Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of women s comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize women s contributions to and political uses of comedy. The essays collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender and comedy, spanning centuries of...