Introduction: Feminist Humor and the Future of Fumerism

This special issue on feminist humor looks at the relationship between humor and feminist thought while interrogating the category of female humor itself. The “fumerist,” a term dubbed by comedian Kate Clinton, refers to the feminist humorist who celebrates female difference while expressing underlying feelings of rage.1 Pioneering theorist of feminist humor, Regina Barreca, notes the revolutionary potential of the term “fumerist,” which “captures the idea of being funny and wanting to burn the house down all at once.”2 Seen as too bold, too brainy, too bawdy, and too bitchy, feminist humorists have been overlooked and resisted by predominantly male critics, saddled by their misconceptions of what constitutes “female” behavior and what is worthy of laughter.3The idea that women were not supposed to get a joke, let alone tell one, is rooted in the perception of the second-wave feminist commitment to advancing gender equality through political, legal and social action as no laughing matter. Sara Ahmed among others exposes this fallacy with her concept of the feminist killjoy, who challenges patriarchal authority through joyful resistance and has fun doing so.4 The use of irony, satire, parody, and wit as masked forms of social critique in the US dates back to nineteenth-century female humorists like Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton), Frances Miriam Whitcher, and Marietta Holley, who used humor to challenge gender norms, and early twentieth-century writers like Carolyn Wells, Alice Duer Miller, and Florence Guy Seabury, who used it to critique the patriarchal power structure and advocate for women’s suffrage and women’s rights more broadly. In their reappraisal of the “fumerist,” Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett emphasize the affective power of feminist laughter, how moving beyond the rational power of thought to the “biosocial and psychosocial” power of the “belly laugh” has “cathartic effects of an erotic politics of laughter” rooted in pleasure and joy. In asserting the joy as well as the fury of feminist laughter, contemporary feminist humorists seek to build “mutual communities of belonging” and “unexpected alliances” that hold promise for the future of fumerism.5Since the publication of the last special issue of Studies in American Humor dedicated to “women’s humor” in 2011, “Funny Girls: Humor and American Women Writers,” much has changed in the cultural landscape in relation to issues of social justice as well as humor studies. Advocacy for gender and racial equality and female reproductive rights has been renewed with the advent of the #MeToo, #TimesUp, #BlackLivesMatter, and #SayHerName movements and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The expansion of new media platforms has also led to a renaissance of feminist humor that has in turn impacted humor studies. While the previous issue on female humor was largely focused on literary humor, scholarship today explores a variety of genres from satire and parody to stand-up, sketch comedy, television, film, and cartoons as well as digital media.While the label “women’s humor” can be useful, it has its limitations, and it is a fluid term that has changed meaning over time. In the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s in the wake of second-wave feminism and the women’s movement, the study of women’s humor was inaugurated with the publication of pioneering works by Nancy A. Walker, Regina Barreca, Emily Toth, Judy Little, and Linda A. Morris as well as important collections of essays on women’s humor edited by Barreca, Morris, Gail Finney, and June Sochen.6 The valuable anthologies of primary source material by female humorists including Martha Bensley Bruère and Mary Ritter Beard’s historic collection, Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America (1934), Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner’s Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (1988), and Daryl Cumber Dance’s Honey Hush!: An Anthology of African Women’s Humor (1998) further showed that women’s humor was a serious field of study.7 While these authors made groundbreaking contributions to the field, their work often reflects the second-wave feminist emphasis on reviving and uncovering works by and about women and has been criticized by some as reinforcing an essentialist, largely white, heteronormative, cisgendered point of view. Emphasizing the existence of a unique category of women’s humor can result in the minimalization of differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and national origin among types of women’s humor as well as the affinity between humor by women and by those from other marginalized groups, regardless of gender. Such categories of male and female humor have been increasingly troubled by our understanding of gender queer or nonbinary humor production.More recent multidisciplinary and intersectional approaches to feminist humor include works by Maggie Hennefeld and Kristen Anderson Wagner that focus on film, Michelle Ann Abate’s contribution to the study of comics, Jenny Sundén and Susanna Paasonen’s focus on feminist humor and social media, Shawn Levy’s study on stand-up comedians, works by Lisa A. Guerrero and Danielle Fuentes Morgan on African American satire and by Katelyn Hale Wood on Black feminist comedy, and Rebecca Krefting’s work on “charged” humor.8 Scholarship that explores feminist literary humor through an intersectional lens includes Margaret D. Stetz’s on the literary parody of transatlantic female humorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rachel Trousdale’s and Calista McRae’s on humor in poetry, and my own on female humorists’ use of satire, irony, and wit in the interwar period.9 Current collections of essays on feminist humor and humor in general take a more intersectional approach and raise questions about the intention as well as the efficacy of humor, asking to what extent humor can or should translate into political action and social change.10Early resistance to feminist humor on the grounds that women aren’t funny is laughable given the proliferation of women’s humor and an awareness of the sexist origins of such claims. The idea that women aren’t funny is rooted in false binary oppositions between masculinity/femininity, intellect/emotion, aggression/submission, sexuality/purity, funny/pretty that reinforce an outdated Victorian ideal of the “cult of True Womanhood” based in “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.” According to Barreca, this split creates a double bind for women between the “good girl,” who doesn’t swear, tell jokes, or engage in sexual or aggressive behavior, and the “bad girl,” who does all of the above. “Learning to sound like a Good Girl, while half-concealing the text of the Bad Girl,” Barreca argues, “has been the subject of a great deal of women’s humor” (They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted, 16). Female humorists often mask this subversive or underlying meaning by invoking gender stereotypes in order to subvert them. According to Walker, many critics fail to recognize humor by women and other marginalized groups “largely because the use of stereotypes is assumed to constitute an acceptance of that stereotype” (A Very Serious Thing, 20). Female humorists often “employ stereotypes of women”—which include “the gossipy spinster, the nagging wife, the inept housekeeper, the lovelorn woman, the dumb blond”—“for the purpose of mocking those stereotypes and showing their absurdity and even danger,” Walker states. (9–11). Humorists’ negative use of gender and racial stereotypes is at times so concealed (or the assumption of stereotypes by the reader/audience so strong) that the use can be misinterpreted as an unironic endorsement of such biased norms.While popular theories of humor can be limiting, they can help provide a framework through which we can examine the evolving field of feminist humor. According to an outmoded but nonetheless influential relief theory of humor as elaborated by Freud, “tendentious jokes,” or jokes with purpose, are an outlet for hostile or obscene thoughts and feelings that are temporarily uninhibited and released through laughter.11 These jokes are often used by those in positions of greater authority with the purpose of insulting those in subordinate positions, or “punching down,” thereby reinforcing the status quo. Since these aggressive and sexual tendencies were seen as “unfeminine,” it followed that women were not or should not be the initiators of laughter. Outspoken women of intellect and wit were demonized by a false dichotomy between the domestic “angel” and the liberated “monster.”12 According to Hélène Cixous, this defiant laughter is a matter of perception and can be seen as empowering or threatening depending on your point of view. “You only have to look at the Medusa straight to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”13 This type of laughter stands in contrast to the “faked” laughter of a woman at a man’s joke of which she or some other subordinate person is the butt and can be seen as a physical release, like a kind of orgasm, especially when originated by a woman. But it can also be seen as an assertion of female sexuality, knowledge, and ultimately power. The laughing Medusa, says feminist theorist Susan Rubin Suleiman, is a “trope for women’s autonomous subjectivity and for the necessary irreverence of women’s writing and rewriting.”14 The relation of humor to knowledge and of knowledge to power is at the root of the female claim to humor and the denial, especially among male critics, of feminist humor.The incongruity theory of humor, with its emphasis on the verbal presentation and cognitive perception of a double or ironic meaning (of a socially accepted overt and an underlying subversive meaning), has been central to an understanding of feminist humor. Unlike the relief theory and the superiority-disparagement theories of humor, which emphasize the sexual/aggressive tendencies and the social nature of humor, the incongruity theory is more cognitively oriented, based on the perceptual and verbal aspects of humor, in particular in the use of irony and wit. Incongruity theory is based on the “assumption that human experience works with learned patterns and expectations. When a thing violates our expectation or mental pattern, it is incongruous.”15 This approach can be traced back to Aristotle, who identifies laughter as being caused by a violation of expectation, and Immanuel Kant, who famously defines it as “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”16The “double-voiced discourse” commonly found in feminist humor also reflects what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “heteroglossia” or the “dialogic” voice found in “the Menippea” (Menippean satire), which, according to Bakhtin, displays “dialogical parody.”17 While Bakhtin suggests that parodists use this multivoiced discourse as a means of temporarily challenging the status in the of the Judy that women use this to a more challenge to the status through a concept of the has been by of female humor like with her of the woman, Linda with her critique of the funny false and Maggie Hennefeld in her of the female and from as well as the of comedian how the physical and verbal of the of the woman, too too too too can in be a source of that social In Women and Linda on work in a feminist of Bakhtin by the false oppositions between and female and and and and that have to reinforce the expectation that women are and not Hennefeld the woman in of that the woman is a who social or cultural while feminism is rooted in and In of the Hennefeld the focus from the of an can have effects on the to the between and The in the of the female that from the between and feminism has for contemporary feminist like and more feminist emphasis on the relation of humor to social action and social has of of the of humor by women and other marginalized groups as an of and In Humor and a between female humor and feminist humor. that feminist she the of social we are a social that that be Female humor a person or a from an point of while the of feminist humor and Walker that female humor can be subversive by the of gender thereby Walker identifies types of women’s the cultural of a while while the other the absurdity of that and for of gender Female humor does not the status she but to gender in to to its Walker, many female humorists a feminist that approaches the (A Very Serious Thing, early critics of female humor, like Barreca, a more overt feminist women’s humor, a split between humor that she as which for the and female humor that she is as a but “an not to and but to it into The and purpose of feminist humor is an subject of among and critics of humor her influential and an intersectional approach to women women among a of marginalized by or including Black and stand-up This status marginalized a on those in positions of power and a to critique she is the and efficacy of through humor. as a type of discourse that as a to political This issue of the subversive power of women’s humor and the relationship between and action is central to Krefting’s American Humor and its on emphasis on with her concept of humor, for humor to beyond to according to is challenging social and cultural on the of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, or other category of social from a social and political to social justice and is in the of cultural for the is its is in or or action on of social that such humor not have is no or cultural for into women’s when they to their status as marginalized by humor” it on a cultural to be well but it nonetheless has a purpose in to social understanding of feminist humor is further by the categories of and like and is a term that is and in that it that which it feminist defines as a kind of by a new kind of which like and in the of a discourse” by media and popular a kind of for the feminist of gender equality as been while what is as the of joy or humor, and of pleasure by some with second-wave a new of and that has been into media and popular and the pleasure and with female and The of and is that female and as forms of and the for action to gender equality can reinforce sexist gender stereotypes and can feminist critique the false assumption that gender equality a on the of feminism and what she in the use of an ironic as a of from the of and sexist stereotypes in the media the of Such an to sexist stereotypes as as for a on the a In humor, and an of feminist and while and it also to focus on and ideal political and it gender differences and behavior, which are seen as a result of social this about gender are by about differences between and as and While such they in the status quo. 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