The title of the second panel, “Getting out of Hand: Comic Attitudes and Emancipatory Narratives: Mostly Memoirs,” not only fits the conference theme of Emancipatory Narratives, but also AHSA’s call for submissions that engage the etymology of emancipation: something like “to take out of hand,” or to “free from being grasped.”
This panel investigates comic attitudes (comportments, dispositions) that are shaped by worldly constraints, particularly in memoirs and uses of humor in life writing by marginalized subjects.
Jalylah Burrell’s talk, “Broken Language: Angela Nissel’s Harrowing and Hilarious Misadventures in Television and Print Media,” investigates Nissel’s career in television, launched by the success of her first memoir, The Broke Girl Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke (2001). The memoir secured her entry into television writing, earning her a job on the writing staff of NBC sitcom Scrubs, where she eventually rose to head writer and producer. Despite wresting a seat at a comedy-writing table generally reserved for white men, and blazing an inventive path to follow for a subsequent wave of funny, web-savvy Black women from Issa Rae to Quinta Brunson, she faced serious and consistent challenges to her comic autonomy by virtue of her race and gender. Burrell’s talk begins with specific Scrubs scenes for what they reveal about the limits of the medium and the resourcefulness of Nissel’s comic approach, and then looks briefly at her two other humorous memoirs, Mixed: My Life in Black and White (2007), and Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead: A Memoir—An Honest and Moving Story of Caregiving, Loss, and Strength (2026).
Kara Bauman’s talk, “Biting Back: Sarcasm, Persona, and Comic Resistance,” examines sarcasm as a rhetorical posture through which speakers momentarily slip beyond the social constraints that attempt to define them. If emancipation etymologically means “to take out of hand,” sarcastic discourse performs a similar maneuver: it destabilizes authority through tonal inversion, wit, and biting dialogue. Sarcasm becomes a comic mode of resistance that allows subjects to evade or undermine structures of power without engaging in direct confrontation. The talk traces this strategy in two literary contexts. In Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “The Ugly Tourist,” sarcastic address functions as a weapon against colonial power and the tourist gaze. Kincaid’s second-person voice places the reader within the position of the tourist while simultaneously mocking and destabilizing that authority. David Sedaris’s memoir, Me Talk Pretty One Day, deploys self-deprecating sarcasm to navigate linguistic and cultural humiliation. Sedaris constructs a comic persona whose exaggerated incompetence allows him to resist the disciplinary authority of the classroom. Humor becomes a form of comic emancipation, enabling the narrator to reclaim narrative control while appearing vulnerable. As a rhetorical act of “getting out of hand,” biting humor enables speakers to reframe power relations and momentarily emancipate themselves through language.
The third talk, by KC Clemens, “Life Beyond the Diagnosis: Humor and the Graphic Memoir,” focuses on Jennifer Hayden’s graphic memoir, The Story of My Tits (2015), which uses humor, personal reflection, and visual storytelling to explore the experience of breast cancer. Hayden recounts her life-long awareness of her breasts from pre-adolescence and body image anxieties to motherhood and a breast cancer diagnosis. Her personal cancer journey illustrates how cultural expectations, sexuality, and health intersect in shaping women’s identities. As a memoir, the text emphasizes the importance of storytelling in processing trauma. Hayden’s comic reflections on femininity, sexuality, and bodily autonomy highlight the psychological and cultural dimensions of breast cancer beyond the clinical diagnosis. Ultimately, The Story of My Tits demonstrates how humor and memoir can work together to challenge stigma surrounding illness while fostering empathy and understanding. The graphic memoir rejects presenting illness solely as tragedy and makes an emotionally emancipatory meaning out of a life-altering experience.
Each of these talks offers comic resistance to conventional narratives about racial and gender identities. While our current times too often demonstrate how comic tactics can serve dark desires meant to enforce constraints in the public sphere, the panel instead demonstrates how a comic attitude in aesthetic formats can also offer the emancipation of a sympathetic laughter that creates and maintains communities.