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Abstract
This article explores the work of older female comedians who explicitly refer to their sexed bodies, and their vaginas in particular, as a playfully political discursive strategy. At its heart are a number of stand-up performances made since 2000 by Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr, informed and supported by their performances in a variety of other forms and media (including reality television, talk shows and auto/biographical writing). These performances draw attention to the relationship between performative utterance and visuality through the tropes of public confession and allusions to cosmetic surgery and aging genitalia. This can be risky in a genre in which staged persona, body and performance material are so closely yoked. Despite their different ages and signature practices, Diller, Rivers and Barr can be seen to be working in a professional lineage of female comedians, including Sophie Tucker, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams and LaWanda Page, who have foregrounded their own sexuality as aging women. In their redeployment of taboos which mark the female body as grotesque and unruly, these women expose the scopic regimes that limit how post-menopausal women are read, and thereby erased, in the public realm.
Acknowledgements
A much briefer version of this article was presented as part of a panel on women and aging at the PSi conference, Performing Publics (Toronto, 2010) and some of the material here appears in a collaborative account of this panel: see Erica Stevens Abbitt, Johanna Frank, Geraldine (Gerry) Harris and Roberta Mock, “Aging Provocateurs and Spect(er)acular Pub(l)ic Performances” (Abbitt et al. 2011). I thank my fellow panellists for their insight and inspiration, as well as Debra Levine for her helpful suggestions for further development.
Notes
1. Ian Brodie has offered a model of stand-up based on ethnographic work on legend, the central features of which are the comedian's collaboration with an invested audience and the subsequent production of the illusion of intimacy. A performer's persona is established over the course of a career and audience members use this as a framework to interpret “what is true and what is play. The comedian provides cues and clues, and will quickly try to establish how best to guide a particular audience towards the preferred interpretation. Her aim is not to assist them in the discernment of an actual truth, but to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter, at the time or over the course of the performance” (2008, 175).
2. In Rivers’ response to Gottfried at the end of the show (during which the roastee exercises her right to reply), she told him “You are loud. You are obnoxious. You make me ashamed to be Jewish.” She also criticized Griffin for stealing her act.
3. Bernhard had a recurring role on Barr's sitcom, Roseanne, from 1991 to 1997. Although contemporaries, Bernhard established her career as a stand-up before Barr did.
4. This number changes according to Barr's age at the time.
5. Geritol is a vitamin supplement marketed heavily to older people. Metamucil is a fiber supplement and laxative.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all transcriptions in this article are my own.
7. I have written elsewhere about Lenny Bruce's influence on Rivers. See “Really Jewish? Joan Rivers Live at the Apollo,” (Mock, 2012).
8. Roto-Rooter is an American plumbing service; presumably, Williams is referring to a device that unblocks drains.
9. I write about this at length in Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television (Mock Citation2007), in which some of the material on Tucker, Barth, and Williams in this article previously appeared.
10. This, of course, could also have been a metatheatrical double bluff, as a younger woman, or else ironic, given Mabley's bisexuality. What is certainly clear is that Mabley, like Diller, performed knowingly in character and that, especially for the first half of her career, there was considerable distance between her public and private self-presentations. It is also worth noting that, despite her public persona and having six children, the name “Moms” was apparently originally given to her because of her professional generosity to younger performers.
11. The artist, Martha Wilson, has taken the opposite approach. One of her recent works on the theme of aging is a photograph entitled Invisible (2011), in which she, having stopped dying her hair to conceal its grayness, is wearing a beige raincoat and hat and is barely distinguishable in a cluttered shop: “As you become an older woman in society, you become invisible … They look right through you and don’t see you anymore. Young women don’t know this” (Wilson, Citation2011).
12. Barr used the surname of her second husband, Tom Arnold, at this time. When they divorced in 1994, she dispensed with a surname altogether, before eventually returning to Barr. Although she has not fully withdrawn the allegations against her family, she is apologetic about the manner of her public announcement, the words she chose and the pain she caused (Barr Citation2011b, 217).
13. A few (uncorrected) examples will suffice: “Rejuvenated from a sloppy josephine back to a stuffed pork chop sandwich”; “excuse me while I vomit. I don’t think anybody's worked that worn out snatch since Tom Arnold fingered his way to fame in the 90s”; and, “Jeeze, Rosanne. Hearing about your rejuvenated vagina reminds me of the old joke about Australia, ‘Everyone knows where it is, but no one wants to go there.’”
14. Schneider (Citation1997), Harris (Citation1999) and Bleeker (Citation2008), often in reference to each other, analyze this performance by Annie Sprinkle in their discussions of scopic positioning. In many ways, Sprinkle's solo performances of the early 1990s can be likened to stand-up comedy, in much the same way that Sandra Bernhard's stand-up at that time was discussed in relation to performance art. Interestingly, in the run-up to her 57th birthday, Sprinkle performed “Public Cervix Announcement” (she said for about the third time in 17 years). She published the following Facebook status on 11 July 2011: “What's transgressive now? Over the years I’ve done a lot of ‘tabu’ things. But I have to say the MOST TABU, seems to me, is simply being a woman over 50, slightly chubby and being naked on stage.” A few months later, on a Facebook thread discussing how the clitoris is one of the few parts of a woman's body that does not visibly age, Sprinkle writes, “When I was on the Joan Rivers show with [sex educator, activist and artist] Betty Dodson, Joan Rivers was playing around with a hand mirror, and pretended like she was looking at her pussy, and SCREAMED in horror! It was hilarious” (CitationSprinkle, 2011).
15. Ironically, as Barr's fans would have known, she had been with her partner, John Argent, for several years at this point.
16. This was most evident in the global reporting (and “newsworthiness”) of 83-year-old Marie Kolstad's breast enlargement operation in August 2011.