Cracking Up

Cracking Up PDF Author: Katelyn Hale Wood
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Laughter in the Archives: Jackie "Moms" Mabley -- I Love You Bitches Back: Spect-Actors and Affective Freedom in I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! -- The Black Queer Citizenship of Wanda Sykes -- Contemporary Truth-Tellers: A New Cohort of Black Feminist Comics -- Conclusion.

We Killed

We Killed PDF Author: Yael Kohen
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374287236
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Kohen assembles America's most prominent comediennes to piece together an oral history about the revolution that happened to (and by) women in American comedy.

Who’s Laughing Now?

Who’s Laughing Now? PDF Author: Anna Frey
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772583189
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
From dour old women to buzzkills who can't take a joke, the stereotype of the humourless feminist has repeatedly been deployed to derail and delegitimize the women's rights movement. This collection skips the tired debates that ask whether feminists can be funny—we know the answer to this already—to instead investigate contemporary expressions and functions of humour within international feminist movements and communities. This interdisciplinary volume showcases critical analyses of cultural texts and events, personal accounts of producing and encountering feminist humour, and creative interruptions that pair laughter with insight. As a whole, this work seeks to sideline caricatures of the humourless feminist by promoting a vision of a diverse movement vibrant with innovative, generous, threatening, and, ultimately, triumphant laughter.

The Girl in the Show

The Girl in the Show PDF Author: Anna Fields
Publisher: Arcade
ISBN: 9781510718364
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
For fans of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer—and every other “funny woman”—comes a candid feminist comedy manifesto exploring the sisterhood between women’s comedy and women’s liberation. “I’m not funny at all. What I am is brave.” —Lucille Ball From female pop culture powerhouses dominating the entertainment landscape to memoirs from today’s most vocal feminist comediennes shooting up the bestseller lists, women in comedy have never been more influential. Marking this cultural shift, The Girl in the Show provides an in-depth exploration of how comedy and feminism have grown hand in hand to give women a stronger voice in the ongoing fight for equality. From I Love Lucy to SNL to today’s rising cable and web-series stars, Anna Fields’ entertaining retrospective combines amusing and honest personal narratives with the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the feminist movement. With interview subjects like Abbi Jacobson, Molly Shannon, Mo Collins, and Lizz Winstead among others—as well as actresses, stand-up comics, writers, producers, and female comedy troupes—Fields shares true stories of wit and heroism from some of our most treasured (and under-represented) artists. At its heart, The Girl in the Show captures the urgency of our continued struggle towards equality, allowing the reader to both revel in—and rebel against—our collective ideas of “women’s comedy.”

Feminist Comedy

Feminist Comedy PDF Author: Willow White
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London identifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century--Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald--this book demonstrates that stage comedy was crucial to these women’s professional success in a male-dominated industry and reveals a unifying thread of feminist critique that connects their works. Though male detractors denied women’s comic ability throughout the era, eighteenth-century women playwrights were on the cutting edge of comedy and their work had important feminist influence that can be traced to today’s stages and screens.

Laughing Feminism

Laughing Feminism PDF Author: Audrey Bilger
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814330548
Category : Dissenters in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
An examination of comedy and feminism in the works of early women British novelists.

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes PDF Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547064
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women

The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women PDF Author: Sheila Moeschen
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 0762466626
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A celebration of the most groundbreaking women in comedy who used humor to shake up the status quo and change perceptions of gender and comedy forever. The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women celebrates the outstanding contributions of fifty women in comedy past and present. From legends like Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers, and Tina Fey to current comedy heroes like Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, Abbi Jacobson, and Tig Notaro, this beautifully illustrated book charts a rich lineage of women using humor to speak truth to power, tangle with sensitive subjects, challenge the status quo, and do anything but sit still and stay quiet when laughs are on the line. Some of these women broke boundaries as pioneers on stage as well as in front of and behind the camera. Others penned their way into the history of American humor, redrawing the boundaries of writers' rooms to include diverse voices and perspectives. Through their collective work as stand-ups, sketch and improv comics, humor writers, and slapstick film stars, these women formed a network forged by creativity, guts, and a deep love of what comedy can do and be. In the process, they continue to pass their knowledge and insights from woman to woman, from funny generation to funny generation, offering support, inspiration, and, above all, laughter.

Performing Marginality

Performing Marginality PDF Author: Joanne R. Gilbert
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814328033
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
An academic study of stand-up comedy performed by females. This will aid in the understanding of power structures in our society.

Pretty/Funny

Pretty/Funny PDF Author: Linda Mizejewski
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756933
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
“A totally engaging read [and] a fascinating look at the diversity and range of female comics . . . by an author who herself obviously has a sense of humor.” —Joanna E. Rapf, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either “pretty” or “funny.” Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars—and often they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis Diller to Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett. Pretty/Funny focuses on Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, the groundbreaking women comics who flout the pretty-versus-funny dynamic by targeting glamour, postfeminist girliness, the Hollywood A-list, and feminine whiteness with their wit and biting satire. Linda Mizejewski demonstrates that while these comics don’t all identify as feminists or take politically correct positions, their work on gender, sexuality, and race has a political impact. The first major study of women and humor in twenty years, Pretty/Funny makes a convincing case that women’s comedy has become a prime site for feminism to speak, talk back, and be contested in the twenty-first century.