The Real Mrs. Maisel: Jean Carroll, the First Jewish Female Stand-Up Comedian

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay argues that Jean Carroll, America's first Jewish female stand-up comedian, constitutes a key figure in the history of Jewish performance because she embodied a new model of Jewish femininity in comedy, transforming the emerging genre of "stand-up comedy" from one that reinscribed and circulated negative stereotypes of Jewish women to one that revised and humanized these stereotypes. As pioneers of modern stand-up comedy like Henny Youngman marked the genre with misogynistic accounts of Jewish women as backward and unsympathetically demanding, Carroll provided an alternate representation that captured a more assimilated, sophisticated, and sympathetic Jewess. Her performances on mainstream stages were coded, drawing on stereotypes of Jewish women circulated by her Jewish male colleagues, but humanizing them using a new style of "confidant comedy" that leveraged the intimacy of her informal, conversational delivery.