No Laughing Matter … or Is It?: The Serio-Comic Dilemma of Gender

Gender is a topic which is often the subject for comedic treatment in plays, literature, film, and in stand-up comedy. Kathleen Rowe notes: ‘Almost all comedic forms — from jokes to gags to slapstick routines to the most complex narrative structures — attempt a liberation from authority’ (1995, p. 44). While comedy’s liberatory side can offer transgressive and political takes on authority, it can also be reactionary and discriminatory in both delivery and content. In terms of comedy’s ability to be transgressive, liberatory, reactionary, and discriminatory what does this form offer us in understanding dilemmas we have been exploring in this book? To put a different spin on Rowe’s comment, comedy often pulls at the pants of authority hoping to expose what authority seeks to hide behind, and, in so doing, it delights in breaking taboos, subverting convention, exposing hypocrisy, and shocking its audience. It can instead serve a more repressive purpose by consolidating dominant ideologies, endorsing stereotypes, and causing injury and harm. This double-edged possibility is what La Farge notes in the epigraph that heads this chapter. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.