It's All in the Delivery

Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

By Victoria Sturtevant

University of Texas Press

How changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights.

Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy, from Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude; Murphy Brown’s controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pregnancy in Junior; or the third-trimester stand-up special Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.

In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.

Across this history, popular media have offered polite evasions and sentimentality instead of real candor about the physical and social complexities of pregnancy. But comedy has often led the way in puncturing these clichés, pointing an irreverent and satiric lens at the messy and sometimes absurd work of gestation. Ultimately, Sturtevant argues that comedy can reveal the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural “women’s work,” misrepresentations that rest at the heart of contemporary attacks on reproductive rights in the US.

Well written, clearly argued, full of fascinating ideas and thoughtful analysis, It’s All in the Delivery indeed delivers a powerful and timely set of conclusions. Conceptually strong and well structured, with each chapter building thoughtfully upon its predecessor, the book covers a wide range of textual, narrative, sociocultural and political interventions into pregnancy in American film and TV comedy that will appeal to scholars and reproductive rights activists alike. Moya Luckett, author of Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917

Victoria Sturtevant brilliantly captures American culture’s contractionary and complex attitudes toward pregnancy through thoughtful and astute analyses that are often as humorous as the texts on which she focuses. It’s All in the Delivery incorporates an impressive (and exhaustive) range of examples from film and television. Given the number of texts she cites, I would not be surprised if she watched every television show and film that deals with pregnancy from 1896 through 2023 that she could get her hands on. Michele Schreiber, author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture

It's All in the Delivery addresses a startling gap in feminist media history by turning attention from parenthood to women’s bodies and experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, infertility, abortion. This book also offers a brilliant contribution to feminist comedy studies, illustrating how comedy has allowed this female experience to be represented in a variety of ways since the birth of cinema and—as argued with great wit in the Conclusion—how this female experience can generate comedy. Given the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that has brought reproductive issues to the forefront of our national psyche, this book’s exploration of how we have imagined and visualized reproduction over the past one hundred and twenty years is especially timely. Linda Mizejewski, author of Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics

Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler and co-editor of Hysterical! Women in American Comedy.