Preface / Regina Barreca -- Introduction: Dorothy Parker's Headache / Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon, Sean Zwagerman -- Laughing Aphrodite / Laurie O'Higgins -- Comedy in Ancient Greece and Rome: What Was Funny, Whose Humor Was It, and How Do We Explain the Jokes Without Killing Them? / Barbara Gold -- Mary and Her Sisters / Anne Higgins -- Feminist Humor Without Women: The Challenge of Reading (in) the Middle Ages / Lisa Perfetti -- Laugh, or Forever Hold Your Peace: Comic Crowd Control in Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Prologues and Epilogues / Diana Solomon -- Domestic Manners of the Americans: A Transatlantic Phenomenon / Linda A. Morris -- The Business of British Burlesque / Jacky Bratton -- The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque / Joanna Mansbridge -- Elsie and Doris Waters: Four Songs / Paul Matthew St. Pierre -- "I'm Daphne": On the Comedy of Cross-Dressing and Metamorphosis in Wilder's Some Like It Hot, Lubitsch's I Don't Want to Be a Man, and Ovid's / Metamorphoses / Kay Young -- Biting the Hand That Feeds Her: Patronage and Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Theater / Gilli Bush-Bailey -- Out of the Box: Comedy in Disability Theater by Canadian Women / Kirsty Johnston -- Humoring the Female Pol: Irony, Consciousness-Raising, and "Third-Culture" Discourse / Tarez Samra Graban -- A Cautionary Tale: Ann Coulter and the Failure of Humor / Sean Zwagerman -- Lesbian Stand-Up Comics and the Politics of Laughter / Joanne Gilbert -- Layla Siddiqui as Holy Fool in Little Mosque on the Prairie / Shannon Hengen -- Postmodernity and the Gendered Uses of Political Satire / Lisa Colletta -- Coda: Try This at Home / Peter Dickinson.