Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.6.1.0230
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoThe anthology Gender and Humor: Interdis-ciplinary and International Perspectives, edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini, sets out on an ambitious mission to draw together scholars from diverse fields to explore humor in different national and cultural contexts. In service of this goal, the anthology offers twenty chapters divided into three sections and opens with an editors' introduction titled “Humor: A Many Gendered Thing.” While grouping so many chapters into sections typically offers a window into the broader trajectory of a collection's most notable contribution to the field, only one of these sections (part 2) has any clearly defined thematic or conceptual rationale drawing the chapters together. The first section promises “six comprehensive and all-encompassing overviews of humor and gender from different perspectives ranging from linguistics to anthropology and stretching across both Eastern and Western cultures” (2-3), but that promise seems in conflict with the editors' note just a few paragraphs earlier that “humor is an extremely complex, slippery, and multifaceted concept” (1), even if it does align neatly with the book's very broad title. The second section focuses more narrowly and clearly on psychological studies of humor and gender. The final section has no clear organizing principle and instead serves as a catchall for almost half of the anthology's essays with topics ranging from domestic material, culture studies, and feminism to essays about “the fluidity of both gender and ethnic identities and how these tend to clash and merge in the creation of humor” (3), again echoing the title but offering little critical or organizational traction. The organizational confusion continues throughout the introduction as the editors discuss the different chapters out of order in a frustrated attempt to build conceptual links among the many essays.The first section opens with a chapter by Janet Bing and Joanne Scheibman titled “Blended Spaces as Subversive Feminist Humor” that draws on conceptual blending theory—a “theoretical framework that models how language users integrate information from different domains of knowledge to form novel concepts” (13)—to explore the subversive potential for blended spaces. The second essay, “Traditional Comic Conflicts in Farce and Roles for Women,” by Jessica Milner Davis provides a fascinating history of women actors in farces. Two of the most impressive close readings anchor the section's middle: Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor's “The School for Scandal: Humor and the Scandalized Narrative in Women's Speculative Fiction” applies Susan Sontag's theoretical approach to the comic and the performative to three speculative novels, most notably Gilman's Herland, and Frances Gray's “‘A Gay Arcadia of Happy Girls’: Women, the Body, and the Welfare State in British Film Comedy” rethinks the cultural significance of two British comedy series, Carry On and St. Trinian's. Don Kulick's “Humorless Lesbians” and Francois Bouchetoux's “Gender Trouble in Sketches from Japan” bring the section to a close with broad, not unproblematic claims about German and Japanese humor, respectively.Section 2, the shortest and most focused of the three, opens with Rod A. Martin's “Humor and Gender: An Overview of Psychological Research.” Jennifer Coates's “Gender and Humor in Everyday Conversation” provides a strong example of psychological approaches to humor and gender, as does the collaborative piece by Janet Holmes and Stephanie Schnurr titled “Funny, Feminine, and Flirtatious: Humor and Gendered Discourse Norms at Work.” The final chapter in the section, “Power and Connection: Humor in a Cantonese Family” by John S. Y. Hui is the strongest example of quantitative research in the anthology.Sheri R. Klein's “Humor and Contemporary Product Design: Inter‑ national Perspectives” opens the third section with a promising topic that never quite comes to fruition; the chapter offers only passing nods to actual products with one exception. Next, Sharon Lockyer delivers a clear and thoughtful piece in a chapter titled “Being Bovvered and Taking Liberties: Female Performance and Female Identities in The Catherine Tate Show.” Gail Finney further develops the concept of “family trauma cinema” in the following chapter, “Little Miss Sunshine and the Avoidance of Tragedy.” Fred Gardaphe offers the collection's sole examination of masculinity in the essay “‘What'ya Mean I'm Funny?’ Ball-Busting Humor in Italian American Masculinities,” which interrogates a handful of key scenes from Scorsese's Goodfellas. The collection's most successful attempt at a truly interdisciplinary, international approach comes in the shape of Alessandra Senzani's “‘A Woman, a Wog, and a Westie’: Monica Pellizzari's Critical Humor from Down Under,” which argues that filmmaker Monica Pellizzari blends “a dreamy pasticcio of material conflicts and contradictions sweetened by the visionary, humorous voices of her unruly women” (254-55) in each of her productions. Brigid Maher explores the grotesque's potential to raise questions about power, bodies, and gender in, “Gender and Grotesque Humor in Contemporary Italian Literature: Language, Culture, and Translation.” Rainer Emig provides the second contribution that explicitly addresses nonnormative sexualities in “Queer Humor: Gay Comedy between Camp and Diversity,” a chapter that dovetails nicely with Giovanna P. Del Negro's “Petite Flower, Giver Goddess, and the Duchess of Discipline: Sexual Nonconformity, Play, and Camp Humor in the Performance of Judy Tenuta” that follows it. Editors Raffaella Baccolini and Delia Chiaro conclude the section and the collection with their forward-looking essay “Humor and Gender, Directions for Future Research: Where Do We Go From Here?” in which each contributor shares a blurb that suggests paths for continued research.The final chapter reflects the collection's strengths and struggles on a microcosmic level: too many voices speaking to too many disciplinary perspectives requires that each speak to the proverbial lowest common denominator. Any of the essays on their own could, and should, be in print, but the collection's overly ambitious attempt to cover everything will leave readers frustrated by the lack of depth. The second section, for example, opens with an attempt to review some fifty years of psychological research of humor in twenty-five pages, which stands in stark contrast with this journal's annual review of the humor scholarship that often requires triple the real estate.The issues of depth and organization stem from the collection's potential, however: the collection really should have been two, even three, different anthologies because the essays cover such a broad range of topics, origins, and disciplinary approaches, and breaking them up into separate volumes would have made it possible to capitalize on the essays' strengths while also creating space for the essays to speak to each other. At present, the collection asks too much of each piece, with the result that many chapters flatten gender, humor, or nationality into problematically narrow views or abandon these facets altogether. The reader of the collection could easily imagine one anthology about women and the performance of humor on stage and screen and another that addresses the subversive potential for women and humor, both of which would allow for the same international, interdisciplinary lenses without critical reduction. Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant's recent collection Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy (2017) demonstrates the potential for a well-focused, interdisciplinary anthology, for example, but even with a topic as narrow as women in one nation, Hysterical! still needs nearly five hundred pages to offer an intersectional, interdisciplinary examination that still provides readers with significant depth. While Gender and Humor draws together a number of good essays, the entirety is a bit like a Swiss army knife: in trying to do too much, it does very little very well.
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