No Holds Barred: Millennial Provocations in Women's Stand-Up Comedy

Currently, women are everywhere in comedy: on the stand-up stage; writing for television; streaming on Netflix and Amazon, and making internet content. A perfect storm of circumstances accounts for this phenomenon: new venues for comedy, a postfeminist permissiveness that licenses women to speak that which until very recently had been unspeakable, and audiences’ hunger for fresh perspectives.

Regina Barreca’s They Used to Call me Snow White But I Drifted laid claim to women’s humor, revealing its subterranean sources and overt challenges to the status quo. Joanne Gilbert’s Performing Marginality considered women comedians in the 1980s-1990s who used humor to work out the delicate balance between telling their own stories and interrogating the structures of society. Linda Mizejewski’s recent Pretty/Funny argues that the success of female comics in the new millennium, from Tina Fey to Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, dismantles the pretty vs. funny binary by insisting upon their more complex subject positions as lesbians, women of color, and anti-heteronormative and queer straight women.

This paper will look closely at the myriad women in stand-up who have followed in their wake, and will consider:

• the centrality of a gendered, sexualized discourse to straight women’s humor
• comedians’ critique of millennial post-feminism, post-racism, and heteronormativity
• the mainstreaming of lesbian and queer comedians and the status of feminism in women’s standup

to suggest that the contemporary proliferation of women comedians speaks to the flexibility of comedy as a medium for processing the profound convergences and contradictions of contemporary society.