The Forgotten Pioneer: Jean Carroll, the first Jewish Female Standup Comedian, and Why You Don't Know of Her

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Jewish Cultures

Abstract

My presentation examines the life and performances of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish female standup comedian, in order to understand what her work—and its subsequent absence from the mainstream media canon—reveals about being (respectively) Jewish, a woman, and a standup comic in the mid-century United States. As a performer who reached the apex of her career in the mid-1950s, Carroll was active at a key turning point in history when women were told to 'go back home' after World War II, when Jews "became white," and when 'standup comedy' became a term and nascent performance genre. Drawing on an archive including Carroll’s personal scrapbook and the footage from a now-defunct documentary on her life, as well as discourse analysis of both mainstream and Jewish newspapers, my research recuperates this forgotten figure, arguing that Carroll’s career illuminates the seismic shifts that were taking place along the social and artistic landscape.

Author

• Grace Kessler Overbeke