Pretty/Funny

Women Comedians and Body Politics

Linda Mizejewski

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781477307601
• eBook ISBN: 9780292756939
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

"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.

Index

Italic page numbers indicate photographs.

ABC network: and Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out, 197, 200; and Margaret Cho’s sitcom, 125, 135, 153

Abdul, Paula, 202

abjection: and the body (especially the female, raced, or queer body), 20, 27, 95, 97–98, 107, 110–111, 121–122, 180, 184, 208, 215, 222n7, 227n1; and camp, 53; and the fag hag, 143; and Jewish comedians, 228–229n13; and Kathy Griffin’s comedy, 17, 26, 31, 53, 223n2; and Mae West, 20; and Princess Diana, 217; and Sarah Silverman’s comedy, 95, 97–98, 107, 110–111, 121–122, 184; and recovery from addiction, 137; and stand-up comedy, 15, 222n7, 223n2; and Wanda Sykes, 184

abortion. See reproductive rights

addiction, 27, 125, 130–139, 230nn9, 11

Admission (2013), 10

The Advocate, 149, 164, 171, 185, 203

Afghanistan war, 198–199

African American comedy: anger in, 171; hip appeal of, for white audiences, 178–179, 232n6; as the “humor of the oppressed,” along with Jewish comedy, 112–116; influence of, in twentieth century, 18, 113; reactions of white audiences to, 231–232n2; rhetorical devices of, 166–167; and the “truthsayer” tradition, 176–177; women in, 18–19, 162, 181. See also Sykes, Wanda

African Americans: and the “black best friend” cliché, 161–162; and the black middle class, 157, 170, 180, 185; female, as the antithesis of white femininity and beauty, 24, 155–156, 163, 170, 180; films targeted at, 23; and homosexuality, 180, 185–186, 224n13, 232n8; in Kathy Griffin’s audience, 48–49; rewarded for “acting white,” 77; sex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Pretty/Funny Women and Comedy’s Body Politics: Funniness, Prettiness, and Feminism
• One. Kathy Griffin and the Comedy of the D List
• Two. Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism: Picturing Tina Fey
• Three. Sarah Silverman: Bedwetting, Body Comedy, and “a Mouth Full of Blood Laughs”
• Four. Margaret Cho Is Beautiful: A Comedy of Manifesto
• Five. “White People Are Looking at You!” Wanda Sykes’s Black Looks
• Six. Ellen DeGeneres: Pretty Funny Butch as Girl Next Door
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index