Word: barreca
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...State University of New York, Buffalo, very sensibly notes, "It's a dramatic piece, not a ((literal)) description of what's going on in our society. It seems to me that drama is supposed to make things larger than life so you get the point." Agrees Regina Barreca, who teaches English at the University of Connecticut and is the author of They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted, a book about women and humor: "It has got to be seen not as a cultural representation but as a fairy tale." In other words, as a dream work...
...There's a real reversal going on," says Regina Barreca, an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of two books on female humor. "Women's comedy used to be local and specific -- 'Oh, look at my hair, look at my legs, I'm so fat.' Now male humor seems to be taking a step back to 'Take my wife -- please,' and women comics seem to be much more subversive...
Boosler's kind of routine, as Professor Barreca sees it, is one thing that tends to separate the girls from the boys. "Women tell stories," she says. "Men do one, two, three, bop." The new funnywomen are anything but rote jokesters: like Robin Williams or Billy Crystal,they invent routines as they go along. Paula Poundstone, whose stand-up is a sprawl across a stool, ad-libs about 30% every night. When she was too broke to redeem her outfits from the dry cleaner's, she included the angst in her monologue: "It's like, the clothes are in jail...