the 2008 Association
for Applied and Therapeutic Humor research book prize. Twice presi-
dent of the International Society for Humor Studies (1996 and 2001), she
is a member of the editorial board for HUMOR: International Journal of
Humor Research and a commissioning editor for the Sage Encyclopedia
of Humor Studies.
Giovanna P. Del Negro is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M

University and is interested in gender, humor, and performance. Her
books include Looking Through My Mother’s Eyes: Life Stories of Nine
Italian Immigrant Women in Canada (1997; 2nd ed., 2003), the award-
winning The ‘Passeggiata’ and Popular Culture in an Italian Town:
Folklore and the Performance of Modernity (2005), and Identity and
Everyday Life (2005, co-authored). She is past co-editor of the Journal
of American Folklore. Her most recent publications focus on the party
records of bawdy Jewish women comics of the 1950s and the representa-
tion of Jewish women in Woody Allen’s films.
Rainer Emig is Chair of English Literature and Culture at Leibniz Uni-

versity in Hanover. He was educated at Frankfurt am Main, Warwick,
and Oxford, and has taught at Cardiff and Regensburg. He is especially
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Contributors 307
interested in the link between literature and the media and in literary,
critical, and cultural theory, especially theories of identity, power, gender,
and sexuality. His publications include Modernism in Poetry (1995) and
W.H. Auden (1999), as well as contributions to such edited collections as
Stereotypes in Contemporary Anglo-German Relations (2000), Gender ↔
Religion (with Sabine Demel, 2008), Hybrid Humour (with Graeme
Dunphy, 2010), Performing Masculinity (with Antony Rowland, 2010),
Commodifying (Post-) Colonialism (with Oliver Lindner, 2010), and
Treasure in Literature and Culture (2013). He is one of the editors of the
Journal for the Study of British Cultures.
Gail Finney was educated at Princeton University and the University of

California, Berkeley. She formerly taught at Harvard University and is
currently Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Uni-
versity of California, Davis. Her publications include Women in Modern
Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Cen-
tury (1989; 2nd ed., 1991), Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy
(editor, 1994), Christa Wolf (1999), Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century
Germany: Text as Spectacle (editor, 2006), Literature of Fantasy and
the Supernatural (editor, 2011; rev. ed, 2013), and numerous articles on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and comparative literature.
She is currently working on a book entitled The Dark Side of the Screen:
Family Trauma in American Cinema at the Millennium.
Fred Gardaphé is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American

Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian Ameri-
can Institute. He directs the Italian American Studies Program at Queens.
He is associate editor of Fra Noi, editor of the Series in Italian Ameri-
can Culture at State University of New York Press, and co-founding co-
editor of Voices in Italian Americana. His books include Italian Signs,
American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (1996);
Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer (1997); Mous-
tache Pete is Dead!: Italian/American Oral Tradition Preserved in Print
(1997); Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Studies (2003);
From Wiseguys to Wise Men: Masculinities and the Italian American
Gangster (2006); and The Art of Reading Italian Americana (2011). He
is the recipient of a 2011 Fulbright Senior Lectureship at the University
of Salerno (Italy) and currently at work on a novel and a study of humor
and irony in Italian American culture.
Frances Gray is a former Reader in Drama at the University of Sheffield.

She has written books on modern theater and crime writing, as well as
Women and Laughter (1994), and also writes for theater and radio. Most
recently, she and Kate Dorney produced a study of British theater since
1945, Played in Britain, for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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308 Contributors
Janet Holmes is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of
Wellington, where she directs the Language in the Workplace Project.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She has published
on a wide range of topics including New Zealand English, language and
gender, sexist language, pragmatic particles, compliments and apolo-
gies, and, most recently, aspects of workplace discourse. Her most recent
books are Gendered Talk at Work (2006); Leadership, Discourse, and
Ethnicity (2011); and the fourth edition of the Introduction to Sociolin-
guistics (2013). Her research team is currently investigating the discourse
of skilled migrants as they enter New Zealand workplaces and analyzing
the language used on construction sites and in eldercare facilities in order
to assist refugees who seek to work in these areas.
Jon S. Y. Hui is a lecturer and a program coordinator at the Centre for

Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He coordinates
and teaches discipline-specific English courses for engineering students
and discourse analysis to postgraduate diploma students. Prior to his
academic career, Jon worked in the radio, data, and telecommunication
sectors and held various positions, including research and development
engineer, network engineer, and program and regional manager. His cur-
rent research interests include language and gender, spoken discourse,
professional communication, and language in the workplace.
Sheri R. Klein is Coordinator for Art Education at The Kansas City Art Insti-
tute (Kansas City, MO). She has a BFA and MFA in Painting and Drawing
from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in Curriculum
and Instruction in Art Education from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Her interest in humor focuses on visual humor in contemporary art,
design, and visual culture. She is the author of Art and Laughter (2007),
as well as numerous essays and scholarly articles on the subject of visual
humor and its relevance for art education curriculum and pedagogy.
Don Kulick is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Comparative

Human Development at the University of Chicago. His books include
Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Pros-
titutes (1998) and Language and Sexuality, with Deborah Cameron
(2003). His most recent book is Fucked: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of
Engagement, with Jens Rydström (2014).
Sharon Lockyer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at

Brunel University, UK. She researches the sociology of mediated cul-
ture, critical comedy studies, and the politics of popular culture. She is
the director of the international Centre for Comedy Studies Research
(CCSR). She is the editor of Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on
Contemporary Television (2010) and co-editor of Beyond a Joke: The
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Contributors 309
Limits of Humour (with Michael Pickering; 2005, 2009) and Controver-
sial Images: Media Representations on the Edge (with Feona Attwood,
Vincent Campbell and I.Q. Hunter; 2013), and she has published in a
range of academic journals. She is on the editorial boards of Comedy
Studies, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, and the
European Journal of Humor Research.
Brigid Maher is Lecturer in Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Mel-

bourne. Her main research focus is the translation of contemporary
literature, particularly the translation of humor, irony, and satire. She
also works on crime fiction, transnational writing, comics, and audio-
visual translation. She is the author of Recreation and Style: Translat-
ing Humorous Literature in Italian and English (2011) and co-editor
of Words, Images and Performances in Translation (with Rita Wilson;
2012) and Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circula-
tion, Reception (with Brian Nelson; 2013). She has translated four nov-
els by Milena Agus for Scribe (Melbourne) and Telegram (London), and
Bringing It All Back Home by Nicola Lagioia for Einaudi (Turin).
Rod A. Martin has been Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University

of Western Ontario since 1984. His research focuses on the psychology
of humor, particularly as it relates to psychological health and well-being.
He has published more than 100 scholarly journal articles, books, and
book chapters, including a comprehensive textbook entitled The Psy-
chology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2006), which has been
translated into Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. He has devel-
oped several humor measures that have been translated into numerous
languages and are widely used in research worldwide. He is a past presi-
dent of the International Society for Humor Studies and serves on the
editorial board of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research.
Joanne Scheibman is Associate Professor of English and Applied Linguis-

tics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where she teaches
classes in syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis. Her research focuses
on usage-based approaches to the analysis of language, in particular the
ways in which meaning and participant interaction contribute to gram-
matical and lexical patterning in conversational contexts. Her book,
Point of View and Grammar (2002), proposes that speakers’ attitudes,
evaluations, and metalinguistic commentaries have a robust influence on
the distribution of utterances found in American English conversations.
Her recent articles examine the role of indexical and generalizing expres-
sions in constructing jointly held stances in interactive contexts.
Stephanie Schnurr is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Her

main research interests are workplace discourse, including professional
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310 Contributors
and medical settings. She has widely researched and published on leader-
ship discourse, gender, the multiple functions and strategic uses of humor,
politeness and impoliteness, identity construction, and other aspects of
workplace discourse. She is the author of Leadership Discourse: Interac-
tions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture (2009) and Exploring
Professional Communication: Language in Action (2012).
Alessandra Senzani holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from Florida Atlan-

tic University, a laurea in Translation and Interpreting from the Univer-
sity of Bologna, and a master’s degree in English from Youngstown State
University. Her research focuses on representations of ethnic, class, and
gender identities and the role humor plays in negotiating the discourses
that define them. She has published articles on humor, Italian American
literature and cinema, and Australian Aboriginal literature and cinema
in journals such as Quaderni del ‘900, Voices in Italian Americana (Via),
HUMOR, and Postscript and in edited anthologies. Lately, she has been
working as freelance translator, publishing the translation of Erich Puch-
ner’s Model Home (Barbès) and editing Jim Longhi’s memoir, Woody,
Cisco e Me (Clichy).
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and

English at Penn State University. Her latest monograph is Postmodern
Utopias and Feminist Fictions (2013); she is also co-editor of The Scandal of
Susan Sontag (2009). She has published numerous articles on nineteenth- to
twenty-first-century literature, with a recent focus on feminist narratology
and representations of alternative futures. Her current project, Regard-
ing Climate Change, explores forms of literary climate-change narratives
and the relationship of such narratives not only to transformative thinking
(or the lack thereof), but also to political and ethical action.
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34 Science Fiction Film, Television, 40 Sport Beyond Television

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47 De-convergence in Global Media 56 International Perspectives on

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For Clarissa and Giacomo

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1 Humor: A Many Gendered Thing 1

[AU: We normally called these Parts and

2 Blended Spaces as Subversive Feminist Humor 13

3 Traditional Comic Conflicts in Farce and Roles for Women 30

4 The School for Scandal: Humor and the Scandalized

5 “A Gay Arcadia of Happy Girls”: Women, the Body,

7 Gender Trouble in Sketches from Japan 100

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8 Humor and Gender: An Overview of Psychological Research 123

9 Gender and Humor in Everyday Conversation 147

[comp: this s/b a

11 Power and Connection: Humor in a Cantonese Family 182

12 Humor and Contemporary Product Design:

13 Being Bovvered and Taking Liberties: Female

14 Little Miss Sunshine and the Avoidance of Tragedy 226

15 “What’ya Mean I’m Funny?” Ball-Busting Humor

16 “A Woman, a Wog and a Westie”: Monica

17 Gender and Grotesque Humor in Contemporary

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19 Petite Flower, Giver Goddess, and Duchess of

20 Humor and Gender, Directions for Future

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It is commonly accepted today that, consciously or subconsciously, our gen-

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Conceptual blending is one aspect of mental space theory (Fauconnier 1994),

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