Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Rereading a work first encountered many years earlier always yields surprises. A month ago, I discovered on eBay a copy of a 1955 anthology that was a mainstay of my childhood, A Treasury of Humor and Toastmaster’s Handbook. Intended for adults, it found its way nonetheless into my young hands, and I read all of it with glee (though I did not have the least idea what was meant by a “toastmaster” and assumed it had something to do with bread). There were favorite selections to which I returned so often that I came near to memorizing them, especially Cornelia Otis Skinner’s hilarious reflections on the world of dieting, “The Body Beautiful.” Years later, I could still recall the description of the narrator exercising vigorously, while dressed in nothing more than a pair of pink bloomers, and only realizing afterward that she had put on a show for the window washer outside her apartment.Alongside “The Body Beautiful” were comic essays, short stories, and poetry by a host of white women authors, most of them American and mostly writers for mass-market magazines. They included the justly celebrated (Dorothy Parker; Mary Roberts Rinehart) and the unjustly neglected (Phyllis McGinley; Margaret Fishback; Hildegarde Dolson). I had forgotten, if I had ever noticed, that the editors of this collection, alongside Bennett Cerf, were two women—Marjorie Barrows and Mathilda Schirmer. Although I had never made the connection, my early sense that women not only could write comedy but already had been doing so probably owed much to poring over a book such as this one. I had absorbed, even in the early 1960s, a positive message about women’s talents as humorists.It was, therefore, somewhat puzzling to open a copy of another book I had not seen for many years—Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (1988), edited by Regina Barreca, newly reissued in 2022 as volume 1 in the Routledge Library Editions series of comedy—and to read again the introduction that begins with an epigraph citing William Congreve declaring in 1695 that women lack the humorous impulse. This is followed by Barreca’s assertion that “Congreve’s statement . . . echoes through three hundred years of criticism of British literature” and that “generally speaking, commentators on comedy continue to treat the subject as a necessarily all-male pastime, rather like writing in the snow” (3). Of course, Barreca’s witty allusion to urination right at the start of an academic work is a welcome reminder of just how marvelously cheeky and transgressive feminist writing had become during the second wave of the 1970s and 1980s. The latter decade, after all, was one in which Susan J. Leonardi set PMLA readers buzzing (in some cases, in disapproval) with her 1989 article “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie” by daring to discuss literature that blurred the line between fiction and cookbooks and by embedding a recipe within her own scholarly analysis. Could this new generation of women critics not be trusted to remain wholly serious? Fortunately, the answer was no, and Barreca’s crack about writing in the snow was part of that welcome change.But why does she begin the 1988 Last Laughs with a generalization about what “commentators on comedy” still supposedly were doing that seems, even for 1988, anachronistic? And why does she open her introduction by talking exclusively about British writers? (Not only does she mention Congreve, but she also refers to Reginald Blyth and J. B. Priestley as evidence of more recent misogynist perspectives.) Nothing in the volume’s subtitle, “Perspectives on Women and Comedy,” indicates a concentration on the subject of humor in relation to British women, nor had I remembered its anglocentrism. Yet this focus at the outset is no anomaly. The entire first section of five essays is devoted wholly to British women writers—to Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Fanny Burney, and two essays on Jane Austen. In the second section, too, British subjects dominate, and the two essays on Austen are matched here by two on Virginia Woolf. Of the first eleven essays, in fact, only one discusses an American writer. Linda A. Morris offers an elegant account of Frances Miriam Whitcher (which would be expanded in 1992 into a full-scale biocritical study).The same pattern prevails in the final section. Among those seven essays, there is one about Muriel Spark, one (by Regina Barreca) that talks mainly about Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, and Fay Weldon, one by Fay Weldon herself offering a brief feminist commentary on humor, one—written, surprisingly, by Nancy Walker, whose groundbreaking works of the late 1980s were concerned with American women humorists—that divides attention between the Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood, and the British novelist, Margaret Drabble, and one by Jane Marcus that is largely an attack on other feminist critics’ readings of Virginia Woolf and has little to do with comedy. To describe the contents of Last Laughs in general as heavy on anglophilia would be like saying that milk is heavy on dairy.Why, then, should readers of Studies in American Humor be glad that Routledge has chosen to bring this volume back into print? There are several good reasons. Interspersed throughout, for example, are three original and very wry cartoons on the subject of gender and humor by Nicole Hollander, creator of the “Sylvia” character—a cynical, middle-aged feminist figure (unfortunately, little remembered today) with a cigarette invariably dangling from her lips. In her analysis of the feminist implications of women’s stage and screen comedy, Lisa Merrill provides illuminating remarks on a variety of American performers from Elayne Boosler to Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, and the now-forgotten Danitra Vance, who died tragically young. Esther Cohen conducts a wonderful interview with another brilliant creator of comedy who died much too early, the playwright Wendy Wasserstein. The latter delivers a line that seems not merely perfect for the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the late 1980s, but for the political climate today: “No, I don’t mind offending peoples’, [sic] you know, moral grounds. Fuck ’em” (266).Perhaps the best reason, however, for returning to this newly republished Last Laughs is Regina Barreca’s introduction, which, despite its British slant, is as insightful on the issue of why women’s comedy is different from men’s as it seemed to those of us who read it when it first appeared. Barreca articulates what have now become accepted truths, if not truisms that nonetheless remain razor sharp such as that “women’s comedy is marginal, liminal, concerned with and defined by its very exclusion from convention” (15), that it is “about de-centering, dis-locating and de-stabilising the world” (15), and that it “is a way women writers can reflect the absurdity of the dominant ideology while undermining the very basis of its discourse” (19). (Of course, any such pronouncements offered today would probably not be couched in terms of women as a monolith undifferentiated by race, sexuality, dis/ability, and other categories of identity.)It is good to have this volume readily available again. One missing element, though, is present-day reflection by Barreca in which she could have looked back at the impact on comedy studies that this text made. But for that absence, Routledge, not the editor herself, is to blame; this imprint is notorious for reissuing “as is” older titles acquired from firms (such as Gordon and Breach, the original publishers of Last Laughs) that are now under the umbrella of Taylor and Francis. Readers who are lucky enough, however, to remember the excitement that attended the appearance of feminist books in general throughout the 1980s, including this work on women’s humor, will surely want to record their own memories across the book’s blank endpapers and enjoy a last laugh of pleasure.

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