It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

This incisive study from Sturtevant (A Great Big Girl Like Me), a film professor at the University of Oklahoma, analyzes how comedies have challenged stigmas around pregnancy. She explains that the Motion Picture Production Code implemented in the 1930s discouraged showing baby bumps, a taboo that stood well into the 1950s, when Lucille Ball waged a successful battle against her network to incorporate her real-life pregnancy into the second season of I Love Lucy. Even as restrictions eased in the ’70s and ’80s, movies and shows continued to center male characters in pregnancy stories; Sturtevant notes that the 1981 Burt Reynolds vehicle Paternity, which follows a “confirmed bachelor who hires a surrogate... to have his baby,” tackled surrogate pregnancy from a man’s perspective long before Hollywood explored it from a woman’s. Elsewhere, Sturtevant examines how Juno pushes back against framing working-class teen motherhood as a social problem, and how frank stand-up specials by Ali Wong and Jena Friedman demystify “miscarriage as a common experience that is relieved of some of its burden when shared.” The eye-opening history reveals a dispiriting and long-standing discomfort with discussions of reproduction while making a forceful argument for comedy’s ability to skewer taboos and expand public conversation. A perceptive take on how depictions of pregnancy have evolved since the mid-20th century, this enthralls. Photos. (Dec.)