July 14, 2009, 02:55 PM ET

In My Other Voice ...

Humor by women breaches the “wall of utterance, the wall of origin, the wall of ownership” Barthes claimed as the problem of modern writing — insofar as conventional modern writing takes issue with the notion of discourse against a “classical” language.

If women appear unlaughing at conventional, masculinist humor (“whatsa matter honey, can’t ya take a joke?”) it might in part be because the directive to find something amusing is as inappropriate, even impossible, as the inverted directive not to find something funny. Charges of unlaughing and laughing inappropriately have been leveled at women, as we have seen, since women began to participate in the creation of literary works. These charges have also been brought against the female audience, of course expected to laugh at humor often based on the degradation and debasement of their sex. “The admonition to be happy,” writes Adorno, “voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the high-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry” have about them the …

… fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid the recognition of the suffering it produces.

The women-have-no-sense-of-humor cliché applied by many men to threatening women, according to Mary Daly, causes female energy to be directed “against the Self while remaining disguised.” Reflex action against this accusation — women laughing at something they do not find funny, or at a joke directed against their own values — can be characterized by Daly’s phrase: “smiling at the boss.”

Comedy by women, however, has as its encoded text what is most angering as well as what is most humorous.

The function of women’s comedy is to undo existing boundaries, not merely to test them. It affirms the multiplicity of non-closure against the restrictions of convention and penetrates the hidden secrets of the dominant ideology: that the authority of nature, reality, and other ‘givens’ is a construct of culture, not created by the fiat of an otherly ordered universe. That the structures of comedic writings by women have generally been overlooked by critics can be attributed at least in part to an ideological ‘blind spot’ where women and humor is concerned. Because comedy by women rejects many of the conventions associated with traditional, male-dominated comedy not by way of attack but by subtle subversion, women’s comedies have been misread by critics who can only perceive comedy when it is firmly encased within inherited literary structures.

It is the inability of the critical tradition to deal with comedy by women rather than the inability of women to produce comedy that accounts in great measure for the continued need for critical material on the subject. The vitriolic submerged text of rebellion in women’s comedy has been overlooked because it does not fall within the framework of assumptions concerning appropriate spheres of women’s literary efforts.

The decentering, dislocating aspects of women’s writing erase the finite, tightly closed-off limits of traditional comedy. While assuming ostensible conventionality, women’s comedy subtly undercuts the defining features of the genre it seems to embody in order to repudiate the patriarchal, repressive nature of those limitations. By calling the definitions into question, the compass of the question itself alters, depicting, finally, the ideological foundations embodied by and perpetuated by conventional comedy that often disregards or debases women’s experience.

So there.

(Brainstorm illustration derived from photos by Flickr user nyki_m)