The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

Author: J. Reed

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1137358246

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Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner have been partners in life and work for more than 40 years. Over those years they have been comedic pioneers in television, sound recording, film, theater, and animation. This book explores the ways they have used and expanded notions of queer to make their unique impact on American culture.


The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

Author: J. Reed

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1137358246

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Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner have been partners in life and work for more than 40 years. Over those years they have been comedic pioneers in television, sound recording, film, theater, and animation. This book explores the ways they have used and expanded notions of queer to make their unique impact on American culture.


Hysterical!

Hysterical!

Author: Linda Mizejewski

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 1477314520

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Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens large and small, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren't funny. But today's funny women aren't a new phenomenon—they have generations of hysterically funny foremothers. Fay Tincher's daredevil stunts, Mae West's linebacker walk, Lucille Ball's manic slapstick, Carol Burnett's athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres's tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg's sly twinkle, and Tina Fey's acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women's bodies and behaviors. Hysterical! Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field's leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women's comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women's comedy.


Stand-Up Preaching

Stand-Up Preaching

Author: Jacob D. Myers

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-10-06

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 166670282X

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Few vocations share more in common with preaching than stand-up comedy. Each profession demands attention to the speaker's bodily and facial gestures, tone and inflection, timing, and thoughtful engagement with contemporary contexts. Furthermore, both preaching and stand-up arise out of creative tension with homiletic or comedic traditions, respectively. Every time the preacher steps into the pulpit or the comedian steps onto the stage, they must measure their words and gestures against their audience's expectations and assumptions. They participate in a kind of dance that is at once choreographed and open to improvisation. It is these and similar commonalities between preaching and stand-up comedy that this book engages. Stand-Up Preaching does not aim to help preachers tell better jokes. The focus of this book is far more expansive. Given the recent popularity of comedy specials, preachers have greater access to a broad array of emerging comics who showcase fresh comedic styles and variations on comedic traditions. Coupled with the perennial Def Comedy Jams on HBO, preachers also have ready access to the work of classic comics who have exhibited great storytelling and stage presence. This book will offer readers tools to discern what is homiletically significant in historical and contemporary stand-up routines, equipping them with fresh ways to riff off of their respective preaching traditions, and nuanced ways to engage issues of contemporary sociopolitical importance.


Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry

Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry

Author: Jongwoo Jeremy Kim

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-20

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1315469804

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Augmenting recent developments in theories of gender and sexuality, this anthology marks a compelling new phase in queer scholarship. Navigating notions of silence, misunderstanding, pleasure, and even affects of phobia in artworks and texts, the essays in this volume propose new and surprising ways of understanding the difficulty—even failure—of the epistemology of the closet. By treating "queer" not as an identity but as an activity, this book represents a divergence from previous approaches associated with Lesbian and Gay Studies. The authors in this anthology refute the interpretive ease of binaries such as "out" versus "closeted" and "gay" versus "straight," and recognize a more opaque relationship of identity to pleasure. The essays range in focus from photography, painting, and film to poetry, Biblical texts, lesbian humor, and even botany. Evaluating the most recent critical theories and introducing them in close examinations of objects and texts, this book queers the study of verse and visual culture in new and exciting ways.


Make 'em Laugh!

Make 'em Laugh!

Author: Zeke Jarvis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-04-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1440829950

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This lighthearted and eye-opening book explores the role of comedy in cultural and political critiques of American society from the past century. This unprecedented look at the history of satire in America showcases the means by which our society is informed by humor—from the way we examine the news, to how we communicate with each other, to what we seek out for entertainment. From biographical information to critical reception of material and personalities, the book features humorists from both literary and popular culture settings spanning the past 100 years. Through its 180 entries, this comprehensive volume covers a range of artists—individuals such as Joan Rivers, Hunter S. Thompson, and Chris Rock—and topics, including vaudeville, cartoons, and live performances. The content is organized by media and genre to showcase connections between writers and performers. Chapters include an alphabetical listing of humorists grouped by television and film stars, stand-up and performance comics, literary humorists, and humorists in popular print.


The Male Chauvinist Pig

The Male Chauvinist Pig

Author: Julie Willett

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 146966108X

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In the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, a series of stock characters emerged to define and bolster white masculinity. Alongside such caricatures as "the Playboy" and "the Redneck" came a new creation: "the Male Chauvinist Pig." Coined by second-wave feminists as an insult, the Male Chauvinist Pig was largely defined by an anti-feminism that manifested in boorish sexist jokes. But the epithet backfired: being a sexist pig quickly transformed into a badge of honor worn proudly by misogynists, and, in time, it would come to define a strain of right-wing politics. Historian Julie Willett tracks the ways in which the sexist pig was sanitized by racism, popularized by consumer culture, weaponized to demean feminists, and politicized to mobilize libertine sexists to adopt reactionary politics. Mapping out a trajectory that links the sexist buffoonery of Bobby Riggs in the 1970s, the popularity of Rush Limbaugh's screeds against "Feminazis" in the 1990s, and the present day misogyny underpinning Trumpism, Willett makes a case for the potency of this seemingly laughable cultural symbol, showing what can happen when we neglect or trivialize the political power of humor.


How to be a Gentlewoman

How to be a Gentlewoman

Author: Lotte Jeffs

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1788401611

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* 'This is brilliant and timely' Elizabeth Day 'Part memoir, part manual - this is the type of book every modern woman can take something from' Grazia Learn to navigate the harshness of life with soft power. In her debut book, Lotte Jeffs weaves powerful life experience with practical advice and a psychological deep-dive into what truly constitutes an emotionally rich and meaningful existence. She speaks to everyone from agony aunts and archaeologists, to pop stars and novelists, to explore a diverse picture of what it is to truly live life well. How to be a Gentlewoman will teach you how to slow down, lean out, recognize good relationships and let go of the bad, create a space you love, find your people and construct a happy and 'joined up' sense of yourself. The gentle antidote to a brutal world. For fans of Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love and Elizabeth Day's How to Fail.


Becoming Richard Pryor

Becoming Richard Pryor

Author: Scott Saul

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-12-09

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0062123335

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A major biography—intimate, gripping, revelatory—of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family’s brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he’d known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career—Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar—flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life. Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still.


Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre

Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre

Author: Jimmy A. Noriega

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 100063888X

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Whether creating Broadway musicals, experimental dramas, or outrageous comedies, the performers, directors, playwrights, designers, and producers profiled in this collection have contributed to the representation of LGBTQ lives and culture in a variety of theatrical venues, both within the queer community and across the US theatrical landscape. Moving from the era of the Stonewall Riots to today, notable scholars in the field bring a wide variety of queer theatre artists into conversation with each other, exploring connections and differences in race, gender, physical ability, national origin, class, generation, aesthetic modes, and political goals, creating a diverse and inclusive study of 50 years of queer theatre. For readers seeking an introduction to or a deeper understanding of LGBTQ theatre, this volume offers thought-provoking analyses of theatre-makers both celebrated and lesser-known, mainstream and subversive, canonical and new.