Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Preface 000
Regina Barreca
Introduction: Dorothy Parker's Headache
Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon, Sean
Zwagerman
Part I: Histories, Politics and Forms
Laughing Aphrodite
Laurie O'Higgins
Comedy in Ancient Greece and Rome: What Was Funny, Whose Humor Was It,
and How Do We Explain the Jokes without Killing Them?
Barbara Gold
Mary and Her Sisters
Anne Higgins
Feminist Humor without Women: The Challenge of Reading (in) the Middle Ages
Lisa Perfetti
Laugh, or Forever Hold Your Peace: Comic Crowd Control
in Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Prologues and Epilogues
Diana Solomon
Domestic Manners of the Americans: A Transatlantic Phenomenon
Linda Morris
Part II: Approaches, Texts and Audiences
The Business of British Burlesque
Jacky Bratton
The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque
Joanna Mansbridge
Elsie and Doris Waters: Four Songs
Paul Matthew St. Pierre
"I'm Daphne": On the Comedy of Cross-Dressing and Metamorphosis
in Wilder's Some Like it Hot, Lubitsch's I Don't Want to be a Man,
and Ovid's Metamorphoses
Kay Young
Biting the Hand that Feeds Her: Patronage and Comedy
in Nineteenth-Century Theatre
Gilli Bush-Bailey
Out of the Box: Comedy in Disability Theater by Canadian Women
Kirsty Johnston
Part III: Topics, Theories and Practices
Humoring the Female Pol: Irony, Consciousness-Raising,
and "Third-Culture" Discourse
Tarez Samra Graban
An American Treasure: The Wit and Wisdom of Ann Coulter
A Cautionary Tale: Ann Coulter and the Failure of Humor
Sean Zwagerman
Lesbian Stand-Up Comics and the Politics of Laughter
Joanne Gilbert
Layla Siddiqui as Holy Fool in Little Mosque on the Prairie
Shannon Hengen
Postmodernity and the Gendered Uses of Political Satire
Lisa Colletta
Coda: Try This at Home
Peter Dickinson
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Peter Dickinson is professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
Anne Higgins is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
Diana Solomon is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
Paul Matthew St. Pierre is professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
Sean Zwagerman is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of women's comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize women's contributions to-and political uses of-comedy. The essays collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender and comedy, spanning centuries of literature and a diversity of methodologies.
Through a reconsideration of literary, theatrical, and mass media texts from the Classical period to the present, Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice responds to the historical marginalization and/or trivialization of both women and comedy. The essays collected in this volume assert the importance of recognizing the role of women and comedy in order to understand these texts, their historical contexts, and their possibilities and limits as models for social engagement. In the spirit of comedy itself, these analyses allow for opportunities to challenge and reevaluate the theoretical approaches themselves.