As Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959, John Foster Dulles was often referred to in popular culture as “the most boring man in America”. He was, however, the ideal target for a sketch from Carol Burnett, which she performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957. The sketch takes the form of a song which Burnett sings into camera about her infatuation with the SoS, which culminates in her stealing his luggage from an airport and being put on a terror watchlist. Burnett taps into Sianne Ngai’s concept of zany comedy and its gendered connotations through her performance, presenting a tongue-in-cheek image of a woman obsessed with an upstanding, upwardly mobile lawyer.
Burnett performs Ngai’s “politically ambiguous intersection between cultural and occupational performance” (182) with aplomb, acting every bit the obsessed and slightly manic fangirl. Her performance is that of the act of flirting, and she pushes it to its logical extremes, unabashedly belting a ballad while either crossing her eyes and gawping or offering unflinching eye contact with the audience through the camera. She is at every turn performing the “unmarried woman” stereotype and drawing attention to that performance. In this zaniness we see the layers of performance which she unveils: flirtation and the wooing of a husband is both a performance and, for centuries of young women (up to and including the 1950s), an occupation, with their livelihoods hanging in the balance. Burnett underscores Ngai’s claim that zaniness is gendered, with women expected to move between play and service as well as levels of performance. Burnett’s performance of infatuation for the upper-middle class stability which Dulles represents at once draws attention to this expectation of young women and highlights its ridiculousness. Like Carol Burnett herself, “the zany is not just funny but angry” (218).
Burnett also plays with Alexandra Plakias’s concept of awkwardness and the social script, wedging her character in one of the “people who don’t fit easily into a social role—or who sit uneasily at the juncture of more than one” and are “especially prone to awkwardness” (Plakias 33). An unmarried woman is one such person who sits at a juncture, and her behaviors are all the more scrutinized for amorous (or economic) intent for it. Burnett exploits this awkwardness, poking fun at the simultaneous cultural expectations and deeply rooted suspicion of these young women and their behaviors. Burnett’s zaniness is weaponized against the cultural biases against young women and female sexuality.