SOURCE: “Alice Childress's Like One of the Family: Domestic and Undomesticated Domestic Humor,” in Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy, edited by Gail Finney, Gordon and Breach, 1994, pp. 221-29.

In the following essay, Dresner identifies rebellion as the link between the humor of the white suburban housewife and the African-American domestic worker.

What has been termed “domestic” or “housewife” humor emerged in post-World War II America in response to the back-to-the-home antifeminist sentiment engendered by the political conservatism that considered any threat to the status quo a sign of creeping Communism. Characterized as a body of humorous writing in which the autobiographical persona of a harried, white middle-class housewife describes her frantic and often unsuccessful efforts to cope with life in the slow lane—in the family and home-centered environment of the new postwar suburbs—the domestic or housewife humor popularized by such writers as Shirley Jackson, Jean...