Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States by Katelyn Hale Wood (review)

Katelyn Hale Wood opens Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States with a description of a photograph of Jackie "Moms" Mabley taken in 1972. Housed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the picture includes a signature quote of Mabley's: "I just tell folks the truth. If they don't want the truth, then don't come to Moms." After a brief rumination on Mabley's picture, Wood fast-forwards to 2018, forty-six years after the photo of Mabley was taken, to describe the HBO comedy special 2 Dope Queens featuring Black women comics Jessica Williams and Phoebe Wilson. Wood contends that through their provocative routine, which included a "people who owe Black women apologies" segment, Williams and Wilson "followed in the footsteps of fellow Black feminist comic Mabley" (4). Collectively, the three comedians whose careers span six decades "demonstrate the cornerstone of Black feminist stand-up comedy: joke-telling as truth-telling in the name of Black women's expression and freedom" (ibid.).

In Cracking Up, Wood "archives and analyzes the performative labor Black feminist comedians do to (re)form and assert citizenship in the United States," thus arguing that "Black feminist comedic performance and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest" (ibid.). Accordingly, Wood renders Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Mo'Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, Michelle Buteau, and Amanda Seales as interlocutors who use the stage to resist cis/heteronormativity and white supremacy. Indeed, Wood's theorization of these Black women comics through the framework of Black feminist thought positions them not only as popular entertainers, but as social activists. What significantly strengthens this theorization is Wood's consideration of the history of Black comedy and its use as a strategy of subversion.

Equally important is Wood's theorization of the phrase "cracking up." Deliberating its "varied meanings," Wood denotes how the term can suggest multiple possibilities: that is, to "laugh out loud, to mentally or emotionally break down, to convulse in laughter uncontrollably," which "makes space for a physical and emotional loss of control in a culture that too often restricts, commodifies, or demonizes Black joy and embodied expression" (5). Throughout the book's four chapters and conclusion, Wood applies this concept precisely as a methodology to examine how the comics determine their agency by simultaneously resisting and deconstructing racial, sexual, and gender boundaries and, subsequently, reconfiguring ways of being.

Chapter 1, "Laughter in the Archives: Jackie 'Moms' Mabley," offers a close reading of Mabley's recorded performances during the height of her career. Wood recontextualizes Mabley's legacy, asserting that it "solidifies important precedents for Black feminist comics in Contemporary US performance, cracking up power structures that attempt to silence Black women and Black queer sexualities" (27). One of the pleasures of this chapter is Wood's situating of Mabley within a genealogy of Black queer performance. Wood's reading of Mabley focuses not so much on her personal life—as she was an openly queer woman—but instead on how her stage persona challenged strict notions of Black womanhood, from her costuming to her jokes about sexual freedom. This is precisely what Wood considers queer—that is, "a continuous and paradoxical fight for autonomy and connection, a struggle for individual recognition and communal assembly outside the confines of social and legal constructs of 'normal'" (28).

In chapter 2, Wood analyzes Mo'Nique's stand-up special, I Coulda Been Your Cellmate!, recorded at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW). Wood contends that Mo'Nique "ignites affective and embodied pathways toward freedom for the audience at ORW, both within and against the state authority" (54). Wood expands on the notion of the comedic routine and the comic's relationship with the audience as transgressive in...