In depicting the fraught journey of a woman stand-up comedian in the late 1950s and 1960s, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel portrays stand-up as an ethical medium of truth telling and of sociopolitical protest that challenges systemic hierarchies of gender and sexuality. In this article, I show that stand-up’s foundational subversion is in its professionalism and in its departure from other forms of art. In the show, female stand-up comic Midge Maisel learns to function first as a seasoned professional and then as an ethical crusader who ultimately mounts a two-pronged attack on the sexist underpinnings of American humor and the patriarchal structure of stand-up, substantially influencing the way we receive this liminal genre of cultural expression and reframing it as an empowering vehicle of the marginalized.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.