ABSTRACT
Before Eddie Murphy was “Raw,” Bill Cosby was “Himself,” or Richard Pryor hit “The Sunset Strip,” there was Jackie Moms Mabley. Adorned with toothless smile, floppy hat, oversized shoes, and floral-print housecoat, Jackie Moms Mabley would produce a stand-up variety stemming from early 20th-century vaudevillian traditions well into the mid 20th century. She would set the prototype for those notable entertainers aforementioned, participating in the cultivation and transformation of U.S. entertainment, ultimately positioning herself as the first black female comedian. Honing her monologue, weaving song and her famous softshoe shuffle, Mabley would do more than just stand-up; she would carve a space of a new variety. Using anachronistic references to the stereotypical mammy figure, as Elsie Williams notes in her seminal work on the comedienne, The Humor of Jackie Moms Mabley, Mabley would use the limits of racial, gendered, and sexual representation as a way to reinvent black female identity, speaking loudly, unabashedly, and acerbically within a public space not readily accepting of black female voices.
