SOURCE: “What We Laugh about When We Laugh about Stephen Sondheim's Assassins,” in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 105–23.

In the following essay focused on Assassins, Fulk and Howard examine the dysfunctional family, both biological and adoptive, as the cause of each killer's actions and as the source of their personal and political discontent. They also focus on Sondheim's gender abasement within the musical and the use of guns as phallic symbols.

The culmination of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's musical Assassins, at least from a comic standpoint, is the failed assassination(s) of Gerald Ford. In this scene (scene 13), Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore join forces in an attempt to gun down the President in a public park. Through the ineptness of both women, Ford escapes unharmed. All three of the characters are portrayed as ineffectual: Moore cannot control her gun, Fromme cannot...