Punching Up: Women and LGBTQ+ Comedians’ Experience of Work and Resistance in the Comedy Industry

This dissertation is a case study of comedy work in Canada foregrounding the experiences of women and LGBTQ+ comedy workers in Toronto, Ontario against the backdrop of Canadian cultural policy. I build a theoretical framework of labour resistance in cultural industries more broadly that can attend to formal and informal acts of resistance. Comedy has long been considered an important pedagogical and political tool, and yet, very little research addresses how it is produced. I argue that it is important to consider not only the product itself, but the political, economic, and cultural ecosystem in which comedy products are created. I contend with the structure of the patriarchal industry and the product and circulation of comedy as a specific cultural form. A key finding is that women and LGBTQ+ comedians create safe spaces and engage in whisper networks, which are tactics more akin to feminist and queer social movement tactics than conventional labour organizing. Broadening our conception of workers’ resistance from the margins allows us to consider what workplace organizing can and does look like under increasingly precarious conditions for marginalized cultural workers. Emphasizing process and dynamics throughout, my dissertation is organized around three overarching scales in the process of commodification and circulation of cultural products: the macro, mezzo, and micro. Each chapter interrogates power relations within the production, distribution, and consumption of comedic work, interrogating the structures that the comedians work within and examining how they resist and influence these structures. Rather than privileging one mode of resistance over the other, I demonstrate how they intersect to further the scope of labour organizing and worker resistance in the Canadian comedy industry. Building on comedy studies, queer theory, trans-feminist performance studies, and the critical political economy of communication, my research shows how comedy workers both survive and thrive at different scales within the process of commodification and circulation of comedy, from contending with major festivals and the cultural policy environment, to building networks of care, and through the creation and distribution of queer, feminist, and anti-racist comedic content.

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