Serious Fun: Lesbian Humor and Social Justice, 1960-2000

This presentation explores playful methods of social activism and mirthful modes of political performance that lesbians employ to inspire and sustain deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. Lesbians are not typically associated with gaiety. Dykes, especially those from the 60s and 70s, are routinely caricatured as sexless, humorless, killjoys who (thankfully) lost the Culture Wars to deconstruction-spouting genderqueers.  Stereotypes painting lesbians as strident, frigid, and frumpy abound in both mainstream and queer subcultural accounts of history. Comedic strategies for self-definition and self-promotion successfully employed by gay men to increase their visibility, political clout, and economic capital – including camp, kitsch, and drag – have not been particularly efficacious for lesbians. The question of whether lesbian sexuality and dyke modes of humor can be made intelligible on the stage of national politics has preoccupied artists and activists since the 1960s. At the same time, however, some of the most successful women in the field of stand-up comedy are lesbians (e.g., Ellen, Rosie O’Donnell, Wanda Sykes, and Tig Notaro), or – like the queer-identified Margaret Cho - they have a fluid kind of gender expression. I discuss the notion of comic timing and in particular what lesbian stand-up comedians from 1960 to the present have to teach us about the relationship between tension and laughter, release and liberation.