Introduction

INTRODUCTION LINDA MIZEJEWSKI AND VICTORIA STURTEVANT HYSTERICAL WOMEN The title of this anthology, Hysterical!, has a double meaning. Though the term is used to describe brilliant comedy and the laughter it produces, the idea began as a medical diagnosis used to con- trol women. Born in 1760, but not coming into common usage until about 1818, “hysteria” was based on the Greek word hystera, meaning “womb,” and described a number of different physical and psy- chological symptoms that doctors attributed to a blocked or malfunc- tioning uterus. Paradoxically linked both with sexual frigidity and with frustrated or excessive desire, hysteria explained away a range of female experiences and behaviors, from listlessness to seizures to “excessive” expressions of creativity, intellectualism, sexuality, or anger—all blamed on the uterus. Hysteria gave medical sanction to the idea that women’s bodies predisposed them to emotional or irrational behavior. No need to ask a woman why she might be angry, frustrated, listless, tearful, interested in sex, or not interested in sex. The womb provided a ready answer.1 The diagnosis has long been discounted, and the term “ hysteria” was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s famous DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. But hysteria still packs a punch as a way to silence and dis- credit women. The idea that women are prone to irrational emotion puts them in a double bind: speaking up to protest an unfair accusa- tion of hysteria can easily be dismissed as itself hysterical behavior. Not speaking up means acquiescence.2 The “hysterical woman” persists in late-night comedy or sitcom clichés about irrational wives, pushy mothers-in-law, and crazy or “high maintenance” girlfriends. MMizejewski_6434-final.indbizejewski_6434-final.indb 1 99/20/17/20/17 22:04:04 PMPM 2 LINDA MIZEJEWSKI AND VICTORIA STURTEVANT The culturally circulated notions that women lose their minds over premenstrual syndrome or are prone to uncontrollable crying at the slightest offense are modern diagnoses of hysteria, and if you turn from the DSM to the urban dictionary, you fi nd “bitches be crazy,” a slang catchphrase that crosses racial, class, and cultural boundaries in its usages and citations. Like hysteria, it is a write-off of women’s subjective experiences. No need to ask or try to understand why a woman might be upset. Bitches be crazy. Yet despite its history as repression and misreading, the doubled meaning of hysteria is a provocative model for women’s comedy because it’s also a history of performance and female spectacle—women acting out and acting up. The diagnosis of hysteria could sanction unruly female behavior, and records show that because their symptoms could be disruptive and violent, hysterics were often accused of will- fully outrageous performance. A nineteenth-century French doctor denounced these women as “veritable actresses” who use the diagnosis to undertake “most shameful actions” and “employ the coars- est and often most obscene language and give themselves up to the most disorderly actions.”3 Similar accusations have long been leveled at women comedians, who—while not all coarse—embrace disorder as a strategy of comedy. Moms Mabley, Mo’Nique, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and Lena Dunham have built their careers on the necessity of breaking down the barriers that say women must not speak about scatological, gynecological, or sexual matters in pub- lic. Even less profane comedians such as Fanny Brice, Lucille Ball, or Carol Burnett defy gender norms with their over-the-top clown- ing and parodies of feminine ideals. Lori Landay, in her study of bois- terous women comedians, pinpoints exactly what these ideals entail: “Ultimately, a woman’s place is in a feminine body: immobile, frag- ile, objectifi ed, commodifi ed,” she points out, in a consumerist cul- ture that bombards women with images of how they should act and look in order to conform to a narrow ideal.4 Our hope for the present volume is to repurpose the term “hysterical,” to turn away from the pathologization of female bodily and emotional excess and towards a frank reading of those very same things. We argue that the social meanings of the comic unruly woman are very different from those of her male counterparts, because the history of pathologizing female unruliness has long worked against women’s participation in comedy. The edginess of comedy is understood to be something unnatural to women. Consider the rowdy fe- MMizejewski_6434-final.indbizejewski_6434-final.indb 2 99/20/17/20/17 22:04:04 PMPM INTRODUCTION 3 male performances described in this anthology: Fay Tincher’s dare- devil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Tina Fey’s smirk and acerbic wit. The woman comic’s aggres- sion, madcap antics, and loudness are disturbing because, as Kath- leen Rowe has argued, she “unsettles one of the most fundamental of social distinctions—that between male and female.”5 And when that distinction breaks down, women comics are often subject to a backlash where the logic of hysteria reasserts itself. See for instance a recent rash of pseudoscientifi c claims linking women’s supposed humorlessness to everything from lower intelligence to evolutionary advantages. Comedian Jerry Lewis shocked the audi- ence at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Arts Festival when he proclaimed at a question-and-answer session, “A woman doing comedy doesn’t of- fend me but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.” Pundit Christopher Hitchens famously expanded on this idea in a Vanity Fair essay proposing evolution as the reason women are in- nately less funny than men: men needed humor to attract the interest of women, while women, in order to attract the interest of men, sim- ply needed to inhabit exciting bodies. For Hitchens, sexual desire is a male trait because female desire is all about the womb: “For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to fi lth and embarrass- ment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solem- nity at which men can only goggle.”6 Comedian Adam Carolla put it more succinctly in an interview with the New York Post: “Dudes are funnier than chicks.”7 Like hysteria, the idea that women aren’t funny persists because it symptomizes a much larger gender problem. Few would argue against the idea that humor is an essential and healthy human feature. In studies of American college students, both male and female participants have long indicated they value “a sense of humor” in their mates. But when asked to rate the desirability of potential partners based on a photo and a caption supposedly written by that person, the heterosexual female participants rated men with funny captions higher, while the funniness of the caption made no statistical difference in the heterosexual males’ ratings of potential partners. Olga Kha zan says, “For decades, this response stumped psychologists,” until they fi gured out that men and women generally mean differ- MMizejewski_6434-final.indbizejewski_6434-final.indb 3 99/20/17/20/17 22:04:04 PMPM 4 LINDA MIZEJEWSKI AND VICTORIA STURTEVANT ent things by “sense of humor.”8 Liana Hone, William Hurwitz, and Debra Lieberman refi ned the experiment and were able to demon- strate that “men viewed humor receptivity as a necessity and humor production as a luxury when they were asked to create an ideal long- term partner. For women, it was just the opposite.”9 In other words, young women tend to value a partner who makes them laugh, while young men tend to value a partner who laughs at their jokes. This asymmetry in the social logic of humor as it is currently practiced in certain heterosexual relationships should not be mistaken for an essential difference between the sexes. Media both refl ects and shapes our individual psychologies. We would argue that humor is such an essential mechanism for expressing powerful thoughts and feelings, for social bonding and emotional health, and for making it possible to explore otherwise transgressive or taboo topics that it is a signal mark of inequality that the role of the jokester is understood to be a male prerogative. More and better opportunities for women comics to reach audiences, through stand-up, television, and feature fi lms are necessary and important because they also help reverse social myths that a woman’s proper or natural role is to appreciate male humor rather than speak her own truth through comedy. To accuse women of being unfunny is to accuse them of being something less than fully intelligent, spontaneous, and human, incapable of using all the tools of communication available to human beings, including the tool of humor. Humor is also a key political weapon, so there are political impli- cations to the myth that women are less funny: it discourages women from making use of wit and satire to point out injustices and often marginalizes them when they do. In her classic 1994 book Women and Laughter, Frances Gray traces the argument that women have no sense of humor back to the seventeenth century and analyzes in de- tail this myth’s role in disciplining and dismissing women’s voices. Looking broadly at the ways women’s wit has been condemned, ig- nored, and misread in western cultural discourse, Gray argues that there are roughly fi ve “basic and easily learned” techniques to shut women out of comedy, deny their sense of humor, and therefore silence women’s voices.

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