B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022competition they feel from a woman with a
sense of humor (I can’t hear you) seem to me
to be deaf, dumb and blind. All the women in
this volume had to endure that and worse. No
one’s parents wanted their daughters to go
into comedy. For the women who wanted to be
actresses or singers, those careers weren’t
quite as embarrassing — but the stage was not
an elegant or appropriate setting for a young
lady, especially a young lady who was in want
of a husband.
“In on the Joke” demonstrates how tough
the work was — incessant travel, leaving one’s
family for weeks at a time just to get heckled
onstage or fondled backstage, doesn’t seem so
fun. Levy spends too much time calculating
what a 1959 paycheck would be today. We get
it: inflation.
Of his nine exemplars, only one is still alive:
Elaine May. I was so looking forward to
reading Levy’s interview with her and disap-
pointed that her profile was written without
her input. At the end of his book, Levy does list
some of the more successful working comics
who are women. They are not funny despite
being women, and they are not funny because
they are women. They are funny. Here’s
looking at you, Amy Schumer.Sullivan or Johnny Carson,” Levy writes. As a
late-night talk show host, Carson helped
manage the door to fame for female stand-up
acts. His feud with Joan Rivers is a poignant
chapter in this book. Needless to say, there is
no longer any single television impresario
with that kind of omnipotence.
Female stand-ups also benefited from the
era of TV variety shows — hodgepodge
programs filled with something for everyone,
like Carol Burnett’s long-running show. It
seemed like every performer of the ’60s and
’70s had a variety show — Sonny and Cher,
Glen Campbell, Dean Martin, Rowan and
Martin — all names that now have the scent of
a musty vintage wardrobe and that are
scarcely known to younger audiences. The
shows were generally an hour long, and guest
stars would do an abbreviated edition of their
act and perform gamely with an almost Las
Vegas-style company of singers and dancers.
(Famously, David Bowie once sang “The Little
Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby. Get the
picture?) Now they seem laughably old
school, but that was the 20th-century version
of exposure to a broad audience.
Of all the paths to fame and equality in our
less-than-fair culture, comedy seems to be
among the more retrograde. Those hoary
complaints that women aren’t funny (yawn),
that funny women aren’t feminine enough
(gag) and that men can’t stand the implicithaps she was a real-life inspiration for “The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” an idea Levy floats a
few times.
The reason Minnie Pearl caught me by
surprise, it turns out, is that her persona was
completely invented and invested in by one
Sarah Ophelia Colley, a graduate of posh
Ward-Belmont College, where she was a
theater major. Though not a fan of the
“hillbilly” arts of the Grand Ole Opry, Colley
auditioned for it and was a huge hit on the
radio institution for years, until she had to
figure out what Minnie Pearl would look like
on the new medium of television. The cos-
tume in which she became famous was a
hastily improvised purchase at a Nashville
thrift shop. She died, after a long career, as an
eminence in Nashville.
Levy salts his texts with anecdotes about
Bob Hope, who could make comedians stars
by featuring them as guests on his many USO
tours and TV specials. Ed Sullivan, the Broad-
way columnist turned Sunday night TV host
(when the country had three networks and
only seven channels, everyone watched him),
was even more powerful. Hope and Sullivan
let Phyllis Diller and other female joke-tellers
walk through their velvet ropes, but the men
also kept out many would-be entertainers
such as Belle Barth, who was arrested numer-
ous times for obscenity. She told dirty jokes.
“She knew she was never going to be on Edher extreme distress is widely shared by other
patients? At a small neighborhood support
group, she learns that “none of us received
egregiously bad care, but we all felt that no
health care professionals were really looking
out for us.”
What further evidence of compassion dys-
function does she provide? A shocking 250,000
patients die every year in the United States
from medical errors. Regarding health care
generally, Black Americans fare worse than
Whites, dying of cancer more than any other
racial or ethnic group. Among female breast
cancer patients, Black women die at almost
twice the rate of Whites.
These failures are profound, and it’s critical
to figure out in what ways they may relate to
failures of compassion. Certainly professional
compassion may confer direct benefits: Surgi-
cal patients who had pre-op visits from nurses
trained in compassionate care, for instance,
rated their postoperative pain 50 percent lower
than patients who did not.
Is the email equivalent of yelling at medical
workers the right way to proceed when the
health-care system does fail? Brown antici-from her previous work as a nurse, first in
oncology and later in hospice. She saw the
doctor that next week (and was told the timing
change had nothing to do with her medical
connections but instead with a call from her
husband). Within five minutes, through the use
of an equation on a computer, the doctor
announced that no chemo was required.
Delays really rattle Brown. Post-treatment,
she had a mammogram on the Wednesday
before the Labor Day weekend. That Friday
morning, she emailed the scan coordinator
saying she expected to receive the results that
day. A reply came that radiologists were read-
ing her scan, but the day wore on and no results
arrived. Brown exploded: “Do your damn job,”
she emailed, then took to Twitter to complain.
I empathize with Brown’s anxiety. Diag-
nosed in 2013 with serous papillary uterine
cancer, a rare and aggressive variety, I went
through the full “cut poison burn” treatment of
surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. But both
my cancer surgeon and my medical oncologist,
who together coordinated my care team, em-
bodied all the values of compassion Brown says
were lacking in her care. Is Brown certain thatBook WorldHEALING
When a Nurse
Becomes a
Patient
By Theresa
Brown
Algonquin.
258 pp. $27.95IN ON THE JOKE
The Original
Queens of
Stand-Up
Comedy
By Shawn Levy
Doubleday.
383 pp. $30B
efore I started reading “In on the Joke:
The Original Queens of Stand-Up Com-
edy,” I was reasonably sure I was not
interested in learning about Minnie Pearl
(1912-1996), the country-styled comedian who
wore a straw hat with a price tag hanging off
the side and opened her act by bellowing
“Howdy!” I was certain I was familiar with
Joan Rivers’s biography as we had briefly
worked together on a project and I had been a
fan of hers for years.
But Shawn Levy, whose previous books
include biographies of Jerry Lewis and the
Rat Pack, has done a sensitive job telling the
stories of the nine pioneering women he has
designated as those who cracked the glass
ceiling of comedy.
Jackie “Moms” Mabley was a Black ex-
vaudevillian born in 1894 (or 1897; birth date
is in dispute) in North Carolina who ran away
with a theatrical troupe, ending up in Pitts-
burgh playing in a variety-show sketch called
“The Rich Aunt in Utah.” Vaudeville, especial-
ly on the less-affluent Black tour, required a
performer to sing, dance, tell jokes — and do it
multiple times a day, 30 shows per week.
Entertainers might couple up, like “Buck and
Bubbles,” or emerge a star in their own right,
like the actress Ethel Waters and the musician
Fats Waller. Mabley’s grandparents had been
enslaved. Her road to “The Merv Griffin
Show” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour” was the least likely of any of her
contemporaries, especially as she performed
her act in a housedress and a cap and, later,
often without her teeth, playing elderly before
she even was. Her material was risque, and
she was a barely closeted lesbian. Her journey
was made possible on the Chitlin’ Circuit, the
network of nightclubs and theaters that
catered to Black entertainers and audiences
in the 1930s and ’40s. Many famous musicians
such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie
Holliday and Sammy Davis Jr. got their start
at these venues. At Harlem’s renowned Apollo
Theater, Mabley killed.
I’d never heard of an entertainer named
Jean Carroll, but like several of the stars in
this book, she began her performing life as a
singer-dancer. When she added jokes to her
repertoire in the 1940s, the term “stand-up
comic” hadn’t yet been coined. (That would
happen in 1950, by Variety, the trade maga-
zine.) She was called a “comic monologist,”
and she was famous for being attractive. From
a review: “Miss Carroll does not hurt her
cause by being lovely to look at and by
enunciating like an elocution teacher.... Her
timing is faultless and the laughs follow each
other in almost unending succession.” Per-Nine female comedianswho broke the glassceiling — and l aughedHISTORY REVIEW BY LISA BIRNBACHpates the question by noting that some readers
may think she asks “for too much” — and then
holds firm. Admirably, she does not exempt her
own nursing from scrutiny, telling lively stories
about her interactions with patients and find-
ing that she could at times have done more. She
concludes that change can’t come primarily
from the individual level in a system “focused
on profits” in ways that cause staff to be terribly
overworked, and that universal health care
would be a major step forward.
Following her treatment, Brown suffered
from fatigue and brain fog on the tamoxifen she
took for years to prevent cancer recurrence.
Happily, she did eventually emerge from “can-
cer’s long shadow.” Now recovered and working
as a writer, she pleads powerfully for systemic
change so that patients’ needs will be seen and
addressed in ways hers were not.Barbara J. King , professor emerita at William &
Mary, is the author of several books on
anthropology and animals, including “How Animals
Grieve.” Her latest book is “Animals’ Best Friends:
Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in
Captivity and in the Wild.”JOHN DURICKA/ASSOCIATED PRESSSarah Ophelia
Colley performs as
Minnie Pearl at the
Grand Ole Opry in
Nashville in 1974.
She had a long
career in radio and
television; her
famous costume
was bought at a
thrift shop.Lisa Birnbach is a writer in New York. She co-
wrote and edited “The Official Preppy Handbook”
and wrote “True Prep.”O
n the day Theresa Brown received a
preliminary breast cancer diagnosis at a
Pittsburgh hospital, she learned that a
biopsy was needed to confirm the news and
that it would be arranged before she left the
premises that day. In shock and leaking tears,
Brown made her way to the scheduling desk.
Before long a receptionist told her that she had
“just missed” the scheduler, whose shift ended
at 3. In fact, it was just then 3 o’clock precisely;
the scheduler had departed early.
“I wanted to slam the receptionist into the
wall,” Brown writes. “I wanted to punch her in
the stomach and as she doubled over, gasping
for breath, smash my fist into the bridge of her
nose. I wanted to hear bone crack.”
This incandescent anger fuels Brown’s mem-
oir, “Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient.”
Brown offers no gushing gratitude for her care
team, nor thankfulness for a chance at personal
growth stemming from a life-threatening ill-
ness; she wants no part of the “cancer is a gift”
approach. What she does offer lifts “Healing”
above the usual fare in the ever-expanding
genre of illness memoir: an unflinching look by
a former nurse at the lack of compassion in our
health-care system and the harms that patients
suffer because of it. A longtime contributor to
the New York Times on health-care issues,
Brown writes with a winning combination of
passion, humor and medical knowledge.
She describes compassion in health care as
“effective communication, emotional support,
trust and respect, mutual decision-making,
and treating patients as people, not just illness-
es.” This is exactly what her care lacked: “My
treatment took place at a so-called cancer
center, but no one there did anything to man-
age my fear or calm my soul by explaining the
process. ... No one — except for the ultrasound
tech — told me, ‘We can treat this.’”
In fact, Brown’s breast cancer, a variety of
ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, was invasive
(found outside the milk duct) but very much
treatable. It was of the type ER+/PR+, positive
for the hormones estrogen and progesterone,
and HER2-, negative for human epidermal
growth factor receptor 2. Brown writes with
keen awareness that, at least in the dark hierar-
chies of Cancerworld, she was comparatively
lucky.
Yet she describes delays and dysfunction
that repeatedly made a stressful experience
more stressful. Originally, only radiation was
planned, but then chemotherapy was consid-
ered as an option; if needed, it would precede
radiation. She had an appointment with a
medical oncologist six weeks out and could find
nothing sooner. Here was “a classic catch-22”:
The delay meant she couldn’t know quickly if
chemo was necessary, and she couldn’t begin
radiation until she knew whether chemo was
necessary.
Desperate, Brown called on her connectionsA former nurse calls out the lack of compassion in the health-care systemMEMOIR REVIEW BY BARBARA J. KINGNICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTheresa Brown
laments that
compassion —
which she says
entails “ effective
communication,
emotional support,
trust and respect,
mutual decision-
making, and
treating patients as
people, not just
illnesses” — is in
short supply in
medical settings.