"We Always Somebody Else": Inherited Roles and Innovative Strategies in Black Women's Stand-Up Comedy

This article traces Marsha Warfield's stand-up comedy career as the practice rose to prominence and revolutionized comedic performance in the 1970s. Warfield's uses of humor offer complex representations of Black womanhood, and this essay links her work to companion projects by Black feminist activists and writers in the 1970s and 1980s. It also discusses the strategies Warfield developed to take the stage as herself, which resisted the inherited roles and routines that circumscribe Black women's humorous expressivity.