‘The only Orthodox Jewish woman in British stand-up comedy': Marginality, relatability and popular culture in Rachel Creeger's Pray It Forward!
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In recent decades, comedy studies have displayed a concern with understanding the power dynamics and cultural norms shaping the ‘marginal’ and ‘mainstream’ in comedy. Rarely, however, have intersecting norms concerning religion, gender and race been taken as a point of departure in this field. Through a qualitative analysis of Creeger’s 2022 set Pray It Forward! and of a semi-structured interview conducted with the comedian in August 2022, this chapter explores precisely these issues. Stand-up comedian Rachel Creeger, whose work is the central focus of this chapter, experiences particular intersecting forms of marginalization as an Orthodox Jewish woman on the normatively secular British comedy circuit. She experiences both covert misogyny and anti-Semitism, and more subtle forms of exclusion. At the same time, the frame of marginality is not always experienced by Creeger as a straightforwardly ‘negative’ thing. Instead, Creeger’s comedy complicates the frame of ‘marginality’ through an emphasis on the advantages of having a ‘unique voice’ and on the relatability of her material. Specifically, a repertoire of popular culture references in Creeger’s material blurs the imagined binary between the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ and implicitly disrupts norms concerning religion and gender entangled with this binary frame.
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Humour Jewish Culture Main Topic: Culture and Heritage Jewish Women Orthodox Judaism Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations
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9781032623887
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Link to book (paywalled), ‘The only Orthodox Jewish woman in British stand-up comedy': Marginality, relatability and popular culture in Rachel Creeger's Pray It Forward!
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‘The only Orthodox Jewish woman in British stand-up comedy': Marginality, relatability and popular culture in Rachel Creeger's Pray It Forward!. . 2024: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.4324/9781032623887
