The Forgotten Pioneer: Jean Carroll and the Jewish Female Origins of Stand-Up Comedy

Overbeke, Grace Kessler

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-grce-ev15

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The Forgotten Pioneer: Jean Carroll and the Jewish Female Origins of Stand-Up Comedy

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Although Jewish studies, sociology, and performance studies texts abound with productive scholarship on Jewish men and their contributions to comedy in the mid-century United States, there is remarkably scant attention devoted to the equally significant contributions of their female counterparts. Nowhere is that bias clearer than the peculiar case of Jean Carroll—the first Jewish female stand-up comedian, whose name is typically omitted from both histories of comedy and Jewish-American performance writ large. Using evidence from the unpublished archive of Jean Carroll’s scrapbook, documentary footage, and television clips, as well as three kinds of periodicals (Jewish, mainstream, and industry), I have drawn on archival and ethnographic research models to argue that both Carroll’s groundbreaking success and her historiographic erasure reveal the limits of tolerance in the post-WWII United States. The first chapter functions in part as the most thorough biographical work on Jean Carroll to date, while also making the case that from its inception, stand-up comedy was a forum to rehearse the same subversively autonomous principles that pioneers like Jean Carroll enacted in their own lives. It examines her background as a Jewish child who immigrated to the United States amidst intense xenophobic sentiment (legislated through policies like the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924); and her attempts to wrest control from her abusive father by joining the variety circuit at age eight. The next section builds on this foundation, arguing that although Carroll did not characterize it as such, her career in stand-up comedy was nonetheless a feminist intervention against Jewish male discourse about Jewish mothers and wives as vulgar and demanding. By invoking but then subverting this stereotype with her physical beauty and persona, Carroll was able to capitalize on it while also humanizing it for mainstream audiences. This chapter also examines the entertainment industry’s enduring institutional barriers to being both caregiver and comedian. In a sense, these barriers ended Carroll’s career, as critics found new ‘pioneers’ in rising stand-ups like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers. The third chapter looks at Jean Carroll’s work as a reflection of the complex negotiation of assimilation and difference that American Jews were enacting after World War II. This chapter draws heavily on sociological texts to argue that the shift towards multiculturalism in the mid- 1960s was reflected in Carroll’s changing engagement with Jewishness in her act. She still eschewed overtly Jewish content, using instead what Henry Bial would call ‘double-coded’ references to Jewish culture and practices. However, she became markedly more involved in benefit performances for Jewish organizations, making her Jewishness a cause to champion, not a character to perform. The final section examines Carroll’s far–reaching impact on stand-up comedy. It gives particular focus to Carroll’s impact on women stand-up comics. I use testimonies by contemporary comedians (such as Lily Tomlin and Joy Behar) who claim her as an influence, as well as performance analysis of live shows by Jewish female stand-up comics, many of whom continue to respond to the same negative stereotypes of Jewish women that Carroll addressed in her work. This observation reveals that while Carroll may be overlooked by most publications, her legacy of innovative 'confidante comedy' lives in this alternate archive of women standing up and speaking out.

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