For this LSA graduate student, stand-up comedy is a powerful form of storytelling.
by Gina Balibrera
American culture graduate student and stand-up comedian Julianna Loera-Wiggins is workshopping some new material about getting into her first fistfight on the rugby field.
“I was punched by another Latina,” says Loera-Wiggins, a national-level rugby player. “She was a new player, fairly inexperienced, and she was playing dirty. I was distributing the ball, and she kept grabbing my ankle and tripping me. She did it four times, then I did it to her.” That’s when the punches started flying.
“We always talk about making our ancestors proud, right?” she says. Loera-Wiggins imagined her ancestors and the other player’s ancestors hovering over the rugby field, surveying the fight, judging her subpar fighting skills, and all of the ancestors choosing to side with her opponent instead of with her. They were watching over her, but they were not proud of her at that moment. “The ancestors chose to root for her instead. She really knew how to fight.”
Loera-Wiggins did not sustain serious injuries during the rugby brawl, but she says her bruises felt more painful for having been dealt by another Latina. By turning the experience into a joke about ancestor betrayal for a future stand-up routine, she is rewriting the narrative on her own terms. “At the time, I was shaken up,” Loera-Wiggins says, “but the story makes for good comedy.”
When we know ourselves through “conocimiento,” Loera-Wiggins says, we can interrupt harmful stereotypes and speak out, and we can bring the playfulness of our communities into spaces where we feel unsafe and unseen—and that work can happen in comedy.
Origin Story
Loera-Wiggins has been interested in Latina comedy for a long time. In the process of interviewing family members about intergenerational Mexican American women in northern New Mexico for her graduate program research, she noticed that the women in her family used humor to tell stories. “In las carcajadas [the cackles] of my mother and mis tías [my aunts],” Loera-Wiggins says, painful events transformed into power—and academic inspiration. As her research progressed, she began to explore in her own comedy the ways that pain and joy coexist.
She traces her entry into performing stand-up to a moment in 2020, in the Zoom audience of a comedy show, cackling at a joke by comedian Gwen La Roka that combined the solitude of the COVID pandemic and her longing for paletas, sweet treats sold by a neighborhood ice pop vendor.
“When marginalized voices speak out we can set the record straight, offer solutions for more inclusivity, and we can also explore the ways that humor can quiet the dissonance around us and soften it with our laughter.”
—Julianna Loera-Wiggins
The experience sharpened Loera-Wiggins’s curiosity into a desire to learn more about stand-up and to build an academic field around Latina comedy. La Roka invited her into Las Locas, a collective of Latina stand-up comedians, where Loera-Wiggins noticed the feminist principles of this community; unlike any other comedy space she’d been a part of, performers—whether headliners or newcomers—were paid equally and given equal time on stage. Soon Loera-Wiggins was performing stand-up with Las Locas as well.
These days, Loera-Wiggins is writing a dissertation about feminist Latinx humor, preparing to teach a course on Latinx stand-up, collaborating on a funny, tender art installation on campus, and telling plenty of her own jokes, too.
The 1%
Loera-Wiggins describes herself as a “stand-up comed-demic.” Both touring comedian and academic, she carries two notebooks in her bag while attending to her robust performance schedule: a book of fieldnotes and a joke notebook.
“My methodology in my research is very much tied to being a performing comedian and hanging with other Latinas. And the research and the performance roles inform each other.”
In both academic and comedy spaces, Loera-Wiggins is often the only Latina in the room. She shares some statistics: Latinas make up only one percent of stand-up comedy performers, and at the same time, Latinas represent less than one percent of doctorate holders in the country.
But Loera-Wiggins believes that humor provides a way to examine the pain that comes with that kind of exclusion, and to heal it. Stand-up performances hold the potential to create a sense of what she calls “community abundance,” despite tough odds. Stand-up brings societal issues to a public forum, transforming pain into a punchline.
Stand-up performances can create a sense of what Loera-Wiggins calls “community abundance.”
Tell Me Your Story
Loera-Wiggins is passionate about infusing academic spaces with laughter, and about inviting her students onstage to tell their stories.
At the core of her research is a recurring theme of joy, Loera-Wiggins says. “And I craft joy through self-narrative.” Comedy is also storytelling, or “testimonio,” Loera-Wiggins says, referencing a mode of inquiry and narrative practiced by Chicanx, Latinx, and Latin American scholars and thinkers. “We speak our own truths, from and to the Latinx community, and laugh together about the tough stuff.”
With support from the U-M Arts Initiative’s Graduate Students Arts Research Grant, Loera-Wiggins will bring this embrace of vulnerability to a campus art project called “Dear Diary, Here’s a Joke For You” during the fall 2024 semester. She’ll host a stand-up event featuring rising queer comedians and comedians from communities of color, who will share material on loss, identity, and bodily autonomy. Audience members will be given notebooks in which they can write their own jokes, reflections, and stories. Afterward, Loera-Wiggins will string their papers up in Haven Hall, papel picado-style, in a celebratory airing of dirty laundry.
Loera-Wiggins is also preparing a course on Latinx stand-up comedy, which will culminate in a series of student performances in and around Ann Arbor. She hopes students can become aware of violent and harmful narratives, but also learn how comedy can be restorative.
“Aside from studies about racist aspects of comedy, there hasn’t been much academic work about Latinx humor,” she says. “I’m interested in how Latinx humor can be impactful and informative. … As laughter moves the diaphragm, it can also move your mind.”
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