FIRST LADY OF LAUGHS

Long-overdue assessment of a pioneering female comic.

For many years, Jean Carroll (1911-2010) was one of the few women headlining a comedy act in vaudeville and, once her husband and partner was drafted in 1943, probably the only one working as a “single.” The author of this valuable if decidedly academic study opens with a 2006 tribute to Carroll at the Friars Club to spotlight her enormous influence on subsequent generations of female comics; Joy Behar, Lily Tomlin, Rita Rudner, and Anne Meara were among those testifying to the thrill of seeing her on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere in the 1950s. From an immigrant Jewish family, Carroll was onstage before she turned 11 and already tough enough to get paid by threatening to expose a rigged amateur contest. She seamlessly made the transition from vaudeville to radio to television and nightclub stand-up comedy, along the way transitioning from playing stereotypical “Dumb Dora” bits and joking about her looks to unabashedly presenting herself as a polished, attractive, assertive woman whose jokes, frequently at the expense of her husband, were based on personal observations and delivered in a conversational style that was new at the time. Overbeke, an assistant professor of theater at Columbia College in Chicago, sketches Carroll’s career in the context of an evolving show business landscape, noting that “the changing venues altered Carroll’s work and the overall genre of stand-up comedy.” She also focuses on the way Carroll challenged stereotypes about women in general and Jewish women in particular, “demonstrat[ing] that Jewish femininity was compatible with sophistication and even glamour.” More excerpts from Carroll’s monologues and fewer academic catchphrases like “representation” and “double coding” would make this book more appealing to a general readership, but anyone interested in the history of comedy will find valuable material here.

A welcome first step in making a legend among her sister comics better known to a wider audience.