In On the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy

Also by Shawn Levy

A Year in the Life of Death

The Castle on Sunset

Dolce Vita Confidential

De Niro: A Life

The Rat Pack

Paul Newman: A Life

The Last Playboy

Ready, Steady, Go!

Rat Pack Confidential

King of Comedy

Copyright © 2022 by Shawn Levy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cover images (clockwise from upper left): Jackie Moms Mabley, Michael Ochs Archives; Totie Fields by Martin Mills; Minnie Pearl, Michael Ochs Archives; Phyllis Diller by George Stroud / Daily Express; Joan Rivers by I. C. Rapoport; Elaine May, Archive Photos / Moviepix. All Getty Images.

Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levy, Shawn, author.

Title: In on the joke: the original queens of stand-up comedy / Shawn Levy.

Description: First edition. | New York: Doubleday, [2022]. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021013200 (print) | LCCN 2021013201 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385545785 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984899279 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780385545792 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women comedians—United States—Biography. | Stand-up comedy—United States—History.

Classification: LCC PN2286.8 .L48 2022 (print) | LCC PN2286.8 (ebook) | DDC 792.702/80925 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021013200

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021013201

Ebook ISBN 9780385545792

ep_prh_6.0_148359083_c0_r1

For Mickie and Jenny and Mary and Lulu and Paula and Fanny and Alina and Amy and Shannon

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

One The Philosopher

Two The Pro

Three The Sunflower

Four The Bawds

THE POTTYMOUTH

THE LIBERATOR

Five The Positive Thinker

Six The Perfectionist

Seven The Songbird

Eight The Scrapper

Conclusion

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

_148359083_

Author’s Note

For years, the most important women in my life—my daughter, Paula, and my partner, Shannon—have reminded me that the books I’ve written have been a manly lot, and they’ve cajoled me, in their ways, to write about a woman. And for some time, I’ve tried to make that happen, without ever quite hitting on the right idea at the right time. The concept for this book was, finally, both, and I am so grateful to have an opportunity to show the women who matter most to me that I hear and see them.

There are already several worthy histories of comedy and of women in comedy that deal, at least in part, with some of the figures and some of the era I’ve written about. (I especially recommend We Killed by Yael Kohen, Seriously Funny by Gerald Nachman, and The Comedians by Kliph Nesteroff.) But none hits exactly the target at which I’ve aimed: the rise of women as stand-up comedy stars during the period between, say, World War II and 1970. As valuable and instructive as I found these and several other books on similar subjects, I recognized a gap in the bookshelf, in the historical record, that I could fill.

But, still: Why, in this age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, should a man take on the task of writing about a group of women at all? I asked myself that question often as I was starting out and continually as I was working.

Well, perhaps because one remembers best the thunder one heard in one’s youth, I’ve got a real feel for and obsessive interest in the popular culture of the years between Pearl Harbor and Watergate. This subject sits right in the middle of my wheelhouse.

And imagine getting the chance to research, analyze, and write about Moms Mabley, Minnie Pearl, Elaine May, Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers, to visit Harlem and Greenwich Village and North Beach and Las Vegas in their heydays, to track a show-biz story that was sitting right out there in all its details but hadn’t yet been gathered up and nailed down. Of course I wanted this gig.

The women in these pages are heroes. Each had the notion to enter a career in which there were virtually no female role models, mentors, or colleagues to emulate or be taught by—or at least none whom she knew of. Each created her own path, unaware, in the main, that other, similarly driven women were doing more or less the same thing, more or less at the same time. Each persisted despite social, professional, and even familial doubt, discouragement, resistance, and hostility. And each attained moments, if not decades, of success, sometimes only among insiders, but in several cases in the larger society—and, in a few, with truly iconic impact.

I’ve tried to present their lives and their work with accuracy, empathy, and appreciation, to see them as ordinary women as well as popular entertainers, to understand them in the contexts from which they emerged and indicate their deserved places in the history of comedy, of women in entertainment, of American popular culture.

I am in awe of every single one of them.

Introduction

In October 1983, the Friars Club, that bastion of American comedy royalty, held a roast of comic legend Sid Caesar at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Times Square, one of those ceremonial functions at which show-biz insiders gather to drink and eat and smoke and make wicked, vicious fun of their guest of honor, all to raise money for their often-in-financial-need club or, in flush times, for charity.

Comedian Buddy Hackett was the roastmaster, and such Friars icons as Henny Youngman, Jack Carter, Dick Capri, and Jackie Vernon joined in the mockery of the honoree, which was, as at every such roast, decidedly vulgar and outrageous. Some two thousand men laughed appreciatively, and among them, as Hackett confirmed to a newspaper the next day, was not one single woman: Women? There were no women at the roast. They’re not allowed. There was a time when they weren’t even allowed into the club[house].

Mixed into the throng were some guests of club members, people who weren’t entertainment professionals but who were happy to spend a goodly sum for the experience of being among a constellation of comedy stars and listening to raunchy jokes for a few hours. One of these was Phillip Downey, a slender, dapper, quiet, mustachioed fellow who was maybe a little pale for a guy from Southern California but who blended in like any other civilian at one of these wingdings, laughing at the bawdy jibes, saying a few polite hellos and goodbyes, and mostly spending his afternoon looking all around the room as if awestruck at the spectacle. Nobody seemed to have made note of him when he arrived, when he got up to visit the restroom, when he left.

But the next day, he was the talk of the Friars.

Phillip Downey didn’t exist. Underneath that wig and mustache and tailored suit and demure manner was Phyllis Diller, a comedy legend of more than two decades’ standing but someone who, simply by virtue of her gender, could not be admitted to the Friars as a member or be permitted to attend one of the club’s stag parties/roasts without resorting to subterfuge.

I’ve always wanted to eavesdrop, she told the New York Post, which ran a front-page photo the next day of Phyllis in her Downey drag exiting a Sheraton Centre men’s room. It was the funniest, dirtiest thing I ever heard in my life.

Two years would go by before the Friars, as if shamed into it, made Phyllis the focus of a roast of her own (there was an even bigger turnout than for Sid Caesar’s tribute), and another year would pass before they offered her membership in their ranks, making her the first woman ever admitted to their self-appointed comedy pantheon.

It wasn’t an honor that she needed. For more than twenty-five years, Phyllis Diller had been a household name across America and, indeed, the English-speaking world, a star of nightclubs, theaters, television, movies, Broadway, even classical concert halls. She was rich, famous, widely imitated, and still working actively as she approached seventy—indeed, she was the most well-known and wealthy comedian in the room the day Phillip Downey snuck into the roast.

But there was a great sense of justice finally being done as she was anointed by her peers and granted a place among them. It was as if not only a woman had earned a place in the highest ranks of American comedy but as if women in general were seen as deserving of such recognition. Phyllis Diller had broken ground by attending a Friars roast, if in disguise, and by carrying on in her craft and career until the Friars had no choice but to acknowledge her as one of their own. But then, Phyllis Diller was one of a handful of women in comedy who had broken ground, blazed trails, knocked down doors, and made careers and legends for themselves regardless of the opinions of men. As in so many aspects of her career—indeed, in having a career as a comedian at all—she simply would not be denied.

That pretty much sums up the history of women in stand-up comedy, particularly the early history, when the women in these pages rose as more or less the first women to think that they could (duh) be as funny and sharp and entertaining as male joke tellers and who chose to pursue careers at it. They worked alone for the most part, both in the sense that they were almost all solo performers and in the sense that, in many cases, they didn’t know about one another or see one another as doing the same thing as themselves. They faced the indifference, puzzlement, nay-saying, and sometimes enmity of agents, managers, impresarios, audiences, critics, fellow performers, even their families. And yet they persisted, persevered, pushed forward, making their way ever farther and higher, if only incrementally, and clearing space not only for themselves but for the women working alongside them and for the women who followed them in the curious business of making people laugh for a living.

By the late 1960s, when several of these women were fully established in their careers, the idea of a woman standing up and telling jokes no longer seemed freakish or outlandish within show business or among audiences. There was still a lot of work to be done (indeed, even today it needs doing and redoing, in comedy as in so many other fields). They didn’t get the same opportunities as men, or as many of them, or anything like equivalent pay. But the precedent had been set. The women in these pages didn’t really have any antecedents or models they could point back to and say, I’m like her. But with their lives and their bodies of work, they established a baseline that later generations of women comedians could use as a starting point for their own fledgling careers. Individually and as a never-really-united group, they created space for a form of expression—women telling jokes—that American popular culture had never truly accommodated until they demanded it be recognized and that continues to grow in size and impact to this day.

—

Today you look around the landscape of comedy and you see women ascendant, if not preeminent—women of all types, styles, ages, sensibilities.

Today we have Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman and Tiffany Haddish and Hannah Gadsby and Ali Wong and Leslie Jones and Mindy Kaling and Tig Notaro and Chelsea Handler and Jessica Williams and Samantha Bee and Chelsea Paretti and Jacqueline Novak and Jenny Slate.

Today we have legends living and working and joking among us: Mo’Nique, Rita Rudner, Tina Fey, Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin, Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Roseanne Barr.[*1]

Today we have women doing comedy specials on streaming TV and headlining Las Vegas show rooms and moving from comedy clubs and podcasts to movies, sitcoms, talk shows, and book deals.

Today one of the most acclaimed series on television, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, is the story of a woman breaking into stand-up comedy at the dawn of the sixties. (Another excellent series, Hacks, shines a light on the situation of women in comedy today.)

Today it’s indisputable: there has never been more—or, arguably, better—comedy by women. In fact, the only reason not to call today the Golden Age of Women in Comedy is the likelihood that women comedians will continue to rise and proliferate and redefine the art of stand-up in times to come. The real golden age might yet be on the horizon.

Maybe that’s why it can feel so absurd to recall a day when this once seemed impossible, when women were deemed unsuited for stand-up comedy, when the very idea of a female comedian seemed, to the eyes of the men who ran show business and to most audiences, to be a joke in and of itself.

But that was the truth of it. From the days of vaudeville until the dawn of color TV, a funny woman who wanted to tell jokes was faced with a brick wall—and not the kind you stood in front of at an improv comedy club. Female comedians were not only rare, they were actively discouraged. Club owners, agents, TV talent bookers, rival comedians, entertainment critics: none of them wanted to see a woman tell jokes, and, really, most of them seemed to believe that women simply weren’t funny, full stop. A woman on a stage in front of a microphone was, they reckoned, there to sing, maybe dance, maybe take off her clothes. If she was funny, that was spice to the act, not the point of it.

Take one noted power broker’s analysis of why women couldn’t be as successful at comedy as men:

A woman is feminine, a woman is not abrasive, a woman is not a hustler. So when you see a gal who does stand-up one-liners, she has to overcome that built-in identification as a retiring, meek woman. I mean, if a woman comes out and starts firing one-liners, those little abrasive things, you can take that from a man….The only one who really does it is Joanie Rivers, who’s had, I think, great success with being a stand-up comedian….I think it’s much tougher for women. You don’t see many of them around. And the ones that try sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.

Which hateful misogynist said this? And in what prehistorical epoch?

Try Johnny Carson, the single most powerful creator of comedy stars in the history of show business, and in 1979, when the Great Stand-Up Comedy Boom was in full swing and the likes of Phyllis Diller, Elayne Boosler, and, yes, Joan Rivers, whom he had more or less introduced to the world, were among the most popular stand-up comedians in the nation.

Or how about this, in the year 2000, from another comedy legend who once held the keys to one of the nation’s highest-rated TV broadcasts?

A woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.

That would be Jerry Lewis, the comedian and movie star whose annual telethon in support of the Muscular Dystrophy Association was one of the hottest bookings in the biz for the first fifteen years or so of its life, which began in 1966.[*2]

Or this, from the pages of Vanity Fair, in 2007?

Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about. All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?

That was polemicist Christopher Hitchens, launching into some twenty-eight hundred malignantly unfunny words to attempt a biological explanation for his theory of women’s lack of humor.

Or—last one—this?

I don’t like funny women. I come out of that generation where a woman should be beautiful and sexy and a wonderful flower attached to a man, even though my whole life has been the antithesis of this. To this day, you don’t expect a woman to be funny….Nobody likes funny women. We’re a threat. I don’t like funny women. I don’t think I’m funny. I think I’m witty.

That would be, of all people, Miss Joan Rivers, still rising to the height of her fame and career, in 1981 and, to be fair, maybe telling the readers of Playboy what she thought they wanted to hear.

How did we evolve from such neanderthal ideas about women and humor to the current day, with its rich female comedy culture?

Step by painstaking step, as it turns out.

(Before we continue, though, a few words from Ms. Tina Fey in response to the preceding. In her brilliant 2011 memoir, Bossypants, she wrote:

Whenever someone says to me, Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny, or Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny, or Rick Fenderman says women aren’t funny….Do you have anything to say to that? Yes. We don’t fucking care if you like it. I don’t say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up. Unless one of these men is my boss, which none of them is, it’s irrelevant. My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

(A few years later, asked again about whether women had a disadvantage when doing comedy, she politely seethed: The only disadvantage women have is [we] have to keep fucking answering the question of, ‘Is it hard and are women funny?’ The men don’t have to answer that question. That’s the only impairment.)

—

To arrive at an age when women stand-up comedians would be considered a normal thing, American culture and American show business had to metamorphose, sometimes in sync, sometimes leapfrogging each other.

Some of the struggle had to do with the very nature of stand-up itself. To speak of stand-up comedy is to speak of a very specific art form: the solo artist, armed only with a microphone and a store of wit, energy, jokes, and nerve, facing an audience, telling jokes, making trenchant observations, spritzing one-liners, engaging with the public directly in a performance as daring as that of any tightrope walker, escape artist, or test pilot.

Johnny Carson wasn’t entirely wrong. Stand-up is not for the meek. It combines writing and performing and moxie in a way best suited to the most confident, aggressive, presumptuous, even arrogant personalities. Comedians operate under the assumption that their observations on life and the world are not only humorous but essential. They take the stage with chips on their shoulders, with something to prove, almost looking for a fight. They probe at their audiences, measuring their mood, adapting their acts to the temperature of the room. When they fail, they are said to have died or bombed. But when they succeed, they have killed, their audiences have been slain, everyone in the room died laughing: aggression exemplified.

The stand-up comedian answers to a punch list of responsibilities unique in popular culture. He or she must be funny, most of all, but also fresh, original, relatable, economical, rhythmic, topical, timely, and adaptable. A stand-up act requires the approving response of an audience several times a minute, as compared to a singer, who has three to five minutes between anticipated rounds of applause, or an actor, who can go an hour or more without a peep from the crowd. (I can die every fifteen seconds, sighed veteran comedian Minnie Pearl.) And a stand-up is, by convention, subject to the harassment of a bored or unamused audience or, indeed, any individual audience member; we can’t imagine shouting down a singer or a dancer or an actor in the middle of a performance, but a stand-up, even a world-class name, is open to the scourge of heckling whenever he or she has a weak moment.

The scrutiny to which stand-up comedians are subject is both ongoing and personal. Watch a lousy comedy sketch (or play or film) and you can blame the script or the director or the ensemble for the failure. Watch a lousy comedian, and there is one and only one person upon whom to pin your disapproval. The stand-up rises and falls on his or her own strength or quality or lack thereof. And it’s a minute-by-minute thing: A comic sketch or play or film can start slow and build, and an audience will go along with the development, submitting to the narrative and remaining patient in hope of a payoff. A comedian’s performance, ranging in scale from a tight five, as it’s known in the trade, to a sixty-plus-minute concert, has to provide snap after crackle after pop for the whole of its running time. Whether at open mic in a bar, as a featured performer in a nightclub, or as a headliner in an arena, a stand-up has to provide laughs from start to finish or die from lack of impetus. A comedian, like a sculptor working with an irreplaceable piece of marble or a golfer trying to win a major championship, can’t afford many poor strokes.

All of these qualities of the art could seem, to someone steeped in antiquated and patriarchal ways of thinking, to be somehow inappropriate, or unbecoming for a woman, somehow unladylike—characterizations so absurd and offensive in and of themselves that merely typing them feels like succumbing to the most thick-skulled sort of misogyny. But prior to the spread of feminism in the 1960s, at the time the women profiled in these pages were scrapping to build their careers, these were the dominant notions in the minds of the gatekeepers of show business and the audiences whom they served. A woman alone on a stage was expected to be pretty and to sing, maybe dance. If she did comedy at all, it was with a man or as part of an ensemble. And she certainly didn’t deploy an arsenal of one-liners or zetz any hecklers in the audience. If you believed all that—and these were widely held beliefs—then you couldn’t imagine a woman stand-up comedian, and you would have missed some truly brilliant performers.

—

It wasn’t that audiences and show-biz poo-bahs thought women weren’t funny per se. Women have made successful careers in comic acting from the days of Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler in silent movies through the likes of Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, and Myrna Loy in screwball comedy films, to the emergence of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Mary Tyler Moore on TV—among many, many others. For just as long, women have performed Jane-of-all-trades acts combining comedy (often sketch comedy) with singing and dancing on the live stage (and, later, radio and television) in the vein of Fanny Brice, Mae West, Martha Raye, Pearl Bailey, and, early in their careers, women who eventually turned fully to stand-up such as Moms Mabley and Jean Carroll.

Never, however, in these earlier days were funny women permitted to be women, to talk about their lives, their troubles, or their places in the world in the way male stand-up comedians did regularly. On the rare occasions when a woman was seen primarily as a comedian and not as a comic actress or singing comedienne, the culture forced her into narrow, constricting, undignified roles, neutralizing her gender, her sexuality, her perspicacity, or all three. For women to be accepted as comedians, they had to be constrained or distorted in such a way that the womanhood was bled out of them. They could be ditzes, cute but featherheaded in the vein of Gracie Allen, a brilliant comedian who worked for decades alongside her husband, George Burns, and got most of the best jokes in the act while he served more or less as her straight man. Or they could infantilize themselves outright as the great vaudevillian Fanny Brice did when she adopted her Baby Snooks persona, dressing as a child, speaking babytalk, and entertaining audiences with impish stunts in response to the adult world. They could act older than they were, as the comedian Jackie Mabley did in the 1940s, calling herself Moms, dressing as a granny in a housecoat and slippers, and affecting the demeanor of a woman decades older than her actual forty-odd years. Or they could act foolish and rustic, as the college-educated Sarah Ophelia Colley did in her late twenties when she adapted the persona of a sunny, wide-eyed, man-crazy country gal whom she named Minnie Pearl. But what they could not do was walk out on a stage looking like an ordinary (or, in the manner of men who told jokes in tuxedos, elegant) woman from anywhere in the world and talk in plain, comic terms about the things that people like them—that is, other ordinary women—might recognize as true and funny: husbands, children, housework, shopping, air travel, or any number of the quirks of everyday life that affected men and women equally but which show business and popular audiences seemed to think that only men could address. If they wanted to be funny, in short, they had to, in some way, deny their womanhood.

—

Ironically, it was the emergence of stand-up comedy as a distinct art form that made it possible for women (as well as members of various minority groups) to find wide acceptance as comedy stars. Comic monologues have been part of popular entertainment forever. At the start of the twentieth century, vaudeville (and its raunchy kid brother, burlesque) presented a wide variety of entertainment genres, and comedy—often in skits, often blended with singing, dancing, and novelty acts—was a big part of the draw. Comic entertainers in vaudeville often did double duty, performing their own acts and serving as emcees, even if they were part of a team or ensemble in their principal endeavors. In that way, they often became standouts, recognized not only for their prepared material but for their offhanded, ad-libbed reactions to unforeseen moments onstage or in the audience.

(Importantly, vaudeville and burlesque were mirrored in culturally segregated portions of the culture: the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit of all-Black shows presented to almost entirely Black audiences; the Borscht Belt of Jewish entertainers performing in resort hotels in the Northeast, and, later, Florida; and the Grand Ole Opry, home to what was originally known as hillbilly entertainment and then, after World War II, as country. Those subcultures had their own comedy stars, some of whom, as we shall see, went on to broader careers.)

Vaudeville was, history tells us, killed off by the rise of radio and talking movies, but its essential structure persisted on the airwaves (radio and then television) as the variety show. Too, many comic vaudevillians morphed into comic actors in film or on radio, continuing, in most cases, acts and personae they had introduced on the vaudeville stage.

By the end of World War II, the nation’s vaudeville circuits almost entirely ceased to function. But as those opportunities evaporated, others bloomed. Nightclubs, which offered intimate, scaled-down shows for a sophisticated urban clientele, began to grow in importance. By the late forties, every city of reasonable size was home to at least a few such venues, places where grown-ups could go to eat, drink, and watch a performance that was a little more bijou and deluxe than whatever was at the local movie house (or on radio or TV) on a given night. Nightclubs offered shorter, less diverse programs; a vaudeville show might consist of a dozen or more acts, a nightclub three or four. And the acts were smaller: comic ensembles were winnowed down to small teams or, in many cases, solo performers—modern comedians, essentially, working in one, in the parlance of the trade. So widespread was this latter phenomenon, and so new, that Variety, the font of so much show-biz jargon over the century of its publication and influence, began to use a new term for it—stand-up comedy—in 1950.[*3]

By the fifties, stand-up had taken on the form we recognize today: the loner at the mic telling jokes and stories, spewing one-liners, sometimes riffing off the audience either as a premeditated strategy or as a form or reaction or even in self-defense. In cities such as New York, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the newly prominent gambling and entertainment destination Las Vegas, prestigious nightclubs presented comedians who were already well known from television and radio. At the same time, those cities were home to cabarets, lounges, cafés, and so-called discovery clubs, smaller venues where lesser-known or outright unknown new talent performed, often without salary, in hopes of building a following or being discovered by a manager or agent—perfect breeding grounds for new comedy talent.

And then, as so many other aspects of the culture did, stand-up comedy changed from something standardized, impersonal, and traditional into something experimental, idiosyncratic, and revelatory. The jokes told by such old-timers as Milton Berle, Bob Hope, and Henny Youngman might have been told by anyone (or, as those stars and their peers almost always performed material supplied by professional gag writers, anyone with money). But in the 1950s, just as the groundbreaking practice of method acting demanded that actors look into themselves to mine truths, just as rock and roll disrupted performance norms of popular music, a new type of comedy based in political commentary, personal psychology, spontaneous improvisation, and an attitude of cynicism and even hostility toward the status quo emerged. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and select points in between—and on LP records, the emergent platform in home entertainment—new comedians, almost always working from material that they themselves had written, appeared seemingly in a giant wave, turning stand-up comedy from a form of amusement into a form of self-expression, consciousness raising, even social critique.

They were a distinctly diverse group—political satirist Mort Sahl, theatrical monologist Shelley Berman, hipster firebrand Lenny Bruce, quirky ironist Bob Newhart, and surreal madman Jonathan Winters prominent among them. But they were lumped together by commentators and critics as the sick comics—Time magazine actually ran a cover story with that name in 1959, labeling them sickniks—as if their attempts to somehow personalize their material signaled mental derangement. And there was something else unique about this generation of comedians: it included Black performers such as Dick Gregory and Godfrey Cambridge, and it included (or would soon include) such women as Moms Mabley, Elaine May (with her partner Mike Nichols), and Phyllis Diller. As a generation, they would establish new standards of originality and idiosyncrasy in the field.

It may have been a sign of sickness in some eyes that women were being allowed the same chances as men to be funny or fail in the effort. But as the early history of women stand-up comedians demonstrates, those who persevered and made places for themselves in the field were anything but frail or debilitated. Where doors creaked ajar, they kicked them open; where management was willing to take a chance, they made themselves irreplaceable; where the spectacle of one woman telling jokes drew in curiosity seekers, they came to constitute an array of can’t-miss acts just as varied and diverse as any selection of male comics.

There were, of course, caveats and conditions. While some women were able to force their way to the first rank of comedy stars by the end of the 1960s, they still seemed to do so within brackets. Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, and Joan Rivers didn’t present themselves in the same clownish guises as earlier funnywomen, but they nonetheless took onstage personae that circumscribed their femininity, that set them apart from quote-unquote normal women: the manic harridan, the vainglorious fat girl, and the desperate neurotic, respectively. Their stage faces were more ordinary than the characters that Moms Mabley and Minnie Pearl embodied, they acknowledged their roles as wives and mothers, but they were still set off from the ordinary by qualities that made them ill suited for regular lives. There were biographical and psychological bases for those differences—internal truths behind those performative masks—and, perhaps not coincidentally, Phyllis, Totie, and Joan all experimented with plastic surgery (indeed, Phyllis and Joan became famed devotees of it) and were frank and public about their desire to attain a state of attractiveness that they didn’t feel in their younger days. So, yes, they each found a way through the glass ceiling, but each left something personal, feminine, and real behind in the effort, and each tried to reclaim it, even if only superficially, later on.

—

To chronicle the rise of women in comedy is to focus on a specific moment in history, from the rise of stand-up as a distinct practice through the emergence of sick comedy in the late fifties, when the shape of comedy became clear and fixed in a way that has been maintained for more than a half century. Since that metamorphosis, since the women in these pages made their distinct and individual impacts, the path for younger women who aspired to careers in comedy has become clear: how and where you had to work, what a woman’s comedy act looked like, aspects of stagecraft and career management, the specific venues and practices and styles and subjects that were available to mine and utilize, and so on.

Some definitions are in order. In these pages, stand-up will be considered as distinct from comic acting as practiced by the likes of Mae West, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Shirley MacLaine, Gilda Radner, and Kate McKinnon, geniuses all, but geniuses working with the luxury of scripts and fellow cast members and well-rehearsed characterizations and scenes. It will also be considered distinctly from the art of performers whose acts are chiefly musical and who might best be labeled comediennes, women such as Sophie Tucker, the bold and bawdy Last of the Red Hot Mamas; Anna Russell, who cleverly spoofed classical music; Ruth Wallis, a singer and songwriter famous for her risky double entendres; or such entertainingly funny musical theater performers as Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, Doris Day, and such latter-day inheritors of the tradition as Bette Midler.

Because of the way stand-up comedy, especially women’s stand-up, evolved from vaudeville and associated entertainments to the modern ideal of the art, the notion of a stand-up can, as a matter of history, include women who used music as a vehicle for comedy and told more jokes than they sang songs, women who performed monologues in character (the French word for them, diseuse, would be helpful if it weren’t so obscure), and women who performed semi-improvisatory sketches, especially in the late 1950s, when the techniques of comic improv were radical new inventions in entertainment. And thus, because of the specific moment of their rise (and, in several cases, their falls), some women who combined comical singing with the new sorts of comic energy have made the cut, as have some women who didn’t necessarily work alone but whose contribution to the evolving art of comedy was so specific and influential as to demand that they be recognized and included.

And so we begin with a handful of women whose careers originated in vaudeville and its cognate platforms: Moms Mabley, Jean Carroll, and Minnie Pearl. We will take a side trip to consider a group of women whose acts combined comic song with norm-shattering exploration of the bounds of free speech and good taste: Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Rusty Warren. Another aspect of the comedy revolution, the rise of improvisation, will be represented by the story of Elaine May. And the triumph of women in what was unmistakable as modern stand-up comedy will be explored in the stories of Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, and Joan Rivers, the last of whom, more than any of the others, synthesized everything that came before her: the traditional rat-a-tat style of the Borscht Belt and the male nightclub comic; the daring (and, indeed, raunch) of the after-hours bawds; and the warts-and-all confessional style of the sick comics.

—

This book is an assemblage of biographies, a selection of lives that don’t necessarily connect like a jigsaw puzzle but rather lie side by side, sometimes overlapping, sometimes with gaps between them, to create a collage. The intent is to show what it took to create a culture in which women could be allowed to pursue careers as stand-up comedians. Today, that notion is a commonplace. But when these women began their careers—and, in some cases, even when they retired or died—the very idea was a matter of puzzlement and consternation. Thanks to their fortitude, we are in a far richer place. And we’ve had more than a few real laughs in getting here.

Skip Notes

*1 Indeed, some legends, like Elayne Boosler and Lisa Lampanelli, have explicitly retired, though they no doubt still have their chops.

*2 Never one to put down his shovel when finding himself at the bottom of a hole that he himself had dug, Lewis added, in 2014, It bothers me. I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator. I just can’t do that. And, what the hell, in for a pound, a year later: Seeing a woman project the kind of aggression that you have to project as a comic just rubs me wrong. I mean, you got some very, very funny people that do beautiful work—but I have a problem with the lady up there that’s going to give birth to a child, which is a miracle.

*3 The phrase didn’t appear in most dictionaries for another fifteen years.

One

The Philosopher

When I look out on an audience, they belong to me as my own children. We all have little weaknesses. I been insulted. I been called names. But I don’t get angry. I feel sorry for ignorance in any form. And I’ll try to help them.

—1961

If you wanted to stick a proper name on women’s struggle to be accepted as stand-up comedians in American show business, you could call it Moms Mabley.

Jackie Moms Mabley began her comedy career not long after World War I, performing in all-Black shows for all-Black audiences on an all-Black vaudeville circuit (sometimes even in blackface, more on which soon), and she ended it in the 1970s, as a staple on TV, the star of a feature film, the spokesperson in several national ad campaigns, and a headliner at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Yankee Stadium, and the Fabulous Forum alongside the likes of the Jackson 5, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Tina Turner.

She was born in North Carolina in the nineteenth century to a family that included former slaves, and she died a suburban New York homeowner who wore minks and diamonds, was chauffeured around in her own Rolls-Royce, and was invited to the White House to discuss civil rights.

She had logged forty years in show business before someone thought to capture her comedy act on records, and another seven before someone put her on TV, and she wound up selling millions of albums and appearing regularly on national variety shows and as a presenter at the Grammy Awards.

She was billed as the funniest woman in the world for decades before she was able to carve a path out of the narrow lane of Black show business and cross over to the quote-unquote mainstream, becoming popular with white (and, impressively, youth) audiences at an age when a lot of entertainers would be thinking about retirement—an overnight success, as it were, in her sixties and seventies.

She was a lifestyle groundbreaker, who favored man-cut suits offstage and the company of chorus girls, who often accompanied her as travel companions. She was a crackerjack gambler, hustling jazz musicians and stagehands in games of pinochle and Spanish Pool checkers. Onstage, she broached profanity and sang suggestive parodies of popular songs and spoke openly of sex and of political topics such as racial equality.

In short, she woke up every morning for decades facing impossible odds of racism, misogyny, prudery, dismissal, and doubt, and she went out and stood alone in front of a microphone and created her own legend by making people laugh with the sheer force of her wit and her sensibility. If there was ever a woman who made her own luck out of raw, audacious willpower, it was Moms Mabley.

—

The ability to pursue her quixotic ambition to be a professional entertainer despite the twin disadvantages of being Black and a woman was part of a particularly confident, upbeat, and resilient character instilled in her as a child. She was born Loretta Mary Aiken in Brevard, a mountain town about thirty miles southwest of Asheville in western North Carolina. It was, as she recalled, a bucolic setting, small and airy and uncommonly tolerant. To tell the truth, she said in 1961, there was no segregation where I was born.

The histories and genealogies of rural families of this era can be hard to pin down reliably. Dates and timelines disagree with one another; spellings on government forms can be irregular;[*1] and there are often gaps with no documents of any kind. What’s more, the stories that do get passed down (particularly those shared by Moms, who tended toward fancies and reveries) aren’t always consistent or verifiable.

Some things, though, we can assert for sure. Loretta’s father, James P. Aiken, was born a free man in 1861, the son of Benjamin Franklin Aiken and Mary Jane (Rhodes) Aiken, who had several children each from earlier marriages that had ended in their spouses’ deaths. The Aikens were prosperous, and James carried on the family’s good fortune, entering into various business enterprises, establishing himself as one of the town’s top merchants. According to his daughter, He had the only white barber shop, the undertaker shop, a grocery store, a dry goods shop as well as a house and a plot for all his children. Aiken was considered a significant man of the town, enlisting in the volunteer fire department, a position that carried prestige and was considered an honor.

In 1884, Aiken, who already had two children, married Daphne Bailey Keyth. Seven years later, in 1891, she died soon after giving birth to their only known child together. Aiken very quickly married again; his bride, Mary Magdaline Smith, daughter of Pink and Emiline Smith, was, at age fifteen, some fourteen years his junior. With his new wife, Aiken continued to grow his family—a total of ten children over the subsequent eighteen years, seven of whom would survive birth. Loretta would fall right in the middle among those surviving siblings, arriving in the Aikens’ large home, complete with servants, on March 19, 1897.[*2]

By her own accounts, Loretta was a happy child. The house was comfortable, there was sufficient food and clothing, and she had extended family all around her, giving her a sense of safety and security. I wasn’t born in any log cabin, she boasted. I was born to a prominent family in North Carolina. Such was her contentment that she thought the world ended in the mountains of the Pisgah National Forest that formed the horizon west of Brevard, at the point where the peaks met the sky, and she never imagined life beyond it. The mountains were very high, she remembered, so high that we grew up thinking that on the other side everything drops off into eternity.

In particular, her grandmother and great-grandmother, who lived with the family, were inspirational guiding spirits. My great-grandmother was a grandmother in slavery, and my grandmother was born during slavery, she said. That great-grandmother, according to Loretta, lived to be 117, and her words were like gold nuggets….She used to tell me stories about slavery. She would always say to me—she couldn’t say my name Loretta—she would say, ‘Retta, you are free-born. There’s a world out there, and I want you to go out in it.’ Grandma, too, had lessons to share. My granny was a slave, Loretta remembered. "She was never sold or nothing. But she was a slave….She told me, ‘Child, you look into that fireplace and see the future in those flames, ’cause you’re gonna see the world like your granny never did.’ "

That future would come fast enough, and on the heels of several painful episodes. On August 25, 1909, Jim Aiken and his older brother, Lawrence, raced to the scene of a conflagration in their roles as members of the volunteer fire brigade. The town’s fire truck carried a boiler to generate pressure and force water through hoses, and on that hot day the boiler exploded, killing both Aiken brothers. Mary found herself a widow at