“Girls and Gags”

Abstract

Once told by his teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller that “sex is your theme,” urban regionalist Reginald Marsh devoted nearly one‐third of his oeuvre to depicting burlesque shows. Instead of portraying the male comedians who were a fundamental part of burlesque during the 1930s and 1940s, Marsh consistently pictured only the scantily clad dancer and her grinning audience, suggesting that the nearly nude woman was the sole object of the audience’s laughter. This article examines the artist's frequent linking of sex with humor. It views his paintings and prints in the context of contemporary burlesque skits and girlie magazines to reveal this linkage as part of a larger trend that was vital to modern understandings of commercialized leisure and female sexuality. The distinctly grotesque flavor of Marsh’s humor and its repeated connection to sexual display suggest that the artist used humor both to capture what he saw as the modern, lewd, and popular character of the subjects he depicted, and simultaneously to mediate the potential threat of those subjects. It also may have helped both the artist and his upper‐class viewers negotiate their ambivalence toward the working‐class women in his images, and alleviate the guilt associated with desiring them. As the letters of Marsh’s primary patron William Benton show, this bawdy blend of sex and humor signaled a temporary escape into an invigorating world of lower‐class leisure for his viewers. It also aided Marsh in fashioning his own identity as a liaison into this enticingly tawdry realm.

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