Pretty/funny : women comedians and body politics / by Linda Mizejewski.

Mizejewski, Linda, author.
Austin : University of Texas Press, 2014.
Added to CLICnet on 09/04/2015

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Pretty/funny women and comedy’s body politics — Funniness, prettiness, and feminism — Kathy Griffin and the comedy of the D list — Feminism, postfeminism, Liz Lemonism: picturing Tina Fey — Sarah Silverman: bedwetting, body comedy, and a mouth full of blood laughs — Margaret Cho is beautiful: a comedy of manifesto — White people are looking at you! wanda Sykes’s black looks — Ellen DeGeneres: pretty funny butch as girl next door.
Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either pretty or funny. Attractive actresses with good comic timing, such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts, have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars, and, most often, they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis Diller to Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett. In this pretty-versus-funny history, women writer-comedians–no matter what they look like–have ended up on the other side of pretty, enabling them to make it to the top and butt of the joke, the ideal that is exposed as funny.

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Requested by Myers, S.

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