"Feminist Humor" article, 1976
Title
"Feminist Humor" article, 1976
Description
The article discusses the history of humor and irony in feminist movements. Kaufman uses numerous examples of humorous feminist writing to argue that "humor is surely one of the best feminist weapons."
This article was published in Women: A Journal of Liberation, Vol 5. no. 1 (1976).
This article was published in Women: A Journal of Liberation, Vol 5. no. 1 (1976).
Creator
Kaufman, Gloria
Source
Gloria Kaufman Papers, Indiana University South Bend Archives and Special Collections
Date
1976
Rights
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Identifier
Kaufman_Box1_Folder1_K030
Text
Women: A Journal of Liberation: Vol.5 no.1 (1976)
FEMINIST HUMOR
South Bend, Indiana
Comic of a girl shopping for a doll at a toy store, captioned: "Have you got a doll that plays like Billie Jean King, thinks like Margaret Mead and talks out like Barbara Jordan?"
Why is it that feminists have so readily accepted the notion, now a cliche, that the feminist movement has no sense of humor? I suppose for the same reason that we once accepted the idea that there were no great women painters--and we even went on to explain why not. There is now great excitement in the art world, as it rediscovers what it already knew. Of course there were and are great women artists. Analogously, of course feminists have a sense of humor, and given our history, it is unreasonable to say that we don't.
Great leaders of the suffrage movement in the United States often attracted large audiences who were disinterested in feminist concerns but who enjoyed suffrage repartee. Anna Howard Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had considerable r eputations as platform wits. The majority of many of their audiences would have r ated these speakers far higher for their senses of humor than for their trenchant political analyses. The popularity and the visibility of suffragist humor, were there no other feminist humor, undermines the thesis of feminist sobriety.
The use of irony was a consistent device in the suffrage movement and it was wielded with delightful results by Alice Duer Miller in the 1910's. She employs irony deftly and lightly:
Why We Oppose Votes for Men
1. Because man's place is in the armory.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods, women will no longer look up to them.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.
It is a commonplace among feminists today that the same arguments that were proferred against the 19th amendment are being raised against the ERA. But we have not, for some reason, also noted (why not ?) that contemporary feminists are using the same devices of humor that our counterparts used sixty and onehundred years ago. Feminist humor of the 19601s and 19701s , however, unlike suffrage humor, has not so far attracted the attention of the larger public. Many feminists still become angry at (and then frustrated by) the frequent accusation that the movement has no sense of humor. The anger is perhaps based upon an unconscious recognition that humor is directly related to intellect, so that the charge is tantamount to a charge of dull-wittedness.
The comments I am recording here are no more than first impressions. Generally, the last thing that I would offer for publication are first impressions. These remarks exist only because of my own frustration at hearing again a:nd again the assertion that feminist humor does not exist. My major purpose is simply to announce its active presence.
Contemporary feminists have great fondness for put-downs and for one-liners (which are good for posters at demonstrations). In 1973 the Feminist Invention Group of New York City put out a small pamphlet of responses to attempted male put-downs. A few of them are:
Male: What you need is a good lay. Woman's Retort: I'd rather have a hula skirt.
Male: How's your sex life? Woman's Retort: Better than yours!
Male: Nothing's worse than an old woman trying to look young. Woman's Retort: It's worse for men: they age from the bottom up.
It's easy to generate put-downs at a party or in a group. One of the best I've come across is Isabel Shapiro's response for a male offensively attempting a pickup.
Man: Haven't I seen you somewhere before ? Woman: Why, yes, aren't you married to my lover?
A large quantity of feminist humor deals with women only. Men are absent, or they are part of an undifferentiated and characterless background. The following riddle comes from a woman's world:
Question: What's the difference between a gay woman and a straight woman? Answer: None--they're both closet bisexuals.
Maxine Feldman performs as a lesbian comic, and her inquiry to a man and a woman sitting together, "Tell me, do mixed marriages really work?" humorously diminishes the male role. In Gabrielle Burton's "No One Has A Corner on Depression But Housewives Are Working On It," we are in another woman-world:
.. "I went to the grocery store--that's my little outing, I love going to the grocery store--all the noise and colors--crouching there in aisle with your adrenalin surging--until that exciting moment when you find a mistake in the posted unit price. Poor old Albert Einstein I always think. Stuck in his lab calculating infinity, while Mrs. Einstein, what's her name? had all this.
I was really having a good time. I squeezed the Charmin; grabbed up an armload of those new little mini-pads--if those pads are as unbelievably comfortable as they say, I'm going to wear them even when it's not my period."
Bubul's Barbie-doll cartoon is a good visual representation of this trend in feminist humor. The little girl in the cartoon is full of character and personality; the salesman is merely an undifferentiated male.
Feminist humor can be both a mechanism for survival and for attack, at separate times or simultaneously. In describing feminist humor, I must not fail to mention and to emphasize its political function as an educative and an attack device. What would be more illuminating on the politics and dangers of the IUD than the following satire in Majority Report (October 1972) by Jane Field?
''New Discoveries Hailed as Birth Control Breakthroughs -"UMBRELLY UNF URLED"
"Pudenda, Kansas, Oct. 10 --An entirely new method of birth control has been discovered by Dr. Lura Merkin of the Merkin Clinic. A tiny folded umbrella is inserted in the penis and opens automatically when it has reached the apex of the shaft. The underside of the umbrella contains jelly (hence, the name "umbrelly") which causes the sperm to undergo a chemical change rendering it incapable of fertilizing the egg. Dr. Merkin said that the "umbrelly" can be inserted in the penis without an anesthetic, and with very little discomfort to the man. Thus, it can be done in a matter of minutes, in any soundproof doctor's office.
Experiments on a thousand goats (whose sexual apparatus is said to be closest to man's) proved the sperm umbrelly to be 100% effective in preventing pregnancy and eminently satisfactory to the female goat since it does not interfere with her rutting pleasure.
Dr. Merkin declared the "umbrelly" to be statistically safe for man. "Out of every hundred goats only two died of intra-penis infection; only twenty experienced painful swelling in the unerected member; sixteen developed cancer of the testicles; and thirteen were too depressed to have an erection. "
In the long and often tedious battle for human rights, humor is surely one of the best feminist weapons. We must not undervalue it. ¦
Ms. Kaufman is collecting samples of feminist humor for an anthology on this subject. Please send any contributions to Gloria Kaufman , 305 Wakewa Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.
FEMINIST HUMOR
South Bend, Indiana
Comic of a girl shopping for a doll at a toy store, captioned: "Have you got a doll that plays like Billie Jean King, thinks like Margaret Mead and talks out like Barbara Jordan?"
Why is it that feminists have so readily accepted the notion, now a cliche, that the feminist movement has no sense of humor? I suppose for the same reason that we once accepted the idea that there were no great women painters--and we even went on to explain why not. There is now great excitement in the art world, as it rediscovers what it already knew. Of course there were and are great women artists. Analogously, of course feminists have a sense of humor, and given our history, it is unreasonable to say that we don't.
Great leaders of the suffrage movement in the United States often attracted large audiences who were disinterested in feminist concerns but who enjoyed suffrage repartee. Anna Howard Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had considerable r eputations as platform wits. The majority of many of their audiences would have r ated these speakers far higher for their senses of humor than for their trenchant political analyses. The popularity and the visibility of suffragist humor, were there no other feminist humor, undermines the thesis of feminist sobriety.
The use of irony was a consistent device in the suffrage movement and it was wielded with delightful results by Alice Duer Miller in the 1910's. She employs irony deftly and lightly:
Why We Oppose Votes for Men
1. Because man's place is in the armory.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods, women will no longer look up to them.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.
It is a commonplace among feminists today that the same arguments that were proferred against the 19th amendment are being raised against the ERA. But we have not, for some reason, also noted (why not ?) that contemporary feminists are using the same devices of humor that our counterparts used sixty and onehundred years ago. Feminist humor of the 19601s and 19701s , however, unlike suffrage humor, has not so far attracted the attention of the larger public. Many feminists still become angry at (and then frustrated by) the frequent accusation that the movement has no sense of humor. The anger is perhaps based upon an unconscious recognition that humor is directly related to intellect, so that the charge is tantamount to a charge of dull-wittedness.
The comments I am recording here are no more than first impressions. Generally, the last thing that I would offer for publication are first impressions. These remarks exist only because of my own frustration at hearing again a:nd again the assertion that feminist humor does not exist. My major purpose is simply to announce its active presence.
Contemporary feminists have great fondness for put-downs and for one-liners (which are good for posters at demonstrations). In 1973 the Feminist Invention Group of New York City put out a small pamphlet of responses to attempted male put-downs. A few of them are:
Male: What you need is a good lay. Woman's Retort: I'd rather have a hula skirt.
Male: How's your sex life? Woman's Retort: Better than yours!
Male: Nothing's worse than an old woman trying to look young. Woman's Retort: It's worse for men: they age from the bottom up.
It's easy to generate put-downs at a party or in a group. One of the best I've come across is Isabel Shapiro's response for a male offensively attempting a pickup.
Man: Haven't I seen you somewhere before ? Woman: Why, yes, aren't you married to my lover?
A large quantity of feminist humor deals with women only. Men are absent, or they are part of an undifferentiated and characterless background. The following riddle comes from a woman's world:
Question: What's the difference between a gay woman and a straight woman? Answer: None--they're both closet bisexuals.
Maxine Feldman performs as a lesbian comic, and her inquiry to a man and a woman sitting together, "Tell me, do mixed marriages really work?" humorously diminishes the male role. In Gabrielle Burton's "No One Has A Corner on Depression But Housewives Are Working On It," we are in another woman-world:
.. "I went to the grocery store--that's my little outing, I love going to the grocery store--all the noise and colors--crouching there in aisle with your adrenalin surging--until that exciting moment when you find a mistake in the posted unit price. Poor old Albert Einstein I always think. Stuck in his lab calculating infinity, while Mrs. Einstein, what's her name? had all this.
I was really having a good time. I squeezed the Charmin; grabbed up an armload of those new little mini-pads--if those pads are as unbelievably comfortable as they say, I'm going to wear them even when it's not my period."
Bubul's Barbie-doll cartoon is a good visual representation of this trend in feminist humor. The little girl in the cartoon is full of character and personality; the salesman is merely an undifferentiated male.
Feminist humor can be both a mechanism for survival and for attack, at separate times or simultaneously. In describing feminist humor, I must not fail to mention and to emphasize its political function as an educative and an attack device. What would be more illuminating on the politics and dangers of the IUD than the following satire in Majority Report (October 1972) by Jane Field?
''New Discoveries Hailed as Birth Control Breakthroughs -"UMBRELLY UNF URLED"
"Pudenda, Kansas, Oct. 10 --An entirely new method of birth control has been discovered by Dr. Lura Merkin of the Merkin Clinic. A tiny folded umbrella is inserted in the penis and opens automatically when it has reached the apex of the shaft. The underside of the umbrella contains jelly (hence, the name "umbrelly") which causes the sperm to undergo a chemical change rendering it incapable of fertilizing the egg. Dr. Merkin said that the "umbrelly" can be inserted in the penis without an anesthetic, and with very little discomfort to the man. Thus, it can be done in a matter of minutes, in any soundproof doctor's office.
Experiments on a thousand goats (whose sexual apparatus is said to be closest to man's) proved the sperm umbrelly to be 100% effective in preventing pregnancy and eminently satisfactory to the female goat since it does not interfere with her rutting pleasure.
Dr. Merkin declared the "umbrelly" to be statistically safe for man. "Out of every hundred goats only two died of intra-penis infection; only twenty experienced painful swelling in the unerected member; sixteen developed cancer of the testicles; and thirteen were too depressed to have an erection. "
In the long and often tedious battle for human rights, humor is surely one of the best feminist weapons. We must not undervalue it. ¦
Ms. Kaufman is collecting samples of feminist humor for an anthology on this subject. Please send any contributions to Gloria Kaufman , 305 Wakewa Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.
Collection
Citation
Kaufman, Gloria, “"Feminist Humor" article, 1976,” IU South Bend Archives Digital Collections, accessed May 2, 2024, https://iusbarchives.omeka.net/items/show/170.