First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-up Comedian

By Grace Kessler Overbeke

NYU Press 2024

"Jean Carroll changed the game of stand-up comedy forever", or so we're told by Grace Kessler Overbeke (Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago), the author of First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-up Comedian, a decidedly academic study of Carroll's professional life. Born Celine Zeigman in Paris, 1911, Carroll immigrated to the United States as a child of a turbulent household, and had to assume breadwinning responsibilities in her youth, an act that would launch her on a four-decade long entertainment career.

Starting from amateur talent shows to a stint in vaudeville, Carroll was part of a vanguard of innovating comics, who took full advantage of a shifting landscape in comic media and circulation that took her from the venues of humble presenting houses and radio waves to a booming culture of comedy clubs, "party" records and eventually to television variety programs and sitcoms. In a genre often portrayed as an inherently masculine domain, Carroll's example as that rare female voice in an early cohort of almost exclusively male stand-up comics proved to be a fount of inspiration for later comedy legends like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin, two of the many contemporary comics whose effusive testimonies as to the influence of Carroll on their own art studs this book. A woman who was "doing stand-up comedy before Lenny Bruce could speak", Carroll bloomed into her own distinctive, conversational style of stand-up after becoming a solo act once her vaudeville husband/wife routine with her partner Buddy Howe broke up after Buddy was drafted for the second World War.

Using her innovative tone of "confidant comedy", Carroll was able to adopt a more "anecdotal, gossipy form of storytelling humor" that perfectly utilised new developments in stand-up like an increasing use of microphones or the prevalence of radio comedy shows. Hovering above her whole career, but especially once she got her own ill-fated TV sitcom and her later numerous appearances on the juggernaut that was The Ed Sullivan Show, was the spectre of prevailing negative attitudes towards women in entertainment and the vulgar stereotypes about Jewish women, an atmosphere of latent hostility that influenced the persona that Carroll adopted for her stand-up routines; a desire to be "an assimilated American capital-L Lady— the picture of dignity, respectability, and femininity".

Overbeke is at her best when breaking down individual routines from Carroll's comic arsenal, and at contextualising the way she broke through to the various mediums available to her in the broad, exuberant comic tradition of the American mid-century. Her meticulous research into the critical and popular reception of Carroll's art is obvious in these pages, and she can be relied upon to provide quotes from newspapers and trade journals of the day, or pages from Carroll's personal scrapbook, that highlight the heady cocktail of conniptions and acclamations that this artist was routinely attracting in the penny press. What the book suffers from is the author's penchant for academese, a regrettable potpourri of scholarly jargon that effectively yanks the reader out of the narrative and into a stream of dubious declarations. While trying to attribute a "Jewish flavor" to the fictional unhappy marriage at the heart of Carroll's short lived ABC sitcom, Overbeke writes:

Audiences [won't] necessarily "read" [this] high-strung hostility as Jewish. But, as the performance theorist José Muñoz argues, heightened emotion of any kind is often read as antithetical to the "affective performance of normative whiteness," which he describes as "minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment." Picking up on this thread, the performance studies scholar Henry Bial identifies a recurring "rhetoric of ethnicity as excess." Behaviour that is too loud, too unruly, too discordant is often "coded" as ethnic.

Instead of surfeiting the reader with these lengthy tales of "coding" and "double-coding", one wonders if more should have been said about Carroll's personal life or how her stand-up routines were different from the other comics of her milieu. For a book purporting to restore Jean Carroll to her rightful place in the lineage of comedy history, the presentation of her professional life in a vacuum without the presence of competing forces influencing her art and being influenced by her in turn, leaves the reader with an oddly desiccated feel for her story. And yet, this is a welcome step in unearthing Carroll's legacy and elevating her remarkable exploits from the footnotes of stand-up history.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi