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Abstract
In this article, I discuss the iconic African-American mid-twentieth century stand-up comic Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley. Specifically, I theorize the ways in which Moms’ voice, vocal technique, and formalist relationship to language performs a queer and Black maternity in excess of the trappings of the ‘mammy’ figure of the US minstrel tradition. I call this performance the ‘mom voice.’ With this term, I consider how Moms’ voice works to deconstruct language as a system of signification in a way that provides a glimpse into the interiority of Black maternity as a cultural and subjective formation. I think about her voice and the grain of it, her raspy breath and speed, the quickly-moving timbric rhetoric. In these ways, Moms’ maternity exceeds the normative scripts for Black maternity in dominant US mid-century popular performance culture. In short, Moms’ voice necessarily engages the Mammy caricatures, critiques, and exceeds it. I argue that Moms’ work on record exemplifies how the commingling of sound and as a performative, commingling, is at once an essential element of stand-up comedy as a form and a crucial method for her alternative performance of Black motherhood.
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Eleanor Russell
Dr. Eleanor Russell is a writer and theorist living in Taos, New Mexico. She received her doctorate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University in December 2020. Her current book project theorizes the relationship between mid-twentieth century stand-up comedy audio recordings, sound studies, and the avant-garde.