Professor of French Cheryl Morgan is the editor of a newly published special volume of Women in French Studies, “Tu es drôle pour une fille”: Funny Women in French from the Salon to YouTube (Vol. 10, 2024).
The volume explores the cultural archive and contemporary production to examine women’s creative use of humor from the 19th-century to today. Against a tradition of reception that treats women as humorless and laughable, the 17 articles in this volume demonstrate and reflect on diverse humorous forms and practices of women of French expression.
The title was inspired by YouTube humorist Natoo’s (Nathalie Odzierejko) 2014 vlog “Les femmes et l’humour,” her response to a viewer’s back-handed compliment, “Tu es drôle pour une fille!” (You’re funny for a girl!). More than a third of the volume’s pieces focus on literary works by authors ranging from Olympe Audouard to Léïla Sebbar. The remainder point to a very dynamic and broader media landscape.
Morgan also published an article in the volume, “Modern femmes d’esprit, or Rieuses of the Belle Epoque.” Part of her larger project tracing the comic and the humorous in French women’s writing in the long 19th century, this article asks what happens to the femme d’esprit (woman of wit) in the Belle Epoque. While her fortunes diminished as the century came to an end, her myth still loomed large in the cultural imaginary even as actresses, singers, dancers, and demi-mondaines rose to prominence in “gay Paris.”
At the same time, the rieuse, a less familiar figure of Belle Epoque gaiety, seems to take Paris by storm. Powerful and opposed symbols of elite and popular Paris respectively, the femme d’esprit and the rieuse were real women as well and contributed to the period’s vaunted “esprit français” (French wit). The zones in which they wielded their wit became porous, allowing them to cross paths, overlap, and even merge. Elastic and ambiguous, both terms enter into dialogue in Morgan’s consideration of a modern femme d’esprit, author Daniel Darc (Marie Régnier, 1840-1887), who first drew critical attention with her one-act comedy Les Rieuses, and the Club des Rieuses,a women-only dinner club formed by a group of Paris actresses from different theaters.
