Editors:I greatly enjoyed reading Kirsten Leng’s article “Comedy as a Practice of Care: Restorative Laughter and Reciprocal Empathy in the Pandemic,” in which she argues that comedy can be understood as a practice of care, meaning that it has affective and nurturing dimensions.1 She draws on the statements and comments of late-night comedians during the COVID-19 pandemic, who, although professionally paid, offered their comedy as a form of care for their audiences under difficult conditions in an attempt to establish genuine connection.I love this idea and would go even further to suggest that some forms of care work and comedy are inexorably interconnected. It is not an accident, for example, that the health professions have a long-standing tradition of using comedy because those receiving care and those giving care need relief from their reciprocal burdens. Caregiving can be greatly satisfying, but it can also be exhausting, degrading, and emotionally draining, whether care is given under market conditions or in a context external to them. As Leng notes, comedy does important restorative and emotional work that allows workers to continue their difficult labor.I wasn’t entirely clear on the difference between comedy as a means to relieve pain, however, which Leng notes is rather cliché, and comedy as a form of care work: this seems more a difference of degree than kind. After all, is not all care work a means by which lives can be made more comfortable and livable? Comedians and audiences connected during the pandemic to relieve the pain of isolation, uncertainty, and loneliness. Leng turned to podcast comedy to ease profound psychological pain, and when my own life conditions became impossibly difficult, I turned to light romantic comedies. The care work that various comic artifacts can accomplish is critical and important because they offer laughter as a therapy in exactly these kinds of moments.Lisa GabbertUtah State UniversityEditors:Amber Day insightfully observes in “Mothers and Whores: Female Performers and Comedic Controversies” that the brouhaha generated by comic bits from Samantha Bee and Michelle Wolf served all too well to distract audiences from engaging the key political issues that their satire aimed to address.2 Samantha Bee’s remarks were intended to expose the hypocrisies of the Trump immigration policies not to provoke a fake debate on her use of the c-word. While tactics of redirection ever proliferate in struggles over larger public sphere narratives, recent changes in the media landscape don’t help. The media landscape is increasingly owned by a handful of corporations that profit from distracting and dividing audiences rather than informing them.3 The critics who troll feminist comics undermine not only those who use wit to bring attention to political issues but also the viability of public sphere discourse. Indeed, as Herbert Marcuse argued during the Vietnam war era, cultural conservatives who dwell on the shock over the use of profanity miss what is truly obscene.4Day also lays out in clear terms how trolls mobilize misogynist tropes of nasty women and angry spinsters against such allegedly innocent wives and mothers as Sarah Huckabee Sanders. As Day explains, this misogynist tactic obscures not only Sanders’s position of power within the Trump administration but also the real vulnerability of immigrant mothers. We could add that Bee is not just a mother who happens to be a comic but also a warrior of wit who shreds the traditional script of the mother and offers a much more engaging one. The mother comedian as warrior both makes us laugh and takes back power from those would-be protectors who turn out to be pussy grabbers instead.When women are angry, they are assumed to be humorless, as Day, following Rebecca Krefting, argues. Day also observes that feminist comics use anger to generate comic catharsis. Stand-up Kate Clinton calls this fumerism, and the catharsis it brings to outrage over injustice can be more than momentary relief. Collective catharsis fueled by fumerism can produce ripples of change that alter political landscapes.5Day points out a relevant difference between Bee’s and Wolf’s performances: while Bee was speaking directly to her niche liberal audience, Wolf’s roast at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner gave her a chance to make satirical comments directly to their targets. I wonder if these two comics were also doing something more. Wolf’s performance contributed to a genre shift in the kind of humor staged at the dinner. The shock effect of her humor signaled the change. The dinner was once a place where political insiders set aside differences to share in the comradery of a privileged elite through the genre of the roast. In the roast, mild jabs seal friendships rather than bruise them. Wolf’s insult comedy (like Colbert’s before her) transformed the genre of humor and its function at these Washington dinners; instead of delivering a playful roast among an inner circle of friends, Wolf deployed satire’s moral edge and hence performed one of comedy’s oldest functions: speaking truth to power. In this respect, she joins Bee in engaging humor as a laughter-provoking tactic for confrontation and change.Cynthia WillettEmory UniversityEditors:As a feminist scholar who has studied media framing and pop culture depictions of actual and fictional women politicians, I read Marissa Spada’s article, “Incongruent Bodies: The Gender Politics of SNL’s Hillary Clintons” with interest.6 Spada argues that although all of Saturday Night Live’s presidential parodies elicit laughs by poking fun at the human foibles of those who seek and serve in the office of US president, the send-ups of women presidential contenders “maintain the patriarchal status quo” by “foreground[ing] the basic contradiction of the woman candidate.” Because the US presidency has, since its inception, been an almost wholly white, cisgender, heterosexual, male role, the prospect of a woman president is so incongruous as to be a priori ridiculous. Spada is absolutely correct in her assessment, yet the average voter and many academics are likely to resist that conclusion, pointing to women’s ascendance in a variety of spheres, including even to the US vice presidency. Speaking to David Letterman in 2008 about her popular parody of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, SNL alum Tina Fey responded to conservative criticisms that her performance was sexist by saying that “you have to be able to goof on the female politicians just as much, otherwise you really are treating them like they’re weaker.”7So what’s the difference between a silly joke, a sexist barb, and a feminist quip? Recalling the functions of parodic humor as they relate to power in society helps answer this question. Premodern parody was exemplified by the court jester; the singular figure was allowed, in very particular times and places, to make fun of the monarch or speak truths that others could not. In that context, the jester’s humor vented the pressures of class disaffection, made the monarch seem more relatable, or served as ostensible evidence of the monarch’s forbearance. In postmodern, democratic societies, the parodist’s pen is a vital enactment of free speech and a tool for curtailing corruption or complacency. What makes parody either radical or reactionary, however, is the direction in which the comedian punches. “Punching up” is more laudable than “punching down.” If political parody is to function constructively, it needs to level the playing field rather than tilt it even more in favor of oppressive people and power structures.That’s why parodies of women politicians (and of anyone hailing from marginalized positions) are complicated. As Spada’s analysis makes clear, these parodies are often paradoxes, simultaneously enacting and critiquing misogyny. Unfortunately, television’s imperative to appeal to the broadest audience possible means that feminist humor is often followed by a sexist joke. The 2015 SNL sketch in which Kate McKinnon’s Clinton softened her expression for a campaign announcement—forming her eyes and lips into a winsome pout—critiqued the hypersexualized persona women are expected to adopt on film even as it leaned into the stereotype of Clinton as harsh and domineering.8 Similarly, during the 2008 presidential primary, an SNL sketch depicting a Democratic primary debate poked fun at the media’s fawning support for Barack Obama even as it characterized Clinton’s qualifications in terms that reinforced stereotypes about women leaders. In response to one question, Amy Poehler’s Clinton maintained that only she was “aggressive,” “relentless,” “demanding,” “annoying,” “pushy,” “grating,” “bossy,” and “shrill” enough to take on executives at big oil companies.9 Although the sketch began with a critique of how women politicians are often evaluated unfairly by journalists, the biggest laugh came from the comic relief provided by the sexist joke—the familiar and even comforting characterization of women’s power as brash and strident and therefore incongruous with an idealized (and tacitly masculinized) presidential persona. As we assess the forms and functions of parody in democratic societies, we must be mindful of when the jokes punch up, when they punch down, and which interests are served in both cases. Regrettably, even today, sexism too often gets the last laugh.Karrin Vasby AndersonColorado State UniversityEditors:I eagerly read Lisa M. Beringer’s article “Resistance TV: In Search of Racism’s Off Switch.”10 I found much of her argument that satire can be effectively used in sketch comedy as a form of refusal to be particularly thought provoking, and the framing implied by the title itself raised productive questions for me that linger. As Beringer notes, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has argued that the postracial is a “trick room” that seems open but ultimately suffocates and requires an “off switch,” foreshadowing the unsustainability of the post-Obama mythology. Beringer then suggests that satirical Black comedy “seeks this off switch by resisting systemic and internalized racism,” which puzzled me.11 Are we to understand the analogy between critical race theory and a postracial mythology and Black satire and racism to imply that the off switch of the postracial can be achieved by resisting racism? More specifically, are these Black satirists, as the title states, “in search of racism’s off switch”?To my mind, twenty-first-century Black sketch comedians resist limited stereotypes of Blackness and, at least as of 2016, generally ignore the fallacy of the postracial and instead open up space for what I call kaleidoscopic Blackness—the idea that there are many ways to be Black at any given time and that no expression of Black identity is more or less valid than any other. Arguably, this isn’t pushing back against racism but is instead pivoting away from the presumed significance of the white gaze. While Black satire is a critical form of activism that opens up venues for individual and communal Black survival, seeking an end to racism per se seems beyond the responsibility of any singular Black comedian. Black comedians in the twenty-first century are notable for at least voicing doubts about if not expressing outright skepticism toward the idea that racism might end. After all, Black people did not invent racism and thus cannot control if it endures. Indeed, this dynamic is part of the way “ending racism” is used wryly by satirists like W. Kamau Bell in his W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour—the title itself inspires sardonic laughter because no matter how well crafted or hilarious the attempt may be, the stated goal of ending racism naturally fails before it begins.What then might be the real goal of Black sketch comedy? Chappelle’s Show and Key & Peele—both basic cable shows that relied on high viewership—certainly operated with a necessary awareness of white viewers. It is possible to imagine that they were interested in white responses, but this does not mean they were looking to end racism, as the article’s title suggests. They certainly expressed frustration with racism, sought to assert their own Black identities, and took swipes at racists and a racist system, but they did not function in the expectation of putting an end to systemic racism itself. Putting these earlier shows in conversation with A Black Lady Sketch Show is also tricky—Chappelle’s Show premiered almost twenty years ago and the tenor and form of Black satirical sketches over the past two decades have shifted substantially in response to sociopolitical movements and the advent of social media. As an HBO production that is not as dependent on a mainstream audience as shows aired on public networks and that has been deliberate in crafting a writers’ room occupied by a diverse array of Black women, A Black Lady Sketch Show doesn’t seem interested in white reactions at all. If “racism’s off switch” suggests the centrality of white viewers who need this switch flipped, it seems A Black Lady Sketch Show is engaged in something fundamentally different. I’d be remiss not to note, too, in passing that although Thede and her “hertep” character are described as biracial in the article and while she does in fact have a Black mother and white father, she self-identifies as Black both in interviews and through the name of her show. Her “hertep” character and her interstitial fictionalized self both have white ancestry, as do many Black Americans—in fact, a 2015 study in the American Journal of Human Genetics states that the average self-identified Black American has 24 percent European ancestry. However, this does not negate her self-identification; Thede makes this especially clear by showing her “hertep” character with two Black parents in the sketch at the sister’s wedding.In A Black Lady Sketch Show, audiences bear witness to Thede and company as they relish in joyful Black possibility to demonstrate all the things Blackness already is—the quotation from Thede and context that Beringer includes is instructive here—rather than spending time attempting to demonstrate what Blackness is not to white viewers who may not be convinced anyway.12 The revolutionary move of the show is how it disregards whiteness (and maleness) and centers Black female voices as a mechanism of self-making and survival. Thede even takes this emphasis on tenacity to an absurd, heightened conclusion, imagining Black women as the sole survivors of the apocalypse itself, but it’s not really the end of the world because Black sisterhood is a world unto itself. There’s no white gaze or response because there are quite literally no white people—no white writers, no white actors, no sense of even needing to explain or contextualize Black cultural experiences.Maybe then, instead of considering white viewership and looking for racism’s off switch, they’re just giving us a different channel to watch.Danielle Fuentes MorganSanta Clara UniversityEditors:“The Recovery Room” has always been one of my favorite features of Studies in American Humor, since it exposes us to overlooked or forgotten figures, a chance to dive deeper into the history and context of American humor. Daniel J. Burge’s “George D. Prentice and the Whig Sense of Humor” does just that, recovering for us a figure who has not received critical attention for more than fifty years and who, even when he was the subject of scholarship, was discussed primarily in terms of “his political efforts on behalf of the Whig and Know-Nothing Parties.”13 Burge notes that Prentice’s “witty paragraphs, which were reprinted in papers across the nation, gained him a national following” and that “Prentice’s humorous sallies on leading Democratic politicians and editors brought him into the national spotlight and established his reputation as one of the most notorious editors of the mid-nineteenth century.” 14 That Prentice has been all but forgotten underscores for us once again the ephemeral nature of humor in general and of nineteenth-century American humor in particular. Thus the need for a recovery room.Burge quotes copiously from Prentice’s “humorous sallies,” which reveals a main reason he has been forgotten: his humor consists almost totally of ad hominem attacks on various Democratic politicians, most of them obscure to us. Further, while these attacks resonated with Whig readers at the time, they do not resonate with modern audiences, partly because of the obscurity of the targets but also because ad hominem attacks, even humorous ones, are usually just not that funny to most people. Even so, Burge has done an admirable job of recovery.Burge’s larger point is that Whig humor deserves to be reexamined; as he writes, “Recovering Prentice’s distinctive brand of humor helps remind us that Whigs were not uptight moralists who frowned on the hurly-burly of politics.”15 He cites Seba Smith’s Jack Downing letters and David Ross Locke’s Petroleum V. Nasby character as examples of humor that attacked the Democrats, but he could have also cited a number of Southwestern humorists as Whigs who used their humor for political purposes. Although recent scholars have refuted Kenneth Lynn’s blanket appraisal in his 1959 Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor that all of the Southwestern humorists were Whig gentlemen who pointed out the failure and chaos of Jacksonian Democrats, many of those humorists were indeed Whigs, and their humor survives, relatively so, because their approach is more literary and sophisticated than the personal attacks of a writer like Prentice.That said, a chief merit of Burge’s recovery of Prentice is to remind us that American political discourse has always been vitriolic, not to mention nasty and personal. We live in an age of polarized, attack-dog politics, but our age is not the worst, as bad as it seems to us. Burge’s reminder of a forgotten figure is also a reminder that American politics in the nineteenth century was even more polarized and uncivil than ours, with nearly every one of the many newspapers of the time house organs for particular parties, many of them indulging in the kind of acerbic personal attacks Burge recovers for us. In our time, Rush Limbaugh made a fortune and captured a large audience with humor based on nothing more than vicious ad hominem attacks. A century hence, perhaps he will need to be recovered as a forgotten figure who once commanded the nation’s attention. Thanks to Daniel J. Burge for another informative visit to the recovery room.John BirdWinthrop University