Here we go again.This is precisely what I thought as I cracked the spine of Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars. Not because I anticipated some rehash of a liberatory mystique or an all-politics-is-personal return of the oppressed. Far from it. Nor did I expect a straightforward account of the seemingly popular awareness that prominent women are too often objects of public shaming crusades. Rather, I thought here we go again because “female-identified, feminist comedians” (3), as Amber Day maintains, are themselves “sites of battle over cultural conceptualizations of gender, race, power, and public space” (2). What is more, they are touchstones of the frontlines for “contestations around cultural values, priorities, and moral boundaries” (4). These contestations are as long-running as they are driven by whatever irks patriarchal thought-leaders at any given moment, which is no doubt why Caught in the Crosshairs also reminded me of The Onion’s numerous takes on feminism and women’s rights over the years, not to mention the pointed musings of an internet princess (more on these allusions below). Indeed, to engage with the conflicts that enveloped Day’s case studies is to be shaken by the carnival joy that seems to come with so much antifeminist and misogynistic scandalmongering, derogation, and traducement.First things first, though. Caught in the Crosshairs is not about the singular trials and tribulations of comedians like Leslie Jones, Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby. The book is about the ways that “funny women” (11) are like matches held to the fuse of whatever incendiary rhetorical devices might be deployed by those intent on preserving the dividing lines between masculinity and femininity, male and female, us and them. Crucially, Day puts to rest the staid notion that any woman using comedy to express herself has a feminist agenda and the hackneyed idea that stand-up comedy is a man’s game. And even though she retains the setup of male-dominance-versus-female-subservience in her situation of women as “sites of cultural contestation” (17), she deftly establishes the ambivalences of a comedy industry that has transformed the public sphere into an online feedlot for trolls, red-pilled chads, and soy boys. Furthermore, Day troubles the commonly held ideas that comedy is fundamentally transgressive, that all comedians tend to cross lines, and that rhetorical contests qua cultural wars are won or lost in our current moment according to the force of comic arms. The hook, of course, is that the range of what feminism can be has made so-called feminist comedians easy targets for fitful outbursts in response to their supposed transgressions. The result is that Jones, Schumer, and the others are at best the tinderboxes of much broader cultural warfare or, at worst, the comic foils of circumstantial villainy.It is therefore fitting that Day utilizes the concept of affect as her organizing principle, identifying “particular affective states” (22) that seem to correspond with each flash point she examines. Much like Sara Ahmed theorizes the cultural politics of emotion through the lenses of pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love, Day examines the “targeted trolling” and “misogynoir” (22) against Jones through the lens of ridicule; the cruel anti-feminism and “antifandom” (53) against Schumer through the lens of loathing; the cultish appeals to motherliness and true womanhood used to dress down Bee and Wolf through the lens of revulsion; and the inveterate discourses of “male rulemaking” that Gadsby uses to rail against “the toxicity of comedy norms for women and minorities” (101) and any would-be critics enabled by them through the lens of hope. It is a compelling setup.The second chapter, on Jones, offers an evocative take on all-too-commonplace digital harassment by recalling the torrent of taunting, menace, and torment that came after Jones was cast in the 2016 all-female reboot of the 1984 comedy horror film Ghostbusters. While Jones most certainly took the brunt of abuse from “aggrieved male fans” (28), with a good deal of invective centering on “her embodiment as both Black and female” (33), those staking claims in a “traditionally white, male space” (29) had bigger fish to fry. As Day observes, there were resonances of internet publics that coalesced around the Gamergate movement. There were resonances, too, of all the talk about Social Justice Warriors, spurred on by the once prolific and influential far-right political activist and provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote a scathing review of the film upon its release. The film thus became an object lesson in who has cultural rights of trespass (and who does not). Simply put, according to Day, there are male territories and white territories, and those who do not conform are at risk of the sort of asymmetric rhetorical warfare promoted in online public spheres.These spheres widen in chapter 3 when Day situates Schumer “as an object of deceit and repulsion, the personification of feminism as a threat to patriarchal norms” (43). Her sketch comedy show Inside Amy Schumer initially attracted a lot of positive attention. She was vulgar, and her characters were often “vapid or vain” (45), but Schumer looked the part and was just self-deprecating enough to win praise for making fun of a man’s-world ethos at the same time as she depicted how “women can be complicit in shoring up some of the most pernicious aspects of patriarchy” (48). So, she was attacked from all sides, labeled a poseur, called antiwoman, deemed a radical (or, more harshly, a strictly white) feminist, accused of being racially insensitive, et cetera. In short, Schumer became a victim of misogynists and female antifans alike. Consequently, as Day argues convincingly, she came to typify “the power structures contemporary popular feminism threatens and the ones it often unwittingly upholds” (60). Jones, even with her big and loud persona, was largely an unwitting mark. Schumer, however, wanted to be a mark. She welcomed the vitriol, instigated it, even invited it. The problem that Day exposes in both instances is that feminism tends to be a comic failure from the get-go.What makes Bee and Wolf different as comedic twins, so to speak, is that they refused to grant that premise. In 2018, Wolf took to the stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner and lambasted then White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in one instance likening her to Aunt Lydia from the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Why? Because, in Wolf’s telling, Sanders enforced “a regime of brutal misogyny and cruelty” in doing President Donald J. Trump’s bidding during his first administration by “lying, bullying, and actively working against the interests of other women” (69). Sanders was not amused. She made that clear by sneering at Wolf during her performance and then casting her after the fact as a “bitter feminist” while representing herself as an “innocent wife and mother” just trying to pursue happiness (71). Similarly, in a segment for her show Full Frontal in 2018, Bee excoriated Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, for posting an image of her with her young son on Instagram at the same time her father was implementing family separation policies among immigrant communities. Some might have seen Ivanka as an emblem of ideal womanhood. Bee dubbed her a “feckless cunt.” The commentary about these performances revolved around how the monstrous comedic content undermined whatever critical message they might have contained, and characterized “the performers themselves as outside the boundaries of polite society” (73). They were just too brash, too blunt, too unscrupulous in their rhetoric to be acceptable, let alone tolerable as women, as feminists in good faith, as models of femininity.Forlorn hopes. Especially if the message is deemed to be as rotten as the messenger. But what about the medium? According to Day, the conviction that there is hope if there is comedy only holds if the comedy industry is held to account, and never more so than when comedians intimate how to make advances in the culture wars. In their Netflix stand-up special Nanette (2018), the Australia-born and “relatively unknown butch lesbian” (84) Hannah Gadsby took to the Sydney Opera House with a set predicated on rejecting “the industry pressures” (88) that contributed to their own longstanding willingness to do humiliating, self-deprecating humor. Repeatedly referencing their story of trauma and ill-treatment in what amounts to a commentary on “the comic degradation of women” (89), Gadsby explains their inability—or, more accurately, unwillingness—to continue doing comedy as usual. Gadsby was largely praised for Nanette, especially considering its coincidence with the #MeToo movement. Still, people wondered aloud if the comedy special was actually comedy. Their next special, Douglas (2020), raised the same question insofar as it featured Gadsby defying the expectations of masculinist rule-makers that they previously abided to make fun of the very foolish wisdom that comedy is as men do it.All of this leads neatly into Day’s affirmative conclusion. The career of this or that comedian “ebbs and flows” (106), she says, as has that of Jones, Schumer, and the others. And culture moves on, proving that no cultural imaginary can be reduced to a single person or issue or, in this case, any single woman or construct like gender; it can only be understood through attention to the “constant discursive struggle” (112) over standards, genres, norms, and conventions as they pertain to matters of speech, public space, and possibly comedy itself. If there is comedy there is hope.Caught in the Crosshairs does bring me back, though, to the comic truths in The Onion’s infographic from August 2016, on the eve of Trump’s first presidential victory. It offered a “Timeline of the Feminist Movement” that began with Eve eating the forbidden fruit as “the first recorded act of civil disobedience” and ended with feminism getting “dealt a crippling blow by YouTube user TruthMaster 69.” Day’s book also hearkens to observations made in late 2022 by the Internet Princess (alias of Substack writer Rayne Fisher-Quann), cataloging as they did the rituals of misogyny, sexualized obloquy, and meninist-styled insults meant to inflict rhetorical injuries such that “there will always be a woman who we feel deserves to be punished” and is thus “placed between the public crosshairs.” Or, as she lamented in the title of her post: “Here we go again, and again, and again.”How to square these sentiments and the struggles Day documents in her case studies with, say, the controversy comedian Matt Rife courted after telling the domestic violence joke heard ‘round the world in his 2023 special Natural Selection? Or his “comical” lack of remorse in response to the backlash? Or his unapologetic stance in the subsequent world tour titled ProbleMATTic? Is this where Iliza Shlesinger’s so-called “digestible feminism” comes in, with its appeal in her special A Different Animal (2025) to making women laugh while tricking men into believing in our own knack for being what that infographic from The Onion labeled male TV characters from 1950s sitcoms—shambling fools?Caught in the Crosshairs might have better equipped me to answer these questions if Day had brought the affective element full circle. She did not. And so this book is an exceptional, necessary marking of the spirit of the times, but one that tempts what Simone de Beauvoir identified as the torture of Sisyphus more than an acceptance that the comic possibilities of feminist comedians are part and parcel of uphill struggles. Some culminate in freedom at the mountaintop. Others—tragically, laughingly—turn feminism into the eternal return.
Christopher J. Gilbert (Wed,) studied this question.