Abstract: This article presents a performance analysis of One Woman Show by Liz Kingsman, based on a viewing of the show’s 2023 run in New York at the Greenwich House Theater. Written and performed by Kingsman, One Woman Show parodies the titular genre, satirizing the hypocrisies and paradoxes that women performing solo comedic material must navigate. In doing so, it offers a rich case study to examine in concert with scholarship on women and comedy, which often focuses on the binaries that circumscribe women’s ability to function as joke-tellers in a patriarchal society. Whereas theorists such as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn uphold approaches to humor based in the materiality of the comic body, Kingsman’s show critiques the overexposure of the explicit, “unruly” body in women’s comedy. The show questions a performer’s ability to tell an authentic story in such a highly constructed genre and highlights the readiness with which women’s expressions of sexual desire turn back around into exploitation and objectification. Kingsman’s performance, however, constantly finds ways to distance and displace any true scrutiny of her person onto another surface, layering multiple narrative frameworks, timelines, and personas across her single body. I argue that the many-layered frameworks of One Woman Show function as a form of comic embodiment that displaces materiality in favor of theatricality. With this “embodied meta comedy,” Kingsman offers a strategy of representation that is self-aware without resorting to self-deprecation, using the body as a tool without it reading as an object.
{"title":"Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show as Embodied Meta Comedy","authors":"Jennifer Schmidt","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932207","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article presents a performance analysis of One Woman Show by Liz Kingsman, based on a viewing of the show’s 2023 run in New York at the Greenwich House Theater. Written and performed by Kingsman, One Woman Show parodies the titular genre, satirizing the hypocrisies and paradoxes that women performing solo comedic material must navigate. In doing so, it offers a rich case study to examine in concert with scholarship on women and comedy, which often focuses on the binaries that circumscribe women’s ability to function as joke-tellers in a patriarchal society. Whereas theorists such as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn uphold approaches to humor based in the materiality of the comic body, Kingsman’s show critiques the overexposure of the explicit, “unruly” body in women’s comedy. The show questions a performer’s ability to tell an authentic story in such a highly constructed genre and highlights the readiness with which women’s expressions of sexual desire turn back around into exploitation and objectification. Kingsman’s performance, however, constantly finds ways to distance and displace any true scrutiny of her person onto another surface, layering multiple narrative frameworks, timelines, and personas across her single body. I argue that the many-layered frameworks of One Woman Show function as a form of comic embodiment that displaces materiality in favor of theatricality. With this “embodied meta comedy,” Kingsman offers a strategy of representation that is self-aware without resorting to self-deprecation, using the body as a tool without it reading as an object.","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141708155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This article examines Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s dramatic comedy Neighbors (2010) to explore how contemporary African American engagements with the legacies of blackface minstrelsy interrogate the genre’s stubborn persistence and offer important new approaches to historicizing comedy. A play that stages a live minstrel show for twenty-first-century audiences, Neighbors toggles between outrageous spectacles of blackface caricature and contemporary family drama, constructing a warped reality where the fraught theatricality of blackface overlays and infuses the race relations of everyday domestic life. I show how Jacobs-Jenkins uses this mashup of theatrical genres to cultivate a historical consciousness in and of theatre. By delineating the coercive bodily repertoires that perpetuate racist comedy, the play draws out the past in theatre’s present to theorize minstrel comedy’s failure to end. I argue that Neighbors insistently implicates its audience in the production of blackface entertainment, developing a critically resistant practice of comic historiography that disrupts complacent progressive histories of the minstrel show’s ostensible decline. The play’s historiographical interventions, I suggest, offer fresh insight into comedy’s form and function. By crafting a play with multiple endings, Jacobs-Jenkins reconfigures the classical definition of comedy as a genre that ends in the conservative restoration of the social order. In so doing, he turns blackface performance into a reflexive tool that deconstructs its own histories of reproduction. Neighbors thus harnesses the political fallout of comedy’s failure to end by carving out a new critical stance from which to examine the vexed histories of US comic entertainment.
{"title":"Staging Comedy’s Ends: Minstrel Embodiment in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors","authors":"Emily Banta","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932208","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s dramatic comedy Neighbors (2010) to explore how contemporary African American engagements with the legacies of blackface minstrelsy interrogate the genre’s stubborn persistence and offer important new approaches to historicizing comedy. A play that stages a live minstrel show for twenty-first-century audiences, Neighbors toggles between outrageous spectacles of blackface caricature and contemporary family drama, constructing a warped reality where the fraught theatricality of blackface overlays and infuses the race relations of everyday domestic life. I show how Jacobs-Jenkins uses this mashup of theatrical genres to cultivate a historical consciousness in and of theatre. By delineating the coercive bodily repertoires that perpetuate racist comedy, the play draws out the past in theatre’s present to theorize minstrel comedy’s failure to end. I argue that Neighbors insistently implicates its audience in the production of blackface entertainment, developing a critically resistant practice of comic historiography that disrupts complacent progressive histories of the minstrel show’s ostensible decline. The play’s historiographical interventions, I suggest, offer fresh insight into comedy’s form and function. By crafting a play with multiple endings, Jacobs-Jenkins reconfigures the classical definition of comedy as a genre that ends in the conservative restoration of the social order. In so doing, he turns blackface performance into a reflexive tool that deconstructs its own histories of reproduction. Neighbors thus harnesses the political fallout of comedy’s failure to end by carving out a new critical stance from which to examine the vexed histories of US comic entertainment.","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141689199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Negin Farsad, Katelyn Hale Wood, Maria De Simone, Matthew McMahan, G. Overbeke
{"title":"“A Trusted Voice Saying Ludicrous Things”: Excerpted Interview with Stand-Up Comedian Negin Farsad","authors":"Negin Farsad, Katelyn Hale Wood, Maria De Simone, Matthew McMahan, G. Overbeke","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932209","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141713661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This article offers a model of analyzing improv comedy by minoritarian improvisers that refuses to reduce the performance to being about race and gender. This work draws on critiques of identity and representation advanced by queer of color performance studies scholars to show how race and gender can matter in improv without their being the only aspects of significance. Examining a scene from Toronto’s fortieth anniversary of Theatresports, I highlight how the form of the “Dubbing Game”—where improvisers speak for one another—combines with the improvisers’ creative choices to produce a lively and laughable piece of improvised theatre. Exploring how the Dubbing Game separates voice from body shows how race and gender can be sensed as an event rather than strictly adhering to bodies. Through this exploration, I argue that part of what makes this dubbing scene funny is the disorganization of the representational logic. Importantly, disorganizing representational logic is only part of the scene’s comedy. This article shows the many ways that the scene’s comedy emerges through particular creative choices rather than from information about the “what is” of race and gender.
{"title":"Disorganizing Representation in Theatresports: A Case Study in Improv Comedy","authors":"Keira Mayo","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932204","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article offers a model of analyzing improv comedy by minoritarian improvisers that refuses to reduce the performance to being about race and gender. This work draws on critiques of identity and representation advanced by queer of color performance studies scholars to show how race and gender can matter in improv without their being the only aspects of significance. Examining a scene from Toronto’s fortieth anniversary of Theatresports, I highlight how the form of the “Dubbing Game”—where improvisers speak for one another—combines with the improvisers’ creative choices to produce a lively and laughable piece of improvised theatre. Exploring how the Dubbing Game separates voice from body shows how race and gender can be sensed as an event rather than strictly adhering to bodies. Through this exploration, I argue that part of what makes this dubbing scene funny is the disorganization of the representational logic. Importantly, disorganizing representational logic is only part of the scene’s comedy. This article shows the many ways that the scene’s comedy emerges through particular creative choices rather than from information about the “what is” of race and gender.","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141714700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Scenic Charge Artist’s Toolkit: Tips, Templates, and Techniques for Planning and Running a Successful Paint Shop in the Theatre and Performing Arts by Jennifer Rose Ivey (review)","authors":"Rebecca Wolf","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932217","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141691099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maria De Simone, Matthew McMahan, G. Overbeke, Katelyn Hale Wood
{"title":"Centering Embodied Comedy in Theatre and Performance Studies Scholarship","authors":"Maria De Simone, Matthew McMahan, G. Overbeke, Katelyn Hale Wood","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141708581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: For stand-up comedians, bombing—that is, failing to make an audience laugh, resulting in a sour, unsatisfying, and perhaps humiliating performance—feels terrible. It is also an inevitability. Eventually, even the most skilled and seasoned comedian will suffer a misfire. Comedians bomb if the audience doesn’t understand or agree with their material or if they fail to create sufficient rapport with their audience. Sometimes bombing occurs for reasons well outside the comedian’s control. However, there are some practices that can blunt the effects of bombing, if not avoid it altogether. Drawing from my own practice-as-research as a stand-up comedian, coupled with close readings of comedy studies scholarship, I delineate several approaches comedians can take to mitigate bombing on stage. Comedians can shift their mindset away from chasing laughs. They can focus on telling the truth and amusing themselves. Finally, they can adopt a playful curiosity about the present moment that can steer them through disaster. While bombing is not pleasant, it can be instructive.
{"title":"On Bombing: Causes and Strategies of Resilience for Stand-Up Comedians","authors":"Megan Gogerty","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932210","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: For stand-up comedians, bombing—that is, failing to make an audience laugh, resulting in a sour, unsatisfying, and perhaps humiliating performance—feels terrible. It is also an inevitability. Eventually, even the most skilled and seasoned comedian will suffer a misfire. Comedians bomb if the audience doesn’t understand or agree with their material or if they fail to create sufficient rapport with their audience. Sometimes bombing occurs for reasons well outside the comedian’s control. However, there are some practices that can blunt the effects of bombing, if not avoid it altogether. Drawing from my own practice-as-research as a stand-up comedian, coupled with close readings of comedy studies scholarship, I delineate several approaches comedians can take to mitigate bombing on stage. Comedians can shift their mindset away from chasing laughs. They can focus on telling the truth and amusing themselves. Finally, they can adopt a playful curiosity about the present moment that can steer them through disaster. While bombing is not pleasant, it can be instructive.","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141703611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: Mehrub Moiz Awan is a Pakistani khwaja sira-trans activist, public health specialist, global policy practitioner, independent academic, and performer. Their comic performances include the viral “gender ambiguous” and “shamelessly cute” Shumaila Bhatti (2016–20), the bold comic drag persona of Phudina Chatni (2018–22), and a present movement toward building khwaja sira-trans comic collectives (2023-present). In this excerpted conversation between Claire Pamment and Awan from October 2023, Awan reflects on her embodied experiences of comedy in transition across personae, forums, and a rapidly shifting landscape of transgender rights in Pakistan and beyond. She directs us to the mutually imbricated local and global forces prefixed on killing trans and queer joy while pushing us toward queer, resilient, and collective joyful worldmaking.
{"title":"Mehrub Moiz Awan on Queer Joyful Worldmaking, in Pakistan and Beyond","authors":"Claire Pamment, Mehrub Moiz Awan","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932211","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Mehrub Moiz Awan is a Pakistani khwaja sira-trans activist, public health specialist, global policy practitioner, independent academic, and performer. Their comic performances include the viral “gender ambiguous” and “shamelessly cute” Shumaila Bhatti (2016–20), the bold comic drag persona of Phudina Chatni (2018–22), and a present movement toward building khwaja sira-trans comic collectives (2023-present). In this excerpted conversation between Claire Pamment and Awan from October 2023, Awan reflects on her embodied experiences of comedy in transition across personae, forums, and a rapidly shifting landscape of transgender rights in Pakistan and beyond. She directs us to the mutually imbricated local and global forces prefixed on killing trans and queer joy while pushing us toward queer, resilient, and collective joyful worldmaking.","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141708825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage ed. by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter (review)","authors":"Ana Candida Carneiro","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932212","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141712732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Staging Violence against Women and Girls: Plays and Interviews ed. by Daniela Cavallaro, Luciana d’Arcangeli, and Claire Kennedy (review)","authors":"Amanda Rose Villarreal","doi":"10.1353/tt.2024.a932215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932215","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":209215,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Topics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141700668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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