They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor

4. The Laughter in the Kitchen: Growing Up Female and Funny

The Laughter in the Kitchen Growing Up Female and Funny Keeping It to Ourselves There were maybe ten to fifteen women between the ages of eighteen and eighty-three in that basement kitchen every Sunday afternoon. Only women. The men would be upstairs doing whatever they did; nobody expressed much interest. The women would have all gone to church on their own, the men treating God as if He were one of their wives' relatives that only the wives had to visit. The husbands stayed home to wash the cars. After church, the women came home to cook. Having served the requisite amount of church time, the women would feel a little reckless, a little lighthearted. They would joke around, sometimes not too kindly, about their lives, their husbands and children, and their neighbors. By the time the veal cutlets were ready, the noise level would have reached majestic proportions. It looked like, and sounded like, an opera. Aunt Josie would be holding her sides, the shiny material of her black dress stretched to bursting by her laughter. Aunt Lucy would be mimicking the snooty salesgirl at A&S, with her facility for reproducing every 101 102 • They Used to Call Me Snow White move perfectly. Aunt Marie would be wiping the tears away, being a silent laugher all her life, unable to stop herself from crying if she laughed, as if to appease the gods, who wouldn't want her to be too happy. Then cousin Nina would start on her husband's habit of falling asleep when they had company, and we would understand and laugh. Everyone spoke at once, everyone shrieked at a particularly wicked line. And then the most amazing thing would happen. When the food was brought upstairs and we sat down with the men, all the laughing stopped. We all smiled, but all traces of conspiracy and the raucous, unholy enjoyment of the steamy kitchen were completely removed . The serious talk began—money, cars, jobs. Nobody made wicked remarks. Nobody shrieked. And if one of the uncles asked, friendly and sincere, what we had all been laughing at downstairs, the only answer anyone ever gave—ever—was "Oh, nothing." What Our Mothers Taught Us Many of us grew up listening to the laughter in the kitchen. Even as little girls we knew that our mothers, aunts, neighbors, friend's mothers, women in general, were pretty funny. We listened to funny conversations while hiding under the tablecloths, overheard one-sided phone calls that were funny despite the absence of half the dialogue. Nicole Hollander, the cartoonist and creator of "Sylvia" (a cartoon syndicated in several countries , translated into many languages) explains, "My grandmother , my mother and all her friends were witty; in my neighborhood, women had all the best lines." Similarly, Marilyn Sokel, whose appearances on The Tonight Show and on Broadway have won her a large following, says that her sense of comedy "came from my mothei*—she had a bawdy sense of humor. There were more women than men in my family and when we all got together there would be my sister, my cousin Betty, my Aunt Lillian, my Aunt Mabel, my mother. . . . Most The Laughter in the Kitchen • 103 people go into comedy because they made their friends and relatives laugh. . . ." Gilda Radner has told very much the same tale: "I'll interview my mother. 'Why am I funny?' She'll tell me stories about my grandmother." The playwright Wendy Wasserstein also remembers thinking as a child "that my family was very funny. I think this was because my mother was somewhat eccentric." Wasserstein describes how she learned to use her writing talents to her advantage in high school. It's not exactly about becoming head cheerleader, but about using her talents to get her out of something rather than into something. She recalls, "I figured out that one of the ways I could get out of gym was if I wrote something called the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show. I know very little about fashion, but they used to have this Mother-Daughter Fashion Show once a year at the Plaza Hotel, and you got to leave school for the fashion show. But if you wrote [the show] you didn't have to go to gym for like two or three weeks, it was fantastic." Wasserstein got out of gym, but she also got to write early on for an all...