Moms Mabley and Whoopi Goldberg: Age, Comedy and Celebrity

Abstract

In keeping with the representational imbalances of popular culture, interest in ageing and celebrity has to date been preoccupied with white female performers and the ways in which their ageing is pathologised, celebrated or erased.¹ Against this background, and reflecting this volume’s concern to extend critical work on celebrity and ageing, this chapter explores the role age and ageing plays in the celebrity and performances of two black female comics, Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley and Whoopi Goldberg. My argument here is that Mabley and Goldberg can be linked. Firstly, this is with regard to their roles in the history of African American comic celebrity, and secondly, it relates to the ways that the content of their comedy repeatedly poses questions about the cultural construction of (and meanings attached to) age. This can be understood through the ways in which their embodied comic performances both foreground and render ambiguous the ageing female body in celebrity representation. Both performers can be read as revealing some of the ways in which the history of racialised representation shapes available forms of bodily presentation with regards to ageing, but both refuse to conform to the conventional meanings attached to these and use their comedy as a means to redefine and comment upon cultural expectations of age and femininity. Both figures exceed the limitations and meanings assigned to them, and they thus have ‘something to tell us’² about the cultural tropes of ageing, sexuality, ethnicity and the temporality of celebrity.