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Performing Marginality
Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique

Joanne R. Gilbert Available March 2004 		How do contemporary American female comics perform onstage, and what does this performance reveal about power relations in our culture as well as the existence of a "female" and, more specifically, "feminist" genre of stand-up comedy? In this long overdue study of women and stand-up comedy, Joanne R. Gilbert explores these questions in order to illuminate the social, political, and cultural implications of power and gender in popular entertainment.
Performing Marginality provides a historical overview of female comic performance and offers a taxonomy of comedic postures assumed by contemporary female comics, providing a useful way to categorize this often overlooked genre.
The book develops the notion of "performing marginality" not only as the way female comics perform their gender onstage, but as the means by which all of us construct, contest, and negotiate our gendered, racialized, and otherwise marked identities in everyday life. 		"An academic study of stand-up comedy performed by females is long overdue, and its importance for understanding power structures in our society cannot be underestimated. This book will add to the paucity of studies currently available in both women's humor and stand-up performance."
—Mary Ann Rishel, Ithaca College, author of Writing Humor: Creativity and the Comic Mind

Joanne R. Gilbert is associate professor of Communication and director of Women's Studies at Alma College.
 
Humor in Life and Letters Series

$26.95s paper / ISBN 0-8143-2803-2

236 pages / 6 x 9

2004

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