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Broadly,
Cracking Up frames stand-up comedy as an important platform from which to examine citizenship in the United States, articulate Black feminist political thought, and subvert structures of power. Katelyn Hale Wood also champions comedic performance and theatre history as imperative contexts for advancing historical studies of race, gender, and sexuality. From the comedy routines popular on Black vaudeville circuits to stand-up on contemporary social media platforms,
Cracking Up excavates an overlooked history of Black women who have made the art of joke-telling a key part of radical performance and political engagement.
About the author
Katelyn Hale Wood is assistant professor of theatre history at the University of Virginia. Their previous writing has been published in
Performance Matters, Theatre Topics, QED: A Journal in GLTBQ Worldmaking, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and the
Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. Wood lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Summary
Archives and analyses Black feminist stand-up comedy in the United States over the past sixty years. Looking closely at the work of Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, Mo'Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and others, this book shows how Black feminist comedy and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest.
