Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy wins the Popular Culture Association's Susan Koppelman Award

We are delighted to announce that Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant's book Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy has won the Popular Culture Association's Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture.

Ideal for classroom use, Hysterical! is an anthology of original essays by the leading authorities on women’s comedy. The book surveys the disorderly, subversive, and unruly

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performances of women comics from silent film to contemporary multimedia.

Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens large and small, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren’t funny. But today’s funny women aren’t a new phenomenon—they have generations of hysterically funny foremothers. Fay Tincher’s daredevil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg’s sly twinkle, and Tina Fey’s acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women’s bodies and behaviors.

Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field’s leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women’s comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women’s comedy.

About the Popular Culture Association

The Popular Culture Association was founded by scholars who believed the American Studies Association was too committed to the then existing canon of literary writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman. They believed that the American Studies Association had lost its holistic approach to cultural studies; there was little room, as they saw it, for the study of material culture, popular music, movies, and comics.

To remedy this situation, Professors Ray Browne (Bowling Green State University) and Russell Nye (Michigan State University) started an organization that would be open to more subjects and forms of cultural studies. The Association’s first meeting was in East Lansing, Michigan at Michigan State University in 1971. Aiding the efforts of Browne and Nye were early pioneers such as Jane Bakerman, Carl Bode, Pat Browne, John G. Cawelti, George N. Dove, Marshall W. Fishwick, M. Thomas Inge, Susan Koppelman, Peter C. Rollins, Fred E. H. Schroeder, Emily Toth, Tom Towers, Daniel Walden, and many others.

In 1979, the American Culture Association became a partner in the study of Popular Culture and the two organizations have held joint conferences since that time. Under the tutelage of Ray Browne, the organization grew. The national conference has over 2,000 participants. Moreover, the organization has seven regional organizations: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Far West, Southwest/Texas, and Oceanic. The regional organizations range in size from 200 to 1,000 participants. The PCA is closely affiliated with four international popular culture organizations in Australia/New Zealand, East Asia, Canada, and Europe. PCA also supports two prestigious, peer-reviewed journals—The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of American Culture—and maintains an international organization that meets in the summer of odd numbered years.

In 2003, Ray and Pat Browne stepped down as the leaders of the PCA after many years of building and nurturing the organization. Today, the PCA continues to nurture the study of popular and American culture, champion new and established scholars in both their research and teaching, and support the publication of its two prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of American Culture.

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Top 10 Feminist Moments in Women’s Comedy

This Sunday, Ellen DeGeneres will host the 86th Academy Awards. DeGeneres and her career comprises a full chapter of Linda Mizejewski's new book Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. Other chapters cover star writer/performer comedians Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, and Wanda Sykes, among others. We asked Professor Mizejewski to list her favorite moments in comedy when women have delivered provocative commentary on women's issues.

Top 10 Feminist Moments in Women’s Comedy
By Linda Mizejewski

My favorite feminist moments in comedy would have to begin with Fanny Brice and her parody of the Ziegfeld showgirls in the 1920s, and then move to Mae West, Lily Tomlin, and episodes of Roseanne. The list would turn into another book! So I’ll focus instead on the new generation of women comedians who, since 2000, have grabbed headlines, turned heads, and in some cases made history with their political comedy about gender, sexuality, race, and class. The performances listed below are not in any order because all of them are amazing, but the Fey-Poehler performance is listed first because it’s the one that’s gotten the most mainstream attention.

1

The Saturday Night Live Tina Fey/Amy Poehler skit on Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton (2008)

At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, Fey and Poehler impersonate Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton “crossing party lines to address the now very ugly role that sexism is playing in the campaign,” as Fey’s Palin piously puts it. This skit wittily contends that no matter what women look like, their looks will always be more important than what they say, as far as mainstream media is concerned. For the topic of international politics, Fey/Palin’s contribution is that she can see Russia from her house, while Poehler/Clinton, a brilliant politician, complains about journalists sniping that she has “cankles.” The skit was part of a series of Fey’s Palin impersonations on SNL which, some pollsters suggested, influenced the 2008 presidential election.

Watch the sketch: www.hulu.com >>

2

Wanda Sykes’s routine on Michelle Obama in her performance concert I’ma Be Me (2009)

Sykes begins this routine with her childhood memory of her mother’s rebuke that Wanda and her sister shouldn’t “dance” in the car because “White people are looking at you!” She develops this into a scathing and hilarious commentary on the white policing of black bodies, especially black female bodies. When she uses the new First Lady as her extended example, the comedy is a coup of fierce race/gender critique. High points include Sykes lampooning the stereotype of “the angry black woman” and shrewdly pinpointing the racism underlying journalists’ probing question, “Who is the real Michelle Obama?” 

Get Wanda's DVD I’ma Be Me >>

3

Margaret Cho’s All American Girl segment of I’m the One That I Want (2000)

In this segment of her first performance concert, Cho tells from a feminist perspective the story of her failed 1990s sitcom All American Girl. During her experience with ABC network executives, she was told her face was “too big for the camera”—that is, too Asian—and that she needed to lose 30 pounds in two weeks in order to look acceptable for primetime. In this virtuoso comeback, Cho castigates the racism and sexism of the entertainment industry and also tells how the ideal of the thin white body nearly killed her. Her exuberant manifesto at the end of this concert is a high point in feminist pop culture.

Get Margaret's book I’m the One That I Want >> | And her DVD >>

4

Ellen DeGeneres hosts the Emmy Primetime Awards (2001)

In the months after 9/11, the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony had been canceled twice and was finally re-scheduled in November, with DeGeneres as its host. She won overwhelming acclaim for a performance that hit exactly the right notes, respecting the ongoing national trauma and gracefully pointing to the future. This role was also the turnaround for DeGeneres’s career, which had faltered badly following her groundbreaking coming-out in 1997. Her television series Ellen (1994-98) had been picketed by protesters, slapped with censorship warnings, and eventually cancelled. But at the Emmys just four years later, she stepped into the role of affable host that turned out to be her niche, eventually launching her to international fame with her daytime talk show. At the 2001 Emmys, she cites her butch lesbianism as the key to the award ceremony’s political meaning: “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?” The line cleverly recruits the visibility of Jewishness, Hollywood liberalism, and homosexuality as signs of patriotism and calls attention to her gay identity as her claim to citizenship.