Hysterical! Women in American Comedy ed. by Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant (review)

Few areas of our field are as vibrant and exciting as feminist comedy studies. In recent years, monographs by Bambi Haggins, Rebecca Krefting, and Linda Mizejewski, among many others, have infused humor studies with renewed energy, drawing necessary consideration to embodiment, cultural citizenship, and neglected pioneers of film, radio, and television. Hysterical! Women in American Comedy, a weighty volume edited by Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant, represents an essential new contribution to this crucial body of work. In fifteen essays, the contributors offer deeply historicized and detailed analyses of sixteen comedians who have shaped American comedy and popular media over the past century. Covering everyone from Mabel Normand to Lena Dunham, Hysterical! offers up a veritable feminist history of comic performance on screen that remains to be written. In the process, it brings scholarly attention to performers who are overlooked while offering fresh insights into well-established, long-studied icons.

The book avoids any kind of sectioning off, but readers might notice a general arrangement that evenly balances out the major eras and modes of entertainment: the comedians who came of age on stage, in silent film, and on the radio (Mabel Normand, Faye Tincher, Mae West, and Fanny Brice); the comedians who rose to nationwide fame on broadcast television (Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Lily Tomlin); the major Chitlin' Circuit comedian Moms Mabley, the comedians who made their names during the stand-up boom in the 1980s and 1990s (Roseanne Barr, Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Cho, Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes); and the comedians who have thrived on postnetwork television (Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Lena Dunham). These are not clean categories, of course, and Mizejewski and Sturtevant were wise to avoid the clustering I offer here for perspective. (Moms Mabley, for example, started on the stage and ended her career in television and film.) But the extensive coverage will be easily adaptable not only for teaching but also for structuring courses on women and comedy.

By its very title, Hysterical! aims to redress the blatant sexism in how women and women's comedy have been understood. "Our hope for the present volume," Mizejewski and Sturtevant write in the introduction, "is to repurpose the term 'hysterical,' to turn away from the pathologization of female bodily and emotional excess and toward a frank reading of those very same things" (2). In focusing on the nuances and extremes of female comic performance, the authors empower these comedians as artists, actresses, even activists. Additionally, the chronological organization allows readers to trace developments in gender, sexuality, medium, and comic style. Although many scholars of humor and media focus on the present, the rewards and value of returning to the past come through here brilliantly.

Along these lines, the inclusion of women who might not immediately come to mind is a noticeable strength of the collection. Similar collections might have started with Mae West or perhaps even with a comedian as recent as Joan Rivers, but chapters on Mabel Normand (by Kristina Brunovska Karnick) and Fay Tincher (by Joanna E. Rapf) remind readers of the important role women comedians played in a silent film era too often remembered as the heyday of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Throughout the book, the rich biographical detail, complemented by attention to industrial and social factors, both introduces and revitalizes these performers for students and scholars alike.

The strength of the collection lies in the fact that each chapter offers a broad survey of these performers' careers, drawing on insights from feminism, media studies (especially star studies), and even affect studies in the process. The focus on body politics, informed by and extending from Mizejewski's and Sturtevant's own monographs as well as foundational work by scholars like Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (who wrote the foreword), creates coherence without repetition. Rather than offering familiar observations about resistance and liberation, the authors tackle questions of subversion from innovative new angles that speak to ongoing conversations in...