Look Who's Laughing : Gender and Comedy

With its emphasis on the roles that gender plays in the creation, reception and interpretation of comic art, this work looks critically at generic and gender diversity as well as comedy's underlying unities.

First Published in 1994. Look Who''s Laughing belies the notion that in a joke the only place for a woman is in the butt, Rather than analysing women''s humor in isolation, Gail Finney and twenty scholars map the terrain that the genders share and the areas that each hold exclusively. Their essays investigate witty heroines, sexual parodies, domestic humor and romantic power. They focus on comic drama and fiction, stand-up comedy, cartoons, and film describing the roles gender has played in the creation, reception and interpretation of comedy from the sixteenth century to present. They consider works by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Zora Neale Hurston and Virginia Woolf, whilst discussing characters such as V.I. Warshawski, Molly Bloom and Elizabeth Bennet. The book''s emphasis on comedy''s diverse sources uncovers critical prejudices and defines new contexts enabling men and women to understand more about each other''s attitudes towards humor, its means and ends.