Our Bodies for Ourselves: Lithe Phenomenal Bodies in the Stand-up of Jackie "Moms" Mabley

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon use well-developed notions of the body that repudiate the contingency that fetters subordinated beings. They prescribe mitsein (i.e., being with), but they fail to address the intersection of oppressions such as race and gender. The stand-up performances of Jackie "Moms" Mabley, the first great black female stand-up comedian in the United States, provide insight into the mitseins accomplished by multiply oppressed entities. Sigmund Freud's descriptions of comedy and laughter paint them as moments free from contingency. Mabley's comedy presents bodies that vacillate between the particularistic and the universal and emancipation and subordination. In doing so, Mabley replaces the harsh imposition of contingency with a mitsein based on fluidity and social responsibility. The key to this mitsein is a praxis of care. It is the means through which bodies are pulled out of the stagnation of contingency and ushered into liberating mitsein.