Weathering the Comic Storm: On Being Trans and Funny

Beginning in the aftermath of a collapsed avant-garde proletarian poetry scene with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this essay explores the journey of two comedians as we participated in a transphobic local open mic stand-up comedy scene. Situating trans people at the intersection of funny (haha) and funny (strange), I argue that an atmosphere of transphobia involving a push-and-pull of repulsion and intimacy constitutes specific stand-up comedy spaces and stand-up comedy as a social practice. While trans people practicing stand-up comedy can contest these spaces, it also involves a process of weathering that may be unsustainable for its practitioners, inclining stand-up comedy towards an exclusive culture or in-crowd that trades in misogyny, transphobia and their intersection in transmisogyny. Nevertheless, there are efforts to contest these dynamics and they are not set in stone. This analysis complicates accounts of subversive humor in feminist philosophy of humor by showcasing the instability of social affects and atmospheres. The essay is interspersed with several unpublished and/or rejected poems.