Feb
18
Potential Paper Topic: Menstruation Humor in Stand-Up Comedy
February 18, 2015 | 3 Comments
(post by Kathy Cacace)
It’s true that I work in medical publishing, but in the Venn diagram of my personal interests and my professional life, there is only one small overlap: how we talk about our bodies, particularly women’s bodies. As I thought about this in relation to our class discussions and the theme of oversharing, and as my personal love for stand-up comedy caused this to catch my attention, I started to circle around the idea of period jokes as a topic for my final paper.
Menstruation is a highly gendered biological function that still remains somewhat taboo. If anything could be classified as a stereotypical TMI/overshare topic, I think menstruation would fall firmly in that category. But I think there is some stuff to be unpacked here; even in just thinking through the bits I’m familiar with, I began to pick up on a tension I’d like to explore between explaining a female-gendered experience, the question of the comedy stage and the comedy club as a gendered space, the concept of “hackiness” around the topic, and the role of both male comics and male audiences within this topic.
I’m not quite sure what my thesis is, or even really what my angle is yet. But I think I’m interested in the ways that women talk about menstruation in a comedic context, perhaps versus the ways in which men approach the same topic. A cursory search of JSTOR has turned up some really interesting articles that could either help to either broaden or focus my line of inquiry: uses of obscenity in live stand-up comedy, humor in ritual behavior among Marathi speakers in India, attitudes towards menstruation and menstrual blood in Elizabethan England, bawdy humor and body politics in Jane Austen’s novels, etc.
I’ve also started to collect contemporary stand-up jokes about the topic from Cameron Esposito (linked above), Margaret Cho, Chelsea Peretti, Louis C.K., etc. Right now, I think I’m most interested in reading/viewing broadly on the topic before I hone in on exactly where I’d like to take this, but I’m pretty excited about tackling it as a seminar paper.
Comments
3 Comments so far
I think this is an extremely promising paper topic–and a really original angle on our course concerns. I particularly appreciate that this comes from the intersection of your personal interests and professional life. I am really excited to see you work on this–it will be a contribution to both feminist studies and studies on humor, and fundamentally interdisciplinary. Your preliminary searches seem perfect–you are circling around the topic and collecting material. Just ideal! In a forthcoming post, I will talk a bit about developing digital projects for the course, if you want, and I could see this developing into a digital project as well as a wonderful seminar paper.
Hey Kathy — This made me think of artists who use menstrual blood in their work, like Carina Ubeda. Might take you away from standup though, which is such a great angle.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/menstrual-blood-art-carina-ubeda_n_3499027.html
Hey Destry! Thanks! There is so much good stuff out there on the topic, and so many directions to take it. This fits nicely with this awesome piece I read this weekend by Emily Erwin Culpper about a film she made in the 70s called Period Piece, and in it she name checks about five other artists who do work on the theme as well…