Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show as Embodied Meta Comedy

Abstract: This article presents a performance analysis of One Woman Show by Liz Kingsman, based on a viewing of the show’s 2023 run in New York at the Greenwich House Theater. Written and performed by Kingsman, One Woman Show parodies the titular genre, satirizing the hypocrisies and paradoxes that women performing solo comedic material must navigate. In doing so, it offers a rich case study to examine in concert with scholarship on women and comedy, which often focuses on the binaries that circumscribe women’s ability to function as joke-tellers in a patriarchal society. Whereas theorists such as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn uphold approaches to humor based in the materiality of the comic body, Kingsman’s show critiques the overexposure of the explicit, “unruly” body in women’s comedy. The show questions a performer’s ability to tell an authentic story in such a highly constructed genre and highlights the readiness with which women’s expressions of sexual desire turn back around into exploitation and objectification. Kingsman’s performance, however, constantly finds ways to distance and displace any true scrutiny of her person onto another surface, layering multiple narrative frameworks, timelines, and personas across her single body. I argue that the many-layered frameworks of One Woman Show function as a form of comic embodiment that displaces materiality in favor of theatricality. With this “embodied meta comedy,” Kingsman offers a strategy of representation that is self-aware without resorting to self-deprecation, using the body as a tool without it reading as an object.