In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy by Shawn Levy

In an era when Ali Wong, Tiffany Haddish, Hannah Gadsby, and so many other women comics seem to dominate streaming TV, it’s hard to imagine a time when stand-up comedy was essentially a boys’ club.

In the latter years of vaudeville, in the Vegas and Borscht Belt showrooms of the 1940s and 1950s, and on most of the early TV variety shows, the joke tellers were almost exclusively men. As late as 1979, TV’s leading comedy kingmaker, Johnny Carson, confessed that women comics “sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.”