Grace Kessler Overbeke's "First Lady of Laughs"

Grace Kessler Overbeke is Assistant Professor of Theatre, Comedy Writing & Performance at Columbia College, Chicago.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of First Lady of Laughs is mainly devoted to transcribing one of Jean Carroll's most famous routines, "The Racetrack Routine" in which she offers a comical peek into the goings-on at the horse races. It is one of the few pages in the book in which the reader 'hears' Carroll's voice more than my own. In that sense, it may not be strictly representative of the book as a whole, since it is an analytic biography, not simply a transcription of her work. However, I do think that the transcribed passages represent a valuable contribution of the book. Stand-up—and performance in general—is such a temporary, evanescent form. Whereas a play script can be published and endure well after the performance took place, that is not always the case with stand-up. My hope is that in the moments where the book shifts performance from the screen to the page, it is allowing that performance to broaden its reach. So in that sense, page 99 gives an accurate representation of (at least one of) the goals of the overall work. This is an interesting exercise—sort of a literary equivalent to the idea of "Every Frame a Painting" in film!

Learn more about First Lady of Laughs at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue