Feminist Humor

So much has changed yet so much hasn’t

My cartoon from 2008 still resonates, unfortuately

There are numerous ways to get someone to laugh. I’m not a student of humor theory, I just have been practicing it my whole life, starting with an audience of one: my mother. From the beginning, drawing funny pictures was my way to communicate, and I discovered it was a positive thing. But we know humor can be negative, can make people feel hurt, angry or worse.

I have been a feminist all my life, have watched the world of humor interact with women’s rights and it has not always been pretty. Humor has been used to put women down for generations; then when we tried to create humor, we were told we were not funny. When jokes were made at womens’ expense, and we didn’t laugh, we were told we couldn’t take a joke, were humorless. When we made jokes about men, they weren’t funny. I could go on.

In the late 70’s when I began seriously drawing cartoons, gender was not on my mind. In part because the Second Wave of Feminism made me feel things were getting better (I was a teenager, what did I know?); probably the more honest assessment was I was frightened of the subject because it was still contentious. I’m no longer frightened.

The cartoon below was published in The New Yorker in 1996, under the editorship of Tina Brown, the only female senior editor in the magazine’s history. I doubt it would have been published in the 1990’s without Brown’s insight. We were experiencing a backlash against feminism, and it was still a misunderstood word — and concept.

Now, while the word and concept may be embraced by more people in this country, it is not universal. That’s where humor can come in: it eases readers into an idea with a smile.

It’s astounding to me how much change, how much back and forth, we have gone through as a country when it comes to the rights of women since I began drawing for The New Yorker in 1979. The backlash in the 80’s and 90’s was only interupted by 9/11; we were rightfully distracted. The four years under the Trump administration set us back yet again, and the right wing in this country is still trying to take away a woman’s right…