Uncovering Stand-Up Comedy’s Feminist Media History
Samantha Silver's “'Funnier Than Moms Mabley': The Stand-Up Comedy of Hattie Noel," winner of the SCMS Gender and Feminisms Caucus Graduate Student Writing Award, is published in the current Winter 2025 issue of Feminist Media Histories. The issue (which in addition to including Silver's article, focuses on Camille Billops and James V. Hatch) is free to read online during Black History Month. We recently asked Silver to tell us more about the trailblazing career of comedian, actor, and singer Hattie Noel.
Who is Hattie Noel?
Hattie Noel is the best comedian you’ve never heard of! She performed from the 1930s to the 1960s and was part of the emergence of stand-up comedy as a recognizable genre. She put out several early 1960s live comedy albums with Black-owned record label Dooto Records. She toured with Bessie Smith as a comic blues singer, and she had small parts in several Hollywood films. Her stand-up comedy LPs from the early 1960s offer a Black feminist perspective on the civil rights movement, and her career shows how blues performance and stand-up comedy performance have a shared history and other commonalities.
What is the article about?
This article tells the story of Hattie Noel through analysis of her comedy albums and career in entertainment as a comedian, actor, and blues singer. Her career reveals connections between the history of the blues and stand-up comedy that have previously been overlooked by scholars. She is not a well-known figure even within comedy and humor studies circles, but she did appear in several major Hollywood films. She was often the maid, but she also posed as a figure model for Disney, which animators use to draw animated figures. Her body was the model for the dancing hippo in Disney’s Fantasia. This poses an interesting example of how mainstream Hollywood positioned her as the butt of the joke, while she herself was an incredible comedian. When she took the stage as a stand-up comedian in Black-owned clubs and on the Black-owned record labels, she could use humor to her advantage. As a dancing hippo, she was laughed at.
Where did you get the title “Funnier than Moms Mabley”?
I was personally fascinated the many expressive phrases and monikers used to promote Hattie Noel’s albums. For example, she was hailed as “the most hilarious funmaker on wax” and as “funnier than Moms Mabley” by Walter “Dootsie” Williams who wrote on the backs of Hattie Noel’s albums. The Mabley connection is also interesting, because she is much more well-known historically, but Noel shows that she at least had competition from other Black women comics.
One of the most fascinating stories in this article is Hattie Noel’s relationship to Disney animation and her role in Fantasia. Can you tell us more about that?
Though she is not a well-known figure, and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, if you’ve ever watched Disney’s Fantasia, or if you’ve seen the image of the animated dancing hippo in a tutu, then you’ve seen the image of Hattie Noel. She is etched into the history of entertainment, but she was simultaneously defining a new art form that emerged from her performance of the comic blues and expanded through the use of the LP to be sold as stand-up comedy. In the piece, I detail the grotesque and dehumanizing ways her image was used by animators and how it exists in stark contrast to her comedy performances on stage and on vinyl.
Congratulations on winning the 2023 Graduate Student Essay Award! How do you see your article contributing to the Gender and Feminisms Caucus of SCMS?
Hattie Noel’s story reveals how women, and specifically Black women, were some of the earliest stand-up comedians, despite it being understood as a male genre. That she was also a Black woman who spoke openly about sexual pleasure and offered her own particular critique of the way things were helps paint a clearer picture of the way race and gender intersect, and the ways that forgetting Black history also leads to an erasure of women’s role in history. I am also thrilled to be included in this special issue with some of my academic heroes, especially Joshua Chambers-Letson, Ruth Feldstein, and Miriam Petty, whose work has been influential to me.
What does it meant to you to be featured as part of Black History Month?
As a white scholar, I recognize my in recovering Black history is at a disadvantage by being an outsider to the Black community. But I also see enormous value in all scholars of all backgrounds recognizing Black expressive culture’s impact on the history of stand-up comedy. As a comedy and humor studies scholar, I was eager to tell this story and let her name be spoken and known as an important figure in U.S. cultural and media history. My hope is that shining a light on these histories of Black women comics and the sonic archives of their LPs will put her Noel and other Black women back into the limelight in comedy’s history. Black history is American history, and Black history is comedy history.
We invite you to read “'Funnier Than Moms Mabley': The Stand-Up Comedy of Hattie Noel" and FMH's issue 11.1 for free online during Black History Month 2025.
POD copies of issue 11.1 can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to HSNS, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.
About the Author
Samantha Silver, Ph.D. recently received her doctorate in American Studies from George Washington University in D.C. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the English & Creative Writing department at Susquehanna University in Central Pennsylvania. “'Funnier Than Moms Mabley': The Stand-Up Comedy of Hattie Noel" is part of her manuscript, “A Blues Singer and a Drag Queen Walk into a Bar: A History of Stand-up Comedy,” which analyzes early comedy albums using methods in sound studies, gender studies, and literary studies to show how Black women blues singers, Jewish lounge acts, and drag queens influenced the history of stand-up comedy in the United States.