Not Just for Laughs: Women, Performance, and Humour
By Tanya Mars

By 1972, women artists begin to take up video and performance with a vengeance. In contrast to other forms of art where there were already established rules and canons, these media provided a safe haven for women to explore their bodies, their politics, and their humour. In Toronto, it was The Hummer Sisters who most successfully explored and exploited the use of video in performance.

Straddling the line between performance and experimental theatre, The Hummer Sisters created extravagant, multimedia political satires that addressed timely feminist issues, but also looked to more specific political subjects, particularly local civic politics. Smart, savvy characters were played by the four, who were backed by a live band (The Government, in the 1970s) and banks of TV monitors which provided them with a rich cast of onscreen characters. Technically complex, and intellectually rigorous, the Hummers were harsh political critics, and no politician, at home or abroad, could escape the scrutiny of their scathing wit:

Born in the crossfire of rock and TV
Suckled by the CBS news
Studied history and ethics and Disneyland
Served under General foods
Went AWOL with Janis and Jimi
Got fat on imported dues
Paid in Alabama and Vietnam
By cats in blue suede shoes

In an interview with Deanne Taylor and Janet Burke, Taylor describes the main themes of the Hummers’ works:

There are two types of content in the scripts. One is about girls and boys and sex and bodies, very much about the bodies. From the beginning, part of being post-feminist was being post-birth control pills, post-invasive body changing, hormone changing. Big science versus the body is one of my favourite subjects because it’s sort of like big media versus the mind. It’s all about the media invading and dumbing down and treating us all as consumers and widgets in the great industrial machine, that all the problems are fixable by science and mechanics. All those things offend me deeply. Whether they are doing it to the hamburger or my ovaries. So the early plays were a big mix of current events…

As self-proclaimed “post-feminist, urban guerrilla, girl-next-door rock stars,” the Hummers tackled subjects that loomed large in the media and public consciousness. In Nympho Warrior (1972), The Hummer Sisters guide us through the female cycle of reproduction vs. desire. “Lunar tick, lunar tock, watcha got? Got the hots!” They offer female audience members valuable birth control information, as well as insights into the ever-complex world of male/female relationships. In addition, as archaeologists for the Ministry of Nymphomania, the women go on a quest for enlightenment to the Lost Continent of the Male Vagina:

You lucky people…here in these hallowed halls. Here in the glow of mutual surveillance. The great themes, the great questions pose themselves in attitudes of stern reproach. Begging an answer…What’s the matter? What IS the matter? (I don’t know.)

The structure of Nympho Warrior included a live band, singing, live video feed, smart lyrics and dialogue, and drawing – a true multimedia extravaganza. The content of Nympho Warrior is full of puns and innuendo, revealing a kind of tough-broad, uppity feminist humour.

Q: You know what happened to the woman who stopped struggling?
A: She ended up with a mink coat.

Later in the 1970s, they looked to international news stories as the inspiration for their elaborate narratives. The Bible As told to Karen Ann Quinland and The Patty Rehearst Story, were two of the early works that questioned the sanity of authority:

Cleaning up the mess. Sisters
Your bodies are occupied
territory, bristling with
IUD installations, humming
with chemical sterility,
invaded by vacuums and
knives. Sisters wipe those
smiles off your faces and
chew a big wad of garlic
at all times. Find someone to
marry, don’t fuck under the
full moon, less is more, have a nice baby, habdullah, allah y’allah.
No one wants to confess in the closet anymore.
New chroniclers. New contenders. Not one of them wants
to play Jesus. They all want to play God.
The corridors of power are lit up like a catwalk.

Humour is indeed a very serious business, and in the hands of women who create feminist humour it is a very seriously subversive business. As Barreca notes, “…humour is often directed at any institutional body of regulations…Any set of rules needs needling, needs the perspective humour can offer…”The Hummer Sisters, exemplary feminist needlers, belted out lyrics with a lusty, raunchy gusto that got right to the core of the issues:

PATTY: …we must learn to speak in headlines
DRUMS/SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ALL STARS: No sex without work no work without sex
A woman’s business office
Is a Moonlit Deck. Yeah!
ROCKY: What did we ever do before dialectical Infantalism?
PATTY: I was a successful princess.
CRYSTAL: I was a vivisectionist.
ROCKY: I slept all the time.

Blunt and pushy, The Hummer Sisters let you know exactly what to expect when you mess with Bad Girls, just in case you thought you could get away with something:

She’ll cut you dead. Fast or slow. She’ll stick it in
She’ll stick it on you.
And suck the life from you.
She’ll cut your lumps off and
Put them in a yogurt thing and
Save them in the fridge.
She’ll cut your toenails off
And put them in a little Kleenex in her pocket.
She hands you things that explode in your mouth
She’ll smear blood on your bed and whisper your name
To the other zombies.
She listens to your breathing and presses on your heart
To make it stop.
She fits herself to you
As close as a skin.
The she peels you down to the jelly. She’ll fuck you silly and
While you’re sleeping
She’ll clean up your floor
She’ll clean up your table and
Your ashtray and your donuts and
Your papers and your matters and your mood and
Your manners and your memory and when you wake up
And you won’t know who you are or
What you did and I’ll tell you.
You’re a dead man. Amnesiac castrati

And they remind you that:

You can have my body
Just stay out of my mind
Out of my mind
Out of my mind.
Screwing you is Our business.

In 1980, The Hummer Sisters ran for mayor of Toronto against Art Eggleton, a conservative politician who was opening unsupportive of the arts. Running on the campaign slogan ART vs. Art, Janet Burke, Deanne Taylor, and Jenny Dean gripped the imagination of the public. According to Burke, “We ran basically because Art Eggleton was running uncontested. It was a shoe-in for him…we thought, this is our moment and off we went.” The Cameron House was campaign headquarters for the Hummers. Deanne Taylor and Janet Burke describe how the whole idea came about.

D: I was doing the usual griping about local politics when everyone else was more concerned about Nicaragua. That was what I found with most of the progressive, thoughtful, educated, passionate people in the city with very good hearts – they focussed internationally on all kinds of problems in other countries…But you could not get anyone the slightest bit interested in local politics…I was sort of interested in all the boring details. How policy happens or doesn’t happen. I thought people would be interested if they knew about it. That if they could see that grand theft was going on at the waterfront, for example, then they would care as much as they cared about the Sandinistas. It hit me to run for mayor. I wasn’t thinking about Mr. Peanut and our friends who had done it. Of course that was a part of our experience and it was in there and it was a wonderful example. But I didn’t think about that at first, I just thought, wow how about this. I immediately phoned you guys (the other Hummers) and you came over. That was an idea that never stopped getting yeses as soon as you heard about it. Then we called a hundred friends, got them all in a room together, and said would you help? Absolutely and they all did.

J: The whole community got behind us from every medium – musicians, actors, and visual artists. It was like a giant, fabulous parade. It was phenomenal.
D: It was.
J: A month here at the Cameron and the month leading up to it. It was an extremely brilliant thing.

At its best, humour, like art, has many functions. “Besides serving as entertainment, an escape mechanism, an expression of subversive intent, it is also used to establish cohesion, solidarity, and a group identity within specific communities.” This is exactly what the Hummer for Mayor campaign accomplished. And despite being Bad Girls, The Hummer Sisters got ten percent of the vote. While they did not get elected, they did demonstrate to politicians that the “art” vote did count. At the same time, they showed the art community that it could have a significant impact on local politics.