In 1999 during her one woman show I’m the One that I Want, Margaret Cho said, “I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I am going to succeed as myself.” She was referring to the cancellation of her sitcom, which was the first sitcom to star a Korean American. The producers of this now defunct television show forced her to lose weight for the role to appeal to American audiences. Cho explains that they wanted her to seem more American, to fit an American ideal of what Asian women look like. They told her to “Be more American, less Asian, but not too much. Be Asian, but not too Asian.” Ironically she was meant to play herself. Cho lost the weight but was hospitalised for kidney failure, her show was cancelled due to low ratings, and she was broke. Four years later Cho wrote I’m the One that I Want and has had a very successful career playing her self on stage for the past twelve years. I used to be a stand-up comic. I performed at some clubs in England and even won 2nd place in a gong show at The Comedy Store in London about seven years ago. I was never gonged off the stage so I felt pretty successful. During my MA program I studied traditional clowning and commedia dell’arte. I literally clowned away during grad school. Eventually I wrote a one woman comedy show and performed it at a few music festivals in the English countryside. I got tired of mucking about in mud and performing for drunk kids waiting for The Killers to get on the main stage (this was circa 2005 when The Killers were cool) so I stopped touring and began deconstructing my performance process. I’ve always been fascinated with the subversive nature of comedy, so the focus of my MA thesis was on working towards a feminist aesthetic through the use of comedy as a political tool in performance- a means of subverting oppressive patriarchal structures. I used performances from great comediennes like Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, and Cho and critical theory from Butler and Mulvey to work out a theory of feminist performance and the importance of the Self gaze and its power over narrative and meaning. I am only now seeing connections between my work in feminist theory and McComiskey’s concept of neosophistic rhetoric. My show and subsequent thesis was a graffitic immemorial discourse- a reworking of the patriarchal narrative structure defied and re-contextualised, a new gaze, a new auteur.
I turn my attention now on issues of race but the problems are somewhat similar- what does it mean to subvert power structures and does subversion create meaningful change? In “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism,” Victor Villanueva asserts, “Multiculturalism hasn't improved things much, not even at the sites where students are exposed to such things. Maybe the relatively low numbers of people of color on our campuses or in our journals-or the high numbers at community colleges with disproportionately few of color among the faculty-reinforce racist conceptions. The disproportionately few people of color in front of the classrooms or in our publications, given the ubiquity of the bootstrap mentality, reifies the conception that people of color don't do better because they don't try harder, that most are content to feed off the State” (651). After reading Villanueva, another student and I posed these research questions in a class last spring:
• Have more people of color published in rhetoric and writing journals in the past decade?
• Are more people of color receiving PhDs in the field of rhetoric and writing?
• Are more people of color receiving tenure-track positions in the field of rhetoric and writing?
In response to our questions, the instructor of the course said that this inquiry was not interesting or relevant and that racism was not an issue in academia and especially not in the field of rhetoric and writing. I must have blacked out when the problem of racism was resolved. Was this in 2008? Or 2009? Those years are a little fuzzy.
I want to explore connections between neosophism, comedy, and racism. There are spaces of contention that cannot be articulated except through the use of comedic structures. Click here for an example. I see comedy as a way to subvert and redefine oppressive structures and as a means of rebuilding and re-imagining possibilities.
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