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WHAT'S SO FUNNY? THE EXPLOSION OF LAUGHTER IN FEMINIST CRITICISM
Regina Barreca, ed., New PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN AND COMEDY. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992. (Studies in gender and culture, v.5) 244p. ISBN 2-88124-5331; pap., ISBN 288124-534-X.
Regina Barreca, UNTAMED AND UNABASHED: ESSAYS ON WOMEN AND HUMOR IN BRITIS LITERATURE. Detroit: State University Press, 1994. 191p. bibl. index. $29.95, ISBN 0-8143-2136-4.
Gail Finney, ed., LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING: GENDER AND COMEDY. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1194. (Studies in humor and gender, v.1) 363p. $39.00, ISBN 2-88124-644-3; pap., $20.00 ISBN 2-88124-645-1.
Frances Gray, WOMEN AND LAUGHTER Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994. 202p. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-1512-0; pap., $12.95, ISBN 0-8139-1513-9.
Linda Morris, ed., AMERICAN WOMEN HUMORISTS: CRITICAL ESSAYS. New York: Garland, 1994. (Studies in humor, v.4) 437p. index. $72.00, ISBN 0-8153-0622-9.
Alice Sheppard, CARTOONING FOR SUFFRAGE. Albuquerque: University of new Mexico Press, 1994. 276p. ill. bibl. index. $37.50, ISBN 0-8263-1458-9.
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. "-George Eliot.
"Laughter, like nuclear energy, has no opinions, positive or negative, about the status quo. What it does have, like nuclear energy, is power, to whic we can relate in a number of ways... If feminism is to change all that needs to be changed, therefore, it is essential for women to clarify their relationship to laughter." - Frances Gray (p.33).
Frances Gray's comparison of laughter to nuclear energy is typical of recent feminist inquiry into humor characterizing laughter as an "inflammatory device," a way to "blow up the law" or to "explode" the foundations of patriarchy, the writers in these six critical volumes are the most recent contributors to the eruption of women's humor scholarship in the past ten years. despite subtle variations in their theoretical perspectives, all of the writers reviewed here agree that female laughter is a serious thing, that it has been all but ignored by traditional (mostly male) humor scholars, and that it can be an unsettling, disruptive political force, shaking the core of male domination.
In addition to disproving the popular misconception that women have no sense of humor, feminist critics have also interested in discovering what, if any, differences there are between male and female senses of humor. Some of the conclusions have been...