TY - BOOK AU - Mizejewski,Linda TI - Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics SN - 9780292756922 U1 - 792.702 8092 23 PY - 2021///] CY - Austin : PB - University of Texas Press, KW - Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) KW - United States KW - Racism KW - Women comedians KW - PERFORMING ARTS / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction. Pretty/Funny Women and Comedy’s Body Politics: Funniness, Prettiness, and Feminism --; Chapter One. Kathy Griffin and the Comedy of the D List --; Chapter two. Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism: Picturing Tina Fey --; Chapter three. Sarah Silverman: Bedwetting, Body Comedy, and “a Mouth Full of Blood Laughs” --; Chapter four. Margaret Cho Is Beautiful: A Comedy of Manifesto --; Chapter five. “White People Are Looking at You!” Wanda Sykes’s Black Looks --; Chapter six. Ellen DeGeneres: Pretty Funny Butch as Girl Next Door --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either “pretty” or “funny.” Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars, and, most often, they’ve been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis Diller to Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett. In this pretty-versus-funny history, women writer-comedians—no matter what they look like—have ended up on the other side of “pretty,” enabling them to make it the topic and butt of the joke, the ideal that is exposed as funny. Pretty/Funny focuses on Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, the groundbreaking women comics who flout the pretty-versus-funny dynamic by targeting glamour, postfeminist girliness, the Hollywood A-list, and feminine whiteness with their wit and biting satire. Linda Mizejewski demonstrates that while these comics don’t all identify as feminists or take politically correct positions, their work on gender, sexuality, and race has a political impact. The first major study of women and humor in twenty years, Pretty/Funny makes a convincing case that women’s comedy has become a prime site for feminism to speak, talk back, and be contested in the twenty-first century UR - https://doi.org/10.7560/756915 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780292756922 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780292756922/original ER -