1. The Gender of Wit

1While the place of women in comedy has been the subject of many studies and much controversy, women and wit seem to belong together—and not only due to their alliterative quality. British and American women writers from Jane Austen to Dorothy Parker have been renowned and remembered for their wit, for example. But as a type of humor, wit has undergone a series of transformations regarding its moral implications and value. Wit even comes with its own complicated gendered history. In this article, I bring these shifting, often contradictory, gendered meanings of humorous wit into conversation with the often conflicting representational strategies that have informed the construction of femininity in contemporary mainstream TV comedies.

2Wit is such a distinctive type of humor that various Early Modern British philosophers have pondered its meaning and cultural value over the course of the last few centuries. In the following pages, I will briefly sketch out how, in the eighteenth century, English writers like Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope served as gatekeepers of wit, sifting through its iterations and separating true wit, which captures a deeper truth about the world through clever observation and comparative craftsmanship, from false wit, which disguises empty and superficial rhetoric. Wit has been placed in relation to intellect and emotion, truth, and entertainment, and has been altogether questioned as a valid type of humor. Writers like Jane Austen had to carefully navigate this critical legacy, especially when wit became increasingly more unfashionable in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, wit finally became associated with a feminine sense of humor, no longer revealing deeper truths, but amusing and charming, nonetheless. This, in turn, impacted how wit was written in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries when wit, and Austen, were rediscovered and re-interpreted by Hollywood with an avalanche of romantic comedies.

4My article discusses how their leads’ wit has been embedded within narrative frames of stereotypical femininity, using tropes such as romantic rivalry or flirtation, motherhood, self-defense, or deflection to disarm the intellectual power of their wit. This ensures that their wit is perceived as less threatening to the male-dominated cultural hegemony. Understanding wit in this way means that I situate it more in the realm of what Rebecca Krefting calls “safe comedy,” which is “typically characterized by apolitical jokes that focus on shared social concerns and experiences without calling into question the terms of their construction or exclusivity,” rather than charged humor, which “offers strategies for combating cultural and legal exclusion” (3). At the same time, my readings show how these narrative frames and tropes reveal different concerns about wit as a type of humor. Below, I analyze how the type of wit employed in the shows can rupture social conventions and has the potential, though not always fully realized, to question established gender norms and knowledge systems.

2. Wit as a Contested Type of Humor

5In “An Essay on Criticism,” English poet and satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744) summarized wit thus: “True wit is nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d” (Poetry Foundation). Before discussing female wit of the last three decades, I briefly turn to the question of how wit has emerged as a distinctive, but often contradictory, type of humor over the last centuries. In this, I follow Octavia Cox’s attempt to map out the genesis of wit as a complex type of humor, which she uses to prepare her reading of Austen’s novels, which rose to renewed fame in 1990s transatlantic pop culture and have therefore greatly influenced mainstream comedy. Especially Early Modern British writers like John Locke, Joseph Addison, and Samuel Johnson have prolifically argued for or against wit’s merits. I understand these texts on wit as “cultural work” (1985), to borrow Jane Tompkins’s term, because they reflect their times’ social and political concerns (xiii), and though they might not resonate with contemporary audiences, addressing them is important to fully understand wit as a type of humor. Tracing these contestations sheds light on the multi-faceted labor that wit performs within different contexts, as well as its entanglements with power dynamics. The latter is evoked whenever the propriety of a situation, a subject matter, or a target of wit is questioned, which gestures at regulatory strategies for wit. This brief excursion to British cultural history helps me to identify key concerns that wit still produces today as well as survey its entanglements in specific value systems at various points in time when questions of truth, clarity, nature, and propriety troubled philosophers. Sketching out these contextual dynamics will complicate my reading of wit in contemporary TV comedies and show how wit has often been domesticated, contained, and moralized.

6Though Early Modern British texts on wit differ greatly, many writers have identified similar characteristics, like its pace, its comparative ingenuity, and occasionally its produced affects of surprise and delight within the audience. English philosopher John Locke (1588-1679) was one of the first writers to propose a definition, in which wit is “the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy” (Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”). A certain unease with the category of wit is palpable in most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts, not least because of wit’s connection to intelligence. After all, to be quick-witted is often understood as intelligent, which has prompted these Early Modern British writers to ponder what marks wit as good or bad.

7During the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) has been the most prolific British writer on this issue. In a series for the British magazine The Spectator (1711-12, and 1714 edited by Addison), he offers an in-depth discussion of the properties of true, false, and mixed wit. His writings work out the distinction between intelligent forms of wit that speak of deeper truths about the world and linguistic playfulness that might appear smart but is void of meaning. Moreover, Elizabeth Kraft outlines Addison’s complicated gendering of wit in her study about the intersection of wit and an ethics of desire in The Spectator. She maintains that for him, wit is “‘manly,’ and as such it must eschew the obvious materiality of anagram, acrostic, pun, mere rhyme (doggerel, echo, bouts rimes, etc.), image, lipogram, and chronogram” (634). In his derision of false wit’s materiality, which is clearly coded as female, Addison nonetheless compares true wit to a beautiful woman, who remains beautiful, dressed, or undressed (Kraft 635). The implicit gendering of a playful use of wit as mere ‘dressing’ not only distinguishes between true (male) and false (female) forms of wit but places wit in a context of desire and (sexual) appeal. As Kraft maintains, Addison frequently compares “false wit to overly clever (and ineffective) courtship rituals” (639). The connection between wit and romance can still be traced in its iterations today, where wit is integrated into the romance plot of contemporary TV comedies. This early British account of wit not only explicitly genders it but also suggests that wit can be thought-provoking or simply entertaining. This distinction will be central to my discussion of Gilmore Girls.

8Wit’s relation to thought-provoking insights and truth has troubled English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in the eighteenth century. In his essay The Life of Cowley, published between 1779-1781, with its reflections on the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, Samuel Johnson attests that wit needs to reveal a truth: “that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just” (Lives of the Poets). But speaking about a group of seventeenth-century English writers he called the ‘Metaphysical poets’, Johnson applauds wit only when insightful comparisons do not stretch beyond plausibility:

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, [the Metaphysical poets] have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions[.] (Lives of the Poets)

9Johnson’s critique of this laboriously set-up relationality gestures at the question of how much intentional craftsmanship should go into wit and implies that the more effort it takes, the less truthful it may be. The danger of wit, then, seems to lie in its obfuscation of truth and its sacrifice to clarity. With the turn from the Enlightenment period to Romanticism, the suspicion of wit as an elegant but empty gesture lingers, but now wit seems to be not only devoid of truth but of sentiment.

3. Austen’s Wit and Its Legacy

10Jane Austen’s wit has become part of an English-speaking cultural memory. Moreover, Austen’s witty heroines serve as blueprint for later female-centered comedies in Britain as well as the US. Beyond many direct adaptations of Austen’s works, contemporary romantic and TV comedies borrow heavily from Austen’s materials, and their witty women, especially, share many similarities, most importantly that their wit marks them as intelligent while the romantic narrative frames ensure that they remain unthreatening to male hegemony.

11Despite her era’s general distrust of wit as a “vehicle of ridicule” (Monteiro 81-82), Austen relies on wit in her observation and portrayal of characters, but, crucially, carefully negotiates wit as a talent of her heroines, as Belisa Monteiro explains:

Not only does she contribute and help keep alive the tradition of the English comic heroine, Austen also makes what she considered much needed improvements on the heroine figure of the novel by incorporating wit as a defining and dominant characteristic. In a literary culture that valued the heroine for her emotional susceptibilities, Austen’s comic heroines present a different model of womanhood: one more empowered by strength of mind, by ‘quickness of intellect,’ and a witty apprehension of experience, than undermined by emotions. (92)

12Monteiro’s reading of Elizabeth, whose wit also guards her against male seduction, shows how carefully wit and feeling are balanced out in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Similarly, Austen’s witty heroine Emma, in the eponymous novel (1815), is tempted by the elegance of wit and expression, but learns that is not permissible as ridicule when it fails social and moral obligations. Emma’s social failure at a picnic recalibrates her perspective on her social world and stops her from flaunting her wit, for which she had been criticized by her love interest. Thus, “Austen embraces the high and serious concept of true wit, as articulated by Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Addison, Pope, Johnson et al. but simultaneously avoids what the word ‘Wit’ had come to denote by the Regency period” (Cox 5). At the same time, Austen’s careful inclusion of wit for her female characters allows her to create heroines who diverge from the eighteenth-century literary trend of Sentimentalism with its passive women.

13Austen’s criticism of the sentimental(ist) heroine, like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), centrally informs her writing of female characters. Nancy Walker and Stephen College look at wit as a counter-mode to the re-emerging sentimentalism of nineteenth-century literature and point out that “the popular image of the women writer as soggy sentimentalist was considered an insult by women of wit” (20). Both show how sentimentality in literature was often the result of powerlessness, whereas wit served as the expression of confidence, insight, and power (6). I find this opposition to sentimentality productive because several of TV’s witty women, including Fran Fine, Lorelai Gilmore, and Midge Maisel, are decidedly non-sentimental, with their quick-witted retorts and repartees.

14The last three decades saw a renewed interest in Austen’s works with an influx of film adaptations. The immensely successful BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995) or Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1996) were both released in the 1990s and sparked another boom of further Austen adaptations, even more radical, modernized re-interpretations like Clueless (1995) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). The trend had an impact on subsequent film and TV texts centering on young heroines, most notably in the romcom genre, but also in comedy in general. Consequently, one can trace Austen’s legacy of witty women to today’s comedies. The careful balancing act of creating witty female characters that counteract the literary trend of sentimental womanhood, while still caring not to portray these women as unfeeling, is still relevant today, because even the wit of Fran Fine, Lorelai Gilmore, and Midge Maisel operates along similar lines.

4. A Woman’s Wit

15The continued migration of wit to an inferior type of humor, stripping it of its claims to truth and feeling, and relegating it to elegant but frivol wordplay, paves the way to slowly re-attribute it to stereotypical femininity so long as one takes care not to play into its rationality too much. In fact, renowned wit Oscar Wilde used “witty” often in combination with women, but paired it with ‘wisdom’ only when it applied to men as “purveyor[s] of rational arguments” (Gantar 1). Other testimonies to a woman’s wit include Kate Sanborn’ anthology The Wit of Women (1885) and Constant Coquelin’s contribution to an issue of Harper’s Bazaar in 1901. In the latter, he emphatically rejects the sexist notion that women do not have a sense of humor, only to then rely heavily on stereotypical ideas of womanhood to make a case for women’s wit, including such claims as: “Wit, humor, sparkle, they are gifts that the gods have liberally bestowed upon the feminine mind” (67). He continues, commenting on women’s correspondence: “It is no attempt at being funny, but just a natural flow of gentle wit,” as “a woman does not try to be funny. She leaves that to man” (68).

16Tracing the transformation of wit from a male to female type of humor, from superior to inferior, from true to natural to effortless provides my analysis with a map to navigate the shifting contexts, while paying close attention to the residues of the term’s moralist contestation and its meanings. As Walker maintains: “womanly wit had difficulty maneuvering around the image of ideal womanhood—an image that denigrated women’s intellect in favor of emotional and intuitive nature (qtd. in Wagner 36). These notions spill over into the twentieth century, where wit finally seems to become ornamental. Unpacking how wit has been framed, tamed, stripped, and put in its place as a type of humor parallels the varied containment strategies that make witty women palatable for mainstream audiences. In the following discussions, I will pick up the various threads of wit as I disentangle its ties to truth and meaningless wordplay (Addison), to quickness and intellect (Locke), to craft and talent (Johnson), and effort and feeling (Austen).

5. The Emotional Wit of The Nanny’s Fran Fine

17Fran Drescher’s The Nanny narratively frames wit within the context of traditional femininity and romantic rivalry, which discloses the sitcom’s moralist portrayal of witty women. Like Austen’s Emma, the sitcom seems ambivalent about wit and its power potential, so it rewards wit when utilized to nurture or to flirt, but punishes the flaunting of wit when coupled with other forms of power, like wealth. Moreover, like Addison, the sitcom reflects on good and bad wit and conflates it with assumptions on gender. But in contrast to Addison, the show reframes female wit not as false and essentially empty, and rather reclaims it as vital to femininity and courtship.

18The era of post-feminist, family-friendly TV entertainment sees Fran Drescher’s immensely popular The Nanny revolve around oddball Fran Fine, a Jewish New Yorker in her 30s, who is obsessed with getting married and, due to a classic comic case of mistaken identities, winds up as the nanny with the rich, white Sheffield family. As Samantha Pickette has observed, with Fran Fine The Nanny closes a fifteen-year gap in centering a Jewish female protagonist on prime-time network television comedy (4). As Fran turns the rich and sheltered Sheffield world upside down, often due to her lower-class and Jewish background, she improves their familial relationships and eventually marries into the family. According to Jennifer Caplan, this sitcom stands out in its portrayal of interfaith relationships as it reverses “the gender of the Jewish and non-Jewish partner. Throughout the 1990s period Jewish women were rarely allowed to be sexually desirable” (6). Fran Fine’s sexual appeal, however, is amplified through costume choices and witty banter at every point.

19The Nanny operates with many stock characters that hark back to comedy of manners clichés. The stuck-up ‘aristocrat’ (Maxwell Sheffield), the smart butler (Niles), the old, undesirable woman (C.C.) and the beautiful, naïve, and supportive female outsider (Fran Fine) who unites all. The appeal of family sitcoms like The Nanny to mainstream audiences lies in their relatable stories and they have been a staple of TV programming almost since its inception. As Brett Mills notes, like romcoms, sitcoms’ entertainment value is linked to escapism from a hard day’s work (2), but sitcoms are often problematic in their representational strategies and their perpetuation of stereotypes (10). The Nanny plays around with many stereotypes, most prominently with femininity, class, and Jewishness. Pickette addresses the representational paradox in the show’s portrayal of Jewishness, arguing that it

revolves around Fran’s unapologetic Jewishness, natural warmth, and desire to share her heritage with her new family, even as it endorses the J[ewish] A[merican] P[rincess] stereotype and establishes Fran’s Jewish identity—an identity largely defined by her nasal voice, gaudy wardrobe, obsession with Barbra Streisand, and desperation for a rich husband—as the most significant source of her ‘otherness.’ (4-5)

20I would amend that Fran is equally othered by her working-class background, which at least complicates the JAP stereotype that Pickette critiques. Furthermore, her materialist impulses are driven by excessive consumerism rather than by status and are often checked by her emotional integrity and genuine generosity.

21Placed in the setting of a wealthy and cultured family with a British father, Fran Drescher’s character is constantly othered, and much of the show’s humor derives from this. The show’s implicit value system is firmly (white) American middle-class, as the lower-class characters, represented by the Fines, are often ridiculed for being uncultured, and the upper-class characters, represented by the Sheffields, also often othered by their Britishness and are satirized as emotionally repressed. While these representational politics are never explicitly problematized and only harvested for their comic potential, the show turns more self-conscious in its representation of women. The sitcom runs on the sexist premise of the “old hag,” which Fran is afraid of turning into and which C.C. Babcock, for the longest time, represents. But there are moments of reflection, most notably when Fran goes to therapy to discuss her obsession with marriage, which she internalized from her stereotypically overbearing Jewish mother.

22Fran is not institutionally erudite or conventionally smart, but the show establishes another form of intelligence that contrasts and complements the Sheffield family and that mostly relies on Fran’s emotional insight into the children and her street smarts—and this is where I would locate her wit. In the pilot episode, she takes the unruly Sheffield boy, Brighton, who terrorizes his sisters and chased away the previous nannies, by giving him the following piece of advice:

FRAN: You know, you should be nicer to your sister.
BRIGHTON:(SARCASTIC) Why, because we’re a family?
FRAN: That’s right. And someday your father’s going to be old and sick and
you’re going to want him to live with her. (S1:E1, 12:57-13:07)

23Fran Fine’s wit is most often placed in the service of raising the children and giving advice. This seems to stand in a long tradition that Nancy Walker, looking at nineteenth-century American literature for women, has identified, maintaining that much of that humorous literature was used as “advice literature,” “warning women of the perils of women’s traditional role” (122). Even though Fran is portrayed to be more insightful than the father, Maxwell Sheffield, Fran only demonstrates her wit when it comes to outwitting the children or solving emotional, interpersonal conflicts. Her strategy to establish power over the father is largely by annoyance, flirtation, and confusion, occasionally scheming when she needs to fix her messes, but her wit is rarely a demonstration of superiority.

24This portrayal differs from that of her romantic rival, C.C. Babcock. Fran Fine’s wit often highlights her emotional intelligence over C.C., whose wit is paired with her wealth. She is consequently characterized as arrogant, but the show also frames her as pathetic, in her pursuit of Maxwell as well as her career ambitions. She is frequently mocked for her lack of an office, simply lingering in Maxwell’s, which often puts her in a similar position to Fran, as both women try to negotiate and charm him while he remains firmly installed at his desk, which cements his (male) authority. These encounters feature in nearly every episode, but Fran finds a way to balance these power dynamics. The set design and the visual frame ensure that Maxwell must look up at Fran, perched on his desk, while C.C. either stands behind him or sits on his couch at a lower level. Fran’s daring desk-border transgression and witty taunting of Maxwell’s authority are softened by her iconic miniskirts, which all clearly accentuate her femininity so that this encounter is rendered visually as well as verbally flirtatious.

25C.C., on the other hand, is shown (and mocked) to aspire to Maxwell’s position of power, as she wears bland, smart business clothes with shoulder pads. She embodies the (fears of the) modern businesswoman, disinterested in children, careerist, and arrogant, but is continuously punished for this. Likewise, her wit often cuttingly flaunts her position in the economic hierarchy, which is immediately checked by either the butler, Niles, or Fran, or (comically) ignored by Maxwell, which also signals her place in the romance plot. Fran, on the other hand, is rewarded for her emotional intelligence by being generally well-liked and ultimately loved by Maxwell Sheffield and by being established as his equal. C.C. is eventually humbled by her failure but still finds her romantic match in the butler Niles, who lacks her social status but is equal to her cutting wit.

26The sitcom features two central witty women, whose wit is embedded and measured in a narrative of romantic rivalry and nurturing womanhood. Thus, wit is fundamental to the show’s construction of femininity. While Fran’s wit largely relies on her emotional insights, C.C.’s relies on her class status. The show, however, punishes her sense of economic and intellectual superiority by using this to make her appear unattractive. In her confrontations with Niles her wit becomes most pronounced and eventually turns into flirty banter. Her wit is thus contained in a romantic courtship narrative that domesticates it. Fran and C.C. are good examples of how wit needs to be framed and carefully balanced out with forms of social privilege, which also determines their status as either the story’s heroine or antagonist. The formula of putting wit in the service of giving nurturing advice or flirtatious banter so that witty women can be perceived as likeable despite their obvious intellect and humor can also found in Gilmore Girls.

6. The Quick-Witted, Trivial Chatter of Gilmore Girls’ Lorelai

27Wit seeps through every dialogue of Amy Sherman Palladino’s early 2000s popular show Gilmore Girls, but my discussion will largely focus on Lorelai Gilmore to trace how her wit is trivial(ized) and hence robbed of its transformative power. At the same time, I will reflect on its potential to question knowledge hierarchies, even though the show itself does not explicitly realize its subversive potential. Nonetheless, Gilmore Girls as a media text can still mobilize a broader epistemological critique, which I explore via its use of wit.

28Though often characterized as a dramedy, Gilmore Girls can still be read as a comedy with clear rom-com elements and shares many similarities with The Nanny. Moreover, David Scott Diffrient reads Gilmore Girls as a successor of the screwball comedy of the 1930s and 1940s, which not only featured many quick-witted women in their romance plots but which, like sitcoms, also provided a temporary relief from the socio-economic uncertainties of their era with “fast-talking heroines, sophisticated husbands and eccentric characters” (xxviii). Gilmore Girls presented its audience with a plethora of witty voices that suggested that “gender inequality could be remedied by spontaneous acts of sassiness or well-times witticisms” (Diffrient xxviii). At the time, the show stood out due to its smart and funny scripts, its cinematography, and its quirky female characters. The main characters are the eponymous Gilmore girls: strong and quick-witted Lorelai, who got pregnant at 16 years old, and her school-smart daughter Rory, who is that same age at the beginning of the first season. While the mother-daughter relationship is central to the show, its premise relies on the family rift between Lorelai and her estranged, wealthy parents. Although Lorelai successfully runs a hotel, her financial situation does not allow her to pay the tuition for Rory’s private school. When the grandparents financially step in, they demand weekly family dinners as a condition for lending the money. Besides the emotional conflicts during those dinners, Lorelai and her parents often clash on their sense of humor, with Richard and Emily Gilmore’s seriousness as the antithesis to Lorelai’s silliness. The following dialogue can be read as exemplary for the dinner dynamics and Lorelai’s quick-wittedness:

RICHARD: Emily, I am perfectly capable of putting a napkin on my lap.
EMILY: Alright I’m sorry. You were on the phone.
RICHARD: Long distance.
LORELAI: God?
RICHARD: London.
LORELAI: God lives in London?
RICHARD: My mother lives in London.
LORELAI: Your mother is God?
RICHARD: Lorelai.
LORELAI: So, God is a woman...
RICHARD: Lorelai.
LORELAI: And a relative, that’s so cool. I'm gonna totally ask for favors.
(Gilmore Girls, “The Third Lorelai,” S1:E18, 1:07-1:30)

29The humor here is generated by traditional comic tools, like “quick, short statements or questions, rapid changes of speaker and usually cleverness, wit or some kind of rhetorical effect stemming from the sound or brevity” (Hough 162). Interestingly, Lorelai’s quick-witted interjections seem to be only for her own (and the viewers’) amusement. Her disruptive commentary fades into the background and does not add to the content of the ongoing conversation and is consequently easily dismissed or ignored. Embedded in this formal dinner setting with its parental power dynamics between Lorelai and her parents, it demonstrates her parents’ hierarchical and economic advantage, which place Lorelai in an inferior social position. This careful staging of Lorelai, who embodies several forms of privilege that are never addressed, as a disadvantaged but self-made woman is not only central to the show’s neoliberal logic but also to making her wit socially acceptable for the audience. In other words, it is important that she is constructed like Fran Fine and not C.C. Babcock. Similar to these sitcom women, Lorelai bases her wit on trivial, pop cultural knowledge, mentioned in passing, while her mother, Emily, uses her own remarkable wit largely to put people, including her daughter, in their presumed place.

30In Gilmore Girls, quick-witted replies often signal the upper hand in a conversation—but not in life. It is therefore interesting that even though Gilmore Girls often presents scenes as a battle of wits, witty comments are nonetheless used to deflect rather than solve a conflict or attack someone. They are used as humorous chatter, and though they do not quite work to de-escalate a situation, they are decorative comments. During fights with her mother, Lorelai often draws on cultural references to make surprising comparisons, which meet wit’s criteria to delight and serve to alleviate the tension for the viewer but also to confuse her opponent, Emily. Following earlier definitions of true and false wit, Lorelai’s certainly falls into the latter category. Her witty comparisons and cultural references do not seek to reveal a deeper meaning, observing nature or society, but trivialize or “decorate” situations. Or, to stay within Addison’s metaphor, they “dress up” conflict to disguise the ugly, but never get to the truth of it. But neither does Emily’s wit, as she only uses it to flaunt her presumed superiority. Both sacrifice clarity for witty commentary, forcing together comparative elements into unlikely metaphors, as if to confirm Johnson’s critique of this type of humor. The ensuing communication breakdown characterizes the relationship between Lorelai and her mother, in which Lorelai’s comparisons and witticisms highlight the gap between the characters, without addressing any fundamental observation about the world.

31Taking Addison’s reflections on wit as truth and wit as linguistic playfulness further, one can see that Gilmore Girls offers both, but it centers the lived experience of women. Though wit in this show is set up as trivial, it has the potential to question what counts as meaningful insights, thereby shifting masculinist meaning paradigms, if not for the characters or the narrative, then at least for the television medium. While the narrative falls short of politicizing female experiences as collective struggle, the text still unapologetically and confidently, portrays these experiences, normalizing concerns that were often dismissed as trivial in more conservative programs.

32Aside from creating confusion or deflecting from conflict, the Gilmore Girls’ wit is often used similarly to Fran Fine’s in The Nanny and put in the service of giving helpful if quirky life-advice. Following Addison’s differentiation of wit, they present truisms, if not wisdom. When Lorelai supports Rory’s student body government vice-presidency by attending a school debate, she advises Rory: “I just want you to remember three things while you're sitting up there: I love you, you’re the greatest kid in the world, and you’re in a skirt, keep your knees closed” (S3:E2, 12:00-12:10). Lorelai’s zeugma here is exemplary of wit when it revolves around female experience, which is rendered most often as individual, rather than collective and as such, becomes depoliticized. Moreover, Lorelai evokes the male gaze here, but tries to downplay its power through wit. Thus, her wit is turned inwards, offering support on how to cope with family or being a woman, rather than outward, making observations about the world or humanity, like when Lorelai gives Rory fashion advice for her date: “Wear your hair down, and your attitude high” (S1:E7, 28:25-28:29).

33Reading Lucille Ball’s comedy, Nancy Walker remarks something similar, arguing that “Instead of directing their humor outward at the culture that has denigrated them, women have directed it inward, making themselves the targets” (120). This is also in line with what Mizejewski has identified as characteristic of post-feminist or girl power comedy: a rhetoric of empowerment, which originally was directed towards social change, is adapted and funneled into an empowerment of the individual through sexuality, femininity, money and/or cultural capital (8). This stands in contrast to their male counterparts from the same story-world, like Luke, who frequently has witty outbursts and observations about the town and hence his wit is almost always directed outwards, mostly articulating his conservative or corrective impulses. However, one could argue that wit based on female experience meets the criteria of “true wit,” as it reveals a female lived truth and it is only a sexist trivializing framing of female experience that robs these witticisms of their greater cultural value. While that is an important contextual layer, Lorelai’s witticisms are still framed as trivial, amusing commentary and though she is perceived as smart and funny, her wit is not portrayed as transformative knowledge.

34In any case, because it is framed by mostly domestic narratives of individual female experience, because it is constructed as amusing chatter rather than intellectual insight, and because it is not targeted outwards, wit in Gilmore Girls is employed to demonstrate a female character’s intelligence without disturbing power hierarchies. The show’s creators, like Jane Austen, take care to frame Lorelai’s wit not as dry, sardonic intellectualism but portray her as vulnerable and caring (despite her self-absorbedness, which the show never problematizes), and, most importantly, as (economically) disadvantaged, at least compared to her wealthy parents. Like Fran Fine, Lorelai’s wit is further embedded in romantic narratives to demonstrate that her ideal romantic suitors, from Max Medina to Jason Stiles to Luke Danes, are the ones who can match her wit. But since she is situated in a world of other witty characters, her wit is not portrayed as her most remarkable feature, it only adds to her overall appeal as a character and as a woman. This changes when one turns to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s next notable creation of a witty woman.

7. The Evolving Struggles with Effortless Wit in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

35The recent comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel explicitly questions different types and functions of humor, installing a witty woman embarking upon a career in comedy at its center within the historical context of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that the show self-consciously struggles with its portrayal of witty women, starting out with an alignment of wit and traditional femininity but ending with a less domesticated, less trivialized expression of wit via an unfolding story of professional ambition.

36Like the Sherman Palladino’s previous work, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel depicts a world of fast-paced, witty dialogues, which mark the titular character Midge Maisel, especially, as the comedian she is going to become. Her witty comebacks shape her relationships with other characters, in the beginning most notably that between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Joel, as her punchline in their break-up scene encapsulates:

JOEL: Did you ever think you were supposed to be something and then you suddenly realize that you’re not?
MIDGE: Yes. Married. (S1:E1, 33:25-33:31)

37This period drama-comedy differs from the other two shows, also because Maisel’s wit is no longer only part of her portrayal as a quirky character but becomes the base for her professional career. The openly sexist hostility of the show’s midcentury setting feeds into Maisel’s characterization as a smart and strong woman who bravely confronts the misogyny of her time. Yet, despite her bravado on stage, she is presented as a very privileged and often naïve character. Her stand-up largely revolves around what are safe comedy topics by today’s standards, like family dynamics and marriage failures. But in the midcentury setting, these topics, paired with her continuous swearing, build up her stage act as transgressive and daring. The contradiction of her performance is marked by her classy dresses and elbow-high gloves that accentuate her femininity but betray her foul-mouthed act. Pickette acknowledges how this also undermines the Jewish American Princess stereotype (66), as she argues that Midge “combines the independent spirit of Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Jewish Big Mouth, the unpredictable power of Kathleen Rowe Karyln’s Unruly Woman, and the attitude and depth of Nathan Abram’s New Jewess” (56). Despite this, Midge’s wit initially only responds to conflict. As Anne T. Donahue declares in her article for Marie Claire: “She calls out sexism and double standards as she sees them, but only insofar as they relate to her experience.” Therefore, her wit evolves as she journeys into a less sheltered world and gains more public visibility. In the end, both the show and Midge recognize the power of her wit, when her wit finally breaks out of the constraints of traditionally femininity and is employed to directly and unapologetically articulate and thus validate women’s lived experiences.

38Due to her previously sheltered life, which falls apart when her husband leaves her, she initially finds it difficult to integrate topics such as racism or work-place sexism into her stage persona. Her struggles to find a broader, political voice and to critically reflect on society become apparent when she, as a Jewish woman, fails to recognize that she is commissioned to record anti-Semitic propaganda and is only warned off by her father, or when she is unaware that she cannot bring her injured, Black colleague, with whom she is touring, back to her Florida hotel in the 1950s due to segregation laws. She also does not realize how close her comedy act comes to outing that same gay Black artist. She only demonstrates any political wit and insight when dealing with open sexism. When she interacts with her sexist, largely male audience, her witty comebacks quickly disarm their sexism. While her confrontations with openly sexist hostility from the audience and the entertainment business seem to unfairly hinder and sometimes derail her career, it does not negatively impact her sense of self. Her strength lies in her ability to shake these attacks off with her effortless wit. In its final season, the show shifts its lightheartedness and shows Midge not only struggling with all these setbacks but also fighting back, strategizing, and finally claiming the stage for herself despite resistance. This move is deliberately staged as her stepping out of her confinement and her ascribed role as a “lady writer” and claiming her professional identity as a comedian.

39From the beginning, especially when drawing from her romantic or family experiences, her wit is portrayed as original and spontaneous. Therefore, her wit, and to a point also her stand-up, seems effortless, which is a double-edged sword. Though being effortless and natural is often defined as a commendable quality of wit, as I have shown above, the show always frames it as Midge Maisel’s reaction to a conflict in her life. Unlike Lorelai Gilmore, these witty responses no longer serve as background chatter, but disarm her attacker. But like most aspects of her life, Maisel’s wit, while effortless, is never unprompted. Moreover, the effortless quality of her wit is amplified to a point where it de-emphasizes the labor and care involved in her stage program and therefore her craft as an artist as well as her ambition as a performer. Only as the setbacks accumulate beyond the bearable and the comedy career that she envisioned seems increasingly unlikely does she step beyond her confined roles as a character, which her stage persona had been building up to for a while.

40Apart from the shows in which she fails to make her audience laugh, the show portrays her as someone who can come up with witty comments and comparisons on the spot, rather than due to a process of creative labor. There are few glimpses in which she takes notes and plans jokes in advance, but even in her breakthrough performance on the Gordon Ford Show in the final episode, she seems to expand her planned program on the spot and adapt it despite the tense circumstances surrounding her performance as she goes off- script on a live talk show and performs her act despite explicit instructions not to. This portrayal of spontaneity and talent makes her appear larger than life. Like in The Nanny, this portrayal of wit is interwoven with femininity and Jewishness. Pickette has criticized this framing of Midge as exceptional because it not only ignores the historical midcentury female Jewish comedians but also suggests that her career is inimitable (76-77).

41The show continuously emphasizes her natural talent and wit. This framing cushions her notable wit to cater to a version of femininity that is perceived as less threatening to the male sphere because it is spontaneous, presumably without targeted design. After all, before her take to the stage, Midge Maisel was shown to love going to comedy shows and never to take offense to the deep-seated sexism of performances, until she measured her own talent against her male competitors. It took her failed marriage to take the stage and the idea that she could try her hand at stand-up comedy is someone else’s. Therefore, she is not initially portrayed to be driven by ambition but falls into this life, and like with everything else, takes this in stride and adapts accordingly. However, in this lies a transformative potential as her wit is recognized and matched by her future manager, Susie Myerson. As Midge hones her wit for the stage, Susie equally employs hers in her new and thriving career as a talent manager. Like in my other two readings, these two witty women utilize their wit differently, but neither wit is moralized by the text, even when both occasionally risk ruining their prospects or relationships with their boundless, spontaneous bursts of wit.

42Especially the final season’s flashforwards show how Midge’s wit has become sharper and directed outwards, which contrasts with actual midcentury Jewish performers, like Joan Rivers, who became famous for her self-deprecating humor a move that speaks to its contemporary audience’s tastes: “as a twenty-first-century reimagining of a 1950s female comic, Midge’s comedic tone further empowers her female gaze in her dependence on outward-facing sarcastic humor” (Pickette 64). Thus, her wit no longer aligns with traditional femininity of nurturing motherhood and playful flirtations. In fact, her wit now ties her more closely to the unconventional Susie, whose gender identity never aligns with traditional femininity. By focusing on the relationship between these two women and opting out of the heterosexual romance plot, the show finally validates an outward-directed wit, which can include truisms as much as wisdom and, as becomes clear in the final season when Midge’s breakout performance directly addresses women, centering the power dynamics that inform female experience in its portrayal of wit.

8. Conclusion

43Analyzing how female wit has been narratively embedded to make it palatable for mainstream audiences shows the careful negotiation of female representation in contemporary TV comedies. Since its heroines should be likeable and relatable, their wit is never used to flaunt their intelligence, but serves a particular function, be it to nurture, to deflect, or to flirt. When it is utilized to express intellectual superiority, it is quickly punished by the narrative. The playful quality, the self-deprecation, the confinement to mostly domestic and family themes, and the service-oriented deliveries all work towards containing women’s wit so that it makes for a safe comedy. Nonetheless, wit marks these characters as capable and smart women, which helps to elevate female representation, especially in TV comedies, out of the bounds of sentimental, mild-mannered, and passive womanhood. At the same time, the effortless and quick wit of these women serves to downplay (sexist) conflicts. It would be interesting to explore how decidedly less witty women of recent comedies like Derry Girls (2018-2022), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-2019), or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019) poke fun at the aggressor, exposing the absurdity, but also showing how in the absence of wit, these situations are not safe, and it is not a woman’s job to react with wit to soften the blow. In any case, these comedic female characters contributed to a better representation of women in TV comedies, even if their wit was often put in the service of help and support and thus easily aligned with traditional femininity.