The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

J. Reed

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137358233
• eBook ISBN: 9781137358240
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Performing Arts
• Index: Social Sciences

Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner have been partners in life and work for more than 40 years. Over those years they have been comedic pioneers in television, sound recording, film, theater, and animation. This book explores the ways they have used and expanded notions of queer to make their unique impact on American culture.

1. Feminism for the Whole Family

Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner were women working together in mainstream media, in comedy, at a time when comedy was experiencing revolutionary change in terms of its political content, innovations in form, and increased popularity. They were enormously successful, even revered by many critics and the public. They won numerous awards and honors¹—the top in their fields—in those years, controlled their own work products, and have maintained a diverse audience to this day.

Still, even given their notable accomplishments, they tend not to be seen as central to the challenging political comedy of the time. The fact that they are relatively marginal in the cultural history of the 1970s and 1980s tells us something about the ways we tell our cultural story. The stories of white, straight men still define cultural history. It is an old point, one feminists have been making for decades, but it remains worth noting.²

In fact, a 2011 study found that it is still true across the literary publishing world that the numbers of women published are significantly less than men (Miller). It makes economic sense for publishers because women (who buy more books than men) tend to read books by women and men, but men overwhelmingly read books only by men. The important feminist point here is not so much about quantifying how many women sell books compared to men, but the fact that women are still seen as “difference.” We live in a world that continues to universalize the experience of white, straight men. And trivialize the experience of women. This difficult truth persists as a central organizing principle of meaning making in American popular culture.

All of this is true despite the fact that feminist politics and culture making were also white hot in the 1970s and 1980s. It is despite the work that Tomlin and Wagner did to create subjective spaces for women in American culture. They were very much engaged in the politics of the time. Their work took on issues of class, race, war, and government and corporate corruption. They were part of the generation of artists and culture makers disillusioned with all that they were raised to believe in. The institution they challenged most explicitly, though, was gender.

They stood at the unlikely corner of funny and feminist. Even at this explosive moment for feminism and comedy, the two did not exactly intersect in the public imagination. Tomlin and Wagner challenged the injunction against funny women and funny feminists with their collaboration together. But that is only one of the liminal spaces they occupy. A unique partnership, they were a comedy team, two women working together to make new meaning, and carve out new subjective possibilities. Although they were very much of their moment, there was no one like them. They were feminist without question, but not without questions.

LILY TOMLIN: PUBLIC FEMINIST

Tomlin was also known as an outspoken liberal—infamous for some of her principled actions like refusing to participate with John Wayne, and Martha Mitchell (wife of Watergate-tainted John Mitchell) on Laugh-In. She appeared in character as a “bag lady” at a 1979 press conference regarding an upcoming event to stop the opening of Diablo Nuclear Power Plant (Oliver). She recorded antidraft registration television and radio spots based on the government’s “offensive racist stereotypes” in Public Service Announcements (PSAs) urging registration in 1980 (Associated Press).

She was particularly known as a feminist, described as such by the gamut of adjectives used to characterize feminists in all manner of articles about her in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, Newsweek said she was “intensely feminist” (Michener), as part of a profile on her; and Time called her “a militant feminist.” And in 1972 Norma McLain Stoop says this:

I had noticed the preponderance of women involved in her career and asked her if she was for women’s lib. “Of course,” she answered emphatically, “and for liberation in general.” (20)

A 1973 article about her in the New York Times adds to the description of “strong feminist,” by continuing, “on Laugh-In, she declined to do skits that were demeaning to women” (Kent, D17). She is described as a “women’s libber” in an industry article about the LA opening of Appearing Nitely in 1978. In fact the piece finds her female centricity noteworthy, as it says in full,

Women’s Libber Lily was with her writer-director-friend, Jane Wagner, and her female dog, Tess, as they left the theatre in her limousine – with a lady chauffeur. (Graham)

She also was a public face of feminist politics in a variety of ways. She was on the cover of Ms. Magazine in December 1976. She marched for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1977 alongside Jean Stapleton in a 12-mile demonstration in Santa Monica (Nabers). She was an important supporter of the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, appearing in two benefits, in 1976 and 1980 (Mehren). She was part of the “Feminist Network” of celebrity supporters for office workers within the Hollywood studio system in 1979 who were threatening to strike. She along with Jane Fonda and Alan Alda were vocal critics of a system of sexist exploitation of mostly women office workers in the industry (Variety). In the Cover Story for Time in 1977, the profile states,

Lily is as devoted to the feminist cause as any performer in the country. She has appeared at benefits in support of the Equal Rights Amendment in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Denver, and she has campaigned for Bella Abzug and Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso. A few years ago, she was appearing on the Dick Cavett Show when Actor Chad Everett referred to his wife as his property—along with his horse and his dog. She stunned even herself by walking off the show. (71)

And in the same week, in the article for the Cover Story in Newsweek, Tomlin is described as “a committed feminist, but her fairness doctrine applies even to the macho Rick. ‘It’s too easy to ridicule someone like him,’ she says. ‘You want to find his vulnerability too. It’s so hard to find that note that doesn’t put you apart from him’” (Kroll, “Funny” 64).

This last quote illustrates well that Tomlin’s feminism, her own articulation of it, is quite thoughtful in terms of the ways gender oppression operates, but refuses to reduce the complexity of feminism to the battle of the sexes, or oppression generally to an us versus them paradigm. In an After Dark interview, she tells a lengthy story about feeling silenced by powerful men on an interview show, and ends it describing how she felt at the moment:

I’m a little confused, nervous, repressed—a little everything, and they just kind of chuckled and put me down in a way they wouldn’t have done to someone else. But they’re conditioned to it, too. They’re victims as much as I am. It’s a whole societal thing. (McLain Stoop, 20)

She does not blame men, or women. Her politics are feminist, informed always by a sensibility that refuses to reduce feminism to less than its highest aspirations.

In the New York Times Magazine in 1976, Ellen Cohn says this: “For Tomlin, an ardent feminist, any male/female nomenclature is suspect. Nonetheless, her body of work is for some women an antidote to that of the female practitioners of stand-up comedy,” who reproduce ideas of female denigration (90). In a 1977 interview with Vogue Tomlin mentions that she reads a lot of feminist books and says, “I’m interested in things that support an androgynous culture, but who isn’t?” (Robinson, 187).

TOMLIN AND WAGNER’S FEMINIST PRESENCE

If not unique in popular culture, Tomlin and Wagner certainly were and are a rare phenomenon that appealed to so many, at the same time that they could create space for women’s subjectivities. As feminist politics are part of Tomlin’s public presence, a consciousness of gender and the ways that the institution of gender shapes the lives of characters—both women and men—are at the heart of all of them. Certainly not all feminist characters, they are created through a feminist lens. At the same time, they were also clearly beloved by mainstream audiences. They addressed multiple, even dissonant subjectivities simultaneously, thus pulling audiences together physically, and ideologically. Tomlin has always been conscious of their divergent appeal as she has noted over the years:

I try to get a peek at my audience just before I go out on stage. I kind of look out over the lights and I am always surprised by the huge cross section of people. There are thousands of people out there, sitting side by side, half of whom wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead together in the same room. (Personal interview)

As this book will demonstrate, without collapsing difference, without capitulating feminist politics, Tomlin and Wagner speak to multiple constituencies at the same time. Certainly, this model of gathering together audiences is the promise of pluralism actually working and mattering in mass media. Their work has always been imbued with a feminist sensibility that challenges male centrality at its core. Indeed, their work was always very much part of the developing feminist discourse of this time in a number of ways. However, they were virtually alone in bringing the voices and experiences of varieties of women characters to the mainstream, from a feminist perspective, using multimedia in the ways that they did.

They were not the only women creating comedy at the time. There were some stand-ups in both mainstream and lesbian contexts. Most of the stand-up work in the mainstream that took on issues of gender fell into the trap of the battle of the sexes. Elayne Boosler’s work—the one woman cited by Zoglin in his book on revolutionary humor of the 1970s and 1980s—is typical of that kind of gender critique. Joanne Gilbert argues that what has been called feminist humor is an impossibility. She writes, “by an inevitable use of an ‘us against them’ premise, marginal humor is part of a rhetoric of victimage” (171). She concludes that

within the genre of stand-up comedy, no genuinely feminist humor exists. As the superiority theory of humor explains, humor always entails hierarchy; if feminism is defined as “gender egalitarianism,” therefore, it is not present in the discourse of contemporary stand-up comics, male or female. (172)

Although Gilbert overstates her case, she does point to the difficulty of transcending the battle of the sexes discourse whenever gender or feminism is a topic in mainstream comedy. Tomlin and Wagner avoid the trap partly by avoiding stand-up. Tomlin’s stand-up is contained to some stories and observations between longer sketches or monologs. But what really sets their work apart from others who are working on a gender critique at the time is that they do not operate on and “us vs. them” paradigm. This paradigm shift is definitional to their work and public presence, and manifests itself in the ways they did and do feminism.

Making women visible, creating spaces for women to exert power and creativity in the mainstream, was a key feminist goal in what is marked as the second wave period. There was an emphasis on unearthing the accomplishments of women who had been written out of history, a celebration of those who were pushing against traditional boundaries and efforts to develop an environment in which women could participate more fully as subjects in the public sphere. Within those terms, Tomlin’s visibility as an independent woman, her identity as a feminist, her creating her own work, aligned her with feminist goals simply as a public presence.

At least as important to that public presence were the kinds of characters they created, and the fact that Tomlin and Wagner were careful to control them fully through their own production companies: Lija, Ominpotent, and Tomlin and Wagner Theatricalz. While they have certainly worked with other people and entities on larger projects, especially film and television, their best work is the work they have had control over together. As Tomlin said to me in a recent interview, “If we have to work with too many other people, it always gets a little sidetracked.”

FEMINIST PERFORMANCE

Tomlin’s taking the stage, alone, and being funny, challenged traditional notions of femininity as well. Moreover, the performance of many different women’s experiences and voices, performed with respect and nuance was a feminist act at that time, and one could easily argue, is still a feminist move. As Suzanne Lavin makes the point, “Tomlin’s comedy starts from the premise that women are free to use their intelligence, their perceptions, and their experience to create a vital performance art, which will contribute a unique and important viewpoint” (34). Her characters offered a presence for women and their perspectives. They were different kinds of women, with their own personalities. Not at all didactic, they were women who were formed under the gender regime of the time, and suffered for it. Edith Ann, Ernestine, Susie Sorority, and Mrs. Beasley are early characters that Tomlin and Wagner developed—all of whom were circumscribed by gender in some way.

Feminist analysis of media was in its early stages in the early 1970s. The discovery and development of women’s voices was a concern for many feminist thinkers and artists. Women were certainly visible in television, film, and onstage, but not as subjects or as protagonists, directors, writers, or producers. The effort and interest was in seeing and hearing women as representatives of themselves, not as the one defined by, through, or for a man. Tomlin and Wagner’s work was very much part of the development of feminist discourse at that level, especially on television.

THE TELEVISION SPECIALS

Often the sketches on their television specials came from a relatively direct feminist perspective. In the second television special, November 1973, there is a short run of fake commercials. One features a young woman (played by Judy Kahan) who simply says, “I don’t need women’s lib. My husband lets me do whatever I want.” Later in that same show, as herself as host Tomlin says,

In those days [school days] we were so brainwashed to believe that we had to have big breasts to be desirable as people that as a child of 11, literally, I’d go to bed at night and hope I would wake up a child with big breasts. But I never had the nerve to send for the ads in the backs of Photoplays. The ads that said, “It’s not a cream, it’s not a salve, it’s not an ointment, it’s not a machine, it’s not an exercise, it’s not a padded bra.” I used to think, “What is it?” Did anyone ever find out?

It then cuts to Tomlin on the stage reading a story as though to children about a bride dreaming about her wedding “and being carried into her new home. . . . ” It dissolves into the enactment by Judy Kahan of a young woman with her bridal headdress still on, in her new kitchen singing, “Oh kitchen, you’re a young bride’s dream. I’ll try to keep you nice and clean.” She starts dancing around the kitchen into an ironing board and she irons what turns out to be a giant picture of herself as she sings, “I’ll iron out the wrinkles. I won’t grow old anymore. I’ll just hang me in a closet. I’ll just shut the closet door.” She prances around as the kitchen gets increasingly out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1. Feminism for the Whole Family
• 2. Queering the Quotidian
• 3. Laughing All the Way to Ourselves
• 4. Selling Out and Buying In
• 5. Our Queer Mothers
• Appendix: Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s Major Projects and Awards
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index