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Pme 8 Feminist Colldons v. 16. no. 1. Fall 1994
WHAT'S SO FUNNY? THE EXPLOSION
OF LAUGHTER IN FEMINIST
CRITICISM
by Debra Beilke
Regina Barreca, ed., NEW PERSPECTIYES ON
WOMEN A1M) COMEDY. New York: Gordon and
Breach, 1992. (Studies in gender and culture, v.5) 244p.
ISBN 2-88124-533-1; pap., ISBN 2-88124-534-X.
Regina Barreca, UNTAMED AND UNABASHED: ES-
SAYS ON WOMENAND HUMOR IN BRITISH LIT-
ERATURE. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
191p. bibl. index. $29.95, ISBN 0-8143-2136-4.
Gail Finney, ed., LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING: GEN-
DER AND COMEDY. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and
Breach, 1994. (Studies in humor and gender, v.1) 363p.
$39.00, ISBN 2-88124-644-3; pap., $20.00, ISBN 2-
88124645-1.
Frances Gray, WOMEN AND LAUGHTER.
Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
202p. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-15124; pap., $12.95, ISBN
0-8139-1513-9.
Linda Moms, ed., AMERICAN WOMEN HUMOR-
ISTS: CRITICAL ESSAYS. New York: Garland, 1994.
(Studies in humor, v.4) 437p. index. $72.00, ISBN 0-
8153-0622-9.
I
Alice Sheppard, MTOONING FOR SUFFRAGE.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
276p. ill. bibl. index. $37.50, ISBN 0-8263-1458-9.
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain
on the afections." -- George Eliot.
"Laughter, like nuclear energy, has no opinions,
positive or negative, about the status quo. What
it does have, like nuclear energy, is power, to
which we can relate in a number of ways. . . If
feminism is to change all that needs to be
changed, therefore, it is essential forwomen to
clarify their relationship to laughter." --Frances
Gray (p.33).
Frances Gray's comparison of laughter to nuclear
energy is typical of recent feminist inquiry into humor.
Characterizing laughter as an "inflammatory device," a
way to "blow up the law," or to "exploden the foundations
of patriarchy, the writers in these six critical volumes
are the most recent contributors to the eruption of
women's humor scholarship in the past ten years. Despite
subtle variations in their theoretical perspectives,
all of the writers reviewed here agree that female laughter
is a serious thing, that it has been all but ignored by
traditional (mostly male) humor scholars, and that it can
be an unsettling, dis~ptive political force, shaking the
core of male domination.
In addition to disproving the popular misconcep-
tion that women have no sense of humor, feminist critics
have alsobeen interested in discovering what, if any, dif-
ferences there are between male and female senses of
humor. Some of the conclusions have been usefully sum-
marized by Gail Finney in Look Who's Laughing:
They claim, for example, that women tend to
tell comic stories whereas mcn prefer telling
jokes; that the primary aim of women's humor
is communication and the sharing of experience
in contrast to men's use of humor as self-pre-
sentation and the demonstration of cleverness;
that comedy by women is less hostile than that
by men: female comics are more prone to self-
directed putdowns than to putting down oth-
ers, the object of women's humor is the power-
ful rather than the pitiful, and women are less
likely than men to laugh at those hurt or em-
barrassed; that women's stories are often non-
linear; and that in women's comic literature
there is frequently more emphasis on recogni-
tion than resolution and on process than con-
clusion, leading to a lack of happy endings or
closure altogether. (pp.4-5)
Despite this fairly lengthy list of gender differences,
most feminist literary critics of humor have focused on
how women have used humor to underscore the absurdi-
ties of patriarchy in an attempt to subvert the system.
For example, Regina Barreca, one of the pioneers in the
field, has focused mainly on the rebellious, angry nature
of women's humor. She believes that "comedy can ef-
fectively channel anger and rebellion by first making them
appear to be acceptable and temporary phenomena, no
doubt to be purged by laughter; and then by harnessing
the released energies, rather than dispersing them" (New
Perspectives, p.6).