Girls Behaving Badly: Comedy of a Different Color

By Sheila Moeschen

Even by twenty first century standards, the moment was jaw-dropping.  This season of the AMC guilty pleasure, Mad Men, a show set in 1960s America, featured an episode where Roger Sterling, partner of the Sterling & Cooper advertising firm, threw a lavish country club party. Sterling added to the dining and dancing with his own brand of entertainment: serenading his new young wife with an old-fashioned southern ballad, performed in blackface.  What’s a little grease paint and a century of human atrocity between friends, right?

Blackface became shorthand for its association with nineteenth-century minstrelsy, a kind of performance where, typically, white actors, wearing black make-up, performed derogatory songs, dances and sketches lampooning African-Americans.  What is considered today as astonishingly distasteful on a moral and ethical scale ranging from Genghis Khan to Hitler, was a completely acceptable performance practice for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, benefitting male and female performers.

The eclectic nature of vaudeville with its emphasis on variety, risqué humor, and its appeal to working classes and immigrants became a logical place for racialized humor.  Apparently, the historical statute on racial stereotypes is nonexistent.  I suspect that archeologists have yet to release their findings of cave drawings of Cro-Magnon man mocking Rhodesia man’s small feet. In the late 1800s, caricatures of alcoholic Irishmen, sexually available African-Americans, and suspicious Jewish merchants brought the houses down with their overly simplistic, completely inaccurate, fairly absurd distortion of these groups. You know, like FOX News but with more pancake make-up.

Conscious of using every weapon in their comic arsenal, female comic performers adopted the principles of minstrelsy and blackface to give it their own gender-informed spin. One of the more popular types of racial performance involved what historians termed “coon songs.” These were racially charged songs and dances, typically set to ragtime accompaniment. The performance of race emerged from a combination of the lyrics and from the white comic’s movements such as an exaggerated “black wench walk.”  Comedienne May Irwin gained fame and immense popularity as a performer of racial humor.  She, like many of her fellow curvaceous performers, used her body as the focus of her depiction of “mammy” characters. Sophie Tucker, one of Irwin’s contemporaries, not only used blackface make-up, but she added a black wig and white gloves.  In her autobiography she claimed that “audiences would gasp and then howl with laughter” when she removed her gloves at the end of her act to show off her white skin.  Remember when white privilege was just so much, fun?

Anna Held, the beautiful, white, female comic who starred in many of Florenz Ziegfeld’s ornate follies, also tapped into the public’s appetite for racial humor.  In many of her acts, she used a staging gimmick called an “animated song sheet,” a huge sheet hung behind the performer that reproduced the piece’s vocal score of the chorus.  Instead of notes, 33 “woolly heads of negro choristers” protruded through the sheet; at Held’s cue, the group sang the song’s chorus.  Something tells me that Michael Richards would have done quite well for himself in the 1900s.

Anna Held

The relationship between race and comedy has evolved, but remains an uncomfortable territory for performers and spectators.  Who earns the right to joke about ethnicity?  Are there unwritten rules to this kind of humor?  Why do some racial characterizations prevail and others become taboo or does comedy, by virtue of its interest in challenging norms, give performers license to address any subject in any way they choose?  How does women’s handling of racial themes in comedy differ from the acts of their male cohort?

The women of vaudeville fed the public fascination for these degrading ethnic characterizations, pandering to the masses in a way that made economic and professional sense.  Additionally, one could argue that their comedy provided an outlet for American’s fears and anxieties over changes in the country’s political and cultural climate.  At the same time, blackface and minstrelsy eventually (thankfully) fell out of favor, leaving many of these comics to either reinvent themselves with new comedy or to face extinction.  Several fell victim to the latter, finding themselves unmarketable and unpopular.  They left the racially infused humor to successors like Whoopi Goldberg, Wanda Sykes, Ellen Cleghorn, or Margaret Cho to name a few who take on this subject with the kind of courage, wit and insight that neither make-up nor music can provide.

Margaret Cho on the "Long Duk Dong" experience

An excerpt from Dawn French's "Girls Who Do Comedy" interview with the truly inimitable Whoopi Goldberg

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Woman in comedy Sheila Moeschen has a PhD in Theatre & Drama from Northwestern University with a Minor in Gender Studies. She puts theory into practice as an improv and sketch comedienne in Boston, MA.

Girls Behaving Badly: It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Lady Laughs

By Sheila Moeschen

When the brash, outspoken, robust comedienne Roseanne Bar announced her presence on the comedy circuit in the late-1980s, people thought it had to be an act. C’mon, no one sounds that bitchy, bored and contemptuous all the time, right? And while we’re on the subject, that Apple company is never really going to make a comeback, is it? People thought differently after the night of July 25, 1990.  In the span of 1 minute and 16 seconds, a frequency and tone shattered the lush San Diego night that made dogs run into traffic and unborn babies stick their fingers in their ears. 






That night Roseanne performed her very special rendition of the Star Spangled Banner before a San Diego Padres baseball game. Hocking a wet lugie on the dusty mound for good measure, the edgy comic flashed her toothy smile and grabbed her crotch before ambling off the field, jogging slightly to avoid the hailstorm of beer cups and obscenities hurled down upon her.

The funny fat lady had sung, but it definitely was far from over. During her stand-up career in the 1980s and early 1990s, Roseanne honed her stage persona based largely on her average looks, blue collar observations about white collar life, nasally piercing voice, and full figure.  She owned her girth with jokes like: “Fat moms are way better than skinny moms. What do you want when you’re depressed? A skinny mom goes ‘Well, why don’t you jog around the block and release the adrenaline from your body.’ A fat mom says ‘Let’s have some Oreos and pudding. When you wake up from that sugar coma it will be a brand new week.’”  Part trailer trash, part working-class Jane, and part satirical “Domestic Goddess,” Roseanne’s self-effacing style and open disdain for, well, everything was indebted to a long tradition of comediennes working in one of the theatre’s most grueling, unforgiving and cutting-edge mediums: vaudeville.

During the turn of the century, vaudeville featured fast-paced, raw, bawdy, highly physical, manic entertainment. Jugglers, singers, dancers, and comics shared the nightly bill with animal acts and novelty performances.  Entertainers created new material weekly and sometimes nightly, kind of like a daily, living Rocky movie if Rocky had been a writer/performer, with twice the sweat and three times the stakes, but with a less kick-ass soundtrack.

Vaudeville was cheap and highly visual so it appealed to working class audiences and non-native spectators (a wife and sheep bit plays the same in any culture).  It was also an ideal forum for female performers who didn’t conform to the standards of beauty, figure and (my personal favorite) “pleasantness” put forth by society’s standards for the actress working the “legitimate” (i.e. non-musical, non-variety) theatre. In her book Rank Ladies, Theatre historian Alison Kibler describes the world of vaudeville and its funny women:

“The eccentric women in vaudeville … were fat, dark-skinned or ‘too mannish.’ In the playful, often novel world of vaudeville, the grotesque women who joked and cackled at prudish Victorian matrons, abused husbands in comic sketches, and took over male parts in athletic acts and slapstick routines were regularly labeled freaks, transvestites and deviants.” 

They also did a lot of suggestive winking and nudging, which was the Roseanne-crotch-grab equivalent.  And most importantly, they were hugely popular (pun intended, wink-wink, nudge-nudge).

Women such as Marie Dressler, Trixie Friganza and Eva Tanguay, self-proclaimed, fat and funny comediennes, won popular and critical acclaim during their careers in the early-1900s.

Marie Dressler as the dowager in "Dinner at Eight."

Dressler, weighing more than 200 pounds, capitalized off her mannish features and outrageous physique by using physical comedy to heighten the disparity between herself and her slender and attractive cast mates. One description of a 1914 performance noted the hilarity that ensued when Dressler sat on and crushed her fellow slender, male player (said crushed player could not be reached for comment. Nudge-nudge, pun-pun). 

Similarly, Friganza, one of the earliest predecessors of contemporary stand-up comediennes, created her acts around “fat girl troubles,” or issues of attractiveness and marriage. Audiences celebrated these women who bore everything thing they had (and even things they manufactured) for comedy’s sake.  Their presence in vaudeville and their popularity helped other women to make a deeper impact on the male-dominated industry. Moreover, by playing on their physicality, these women presented a wry, humorous critique of cultural gender norms. But to what ends?

Turns out, people became a bit angry at Roseanne Barr, claiming she went too far in her parody of ball players and America’s pastime.  The ugly backlash against the comic hit her square in the gut (nudge-nudge, literally).  Roseanne became the poster child for the shrewish, unruly, unattractive, loud-mouthed woman, which, ipso facto translated into: undesirable.  Dressler and her cohort faced a similar issue in their comic approach:  By using their unconventional bodies as comic fodder they risked perpetuating the worst types of stereotypes and perceptions of women.  Dressler’s legacy resides in Roseanne, Lisa Lampanelli, Mo’Nique, and many others who place themselves as the object of derision, but is there a political, artistic, and personal limit to this approach?

Who laughs last, the funny fat lady or the lady who thinks fat is funny?

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Woman in comedy Sheila Moeschen has a PhD in Theatre & Drama from Northwestern University with a Minor in Gender Studies. She puts theory into practice as an improv and sketch comedienne in Boston, MA.