Stand Up, Stand Out: The Making of a Comedy Movement. Directed and distributed by David Pavlosky. United States, 2020. 35 minutes.

Julia Scotti: Funny That Way. Directed by Susan Sandler. Los Angeles: GOOD DOCS, 2020. 73 minutes.

Two recent films showcase the lesser-known life and history of LGBTQ+ comedians, demonstrating the deep linkages between performance and activism. The first film, Stand Up, Stand Out: The Making of a Comedy Movement, is a poignant documentary by David Pavlovsky about the short life (1981-86) of what is believed to be the first American gay-owned and operated comedy club: The Valencia Rose. The second film, Julia Scotti: Funny That Way, follows the life of Julia Scotti, an older trans woman comedian who spent over half her comedy career presenting as a man.

Founded by Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza, The Valencia Rose is an important and often overlooked part of comedy history. Stand Up, Stand Out features interviews with comedians who were pivotal in co-creating the LGBTQ+ San Francisco comedy scene in the 1970s and 1980s. These include activist, politician, and comedian, Tom Ammiano; comedian and musician Karen Ripley; writer and comedic performer Monica Palacios; and the singing duo Ron Romanovsky and Paul Phillips. Their firsthand narratives are accompanied by scenes from their performances and archival footage of viciously homophobic right-wing media and public figures in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most poignant moments of the film features an interview with Ripley, who describes performing comedy to HIV+ patrons who came night after night, just to laugh. The Valencia Rose’s previous life as a mortuary is an apt metaphor for the film’s depiction of the intertwining of comedy and tragedy.

This film would make a wonderful companion to the study of queer nightlife, art, and the formation and creation of safer spaces. The discussion of nightlife as a safer space for the LGBTQ+ community is a useful theme throughout the film, which offers an excellent addition to a classroom exploration of safer spaces as a concept. Supplemental readings might include Moira Kenney’s book Mapping Gay L.A. (2001) or The Roestone Collective’s article “Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization” (2014). The brevity of the film (at 35 minutes) is one of its strengths, as Stand Up, Stand Out leaves ample time for discussion in a classroom.

Where Stand Up, Stand Out looks at the creation of an LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s, Julia Scotti: Funny That Way shows the heartbreak of not having one. Prior to coming out, Scotti was a popular touring stand-up comedian who worked with the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock. After she decided to transition at the age of 48 in 2000, she took eleven years off before returning to stand-up. The film showcases several of Scotti’s personal and career triumphs, including a renewed relationship with her formerly estranged adult children and her time as a contestant on America’s Got Talent.

Scotti describes her comedy prior to coming out as “hack.” And it is hackneyed, especially in comparison to the sets we see from her post-transition. This is because her recent comedy is biting and crass, but free of the punching down from her previous work. Scotti describes stand-up comedy as like “opening your soul so that everyone can see it.” Watching Scotti’s pre-transition comedy in comparison to her post-transition comedy is like watching a flower blossom.

The film does not shy away from the harm and cost of transphobia, which results in the personal repression that plagued Scotti. In a particularly heartbreaking scene, Scotti watches clips of her act from the 1980s, prior to her transition, with her son Dan. One clip is deeply homophobic, the other is aggressively transphobic. Scotti rewinds to watch it over again and yells at her past self to “shut up!” Just as her comedy now works to foster inclusion through laughter, she witnesses how it once did the opposite.

Julia Scotti is an important film, in part because it stars a type of public figure we rarely see, namely an older trans woman. There are numerous reasons for this, including that trans women have historically had a shorter life expectancy than cisgender women—due to factors like systemic and violent transphobia and a lack of material and psychological support (Landon et al. 2022)—as well as the fact that demographics of open trans women tend to skew younger (Herman, Flores, and O’Neill 2022; Statistics Canada 2022). But increasing diverse representation of trans people in front of and behind the camera is incredibly important. Studies show that media representation shapes the cisgender public’s perception of trans people (Solomon and Kurtz-Costes 2018), and media can invoke feelings of belonging for trans audiences. Texts to pair with the film for a discussion of trans representation might include Lucy J. Miller’s book, Distancing Representations in Transgender Film: Identification, Affect, and the Audience (2023), particularly the concluding chapter where Miller proposes meaningful changes to representation; and Thomas J. Billard and Erique Zhang’s article, “Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation” (2022), which takes a trans-oriented sociology of culture approach to media criticism, would also complement the film.

Both films show the historical and social contexts that gave rise to and that stifled LGBTQ+ communities. Crucially, they also demonstrate how performance is not only a tool, but a form of activism. To explore performance as activism, I would suggest an exploration of José Esteban Muñoz’s work, particularly the book Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (1999), and Jayne Wark’s book Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (2006).

Comedy can be a valuable tool in classrooms. Breaking down barriers, it can make complex social commentary palatable and understandable. While both films are suffused with comedic content, I also suggest introducing students to recent LGBTQ+ stand-up comedy, such as Hannah Gadsby’s ground-breaking special Nanette (2018) and Joel Kim Booster’s Psychosexual (2022). It would be interesting to have students consider how the present moment, with its rise in LGBTQ+ representation and growing backlash to queer visibility in politics and popular culture, reflects and/or is shaped by the recent past. Both Stand Up, Stand Out and Julia Scotti would make excellent additions to gender studies, queer studies, and performance studies syllabi, demonstrating how queer laughter is essential to queer liberation.

Madison Trusolino (madison.trusolino@dal.ca) is a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University on the first national scale study of 2SLGBTQ+ poverty in Canada. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Madison researches the intersections of precarity, sexuality, and gender, with a specific emphasis on work and workers in the arts and culture industries. Her research can be found in Feminist Media Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Communication and the Public.