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Gina Barreca's
Guide to Humor

In every audience I talk to there’s always somebody wearing a Huskies sweatshirt.

I’ve even talked in Perth, Australia, which is as far as you can get from Storrs, Conn., while still remaining on the planet. Yet people still wanted to know if I had any of the women’s basketball players in my classes.

Apparently UConn graduates get around.

I’m often invited to speak by professional, community, educational, and medical groups about the importance of humor, but I notice that during the question and answer part of the presentation, the UConn alums ask the same question: “Dr. Barreca, how did you decide to become a scholar of humor in literature and other aspects of contemporary culture?”

I know that what they’re really saying is, “Gina, how did you get into this line of work?”

They want to know how I ended up being a professor at UConn for 20 years instead of selling knock-off Louis Vuitton bags on the street, which, as far as they can see, was my only other career alternative. I’ve decided that it’s time to tell the story — the real story.

Here goes: In my third year as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I wrote an essay for a comparative literature course on In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus. (You thought maybe my real story would involve something having to do with Don Rickles?)

I wanted to write the paper as a parody, where I would imitate the voice of Erasmus’ narrator and discuss the follies of contemporary life.

In other words, I wanted to be funny. That would have been easy. I did not want to write about humor. That would be hard.

It seemed to me that humor was a lot easier to imitate than to analyze. My professor, however, didn’t let me get away with it.

“I know you can do something funny and sharp,” he said, “so, instead, why don’t you try to do something that’s difficult for you?”

It was the first time that a professor I respected threw down that particular sort of intellectual gauntlet.

It was one that, in effect, dared me to sidestep the easy path and throw myself headlong into what I would later see was real scholarship.

I did the paper on how humor functions in Erasmus, and I never looked back.

I challenge my own students in precisely the same way: “Why not try something entirely new?” I ask them.

“How about trying to take your work very seriously — and yourself, well, maybe not so much?”

Graduate school, to which I took a circuitous route, was not exactly a laugh a minute, but it did lead me to write papers on satire: first on the subversive humor of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela and then on George Eliot’s s novel Middlemarch.

After that, I started reading modern British literature, looking for the ways that humor had changed in the hands of the modernists.

I realized that I loved the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon, and I also realized that the only way I would complete a Ph.D. was if I worked on a subject I found genuinely compelling.

I knew, for example, that I wanted to write about issues concerning the lives of women as presented in literature, but when I spoke to my professors about this, they assumed I meant the lives of women as created by male authors.

“Why not discuss working women in Dickens?” asked one. “How about Becky Sharp as a capitalist?” asked another.

“How about I deal with women writers’ humor and comedy?” I replied.

“We don’t think that’s such a good idea,” they chorused. “If it was, somebody else would have already done it.”

I’m not sure what gave me the courage to resist their lack of enthusiasm — perhaps I wanted to be a pain in the collective academic neck?

Or perhaps it was simply an instinctive survivor mechanism, one for which I remain—even after all these years—supremely grateful.

As I started writing about humor and women, I learned to be more confident about being a funny woman.

The first book I ever had published was based on a panel I had organized at a Modern Language Association Conference on the topic of sex and death in Victorian literature.

The title of the panel was (ahem) “Coming and Going.”Although Macmillan of London gave me a contract for the collection of critical essays under the same title, they wouldn’t actually print it on the front cover.

(“Dr. Barreca,” says British editor, “we would like you to change the title of the collection.” Says I, as disingenuously as possible “Why?” To which British editor replies, “We feel the title is, well, redundant.” Finally unable to contain myself, I blurt “Oh, I figured maybe you thought it was obscene.”)

The book was published under the title Sex and Death in Victorian Literature in 1987 — the same year I got my Ph.D. and was hired at the University of Connecticut.

The next collection I edited, Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women in Comedy, concerned itself directly and unapologetically with the topic of women’s humor. It was followed shortly thereafter by another critical collection, New Perspective on Women and Comedy.

The first book I wrote cover to cover was They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor, which was loosely adapted from the research I did for my dissertation.

The scholarly version was published by Wayne State University Press as Untamed and Unabashed, but Snow White used examples from “The Patty Duke Show,” “The Dating Game” and “Saturday Night Live” instead of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf and led to appearances on The Today Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, and Oprah.

I might not have done as much television if I’d stuck exclusively with Erasmus.

It’s been enormous fun, and it’s allowed me the great privilege of encountering people I’d never otherwise have had the privilege to meet, such as the ones with the Huskies sweatshirts and the questions about how I got started.

Humor has been a central part of my work at UConn — both inside and outside the classroom.

Finally, an answer to the other question I get during Q & A: although only one of the players from the women’s basketball team has ever been a student of mine, I’ve had remarkable students in every class during my years at UConn.

I’m proud to declare that almost all of them have been smart enough to get the punchline. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a great indicator both of — and for — success.

Gina Barreca's Guide to Humor

• When we can really laugh, we’ve declared ourselves the winner, no matter what the situation, because our laughter is an indication of our perspective and control. Paradoxically, to be able to lose yourself in laughter is proof that you are confident enough to risk a moment of joyful abandon.
  
  
• Humor allows you to elevate and explore rather than denigrate or hide your feelings. Humor doesn’t dismiss a subject but rather often opens that subject up for discussion, especially when the subject is one that is not considered “fit” for public discussion.
  
  
• The creatively witty person in a group is among the most powerful of its members. As long as his or her humor is used to draw the individuals together under the aegis of the comic moment (as opposed to tearing down or “gagging” members of the team into silence), the witty person is one of the most valuable leaders in any workforce.
  
  
• A joke is never just a joke. It never has been. Humor is about risk and privilege; for women and other groups traditionally exiled from the centers of power, it can signal the transformation of speechless outrage to persuasive, vocal and creative audacity.
  
  
• Why has a feminine tradition of humor remained essentially hidden from the mainstream? Due to the “Tupperware Mentality” that sought to preserve humor by keeping away from potentially hazardous male criticism, working women of earlier generations did not believe in taking the risk. We have come to see in the last 20 years, however, that carefully cultivated risk-taking is essential for success. Humor can be a great part of the process and reward of success.
  
  
• If you have ever tried to run a group or teach a class, you know that when your audience laughs at you, you’ve lost them; equally true is that if you can get them to laugh with you, you’ve got them. Humor can be a crucial way of meeting goals — or sabotaging them. It is potent and needs to be used with thought, insight and intelligence.