Television has often been considered a safe haven for female performers, especially comedians. But in fact, women have often been marginalized – narratively and institutionally – within the medium of television. While there has been a promising increase in the number of creative and professional opportunities afforded to women in TV, there is one arena in which women have historically been, and continue to be, excluded: late-night comedy. As the first female late-night talk show host, Joan Rivers is central to the history of broadcast television and American comedy. While some (but not much) work has centered on Rivers’ impact as a comedian, little of this research has contextualized her career through the industrial frameworks of late-night broadcasting. From starting out as a standup comedian, to becoming Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host in the 1980s, to acrimoniously splitting with Carson and NBC for the opportunity to host her own late-night program, Rivers creatively performed her gender in order to differentiate herself as the singular female host in late night. From a feminist media studies perspective coupled with a historical analysis of Rivers’ professional trajectory in late-night comedy, this thesis will uncover the systemic, personal, and gender-specific factors that contributed to Rivers’ initial success, yet ultimate exile from late night.

There is a discursive formation of incapability that surrounds senior women's sexuality. Senior women are incapable of reproduction, mastering their bodies, or arousing sexual desire in themselves or others. The senior actresses' I explore in the case studies below insert their performances of self and their everyday lives into the large and complicated discourse of sex, producing a counter-narrative to sexually inactive senior women. Their performances actively embody their sexuality outside the frame of a character. This thesis examines how senior actresses' performances of sexuality extend a discourse of sexuality imposed on older woman by mass media. These women are the public face of senior women's sexual agency. The women I use as case studies are crucial because they perform sexually on screen as well as in their everyday lives. Their personae engage and intervene in the discursive formation of incapability outside traditional modes of performance. The performances of Kirstie Alley, Cloris Leachman Joan Rivers and Betty White transgress the invisible but well documented boundary between bodies that can be sexed and bodies that can't. Transgressing this boundary allows these older actresses to become active agents in their sexual lives. Sexual confessions, performances of personae, and citations of previous senior women performers facilitate senior women's sexual performances. The case studies that follow illustrate how these elements work together to create sexual representations of senior women that are not always accepted by audiences, but are still able to intervene into the larger discourse of senior women's sexual incapability.

Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, and Lisa Lampanelli as performers demonstrate an arc of evolving female empowerment in the world of stand-up comedy. In this thesis I shall study the development of each woman’s career by examining her material, progression of her comic persona, and relationship to women’s gender roles, both personally and professionally. While there are many other female comics who contribute to the story of women’s stand-up comedy in the contemporary period (in particular, Moms Mabley and Elayne Boosler), Diller, Rivers and Lampanelli each represent a distinct shift in how their persona combined with subject matter, allowing women to break new barriers in terms of comic performance. Diller’s comedy carved a space for Rivers’, and Rivers’ comedy carved a space for the likes of Lampanelli. In viewing the trajectory of their effect on comedy as a whole, we can see how each woman asserted herself in stand-up performance, and forever changed the nature of who was allowed to get up on stage, and also, what they were allowed to say by their audiences. To quote Joan Rivers, “First there was a gasp…and then there was a laugh” (Rivers “Piece of Work”).