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The Queer Comedy Boom: The History Of Lgbtq+ Stand-Up Comedy, Marcelle Karp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stand-up comedy has long been a straight comic’s domain. In the last decade or so, there’s been a seismic shift in that paradigm as more openly queer comics have taken their spot on the stage. This emergence has created a queer comedy boom, where queer comics are centered. There has been scant documentation on the history of queer stand-up comedy; this project does just that. It tracks the historical presence of queer stand-up comedians in the spaces these comics occupy—the stage—from the early 1900s to the current moment of the queer stand-up comedy boom, a comedic goldmine of counterhegemonic content. …