1. Introduction

2This double standard of ageing has spelled trouble for representations of older women on screen, as (older) women were, and often still are, paradoxically, both hypervisible and invisible at the same time. On the one hand, women’s looks are continually pointed out and focused on, with women being tasked to go to war with and against their bodies, that is, to engage in various technologies of the self in order to control and discipline “unruly” ageing bodies and remain ageless. On the other hand, notable signs of female ageing might be erased from the screen altogether as the older female body is perceived to possess an “intrinsic unwatchability” which ought to remain out of sight. Though this means that older women are not fully absent from the screen—in fact, the older woman is one of the more prevalent images in popular culture—the roles available for older women more often than not offer little variety. The older woman is often no more than a walking stereotype: a witch, a harbinger of misfortune, a gossiper, an asexual spinster or “battle-axe [figure]” feared by her husband; a woman who is “forgetful, mean-spirited, intimidating, toxic, embarrassing, over-talkative, unattractive, sexually frustrated, undesirable,” “useless and repulsive,” and inhabiting an often grotesque, excessively ageing body (White 155).

3What unites both the roles pointed out in The First Wives Club and in the aforementioned list of recurring roles available to (older) women is their (wrongly) presumed lack of comedic potential. Though Frances Gray (1994) points out that there seems to be one truth universally acknowledged in the film and television industry, namely that women cannot be funny because they possess no sense of humor, comedy has been the genre that has provided persuasive alternatives of older and “funny” women which transcend traditional stereotypes. And nowhere has this been more so the case than in sitcoms. It is in sitcoms where (older) women are not only found in larger proportions than in other formats, but it is also the sitcom that provides older women with the authority of a narrative point of view, either as the main protagonists delivering the final punchline or through direct address to the camera (White 10). Moreover, as Susan Liddy has pointed out, “humour [does seem] to be the key element in the [diverse] representation of ageing femininities” (170). Hence, the sitcom offers a “way out,” providing an arena for (older) women to be unruly, funny and behave in ways that contradict stereotypes of ageing and femininity without being punished for doing so.

4In this framework, two British sitcoms are worth exploring: the series Waiting for God (1990-1994), produced by BBC 1, and The Old Guys (2009-2010), produced by BBC Scotland. The Old Guys seems to be an unusual choice, after all its main female character is often side-lined in favor of her male counterparts, whereas Waiting for God posits its main female character at the centre of the narrative. Yet, both series offer compelling constructions of later-life femininity and are symptomatic for the negotiation and treatment of later-life femininities during the 90s and late 2000s. Both The Old Guys’ Sally and Waiting for God’s Diana, are, to an extent, funny or unruly women who do not fit into conventional moulds for older women. I argue that, even if both women incorporate stereotypical portrayals during the course of both series, these stereotypes are an essential part in the process of familiarization. This familiarization may enable sitcoms to provide more differentiated and even radical portrayals in later episodes, as the series quote stereotypical notions before transforming them through the serial organization. This leads, on the one hand, to audiences being able to draw “both on serialized popular culture as part of its cultural repertoire to ‘read’ [later-life femininities]” (Sulimma 29). On the other hand, the sitcoms can produce a framework of intimacy and trust between character and audiences over the course of a series which may help audiences to adapt differently to alternative, contested or disputed representations. Yet, the series position both “funny” women differently: While Diana is the perpetrator of physical and verbal jokes, Sally, though she provides an arguably funny and sarcastic commentary on issues such as romance, child-rearing and ageing, is rather the object of the two men’s jokes in the series.

5The following article explores how domestic and funny formats such as the sitcom construct later-life femininities and subvert conventional portrayals of femininity. Though I argue that sitcoms create particular and subversive images of and possibilities of destabilization for ageing femininities—often within the confines of stock characterizations—I also trace how these alternatives fall short, as the contexts in which women are “allowed” to be funny are restricted to particular spaces and particular roles—spaces which are more often than not self-contained, so much so that representations that run counter to cultural taboos regarding age and femininity are only temporary and remain, ultimately, non-threating to established binaries.

2. Funny and Domestic Women: The Sitcom, Domesticity and Femininity

7The sitcom is also a domestic medium, a position that has allowed it to become a constitutive part of the domestic relations used to construct daily lives as it is cooperated into the “flows” of everyday domestic life (Morley vii). This focus on domesticity has ideological implications: Being a domestic medium, made for the domestic sphere and consumed therein, it has been unsurprising that the sitcom has tried “to replicate the experiences of its viewers” and, thus, has often portrayed a largely middle-class domesticity—a portrayal that has been critiqued as “disturbingly traditional” (Mills 20-21). Moreover, placing the home at the forefront of the sitcom and opening it up to laughter has had “implications for the social roles which characters are cast in and, for women, this places significant limits on the comedic possibilities open to them” (Mills 21). As such, the sitcom has helped to reaffirm, reinforce and culturally legitimize dominant discourses by circulating centralized ideas of largely middle-class domesticity.

[in] comedy shows... it is assumed that certain situations will be experienced as funny by a large portion of the audience; their views on a wide variety of questions, from the relationships between the sexes to class and racial relations, are taken for granted and the jokes are made to fit these assumptions. In this process stereotypes play an important part[.] (25)

10Consequently, sitcoms “do” more than simply reiterate tried and tested formulas. Rather, they manage both sameness and difference at the same time as they are “repetition[s] with a twist because iterability never means mere duplication” (Sulimma 18). Though the sitcoms’ serial organization and circular narrative format renders texts “readable,” it also means that characters, settings, plots, and jokes are never quite the same. With this, sitcoms open up spaces for “licensed transgressions” (Stott 35) which occur through misquotes and remediations. Series rather portray (re)iterations of gender performances, which also allows for the incorporation of changes, developments and transgressions alongside that which is “ordinary and ‘inevitable’” (Sulimma 22). Additionally, regarding gender in particular, comedy programs and “funny” performances reveal the citationality of gender acts by allowing misperformances of gender by rendering them funny. By making audiences laugh, or by including a laugh track that implies the funniness of a performance, sitcoms make and remake femininities and are able to make their artificiality visible with the help of different theatrical techniques, such as “overperforming and revealing the masquerade of hegemonic femininity; by deploying physical comedy to transgress and expose the limits of heteronormative behaviour; by juxtaposing ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ femininities; and by performing the female body as excessive, ageing—différant” (White 10).

3. Case Study 1: Sally in The Old Guys

11A series titled The Old Guys might not be the first series that comes to mind when tracing funny women. After all, the sitcom revolves around Roy Bowden (Clive Swift) and Tom Finnan (Roger Llyod Pack), two older bachelors sharing not only a house and their daily lives but also their attraction for their next-door neighbor Sally (Jane Asher), and heavily banks on “the Odd Couple theme: mismatched housemates [who] bitch and bicker, the twist being that this pair [has] one foot in the grave” (Watson 2009). Yet, The Old Guys highlights in an exemplary fashion how sitcoms may present a superficially subversive character, for instance, by focusing on a single, sexually active and desirable older woman, while simultaneously reaffirming typical common-places that govern the representation of older “funny” women.

12At first glance, Sally is very much in line with female characters that break the mould of older, asexual and unfunny women. Rather, “the girl” is “golden,” that is, she is older, and of pensionable age, but she is also (sexually) active, healthy and dressed impeccably, with elaborate make-up and coordinating accessories. She is, in many ways, a glamorously ageing woman—a cultural and visual celebration of the physiological exception, which perpetuates discourses that ageing can be halted, at least if one has the means to do so. Moreover, The Old Guys provides a portrayal of later-life femininity that is neither centered around finding romantic, long-term partners, nor is it focused on portraying Sally solely as a mother. Instead, the opposite is true: It is Roy and Tom who strive after marriage and stability, while Sally is wholly uninterested in marriage and long-term relationships and rather prefers to have regularly changing sexual partners or even to engage in casual sexual relationships which do not last for more than an episode. Similarly, Sally, though a mother, is distanced from her son throughout the series and does not conform to the ideal of a loving and caring mother.

13In this context, Sally diverges from normative ideals governing later-life femininity. The focus on later-life female sexuality offers an opportunity to frame older women outside narratives that typically exclude them from the sexual imaginary. This is significant as female sexuality is often associated with youth-coded beauty or constrained by moral expectations tied to traditional roles, risking moral censure for women who challenge these boundaries (Simpson xvii). Though Sally breaches these boundaries, she is not overtly policed for those transgressions but, by the men in the series, held up as the ideal woman.

14The Old Guys leaves room for “the possibility of a different sort of repeating” and the chance of failure (Butler, Psychic 192) in their portrayals of gender, with, for example, Sally rejecting what Tom and Roy deem to be typically feminine interests such as quiet music, flowers and scented candles. However, at second glance, the series presents a far more traditional conception of later-life femininity.

16That Sally is an idealized object that both Tom and Roy desire but neither man truly knows as a person becomes evident when Sally temporarily moves in with them. Though Tom and Roy contend that all women like quiet music, flowers and scented candles, making evenings “often feel like you’re partially sighted and a bit deaf” (“Builders” 07:19), Sally jokes that the guestroom “smells like an aromatherapist’s funeral” (08:55) and generally finds Tom’s and Roy’s efforts overwhelming and downright uncomfortable. Indeed, this episode highlights on the one hand Sally’s, Tom’s and Roy’s incompatibility as (romantic and sexual) partners, as Tom and Roy are more concerned that “Sally is [there]. Nude. In [their] shower. Nude” (01:40-45). On the other hand, Sally comments on the pressures to conform to a certain appearance, noting that she “feel[s like] [she] [has] to wear make-up all the time and sit up straight and eat huge meals” (19:05-20). This episode in particular emphasizes that by and large, Sally is reduced only to her body and her appearance, meaning that she is primarily identified with her body and certain body parts (see “Sally’s Party”; “The Therapist”; “The Old Flame”; “Quiz”; “Builders”). Though Roy and Tom are the main perpetrators of this objectification within the series, it is not just the two men who reduce her to the object of their sexual desires, but every man who joins the show for one or more episodes inevitably turns towards Sally as a potential romantic and sexual partner, a situation that by the end of the series becomes part of category-routinized joking that is set up from the first episode onward.

17Sally’s age further complicates matters. Rather than being a way to escape conventional constructions of (later-life) femininity, age is employed to reaffirm the legitimacy of those constructions it superficially seems to break. The series certainly briefly touches upon the implicit threat of ageing to her femininity and sexual desirability. Similar to hegemonic masculinities, which are threatened by the onset of later life and the physical changes which come with it, idealised femininities are equally under threat by the onset of age, as signs of age are “read as failure, … [with] the unending battle against looking old [being] fought, but also little by little lost and [with] shame attache[d] both to looking old and to failing to keep up what appearance of youthfulness is possible” (Twigg 61). Sally adheres to the disciplinary regimens of femininity, seeking to maintain youthfulness throughout the series by engaging in various technologies of the self. In Sally’s case, these technologies range from remaining healthy by engaging in various sports activities (“Marriage”), to maintaining a certain appearance, to keeping her chronological age lower than it is (“The Croft”), a masking of age which may simultaneously conceal and reveal the marks of age.

18Moreover, Sally’s continued sexual desirability has repercussions for her position as a funny woman. While Sally’s comments may garner laughs, little of the humor or the playfulness that characterizes Tom and Roy’s performances can be found regarding Sally. Sally is smart, attractive, “sexy,” aware of her allure, able to dryly remark upon some of the comments by Tom and Roy—but she is, notably, rarely the perpetrator of jokes. The case can be made that Sally nonetheless provides a comedic performance, which, at times, reveals the constructed nature of her idealized femininity and exposes the citational nature of gender acts. Hence, it is the overperformance of heterofemininity that renders Sally the ideal woman of the series. While this overperformance reaffirms her status within the series, White argues that exaggerated performances of gender not only allow for misperformances but simultaneously reveal “the masquerade of hegemonic femininity; by deploying… comedy to transgress and expose the limits of heteronormative behaviour [and] by juxtaposing ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ femininities” (10). Thus, laughter does not derive from open transgressions but from exposing hegemonic femininity “to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler, Gender 138-139).

19However, this argument ultimately falls short, as the series does not truly allow for any misperformance of femininity. That Sally is not, and cannot be, a “funny girl” is directly linked to her performance of hegemonic (hetero)femininity because “[w]omen in comedy on screen have more at stake than men because comedy roles are not marked out as traditional for woman” (White 9) or even as appropriate for women performing a more traditional form of femininity. Moreover, being “funny” could pose a threat to her femininity since comedy has the ability to throw “gender and sexuality into question” (White 10), which would cast doubt on whether Sally is (and can remain) “sexy” and thus the background and target for a male character’s jokes. Not only would a “funny” portrayal render a large part of the jokes within the series a moot point (after all, one of the routinized jokes is that Tom and Roy’s increasingly outrageous attempts to woo Sally during an episode will inevitably fail), but such an added misperformance of gender would upset the structure of the sitcom, making it too transgressive or too subversive. Though “the basis of the ridiculous and the ludicrous… is the unlikely” (Neale and Krutnik 67), and though comedy relies very much on the transgression of norms, comedy is also “intimately concerned with normative behaviours, dress, features and so on” (White 12), meaning that there “must… be a degree of normality in the abnormal, a degree of the appropriate in the inappropriate, a degree of the logical in the illogical, and a degree of sense in the otherwise nonsensical” (Neale and Krutnik 67). Whereas Tom and Roy provide the transgression of norms, Sally embodies a perceived norm of (later-life) femininity that is based on a performance of youthfulness or agelessness. While the portrayal of unruly women, who do not conform to idealized forms of femininity, has been seen as humorous because “[t]he loss of the sense of ‘the normal’… can be its own occasion for laughter” (Butler, Gender 138), this has been less so for other femininities and rarely the case for idealized femininities.

4. Case Study 2: Diana Trent in Waiting for God

22This somewhat well-meaning banter highlights two implicit arguments that inform representations of older women in general: one, that there is an incongruity of older female bodies being attractive and potential sites for pleasure, with the older female body being regarded as a site where “disgust mixes with laughter” (Edwards and Graulund 4), both inherently unattractive and ridiculous. Two, the naming of an erotic magazine highlights that older women are often “categorised as ‘invisible’ except for her role as either mother or grandmother” (Lemish and Muhlbauer 167).

23This has repercussions for the portrayal of women as sexual beings, as “[m]otherhood [or grandmotherhood] is perceived as asexual and sexy women are rarely portrayed as mothers” (169), which, by implication means that erotic visual material featuring older women is not only a contradiction but seems to be wholly incompatible with one another. Yet, Diana, or older women in general, seem unable to escape such a framing because “femininity is defined primarily by these two roles; exactly the same two roles presumed to be lost by older women” (169). This does not only serve as a reminder that “biological reproduction best fulfilled women’s role in the social order” (Stoddard 27) but that it also positions (older) women who do not conform to this role-assignment as an “Other,” resulting in a form of symbolic annihilation.

24However, Waiting for God, despite the copious usage of tried and tested formulas to represent later-life femininity, also provides its most subversive portrayal of later-life femininity through Diana in two meaningful ways. One, Diana embodies characteristics of dominant heterosexual masculinities and, two, Diana is positioned outside spaces of work, family and reproduction as she is neither a mother nor a grandmother but has reformulated her status as a ‘spinster’ as a positive, rather than a pejorative term.

25By juxtaposing Diana and Tom, Waiting for God provides a portrayal in which it is Diana who, despite Tom reiterating that he is “(still) a man” (“The Helicopter” 15:02), convincingly performs masculinity within the series by exposing the artificiality of Tom’s own performance of masculinity. This is exemplified in the ways in which Diana embodies characteristics of dominant heterosexual masculinity, a “group of culturally available, recognised and legitimate themes which are more or less identified with certain aspects of being a man” (Ben-Ari 239). For instance, it is Diana, rather than Tom, who drives or hankers after high-performance vehicles, who feels comfortable in a helicopter, or whose sexual potency is expressed in her numerous love affairs throughout her career; it is Diana who engaged and engages in high-risk behaviors; it is her who was and still is career-driven and economically successful, and, subsequently, it is Diana who comes to feel the impact of ageing and the perceived loss of social and economic power that is heralded by the transition into retirement the most (e.g. “Welcome to Bayview,” “A Trip to Brighton,” “The Psychiatrist”).

26Diana’s formerly adventurous lifestyle as a war journalist and photographer translates to her romantic life. Rather than having been married for nearly all her life, Diana has had many lovers and usually short-term affairs, with none lasting more than five years. In fact, Diana outright rejects marriage in favour of “spinsterhood,” which, to her, is more of an “attitude, [being] a self-contained unit [doing] exactly as [she] pleased until the dismal iniquities of age turned the tables on [her]” (“Welcome to Bayview” 16:13-16:44). Yet, even if she seeks companionship in later life, her attitudes towards marriage do not change; rather, Diana remains opposed to marriage even in the face of her own impending nuptials (“Harvey the Priest,” “Bungee Jumping,” “A Double Wedding?”). Moreover, she sees marriage as a hindrance to sexual expression, arguing that tying the knot with Tom would prevent her from engaging in sexual activities with others and would put a damper on Tom and Diana’s sexual relationship (“After the Operation”)—an argument which the series visually and textually seemingly supports by decreasing the frequency of innuendos and references to Tom’s and Diana’s sex life after their engagement and Diana’s agreement to marry Tom (from the episode “Diana’s Diet” onwards).

27As such, Waiting for God’s portrayal of Diana, who could “run with the boys” (“Welcome to Bayview” 17:00-17:12) and who engaged—and still, if not for the lack of partners, presumably would engage—in a “hook-up culture,” disrupts traditional beliefs about women, that they should eschew casual sexual relationships, encase their sexual desires in romantic motives, or strive for monogamous relationships, without necessarily sexually stigmatizing her. Diana is set up to be ‘not like the other girls’ that is, not focused on marriage, on child-bearing and child-rearing, on creating and maintaining familial relationships. Though the image of a “spinster” has had negative connotations, spinsterhood becomes an advantage for Diana as it locates her as an “interloper,” a figure which, as Halberstam contends, “creates a third space of possibility within which… binaries [may] become unstable” (26). As such, Diana’s destabilizing performance of femininity does not only indicate a polysemic display of gendered subjectivities within the stable category of older “woman” but enables her, and potentially other older women, to construct agency and femininity in later life outside of heteronormative gender role divisions. Throughout the series, Diana is a rebellious older woman, who constitutes her rebellion not necessarily in opposition to masculinity but through indifference to or a mirroring of masculinity (Halberstam 9). That such a shift is possible for other older women, somewhat regardless of their circumstances or physical well-being, is expressed when Diana gathers other older women, all of which walk with a Zimmer frame, to attend her niece’s wedding. As they enter the church, Tom remarks that it is “Diana Brando and the wild bunch” (“The Hip Operation” 27:33-27:36), thus not only equating Diana with Marlon Brando, constituting her as somewhat masculine, but proposing similarly that such an equation might be possible for other older women too.

28That Diana is able to subvert normative representations of later-life femininity is, in large part, due to the fact that Diana is a “funny” woman, who not only performs physical forms of humor but whose comments cause laughter. “Funny” women, at least in the timeframe this paper touches upon, were, as White contends, rarely found in comedy as such women challenged heterofemininity, in that “funny” women contested ideas of “lady-like” behavior, and complicate the dynamic of normal and abnormal, appropriateness and inappropriateness on which comedy relies (12). Diana’s portrayal, in particular her pro-feminist arguments throughout the series, could be easily construed as reproducing what White argues is a common stereotypical representation of “funny” women: the “deviant, monstrous and humourless feminist” (12). However, the series rarely laughs at Diana. Instead of being the object of laughter, as other characters often are, Diana is the perpetrator of jokes, making audiences laugh with her and at others.

29Being cast as a comedian, Diana is not just a funny but an “unruly woman.” As such, she creates disorder and, by being “too fat, too funny, too noisy, too old, too rebellious,” unsettles social hierarchies (Rowe Karlyn 19). Diana’s character portrayal seems to tick numerous boxes of Rowe’s list of what makes an unruly woman unruly: she jokes, she laughs, she is an older woman who staunchly refuses to become invisible. While these points contribute to her “funniness,” they also render Diana funny in the first place. This means that Diana is enabled to be funny because she is old and not considered “sexy” or desirable as a woman anymore. And that she is able to age (dis)gracefully and be sexually active is similarly possible because she is funny, as her position as an unruly or funny woman affords her the “license” for deviant behavior and expression. By being sexually desiring and active, Diana transgresses traditional representations of later-life femininity, but she is “allowed” to do so because the series already positions her as an “odd” woman, who, in many ways, does neither conform to ideas of sedate later life nor to ideas of femininity. Hence, the series separates Diana, to an extent, from heterofemininity. This separation is significant, as otherwise neither humor nor a subversive performance of femininity would be possible to the same degree. After all, as White outlines, women who are seen as attractive to or overly feminine by male characters are often reduced to their symbolic function—a function that would simply permit them to be judged, looked at, and laughed at as objects or as the background for a male character’s joke.

30The humor, however, also complicates Diana’s more progressive statements, as self-deprecating humor and additional asides mitigate the transgression that Diana’s commentary causes. Hence, even if she contends that there is no “stage in a woman’s life when she’ll be cured of her ills without passing through some male-defined age barrier” unless the woman is dead, a wry punch-line that causes moderate laughter and which positions the audience as laughing with Diana at the norm that confines women, Diana, after a pause, provides yet another punch-line. This re-affirms that there might, indeed, be no stage at which women are able to overcome male-defined barriers as she adds: “Unless you’re a Buddhist” (“The Hip Operation” 15:12-15:17). This statement causes considerably more, longer and louder laughter and helps to re-establish the status quo of women’s position. In this vein, Diana’s framing as an unruly woman who breaks with stereotypical portrayals is somewhat superficial. Not only does the series rely on the inappropriate, the surprising and incongruous, with sitcoms in general demanding what Neale and Krutnik call “social and aesthetic indecorum” (3), but the series, by the help of jokes, reduces the threat of subversion that Diana’s commentary could provide.

5. Conclusion

31That Diana, and to some extent Sally, are able to transcend norms and re-negotiate negative stereotypes of later-life femininity is due to three factors: the ways the sitcoms serially distort stereotypical notions, the fact that they laugh at and ridicule social norms, and the ways in which they provide older adults with “safe” domestic spaces in which re-negotiations of later-life femininity are made possible by the spatial seclusion from the rest of society.

32Both Bayview and Sally’s home are largely self-contained and closed-off spaces. The Old Guys and Waiting for God portray “the home” essentially as visual, cultural, and social petri dishes, as separate spaces where transgressive performances can be played out and are accepted as affirmative and alternative conceptions. For all their subversive potential, these performances never become threatening to the established power hierarchies that exist beyond their confines. Hence, the domestic spaces and their performances of later-life femininity remain temporary respites from social norms and strictures which need to be contained and tend to reinforce normative standards. This is particularly notable with regard to the set of older adults’ representational spaces, that is, middle-class, white, able-bodied, comparatively healthy, active, and heterosexual older adults.

33Moreover, the laugh track fulfils a double function in the narratives. On the one hand, it ranges from moderately loud laughter to loud laughter interspersed with jeering and applause, especially when it comes to Diana, which serves an inclusionary function that may help audiences to temporarily embrace contradictions and incongruities. On the other hand, however, the laughter and the humorous quips add ambiguity to potentially transgressive and subversive statements. Hence, the laugh track also has an exclusionary and normative role since, by rendering alternative conceptions of later-life femininity “laughable” in the first place, laughter may illustrate and reinforce gender conventions. Together with the closed-off spatial position of both Bayview and Sally’s house within which transgressive forms of later-life femininity are constructed, examined and negotiated, Waiting for God and The Old Guys provide separate spaces in which representations of (later-life) femininity can be discussed without the threat of social contamination—a contamination that is largely neutralized by the laughter that surrounds potentially alternative depictions of older women. In that, both series might articulate “[gender] politics from a number of contradictory positions” including liberation from patriarchal norms and the exploration of desire (Stott 60). But these explorations are only temporary suspensions of normative representations before laughter and the end of the episode re-establishes the status quo.

34Despite the series’ limitations, however, both sitcoms not only exploit comedy to explore the uncanny discomforts of ageing in a way that disrupts dominant discourses of heterofemininity. They also scrutinize the societal policing and restrictions imposed on older women’s bodies and behaviors, while, at the same time showcasing older female characters visibly aging in unconventional ways. Due to their age, the female protagonists are liberated from heterosexual constraints, the necessity to look a certain way, and traditional social roles, such as housewife and mother, and are thus subject to fewer social expectations. The women in both series are, in many ways, “off the hook... free from needing to please other people in all kinds of ways” (White 164). By dressing differently, “behaving badly,” or by rejecting heterosexual, monogamous companionship in favor of singledom, older women may be able to disrupt the sometimes discriminatory ways in which they are treated, thus becoming not only unruly but funny older women. They become women who do not simply cause laughter and are the perpetrators of jokes but who transcend stereotypical scripts of femininity by being strange, unexpected, and certainly – like Diana Trent herself – a “wild bunch.”