Speaking primarily to female readers about the conditions of the lives they share, female humorists have on the surface seemed to accept and even condone the trivializing routines of women's lives and the unflattering stereotypes of women commonly used in humor. From the early nineteenth century to the present, the sketches, stories, and light verse that constitute this tradition are filled with female figures who are concerned with their appearance, afraid of technology, competitive with each other, and dependent upon men. The familiar stereotypes of the nag, the scold, the "clinging vine," and the gold-digger are present in women's humor just as they are in the humor of men.

But beneath the surface runs a text that directly counters these images and seeks to deny them. By presenting the results of women's cultural conditioning and subordination, America's female humorists implicitly address the sources of women's self-doubt, dependence, and isolation from the mainstream of American life. . . . [M]ost of the personae in women's humor are less aware than their creators of the reasons for the inherent craziness of their lives. . . .

Dorothy Parker employs a more obvious method of presenting "official" and "unofficial" responses in her monologue "The Waltz." Here the speaker uses two voices, one to speak aloud to the man who asks her to dance and the other to provide the reader with her actual responses to the experience. The contrast between her polite "public" voice and her witty and angry "private" voice is both the source of humor and a clear statement of woman's outward conformity and inward rebellion. . . .

"The Waltz" ultimately becomes metaphoric of man's brutality and woman's powerlessness. . . . The sketch ends with the speaker encouraging the man who she has privately identified as a "creature" to pay the band to keep on playing. The hyperbolic language that Parker uses in both the public and private utterances of her persona is at once an example of comic incongruity and a clear indication that the "waltz" of the title is emblematic of a continuing cycle of male domination and female submissiveness. The speaker in Parker's sketch is able to articulate her dilemma, but is doomed to go on repeating it.