No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender

Abstract

Gender is a topic which is often the subject for comedic treatment in plays, literature, film, and in stand-up comedy. Kathleen Rowe notes: ‘Almost all comedic forms — from jokes to gags to slapstick routines to the most complex narrative structures — attempt a liberation from authority’ (1995, p. 44). While comedy’s liberatory side can offer transgressive and political takes on authority, it can also be reactionary and discriminatory in both delivery and content. In terms of comedy’s ability to be transgressive, liberatory, reactionary, and discriminatory what does this form offer us in understanding dilemmas we have been exploring in this book? To put a different spin on Rowe’s comment, comedy often pulls at the pants of authority hoping to expose what authority seeks to hide behind, and, in so doing, it delights in breaking taboos, subverting convention, exposing hypocrisy, and shocking its audience. It can instead serve a more repressive purpose by consolidating dominant ideologies, endorsing stereotypes, and causing injury and harm. This double-edged possibility is what La Farge notes in the epigraph that heads this chapter.

When the same experience that moves one of us to pity is simultaneously moving everyone else to laughter, we may be sure there is something at work, some underlying dynamic, that can reduce us equally to laughter or tears.

(La Farge, 2004)

If you were a boy, having a sense of humor meant pouring salt on the head of the girl who sat in front of you to make it look as though she has dandruff. If you were a girl, having a sense of humor meant laughing when someone poured salt on your head.

(Comedy writer, Anne Beatts, in Barreca 1992)