Granny with a Guillotine

The Radical Wit of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Comedy’s Quiet Revolutionary

Jackie “Moms” Mabley in 1975 (AP Photo).

“I don’t know why I’m up here tellin’ these jokes. I should be home, sittin’ on the front porch in my rocking chair, sippin’ corn liquor and spittin’ on the children.”
—Moms Mabley

Good Friday, dear defenders,

Congratulations on arriving at the end of another week. We say that not as routine, but as ritual—because every week we endure in these dark times is a quiet act of resistance.

With tensions mounting across the country and protests poised to rise like thunderclouds this weekend, we know the air feels heavy. We know many of you are scared. And we know how isolating that fear can be in a world that demands silence. We feel that chilling effect of fear as well.

But not here. Not at this tea table.
Here, we celebrate your voices and cradle them with care.
Here, we honor your courage to speak, to defend, to show up—even when the world wishes you’d sit down.

And let it be known: your spirit lifts us. You, my dear defenders, fill me with hope. And where there is hope, my friends—there must also be laughter. In a world where cruelty hides behind formality, laughter becomes both sword and shield. It refuses to be oppressed, claiming the last word.

Laughter, when wielded with intention, is not an escape from the world—it is a confrontation with it. A light in the fissures, lighting up the lies like fireworks in the night sky. A crowbar prying open the doors of change. As we move forward into this weekend and rising tensions and protests, we need all the joy and laughter we can find. And no one laughed louder—or more sharply—than the woman we remember today.

Today we honor Jackie “Moms” Mabley, who didn’t just tell jokes—she told the truth in a voice so sharp, so unexpected, it slipped past censors and sliced through segregation. Her humor wasn’t a distraction. She used it as a weapon—a tool, reshaping the world she entered instead of allowing it to shape her.

---

Act I: Loretta, Before the Laughter

Before she was “Moms,” she was Loretta Mary Aiken—born in 1894 in Brevard, North Carolina, a Black girl in the Jim Crow South, with a sharp tongue, a big heart, and a fire that couldn’t be taught, only carried.

The world around her was full of locked doors. But inside her home, there was one woman who handed her the key: her grandmother, Jane Aiken Hall. Wise, strong, and fiercely loving, her grandmother filled her with dreams too wide for Brevard’s borders. She didn’t just tell Loretta there was more out there—she believed it for her, long before the rest of the world would.

The precise truths of those early years are not widely recorded, but what we do know from her own accounts is that she survived multiple assaults in childhood—one at age 11, another at 13—resulting in two children she gave up for adoption. At 14, after finally saying "enough," she ran away to Cleveland and joined a traveling vaudeville troupe. She ran not out of rebellion, but out of purpose—a leap toward survival, yes, but also toward self-creation.

Tragedy and trauma were not finished with her yet: her father was reportedly burned to death in a fire. Her mother, killed returning from church, run over by a truck. But by then, Loretta was already gone—already on the road, already chasing the sound of her own voice echoing back at her from the stage.

Still, survival cost her more than comfort—it cost her kin, safety, and self. As she carved a space for herself in performance, her own family carved her out of theirs. Her brothers, ashamed of her career, dismissed her work as “a disgrace,” believe her profession on the same level as open prostitution.

And so she did what many of us have had to do:
She picked a new name and put it on like armor.

She became Jackie Mabley—a name that began as a stage persona, taken from an ex-boyfriend, but became something far greater: a cloak of protection, a rebuke of shame, a declaration of belonging.

She wasn’t hiding behind a character. She was stepping fully into herself.

---

Act II: Weaponizing Laughter

Moms began her career on stage working the TOBA circuit—the Theater Owners Booking Association—run by white theater owners and known colloquially as “Tough on Black Actors.”

By 1921 she had moved to New York City, where she became a fixture in clubs around Harlem. Her early work was frequently ribald and bawdy. One famous line still stands out:

“There ain’t nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one.”

In a time long before open talk of female sexuality, here was a woman on stage talking about how men could better please her—a revolutionary act. Encouraged by friends Butterbeans and Susie, she unknowingly pioneered what we now call situational comedy. She was also among the first to popularize stand-up comedy, a form that would sweep the nation in the 1950s and remains dominant today.

She became the most famous entertainer to emerge from what was once known as the Chitlin' Circuit—a network of TOBA remnants, clubs, and juke joints owned by and serving Black audiences.

She was the first openly gay comedian, publicly coming out at 27—a time when most gay Americans chose life in the closet. Her friends even called her “Mr. Moms,” and her tailored men’s suits defied every expectation of femininity.

As her star rose, so did the stature of her stages. Later in her career, she took center stage at venues that had once barred Black Americans even as guests. She became a fixture at the Cotton Club—a Harlem hotspot that excluded Black patrons while profiting from Black performers—and, in 1939, she headlined the Apollo Theater, the first woman to ever do so, reportedly earning upwards of $10,000 a week.

These weren’t just milestones—they were reclamations.

With a floppy hat, a housedress, and a slow shuffle, she delivered biting critiques of lynching, poverty, interracial love, war, gender hypocrisy, and political double-speak. Topics others feared to whisper, she giggled through with glinting eyes.

“Ain’t nothin’ an old woman can’t say.”

She was telling the truth in plain speech—but cloaked in performance, coded with double meanings. She could skewer a senator with one crooked smile. She could tell America it was sick, and have it clap along to the diagnosis.

---

Act III: The Power of the Persona

Jackie "Moms" Mabley was a subversive force dressed in housecoats and hush puppies. She didn’t just master the stage—she rewrote the rules of who got to stand on it.

At a time when most comedy stages were open only to men—and most of those men were white—Moms was singular. The only woman in many lineups. Often the only Black performer. Always the sharpest tongue in the room. And she didn’t just perform for Black audiences. She took her act into white venues, into the heart of the segregated South, and told jokes about race, war, and justice with a smile so crooked it disarmed.

“They called me Moms ’cause I always made everybody feel better. But don’t let the name fool you.”

She wasn’t just playing a character—she was exposing one: America’s. She used her age, her gender, and her costume—the baggy dress, the toothless grin, the floppy hat—as camouflage. Underneath, she was cutting through hypocrisy like a hot knife through white lies.

In one of her most famous routines, she joked:

“They said, ‘Moms, you can’t say that.’ I said, ‘I’m old. I can say anything.’”

It was more than a punchline. It was a tactic. She aged herself up not because she had to, but because it let her get away with telling the truth.

She never retired. She never relented.

Instead, she kept showing up. On camera. On vinyl. On every stage that once said no. Even as age bent her spine and slowed her steps, her mind stayed razor-sharp, her delivery clockwork precise.

In her final decade, Moms did what few Black comedians—male or female—had ever done: she crossed fully into mainstream television. She appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Pearl Bailey Show, and The Merv Griffin Show—bringing her sly, radical humor into the living rooms of white America. She grinned onstage at Carnegie Hall. She cracked jokes on TV sets once reserved for America’s so-called clean-cut comedians. And she did it her way.

In 1969, at age 75, she recorded a comedy album that reached #14 on the Billboard charts. She had charting records. She had national tours. And she still took the mic at clubs where she’d once been the only woman in the lineup.

In 1974—just a year before her death—she filmed Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You and appeared in the feature film Amazing Grace. She stayed booked. She stayed brilliant.

Even as the world shifted—toward Black power, women’s liberation, and queer rights—Moms had already been there. In costume. In character. In public. In plain sight.

And when they tried to write her out of the story, she just smiled that crooked smile and delivered the punchline anyway.

---

Act IV: Her Legacy—Too Long Overlooked

Jackie “Moms” Mabley died in 1975. She was 81 years old. Though her acts no longer take the stage, her laughter still echoes in every theater where situational or stand-up comedy is heard.

Not long after, comedy entered a golden age—Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg all rising. But the woman who cracked open the stage never quite made it into the history books.

Make no mistake: Moms Mabley was intersectional resistance before we had the language for it. A queer Black woman in a male-dominated world. A feminist voice before the word was safe. A civil rights warrior armed with a joke book instead of a picket sign. Her comedy didn’t just make people laugh—it made them reckon.

Her legacy lives in every comedian who dares to speak plainly. In every drag queen who winks while telling the truth. In every elder told they’re “too old” to matter who says, “Watch me.”

You hear her echoes in Whoopi Goldberg, who credits Moms as a direct influence and portrayed her in a 2013 HBO documentary. You feel her fingerprints on Wanda Sykes, Mo’Nique, Tig Notaro—every comedian who plays with gender, age, and expectation. Many remember Lucille Ball. But without Moms, there may never have been space for Lucille to take the stage.

Perhaps the clearest echo is how she lived:
Out loud. Unbowed. And funny as hell.

She didn’t leave a clean narrative. She left a living contradiction.
Her name was Jackie. They called her Mr. Moms.
She wore dentures and smoked cigars. She was toothless and fearless. Old and radical. Coded and clear.

She left no neat biography. Only a hundred thousand belly laughs—and a blueprint for surviving in plain sight.

---

What Moms Mabley Teaches Us Today

Not every act of resistance comes with a raised fist. Some come in slippers. Some in laughter. Some in the slow, deliberate shuffle of a woman the world mistook for harmless—until she opened her mouth and brought the house down.

Moms Mabley reminds us that survival is not always loud, but it is always holy. That truth can be smuggled inside a joke—with protest as the punchline. That’s why laughter still matters. Not to drown out injustice—but to expose it. To survive it. To carry joy into the fire and come out singing.

Just like Moms.

She teaches us that queerness isn’t new. That Black womanhood has never fit into polite molds. That age is not an erasure, but a torch. That the world will try to shame your truth—and sometimes even your own kin will turn their backs—but still, you rise.

She teaches us to show up anyway.
When they don’t hand you the mic, take the stage.
When they won’t let you in the room, change the locks.
When they say you’re too old, too gay, too poor, too ugly, too anything to matter—make them laugh until they listen.

And in a time when this regime tries to silence, censor, and erase, her legacy whispers back: they can’t kill what keeps the people laughing. They can’t outlaw the joy that knows its own strength. They can’t police the truth when it comes disguised in drag and wit and well-worn wisdom.

“It’s no disgrace for a Black woman to be old. But it is a disgrace for the government to be that old and still act so stupid.” — Moms Mabley

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Moms, it’s this:
laugh anyway.
Wherever you are. Whatever they’re doing. Laugh as the lights go out, and again when they flicker back on. Laugh in memory. Laugh in mourning. Laugh in rebellion.

I am sure that right now she’s taking the stage in heaven.

I can picture it. There’s a hush in the wings. A hush that comes before the lights dim. And in the middle of that quiet, there she stands—shawl wrapped tight, hat tilted just so, eyes twinkling like she already knows the punchline and is letting you catch up.

To every soul who’s been told she was too old, too gay, too Black, too plain to matter—Moms Mabley had a better joke.

And she lived it. Out loud.

This regime can try to close the house, to rewrite the script, to silence the show—but this author will always hear the defiant laughter Moms shared with her audience.
A laughter that cracked ceilings and cut through lies.

I hope after today, so can you.

Until our next bold move,
~ Lady LiberTea ✨🫖

Jackie “Moms” Mabley New York Public Library Digital Collections

---

Because the Jokes Not Over

If Moms made you laugh, made you think, or made you wonder how one woman could carry the weight of so many truths wrapped in so many punchlines—don’t let her story stop here.

You can honor Jackie “Moms” Mabley by supporting the spaces she helped crack open:

📚 Give to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where her comedy holds a permanent place in the story of American performance.

🎭 Watch the Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley documentary on HBO, and share it with someone who’s never heard of her—especially if they think resistance has to be loud to be powerful.

🎤 Uplift today’s Black LGBTQ+ comics and storytellers—especially those who, like Moms, still have to laugh in rooms never built for them.

And finally, if someone tells you they don’t think stand-up comedy changes the world… tell them about the woman who walked through segregation in house shoes and still brought down the house.

Until our next bold cackle,
✨🫖
Lady LiberTea