The Editor’s Drawers

Abstract

Readers:We’re very happy to release StAH 8.1. Although we didn’t plan it, the four articles that make up the primary content are all authored by women scholars who have a strong interest in the role of women in humor, as creators and objects of that humor. Kirsten Leng’s personally framed essay, “Comedy as a Practice of Care: Restorative Laugher and Reciprocal Empathy in the Pandemic,” examines how the tone of late-night comedians shifted, along with its relationship to its audience, during COVID times. Applying feminist theory, Leng shows how comedy can generate a sense of communal solace and expand our understanding of how care can be practiced. In her essay “Mother’s and Whores: Female Performers and Comedic Controversies,” Amber Day analyzes the pushback on Samantha Bee’s critique of Ivanka Trump’s public posture and Michelle Wolf’s joke about Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Day argues that the criticism of the comedians was a conservative reaction couched in terms of feminist solidarity, a contortion that misrepresented both performers’ ethical critiques of the women in the Trump administration as unfair attacks on their motherhood. Both controversies, Day reminds us, reveal the ways in which women performers are targets of the “culture wars.” Also focusing on political humor, Marissa Spada’s “Incongruent Bodies: The Gender Politics of SNL’s Hillary Clintons” looks closely at differences in the Clinton caricatures performed on SNL by Amy Poehler in 2008 and Kate McKinnon in 2016. Despite the near decade between them, Spada shows how both performances are framed by the persistent assumption that presidents are men and by the idea that a woman seeking that office is perceived as an outlier, a perception that stunts the candidate’s performance and shapes the performers’ comic portrayals. Lisa M. Beringer looks at African American sketch comedy as a form of “resistance TV” that challenges enduring stereotypes of race and gender. Liberated from traditional forms of sketch comedy structure and performance, Beringer argues, Chappelle’s Show, Key & Peele, and A Black Lady Sketch Show deploy satire both to expose the entrenched assumptions of racism and sexism and to “assert a claim for Black humanity in self-defined terms.” We trust that you’ll find this lineup of insightful interrogations as provocative as we have.While these articles are the core of our issue, you’ll also find in “On Second Thought” an interesting set of responses to articles that appeared in our last issue on humor and empire, as well as an author’s response to a previous “On Second Thought” critique. And we’re very happy to include another article in our occasional “Recovery Room” series. Daniel Burge’s examination of the Whig humor of George Prentice in the antebellum Louisville Journal, of which Prentice was the editor, makes a case for Prentice’s role in the political wrangles of the period and outlines notable rhetorical differences in Prentice’s style from that which usually characterizes the antebellum Southwest tradition. Prentice’s scurrilous attacks on editors of newspapers aligned primarily with the Democratic party of the time show that the ridicule of and by actors in our contemporary political arena has a long genealogy. And of course, our first number of every issue contains the recurring feature “The Year’s Work.” The review essay of humor scholarship from 2020 is our first offering by a team of contributing editors, Gretchen Martin and Jonathan Rossing. We’re confident that you’ll continue to find this comprehensive review of scholarship to be an interesting survey of the breadth of our field and a useful tool in your own work.Last, we’d like to mention our upcoming special issue “Black Laughs Matter.” This project will fulfill our commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement, which the American Humor Studies Association articulated in its statement of solidarity after the murder of George Floyd. We’re very excited about the lineup of material that will be collected in the special issue, and we expect that you will be as well. However, as Lisa M. Beringer’s article in this issue demonstrates, our commitment to the analysis and critical appreciation of African American humor is ongoing and not simply an occasional focus in a special issue.Until then, we wish you good health and good humor. As always, we remainYr Obdt Svt,—LH