•  
  •  
 

Abstract

This essay examines how a network radio program, The Wife Saver, distinguished itself by its comic spin on the sober homemaking programs so popular in early radio. The program’s hybridity - a common daytime genre mixed with comedy and a male host presiding over a feminized genre – provides a lens for scholars to view radio’s early relationship to comedy, to women’s work, and to female listeners. Balancing irreverence with the utmost reverence for women’s work in the home, this article interrogates how The Wife Saver created a “recipe for laughs” that preserved beliefs about the rhythms of a woman’s day, the commercial function of daytime, the logics of gendered relations of labor and power, and still brought women to their radio sets. Through an analysis of the transgressive potential in The Wife Saver’s humor and the gendered persona created by Prescott, this paper illuminates how the program’s distinctive blend of generic rigidity, dark domestic humor, and a male host able to move fluidly between different gendered positions successfully negotiated the industrial and ideological tensions caused by comic work in the daytime. Examining the dexterity of its male host and the show’s reception in the popular and trade press, this case study exposes the narrow parameters on the mirth manufactured during the radio day and explains daytime radio’s limited use of comedy for female audiences.

Download

Share

COinS