Comic Glory (and Guilt)

This chapter covers the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century shift toward a new brand of postassimilatory and postfeminist joke-work. It highlights select material by celebrity Jewish female comics from the 1990s though the present. An “appropriative license” of select comic material conjoins the reappropriative and misappropriative effects of women performing Jewishly in a zeitgeist of American comedy. Self-ironizing performances by Sandra Bernhard, Sarah Silverman, and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer illustrate how comics slide among race, gender, and sex identities to play up their progressive politics and white guilt in an era of newfound access to mainstream comedy.