Domestic Advice and Its Shadowy Double: Domestic Satire in At Home with Amy Sedaris
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Abstract: Domestic advice media has persisted in the United States for over three centuries, yet images of the mid-twentieth-century homemaker serve as its most referential figure. Televisual domesticity consists of programs offering advice on homemaking, hosting, and crafting. Programs feature prominently on Food Network and HGTV in which white, upper-middle-class women choose to stay home and tend to the family. Alongside these traditional forms of domestic advice, this article considers the work of Amy Sedaris and feminist artists who utilize a blend of critical intertextuality, satire, and nostalgia toward the creation of a parallel, responsive genre—domestic satire.
Women’s television programs began airing almost concurrently with the arrival of television sets into homes beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, namely in the form of cooking and homemaking programs. As such, “appealing to a predominantly female audience became the prime directive” for networks and local stations, and “women hosts began appearing in . . . daytime programs across the country within weeks, even hours, of a station’s start-up.”[1]
NBC’s Home, hosted by Arlene Francis, premiered in 1954 and became the network’s flagship daytime program. Home and local programs like it “initiated a long line of imitators,” giving way to popular magazine-style programs such as ABC’s The Home Show (1988–1994), Martha Stewart Living (syndication, 1996–2004), and NBC’s Later Today (1999–2000).[2] Home, alongside local domestic programming, pedagogical in nature, provided audiences with recipes and homemaking advice and was joined on air by domestic sitcoms such as Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954–1955; NBC, 1955–1958; CBS, 1958–1960). Like Home, Father Knows Best created a genre of imitators with “60% of domestic family comedies on air by the end of the decade” representing the “middle class and suburban.”[3] Domestic sitcoms, film melodramas, and advice programs of the mid-twentieth century demonstrate the thick concentration of domestic media texts on screens at this time. Such texts were both directly pedagogical, such as homemaking programs, in which a host directly addressed the audience and provided a set of instructions for completing a task, and indirectly pedagogical, such as domestic sitcoms, which did not directly teach audiences a skill but instead presented an aspirational image of domesticity.
All domestic advice media are didactic, to greater or lesser extents, and work to sustain the fantasy of middle-class living among its audiences. Nina Leibman argues that “it is probable that the viewing family . . . was to understand its familial inferiority to the Nelsons or Cleavers and then learn from their example,” week after week.[4] Domestic programming, both fictional and nonfictional, supplies US cultural memory with a prototypical figure of domesticity and the trappings of the middle-class home that has persisted into contemporary programming as seen on networks such as HGTV and Food Network. The traditional television homemaker, despite her slip into obscurity during the proliferation of career and single-woman sitcoms such as Julia (NBC, 1968–1971) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977), persists on television screens and beyond, modeled after the aesthetics and ideologies provided by early television programming. This homemaker, though, is not always as straightforward as she might appear.
This article considers contemporary (re)articulations of domesticity and the homemaker on television through both fictional and nonfictional performances, with specific attention paid to domestic programming utilizing satire through its critical intertextuality, that is, its use of the imagery and grammar of earlier television homemakers to expose the myth of the perfect home and hostess.[5] These satirical texts call into question the functionality of traditional domestic advice in the contemporary moment and point to the fraying possibility of achieving the middle-class lifestyle characteristic of the genre. These texts also serve as critical responses to the demands of domesticity that have long been naturalized and utilize the raw materials of the dominant genre to generate their critiques. Appearing alongside traditional renditions of domesticity are those utilizing satire in performances of homemaking, as prominently seen in the works of Amy Sedaris, a comedic actor and avid crafter, namely her television program At Home with Amy Sedaris (truTV, 2017–2020). Sedaris has long contributed to the domestic arts oeuvre, both satirically and otherwise, with her crafting and homemaking manuals I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence and Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People as well as through her small-scale food and homemaking lines.[6] At Home with Amy Sedaris is the first time Sedaris’s long-term domestic endeavors are presented in televisual form with Sedaris performing on-screen as a homemaker. Her version of the homemaker, though, is harried, out of breath, and desperate as she attempts to navigate the perils of hosting, those often unseen and unmentioned in traditional domestic advice media.
Despite her non-normative approach to televisual domestic advice, Sedaris-as-hostess utilizes the nostalgic and familiar trappings of television housewives of earlier eras, performing as an amalgamation of a mid-century homemaker and a domestic advice expert. Aesthetics of the postwar kitchen and happy hostess appear in the form of Pyrex cookware, vintage-inspired kitchen appliances, and Sedaris’s recipes. I analyze how Sedaris introduces satire and humor into the domestic realm through a critically intertextual approach, relying on the familiar codes of televisual domesticity established through both domestic sitcoms, the originator of the television housewife, and nonfictional domestic advice programs, such as cooking and homemaking programs like those of Martha Stewart. Sedaris’s occupation of the genre, speaking from within it, allows her to use what is familiar about the genre to make her critiques, exposing hyperdomesticity as an essential feature of the domestic advice genre.
I consider Sianne Ngai’s theorization of zaniness and its utility for questioning the perfect home and homemaker naturalized on domestic advice programming.[7] Sedaris is not the first to utilize the iconography of the domestic good life and the nostalgia attached to domestic objects to expose their artifice and instead continues the critiques of feminist artists and writers before her. Sedaris’s performances of homemaking—overheated, overworked, and occasionally resulting in bodily harm—reveal the zaniness behind the normalized happy homemaker and domestic advice expert through her satirical approach to the genre.
Toward Domestic Satire: Televisual Domesticity Past and Present
To best understand Sedaris’s critically intertextual domestic satire, it is necessary to briefly consider the past performances of televisual domesticity she draws upon, including aesthetics borrowed from the fictional mid-twentieth-century televisual housewife and the posture and didactic tone of the nonfictional domestic adviser. While sitcom housewives contribute much to cultural memory and contemporary aesthetic mimicry, nonfictional homemakers (such as Martha Stewart and the roster of Food Network personalities) aid in creating a more complete roster of domestic advice experts on television. Nonfictional homemakers either ignore or foreground questions of time in their respective programs. For example, Martha Stewart does not set her watch by the demands of working women but instead luxuriates in the act of baking, crafting, and hosting, whereas Rachael Ray, host of Food Network’s 30 Minute Meals (2001–2019), offers time-saving recipes that supposedly fit into the demanding schedules of busy women and their families. Domestic advice media feature an abundance of both types of expert guidance simultaneously, often on the same network, as in the case of programming on Food Network.
I take television as my main medium of analysis due to the number of domestic representations it has offered across such genres as sitcom, reality and lifestyle, and satirical programming. While medium and genre specificity are limited tools in contemporary convergence culture and while I briefly speak to the spillover of domestic advice content in new media spaces such as Instagram, television serves as a starting place for a discussion of contemporary domestic performances primarily due to its persistent and adaptable examples of domesticity since the mid-twentieth century.[8] Additionally, television was crucial in establishing the recognizable codes of domesticity that many new domestic programs rely on for narrative and aesthetic recognizability, such as the figure of the happy housewife replete with apron and pearls and the posture of the domestic adviser behind a kitchen counter, delivering advice and demonstrating recipes to audiences watching at home.
On her program, Sedaris adopts both the aesthetic markers of television housewives such as June Cleaver and the style of nonfictional homemaking shows, delivering advice to her audience from behind her kitchen counter (see Figure 1). Sedaris cites two local programs out of Raleigh, North Carolina, as formative to her approaches to cooking, crafting, and hosting: At Home with Peggy Mann (WTVD, 1954–1980) and Femme Fare with Bette Elliott (WRAL, 1963–1977). Sedaris says, “[Peggy Mann had] a sewing segment. I just liked the idea of this woman being in her house and inviting you into her house, and she would just teach you domestic things—and sometimes she’d get a little political. She had a good look.”[9] Sedaris’s recipes, too, often resemble mid-twentieth-century decorative food trends likely demonstrated on such programs, such as meat loafs molded into wreath shapes and classic party appetizers such as cheeseballs or shrimp cocktail.
While less apparent in June Cleaver’s kitchen, temporal anxieties associated with balancing work and home life are largely the domain of television as well, as its programming both creates and temporarily relieves crises related to family time. Elizabeth Nathanson argues that “[w]hile many of the traits of the postfeminist time crisis circulate through diverse media texts, television is uniquely able to construct domestic time crises and depict solutions to domestic time stresses.”[10] Such temporary alleviations can be found in short-cut or time-saving cooking programs on Food Network, including Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee (2003–2011), and 5 Ingredient Fix (2009–2011). Rachael Ray’s program is designed around the postfeminist and neoliberal imperative to have it all: to work and manage the family after work and to live indefinitely within the strictures of the double or triple shifts of career, family, and community or care work. While such programs foreground time, they do so uncritically. The time crunch exists for working women, and Ray provides solutions to make it work. Sedaris, too, acknowledges domestic time stresses in her book I Like You with a section dedicated to “Fifteen-Minute Meals in Twenty Minutes.”[11]
However, in contrast to programs premised on time-saving solutions to feeding the family and addressing the time crunch faced by working women, there are a number of programs dedicated less to time-saving domestic solutions and more to complex and engaged baking, crafting, and cooking projects. Contemporary programming on Food Network such as The Pioneer Woman (2011–) and Girl Meets Farm (2018–) demonstrate instances in which former career women living in metropolitan cities return home to marry, raise children, and cook on their respective homesteads. Tisha Dejmanee describes such programming as “US Heartland Kitchen shows,” in which women hosts experience a “bucolic retreat to the traditional family unit as a wholesome and comforting haven.”[12] These programs present a less fractured way of living and the changes women must make to combat the loss of one’s time from the demands of late capitalist living by focusing on family and food rather than careerism and resultant family-related sacrifices. Ree Drummond, host of The Pioneer Woman, and Molly Yeh, host of Girl Meets Farm, embrace forms of domesticity that center food, family, and slow time. Much of the domestic advice genre relies on the myth of slow time often attributed to specific periods and geographies of US history. Drummond and Yeh tap into the truism that rural life moves slower than city life and that time is experienced differently, even pre-industrially. Rural homesteader life produces slower time, the opposite of the time crunch felt by women who attempt to split their time between career and family. As such, unlike the women hosts of time-saving cooking shows, Yeh, more so even than Drummond, is not bound to the pacing of a split life but instead can luxuriate in the creation of a more detailed, complex, and time-consuming practice of baking and cooking.
Stewart, Drummond, Yeh, and others serve as examples of “domestic retreatism” in which women return home after unsatisfying attempts to privilege professional life and career advancement over growing a family;[13] Diane Negra describes this phenomenon as “the pull back by affluent women to a perfected domesticity.”[14] Retreatism, also described as “new traditionalism,” addresses postfeminist media culture’s preoccupation with choice by illuminating the right choice to return home, a choice always available to women yet one that many took for granted as a result of feminist gains.[15] Postfeminist media culture, then, “often functions as a means of registering and superficially resolving the persistence of ‘choice’ dilemmas for American women.”[16]
Questions of temporal anxieties, along with the implicit answers provided by fictional and nonfictional women’s programming, create room for critical commentary and satirical performances of homemaking and the demands of the homemaker. Melissa Gregg argues that “one’s relationship to time is a primary means by which power is experienced. Temporal sovereignty—the ‘ability to choose how you allocate your time,’ according to Wajcman—is a historically specific form of freedom.”[17] Retreatist domestic programming adopts a register of temporal sovereignty in which women not only have free time but choose to dedicate it to the ongoing project of domesticity. Time spent is no longer work but is reinvented as anti-work, insofar as it takes place in the home and for the benefit and happiness of the family, including the supposed joy in production experienced by the wife or mother. Naming housework as work would upset the ascribed sanctity of domesticity, as “the refusal to work means the rejection of its present familial-centered organization and gendered distribution of labor.”[18]
Hanging on the wall of Sedaris’s kitchen in At Home with Amy Sedaris is a clock with the numbers jumbled at the bottom, hands pointing at nothing, and the word whatever stamped across its face (see Figure 2). Sedaris’s performances contrast starkly with both retreatism and time-saving shows. She foregrounds the labor of domestic labor and a frenzied relationship to time. Slow time is revealed as artifice through her harried performance and violent movements. Likewise, as I discuss below, Sedaris critically responds to the time requirements of domestic labor with satire and hilarity, distinguishing herself from time-saving programs in which cooking is structured to fit into a razor-thin, postfeminist balance between duties inside and outside the home.
Questions of tradition and nostalgia are thus essential to understanding domestic performances on television, Sedaris’s included. The golden age of food, family, and tradition as seen in many mid-twentieth-century domestic sitcoms and reiterated in later nonfictional advice programming is an attempt to reclaim visions of “the good life” in an age of neoliberal precarity. Though these nostalgias take different shapes, each tends to offer a similar version of life in which a pleasurable domestic realm is centered, while labor remains relatively invisible, or at least inconsequential to its achievement. Tradition is considered alongside nostalgia to better understand how populations sustain the myth of the good life in moments of precarity, what Lauren Berlant describes as “fraying fantasies of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy.”[19] As I will argue, Berlant’s discussion of the “waning of genre” and the faded “blueprint” of the good life in which “older realist genres . . . whose depictions of the good life now appear to mark archaic expectations about having and building a life” contribute to the creation of the parallel genre of domestic satire.[20] Are more traditional domestic and lifestyle programs beginning, ever so slowly, to become part of this faded blueprint? If so, what does the satire of Amy Sedaris bring to light about the myth of the good life and instructions on how to build and sustain it?
Televised Domesticity, Nostalgia, and Simulacra
At the center of the domestic advice genre is an unresolved nostalgia for a time and place that exists purely in cultural memory, facilitated through media technologies such as film and television. This time and place never really existed and, if it did, only for a fractionate portion of white, middle- and upper-middle-class women. In fact, the domestic advice genre has arguably always utilized artifice and nostalgia as part of its appeal, even in its earliest iterations. Yet the applicability of these strategies in the contemporary moment relies on an additional one, namely the convincing arrangement of a “random collection of images to which we turn in a frantic effort to appropriate a collective past.”[21] Contemporary television is well suited for this endeavor. As Lynne Joyrich contends, “by replaying its own formulas, [television] fosters a sense of living tradition, a continuously available history that appeals to the nostalgic mode of postmodern culture.”[22] Joyrich further argues that “TV narratives provide a present method of consuming the past.”[23] Consumption of the past and its traditions is essential to the domestic advice genre as it provides infinite opportunities for mimicry and rearticulation, operating without any identifiable origin. The genre itself is an amalgamation of religious, governmental, and capitalistic interests often expressed through fictional characters. Carol Stabile’s research on the Anti-Communist Blacklist in the late 1940s shows how “political forces set out to cleanse (their word) the airwaves of what they defined as subversive influences,” instead populating television screens with “the bland homogeneity of 1950s television families.”[24] To this end, Stabile reminds us that contrary to the constant deployment by politicians and government officials in their description of traditional family values, Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) is not a documentary.[25]
Prefabricated domestics such as Betty Crocker, as well as the widespread construction of fictionalized television families as representative of 1950s and 1960s American values and family life, point to the genre’s artifice.[26] The hoarding of fictional icons of an ideal domesticity, what Wendy Brown describes as “reactionary foundationalism,” is a coping strategy for the loss of identity in “post” modes of being: “the strategy of political, religious, or epistemological fundamentalism, foundational with a grand narrative . . . is not rooted in coherent tradition but in a fetishized, decontextualized fragment or icon of such narrative—the American flag, the great books, the traditional family.”[27] The overinvestment in icons such as the family or the home and the prevalence of cultural objects of golden age domesticity, such as Pyrex bakeware, pearl necklaces, or frilled aprons, permit the genre of domestic advice to function without a true referent—the persistent circulation of icons of the good life stand in for any real version of home life. Yet they are just as affectively resonant, if not more so.
Much domestic media rely less on replicating any true sense of homelife of the golden age of the mid-century (as there was no monolithic domestic culture to replicate, despite televisual representations to the contrary), instead presenting a pleasantly and convincingly arranged set of practices and objects that have come to signify or stand in for home. Consumer goods stand in for and “[promise] to give the consumer’s home an atmosphere of ‘pie,’” one more “ideal than the satisfaction provided by any real pie.”[28] Products sold by major home goods stores such as Crate and Barrel and Williams Sonoma are “dressed in a retro style [that] specifically recalls the most prototypical era of housewifery: the 1950s.”[29] Additionally, home appliance brand SMEG’s range of “50s style” kitchen appliances feature the “rounded shapes, chrome details, and bright colours” modeled after the mid-century kitchen, seen on both At Home with Amy Sedaris and in Molly Yeh’s kitchen set on Girl Meets Farm.[30] Retro-inspired kitchenware and home furnishings serve as contemporary representations of mid-century domesticity and are “positioned between the forward-moving hands of the market and the backward-looking glance of nostalgic desire for a fantasy past in which women had all the time in the world.”[31]
Sedaris’s use of such domestic cultural icons allows her to replicate the granular details of the domestic sitcom mise-en-scène. However, as she demonstrates throughout the program, the use of Pyrex mixing bowls and her inclination to dress the part of the happy hostess do little to decrease the stress, time pressures, and overall difficulties of entertaining and homemaking. Here, she uses the icons that promise domestic bliss, the objects of the dominant genre of domestic advice, to forward a critique of such a promise; Sedaris’s homemaking problems aren’t lessened or solved by such objects. Domestic icons, both vintage and vintage inspired, promise a return to an envisioned, rosy past, and perhaps a greater control over one’s time, yet Sedaris’s interaction with these objects, despite their reverent status, still results in domestic chaos.
Domestic Satire on At Home with Amy Sedaris
At Home with Amy Sedaris draws from the generic conventions of homemaking programs as well as domestic sitcoms, uniting them through a satiric perspective that exposes the absurdity of hyper-domestic programming. The result is a distinct subgenre that I refer to as domestic satire, a form that depends on critical intertextuality.
Jonathan Gray’s discussion of intertextuality on television describes the ways “any text that we read can potentially live on forever to haunt future texts.”[32] Similarly described by John Fiske, “all previously read texts can act as ghost texts . . . like the image on a television set with poor reception.”[33] While all texts are intertextual, it is necessary to consider how domestic satire texts such as At Home with Amy Sedaris utilize critical intertextuality to address the limitations of the host genre to which satire relates parasitically. If “genres hold the world in place, establishing and enforcing a sense of propriety, of proper boundaries which demarcate appropriate thought, feeling, and behavior, and which provide frames, codes, and signs for constructing a shared social reality, then parody and satire show how genre has housed a given ideology and made it appear natural.”[34] Critically intertextual texts “[set] up shop on another genre’s ground” and are not “always an ideal guest” as they render the dominant or host genre “opaque,” exposing ideologies that have operated as inherent or given.[35] As described above, Sedaris’s domestic performance hinges upon her recognizability as a homemaker, which she constructs by borrowing aesthetics from televisual homemakers before her, allowing her to critique the genre while seemingly operating within it.
While domestic satire does not currently constitute a genre in itself, other satiric subgenres illustrate how a program such as At Home with Amy Sedaris functions; the subgenre of political satire offers a useful starting point. Programs such as The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996–) and The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 2005–2014) belong to the category of political satire that “[hold] out the promise of a properly critical form of popular culture” by using the aesthetics and formal languages of the programs, ideologies, and institutions they wish to critique.[36] Debuting in 2005 and becoming an anchor in Comedy Central’s block of political satire programming, The Colbert Report featured host Stephen Colbert performing “as a pompous, and often poorly informed, conservative news anchor who [satirized] Fox News pundits.”[37] Gray describes performances like Colbert’s as the ability for satiric or parodic texts to “talk back to more authoritative texts and genres, to recontextualize and pollute their meaning-making processes.”[38] These texts, like those I consider domestic satire, possess “intertextual intent” insofar as they “aim themselves at other texts and genres” and “want us to read them through other texts and genres.”[39] Additionally, satiric and parodic texts work to expose the increasing obsolescence of traditional media genres insofar as “[genres] are only as good as they remain culturally useful to specific groups at specific times.”[40] The erosion of genre, its fading utility at given moments, can contribute to the formation of satiric or parodic genres, or opportunities for genres to flex and mold to fit the needs of contemporary audiences and to reflect upon contemporary sociocultural events and feelings that dominant or legacy genres cannot access.
While I take At Home with Amy Sedaris as the most complete example of domestic satire on television, the subgenre has arguably been in conversation with the host genre of domestic advice for decades. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, “There never was a single strictly straightforward genre . . . that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic contre-partrie.”[41] Regarding television, Alice Leppert’s discussion of the slob-com is critical to understanding how the genre of the domestic sitcom began the self-reflexive work of pointing to the fallacy and fantasy of programming from the 1950s and 1960s. Programs such as Married . . . with Children (Fox, 1987–1997), Roseanne (ABC, 1988–1997), and The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–) belong to the subgenre of the slob-com and feature characters and narratives that “very deliberately violate the norms of middle-class manners” and are “visually and narratively coded as working-class.”[42] Such programs serve as a reprieve from and a critical counterpoint to “the glossy lives of upper-middle-class families broadcast across the networks.”[43] The programs offer a self-reflexive look at the futility of the promises made by earlier domestic sitcoms purportedly reflecting the American Dream, traditional gender roles, job security, and nuclear families. An episode of Roseanne titled “All About Rosey” explicitly puts Roseanne Barr into conversation with past sitcom mothers, including Barbara Billingsley reprising her role as June Cleaver.[44] Billingsley laments the lack of wholesome content on television today, including “girls kissing girls, foul language, and teenage sex.” Barr reluctantly agrees, saying, “Yeah, I know that stuff’s kind of bad,” before adding, “but, do you guys want to know how much money I make?” Billingsley looks shocked at the figure Barr whispers in her ear, before proclaiming, “I’d make out with a chick for that kind of dough.” To this end, it is necessary to include these programs in any working genealogy of domestic satire television.
Additionally, several programs, namely reality television shows, offer parodic or comedic alternatives to the host genres they speak from within. Examples include Whatever, Martha! (Fine Living Network, 2008–2011), starring Stewart’s daughter Alexis and co-host Jennifer Hutt watching and mocking episodes of Martha Stewart Living, and Nailed It (Netflix, 2018–), in which amateur home bakers attempt to recreate elaborate Pinterest-worthy desserts that often end in hilarity and failure.
Martha Stewart, too, has also undergone a change in domestic trajectory from WASPy traditionalist to contemporary lifestyle guru, largely facilitated through her friendship and business partnerships with Snoop Dogg, a rapper and media personality, beginning with their reality television program Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party (VH1, 2016–). Stewart has recently taken to selling CBD products, including her own line of CBD gummies, and has partnered with BIC lighters, along with Snoop Dogg, for the promotion of their new “EZ Reach” extended lighter for “candles, grills, and so much more,” referencing Snoop Dogg’s long-standing and frequently referenced love of marijuana.[45] Even Stewart, the modern mother of domestic advice, has lent her image and brand to restructuring the genre to reflect trends in better living discourse, updated from its earlier staunchly traditional approach.
Domestic satire texts rely on the texts they critique; without Martha Stewart Living, At Home with Amy Sedaris could not operate as a critical text. Just as Stewart borrowed from the advice of nineteenth-century domestic manuals, Sedaris borrows from the resultant pastiche of Stewart.[46] Yet, while citing Stewart as the cornerstone of contemporary domestic advice, Sedaris’s program does more than borrow from Stewart’s established televisual presence; At Home with Amy Sedaris’s use of critical intertextual strategies take the source material into consideration to expose the highly mediated nature of the domestic advice genre. Described by Gray, satirical texts act as parasites as they use the “target genre’s grammar” in order to function and by doing so are able to “[destabilize] the genre by simultaneously defamiliarizing it and placing it under the microscope for scrutiny.”[47] To this end, At Home with Amy Sedaris questions the naturalness of the perfect homemaker and reveals the zaniness at the heart of hyperdomesticity.
Amy Sedaris has starred in both cult classics and popular films since the mid-1990s. Her history of sketch comedy and existence on the fringes of homemaking trends resulted in the creation of her variety format show At Home with Amy Sedaris beginning in 2017 on truTV. Her previous hosting and crafting manuals contribute much to the art direction, aesthetics, and content of the show. In a June 2020 interview, Sedaris states that many of the props and sets for the programs are her personal belongings brought to the studio in a U-Haul.[48]
At Home with Amy Sedaris is described on truTV’s website: “Amy Sedaris cordially invites you into her home where she will show off diverse but necessary homemaking skills, from death-bed etiquette, to gutting a fish, to crocheting miniature sweaters for a mice infestation, to entertaining your husband’s business associates. As always, Amy will give it her best shot to entertain guests, increase her know-how and her can-do, and attempt to work out personal issues. Remember, if you want to be the perfect host, accentuate the positives and medicate the negatives.”[49] The title sequence of the program features whimsical music and a split screen displaying Sedaris’s “diverse but necessary homemaking skills,” which include making an appetizer shaped like a Christmas tree, adorned with shrimp cocktail ornaments, doing floor exercises in a form-fitting jumpsuit, and serving baked potato boats with sliced cheese sails. The title sequence, as well as the segmented nature of the program, depicts the successful homemaker’s ability to tackle any number of domestic tasks. In contrast to the title sequence of Martha Stewart Living, which features images of Stewart engaged in activities such as gardening, collecting eggs, and using power tools, Sedaris’s tasks are presented as offbeat and unexpected for the domestic advice genre.
The first episode of season 1, titled “Cooking for One,” opens with Sedaris massaging a bowl of raw meat as she describes what entertaining means to her: “I believe it is the giving of myself, to you, from us. And when it comes to hospitality, I’ve settled on a certain way of doing things. It might not be the most proper way or the most traditional, or even the most legal, but it works for me, and now, it can work for you.”[50] Sedaris relies on the established tone and presentation of domestic advice programs in which the host speaks to the audience from her home, often positioned behind a kitchen counter, as a friend and mentor. In “Cooking for One,” Sedaris teaches the audience how to cook a baked potato. She slides a jadeite mixing bowl full of potatoes across her counter and says, “Baking a potato seems relatively simple but should you wrap it in foil? Rub it in lard? I prefer placing it on a hot rack, right after stabbing it repeatedly with a fork, like you might a hairdresser who cut your bangs too short.”[51] She places the potato in the oven but first removes a pan of raw meat (the same meat she was massaging at the start of the episode), sniffs it and says, “Mmm . . . just as raw as when I put it in.”[52] Her kitchen is painted a mellow yellow and stocked with vintage-inspired appliances and crafted tchotchkes; the pan of raw meat lingers in the frame.
Popular press publications frequently describe Sedaris in relation to Martha Stewart. She is presented as Martha gone mad, demented Martha, or Martha meets Pee-wee Herman.[53] Many contemporary homemaking shows are indebted to and often replicate facets of Stewart’s programs, and Sedaris—white, blonde, and crafty—reads as a Stewart disciple, at least on the surface. However, as the above description makes clear, Sedaris distorts any Stewart-esque qualities she might possess into a humorous and uncanny caricature. Sedaris has visited The Martha Stewart Show (syndication, 2005–2010; Hallmark Channel, 2010–2012) as a guest on several occasions, completing baking and crafting projects alongside Stewart, including a holiday party cheeseball (Sedaris’s specialty) and an autumnal wreath. In these and other daytime appearances, Sedaris brings levity to the numerous tasks of homemaking and entertaining. In an appearance on Today (NBC, 1952–), Sedaris makes a Halloween meal, including a meat loaf wreath (which host Hoda Kotb calls ugly) and her Aunt Joyce’s brownies. As she demonstrates the recipes, Sedaris says, “This was my Aunt Joyce’s brownie recipe, and before she died, she told me not to share it with anybody, so, it’s in my book.”[54] Here, Sedaris quickly undoes the sanctity of family recipes and the obligation that often comes with inheriting them; Aunt Joyce is dead, and her brownies are being mocked on national television.
At Home with Amy Sedaris shifts between moments of genuine domestic advice (as Sedaris puts her potato in the oven, she notes to cook for ten minutes per ounce) and moments overtaken by absurdity (Sedaris breaks every dish in her kitchen attempting to cook while blindfolded). While clearly drawing inspiration from domestic advisers such as Martha Stewart and Peggy Mann, she appears to draw on other forms of domestic media as well, including what I have referred to here as domestic satire. The absurd and sometimes violent nature of her time spent in the kitchen, such as burning her hair and eyebrows opening an oven accidentally set to 700 degrees or fighting a possessed Christmas nutcracker intent on ruining her holiday party, is reminiscent of the work of feminist artists such as Martha Rosler and Karen Finley. In her video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler stands behind a kitchen counter and makes slashing, stabbing gestures with kitchen utensils and gadgets.[55] While she occupies “the classic TV cooking-show set up,” she does not produce a meal but instead whisks an eggbeater loudly into an empty bowl and slashes a kitchen knife through the air.[56] In her book Living It Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity, Finley teaches readers how to make a “Bobbitt Centerpiece” by carving Oscar Mayer hot dogs into the shape of penises, tied off with ribbon.[57]
Women such as Sedaris, Rosler, and Finley utilize the recognizable imagery and posture of domestic advice manuals and television programs, yet the results from their kitchens and crafting rooms distort such recognizability. In these examples, domestic bliss is thrown into chaos through their performances as zany homemakers.
The Zany Domestic: Implicit and Explicit
The episode titled “Holidays” from the first season of At Home with Amy Sedaris follows Sedaris as she prepares to host a holiday party.[58] As she prepares for her guests to arrive, a possessed Christmas nutcracker attacks, destroying her decorations, Christmas feast, and body in the process (see Figure 3). After the attack, Sedaris loses her Christmas spirit and calls off the party. She is then visited by a series of ghosts who remind her of the joys of hosting, leading to the reinstatement of the party. To prepare to host her guests on such short notice, Sedaris uses objects and foods already in her home to cook and decorate for the party. By the end of the episode, Sedaris has piecemealed a holiday feast and festive decorations using everyday objects like a broom as a Christmas tree and rubber gloves as stockings to hang from her mantle. Her feast, however, also includes a twelve-pound roasted turkey she happened to have on hand, fully cooked and dressed because every hostess is always prepared for the worst.
This episode exaggerates the obstacles of perfect entertaining using a murderous doll while relying on the typical imperative of domestic advice programs to deliver a fabulous meal and party-scape regardless of setbacks, surprises, and time crunches. Sedaris’s program often questions and plays with time as a crucial component of homemaking. While domestic advice programs differ from domestic sitcoms, many of the time constraints seen across the sitcom genre, such as a twenty-two-minute run time and “the desire for a happy, circular ending” appear in homemaking programs.[59] While domestic advisers provide abbreviated versions of recipes or decorating advice in the span of their shows, much of the preparation and labor of these endeavors is lost to editing or theoretically takes place over commercial breaks. The last-minute tie-up results in several prepared dishes and a beautifully decorated table with the audience asked to suspend their disbelief as to how and when this was all accomplished, as in the case of Sedaris’s twelve-pound turkey. The inability to suspend disbelief is highlighted in Sedaris’s appearances on The Martha Stewart Show that often show her directly questioning and exposing the advice and instructions Stewart provides to audiences. In one appearance, Stewart gives Sedaris a homemaking test that includes properly folding a bath towel and hand-whisking egg whites into a meringue. While whisking the eggs, Sedaris says, “No one does it like this, they have mixers nowadays.” She presents a bowl of premixed, perfectly fluffy egg whites that was hidden off-screen and asks, “Why can’t I just use these?”[60] While on her own show Sedaris reveals the unnecessary labor of homemaking and entertaining through a possessed doll, even in Stewart’s domain she draws attention to the time spent on frivolous tasks and the time dupes that occur on such programs.
To this end, I consider Ngai’s theorization of zaniness and its relation to labor, domestic and otherwise. Zaniness acts as a “playful, hypercharismatic aesthetic” that is “really an aesthetic about work—and about a precariousness created specifically by the capitalist organization of work.”[61] According to Ngai, Lucille Ball’s madcap, Jill-of-all-trades performance in I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) crystallizes the nature of the zany, its relation to domestic labor, and the figure of the housewife. Women comediennes before and after Ball also contribute to the understanding of the housewife, maid, or mother as a zany figure. Like the zaniness at the heart of contemporary domestic advice programming, a similar trend in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century film, as Maggie Hennefeld has shown, presents women and housewives as contorted, dismembered, and blown up to keep pace with increasing modernization and industrialization and to complete their housework on time.[62] Films such as The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (J. Stuart Blackton, 1907), in which “an overworked and overtired housemaid’s limbs detach from her body and perform her chores for her while the rest of the body relaxes,” are suggestive of the violent and comedic nature ascribed to such domestic films and their considerations of time.[63] In these examples, the housewife, the mother, and the homemaker are understood as elastic, “ready to contract and expand, modulate and modify,” even dismember and explode.[64]
Following Ngai, I understand hyperdomesticity as the ongoing production of homemakers who perform across the ever more porous boundaries of labor, leisure, and love. As such, the zany domestic acts as “the subject wanting too much and trying too hard . . . the utter antithesis of cool, the perspiring, overheated zany is a social loser.”[65] Traditional domestic advisers operate as what Anthony Giddens describes an “access point”: “a person with specialized knowledge who mediates the relationship between laypeople and modernity’s ‘abstract systems.’”[66] However, in the case of domestic satire, Sedaris’s ability to function as an access point to audiences breaks down and repeatedly exposes her lack of control over her domestic space. Sedaris’s performance maps neatly onto Ngai’s description of the zany; she is not one to emulate but one to avoid as she stands in stark contrast to the effortlessness of Martha Stewart, who, on the surface, could be considered as anti-zany. However, under neoliberalism, it is arguable that everyone is called to be zany to a certain degree, to wear multiple hats and be in perpetual motion and hustle. Considering zaniness and the neoliberal feminist imperative to have it all, as well as the role of aspirational labor in much feminized work, it reasons that zaniness could be an aspirational state, signaling productive citizenship. While one may not aspire to Sedaris’s sweaty zany or an exploding housewife, I urge that the category of zaniness broaden to include those like Martha Stewart who, despite their poise, are always working and producing to an impossible degree, even if audiences don’t always see the labor.
The pedagogy of Stewart’s brand is designed to instruct audiences on developing skills in every conceivable aspect of home and hosting, something domestic advisers have required of audiences since the rise of domestic science. Domestic scientists called for women to be educated experts “in order to understand all parts that [make] up the proper home,” including food safety, sanitation, and home utility regulations.[67] While Stewart occupies a position of implicit zaniness, an invisible requirement of her brand of homemaking advice, feminist writer Karen Finley and Amy Sedaris outwardly express zaniness as an undeniable condition of domestic labor. In order to satirize the effortlessness embodied by Stewart, women like Finley and Sedaris center zany performances in the home to reveal the amount of labor behind every craft and recipe shared by Stewart without commentary.
Finley’s book Living It Up includes deranged crafting projects like making your own casket and inedible recipes made from blood and roadkill, yet she leans heavily into the normative feelings of guilt in the domestic advice genre around the constant need to produce. The opening of her book reads, “Dear Friends, I know and fully understand how guilty we feel that we aren’t making something out of nothing constantly in our hectic lives.”[68] She goes on to write that when feeling depressed or low on inspiration, she hides under her bed and holds her “KitchenAid mixer and . . . daily calendar” until her mood improves, for “just being around [the] mixer makes [her] feel better.”[69] Proximity to ceaseless domestic labor, new laboring devices, as well as the need to enjoy such labor, comes to audiences in the form of domestic advice programs and instructions provided by their experts. Stewart, unlike Finley or Sedaris, is not explicitly zany but instead performs as “cool, blonde, poised, and efficient,” occupying a “home where there [is] a place for everything and everything [is] in its place.”[70] However, to achieve this requires a zany disposition and work that never ends, characteristic of neoliberal living; as Ngai writes, zaniness is “an aesthetic about production.”[71] While Stewart does not reveal her zaniness, nor do any of the traditionally minded domestic advisers discussed here, Sedaris, through her satiric approach, performs as the frenzied hostess and homemaker audiences typically do not have access to on domestic advice programs. Audiences see fragments of domestic processes but, most importantly, are rewarded with the perfect end result, far removed from the messy process of the labor necessary in its creation. Sedaris, instead of fast-forwarding through the mess or resolving it during commercial breaks, spends most of her time as hostess in a swirl of domestic chaos, zaniness on full display.
Mentioned above, Molly Yeh of Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm serves as another example of implicit zaniness, seen in her attempts to create a Funfetti cake from scratch. Like Stewart, Yeh does not comment on the labor required in her recipes, only the beautiful, finished product. Yeh seeks to make a Funfetti or rainbow chip cake, a product that is offered by all major convenience food brands in the form of a boxed mix, yet Yeh’s recipe removes all the convenience. According to her blog post, Yeh experiments with no fewer than twelve different sprinkle and white cake variations, including homemade sprinkles, dyed marzipan, and “found objects” including sesame seeds, edible flowers, and herbs.[72] Yeh, too, consults the town baker for more insight into how her homemade Funfetti cake might mimic the boxed version. The re-creation of the Funfetti cake is undeniably zany. Yet when performed by Yeh, a young, temporally sovereign wife and mother who chose farm life over a career as a Julliard-trained musician in New York, and when performed on Food Network (as opposed to somewhere like truTV or a streaming platform), Yeh’s zaniness is effectively disguised.[73] Additionally, Yeh’s utilization of nostalgic kitchen appliances and mixing bowls, including multiple sets of vintage Pyrex and a robin’s egg blue SMEG refrigerator, helps to establish her in the vein of 1950s homemakers prior, additionally tamping down her zaniness and rewriting it as fun and welcome care of the family, undeniably how she wishes to spend her time. What distinguishes Yeh from Sedaris and what prevents Yeh from occupying any sort of satiric approach is both her program’s placement on Food Network and her lack of criticality in approaching her time-consuming and at times complex culinary creations; even if Yeh is recreating a Funfetti cake from scratch and her ingredients and the end product are whimsical (sprinkles, frosting), the actual labor of baking is held in esteem as a serious endeavor, one that has to be worked at until it reaches perfection.
The middle- and upper-middle-class performances of domestic zaniness seen on domestic advice programming differ, though, from the ongoing and required flexibility of labor conditions of women workers across raced and classed lines; zaniness for the temporally sovereign, often white homemaker differs from the long felt demands of elasticity, adaptability, and double or triple shift labor conditions of those more fully embedded within the conditions of late capitalist living without the option to opt out. While these conditions have become prerequisites for most work captured by late-stage capitalism, they remain a requirement for marginalized groups in ways that are not new and remain remarkably persistent. As such, scholars contest the hyper-contemporary skew of precarity discourse, the porousness of work/life boundaries, and the skills of time management. Gregg is careful to discuss the experiences of the middle class and their newly felt precarity as distinct from the contingencies of work that other social groups have long experienced.[74] Precarity discourse, then, is incomplete without considering the ways in which minoritized groups have experienced the “aspect of high modernity” and have felt the greatest levels of disruption from feudalism to neoliberalism.[75]
This appears in the domestic advice genre in its special attention paid to educating Black or immigrant women on the tenets of domesticity as an American, middle-class pursuit. Mass migration to the northern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in specific focus on the social and cultural requirements of migrants, as well as “setting and defining the terms of citizenship” toward a politics of middle-class inclusion.[76] Publications such as Half-Century Magazine and even overtly political organs such as the Chicago Defender “stressed the importance of thrift, cleanliness, sobriety, and respectability, emphasizing issues of public appearance.”[77] Additionally, early cinema and domestic advice manuals were two avenues for Americanization pedagogy for (white) immigrant women arriving to the United States in the early twentieth century. Sarah Leavitt writes, “Domestic advice became a larger reform movement” and “many immigrant women looked toward [the genre] to learn the ways of their new country.”[78] Similarly, Black women who worked in domestic roles “would be making [homes] belonging to white people as well as their own,” resulting in a triple shift of work and care, including paid employment outside the home, tending to their own families, and work in their communities.[79] The work of Black women domestics rarely included “job descriptions or limitations of tasks . . . resulting in inexact expectations and wildly shifting hours.”[80] For Black and immigrant women especially, zany labor was the norm rather than a choice.
To this end, there is little reconciliation of these disparities addressed by the dominant domestic advice genre or that of domestic satire. Both domestic advice proper and domestic satire speak to aspirational inclusion in the middle class, one through instructions on how to achieve the good life and one through the exposure of the myth of the good life, yet neither address how such inclusion remains inequitable on the basis of race, class, and other social factors or how zaniness for those outside the middle class continues to persist in inescapable ways.
Conclusion: The Waning of Genre
In conclusion, I return to the question of domestic advice’s ability to continuously adapt in the present moment given what Berlant describes as the “waning of genre” or the faded “blueprint” of the good life offered by such texts.[81] Inarguably, the popularity of lifestyle programming and new media content dedicated to homemaking assumes that domestic advice continues to persist through its reliance on traditional markers of the good life, including homeownership, private property, and family. Networks such as HGTV and Food Network trade on “the values and meanings of American homeownership and its strong affiliations with arrival, success, security, even achieving the American Dream, solidifying connections between property, consumption, and notions of the good life.”[82] Contemporary lifestyle media and its domestic advice predecessors remain preoccupied by questions of “what our everyday lives should look like” and “who to be and how to live.”[83] These tastes and dispositions continue to follow a middle-class rule of thumb. The aspirational fantasy of middle-class status is premised upon its deliberate ordinariness and promised attainability for those who practice the advice of its experts. Maureen Ryan notes a tension in the accessibility of middle-class inclusion under neoliberalism in which the economic infrastructures once in place to afford a middle-class lifestyle have, since the 1980s, been in steady decline. Thus, Ryan suggests, “The need to signpost progress through the purchasing of ‘adult’ furniture and a KitchenAid mixer, and the ways in which these commodities stand in for middle-class security, might thus be about the impossibility of its achievement.”[84] Despite awareness that middle-class living is ultimately out of reach for many, the commodification and curation of middle-class iconography, all of which point to the home (despite the lack of homeownership), attempt to keep some semblance of the good life available for consumption in the midst of precarity.
Is this, then, how domestic satire becomes a ghostly version of domestic advice, its shadowy double? Domestic satire, though still in its theoretical infancy, has persisted across media in tandem with the domestic advice genre and must be considered alongside dominant texts to better understand how audiences have received and reacted to domestic advice for over three centuries, as well as what these satirical texts reveal about the myths of American living and gendered citizenship.
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In an era of media convergence, it may seem limiting to focus on television as a specific medium. While domestic advice is no longer only the purview of television, appearing across new media spaces such as Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and others, housewives and domestic advisers were some of the earliest televisual mainstays. ↑
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SMEG’s name is an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla, recalling the enamel and metalwork of the Italian company’s earliest products. SMEG, “Aesthetic: 50’s style,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.smeg.com/aesthetic/50-s-retro-style. ↑
Nathanson, “As Easy as Pie,” 328. ↑
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CBD is an abbreviation for cannabidiol, a compound found in marijuana plants that does not impair the user and that differs from THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, the mind-altering substance found in marijuana. Madeline Buiano, “Martha’s Line of CBD Products Includes Wellness Gummies, Soft Gels, and Oil Drops,” Martha Stewart, updated July 28, 2022, accessed April 20, 2022, https://www.marthastewart.com/7985856/martha-stewart-canopy-growth-cbd. See also EZ Reach BIC Lighter, accessed April 20, 2022, https://us.bic.com/en_us/ez-reach. ↑
Sarah Leavitt describes a brief encounter with Stewart at the 1996 Rhode Island Flower and Garden Show in which Stewart acknowledges the work of nineteenth-century domestic advisers as influential to her magazine, writing, “She cited several names of nineteenth century advisors and noted that she had some of their works in her office.” Sarah Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1. ↑
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At Home with Amy Sedaris, “Cooking for One.” ↑
At Home with Amy Sedaris, “Cooking for One.” ↑
See Steph Eckardt, “Amy Sedaris’ New TV Show, At Home with Amy Sedaris, Is Essentially Martha Stewart Gone Mad,” W Magazine, July 27, 2017, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/amy-sedaris-new-tv-show; Kevin Fallon, “Amy Sedaris: The Demented Martha Stewart We Need Right Now,” Daily Beast, October 19, 2017, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/amy-sedaris-the-demented-martha-stewart-we-need-right-now; and Adam Sternbergh, “Preview the Part Martha Stewart, Part Pee-wee’s Playhouse Set of Amy Sedaris’s New Show,” Vulture, September 7, 2017, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/2017/09/behind-the-scenes-at-home-with-amy-sedaris.html. ↑
Amy Sedaris, Hoda Kotb, Kathie-Lee Gifford, “Amy Sedaris – Cooking – TODAY – Fall/Winter Recipes – Hoda and Kathie-Lee,” Rommel, November 5, 2011, YouTube video, 5:15, accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s0KivA_tw. ↑
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Karen Finley, Living It Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 68. ↑
At Home with Amy Sedaris, season 1, episode 7, “Holidays,” directed by Bill Benz, written by Cindy Caponera, Paul Dinello, and Jodi Lennon, aired November 28, 2017, on truTV. ↑
Gray, Watching with The Simpsons, 51. ↑
Martha Stewart and Amy Sedaris, “Amy Sedaris Takes Martha’s Homekeeping Test,” Martha Stewart, March 19, 2010, YouTube video, 3:24, accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqdHtboWhi8. ↑
Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 188. ↑
Maggie Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). ↑
Maggie Hennefeld, “Destructive Metamorphosis: The Comedy of Female Catastrophe and Feminist Film Historiography,” Discourse 36, no. 2 (2014): 192, https://doi.org/10.13110/discourse.36.2.0176; and Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick, 41. ↑
Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 27. ↑
Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 189. ↑
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 91; and Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 197. ↑
Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher. ↑
Finley, Living It Up, 1. ↑
Finley, 18. ↑
Brunsdon, “Feminism, Postfeminism,” 110–111. ↑
Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 188. ↑
Molly Yeh, “sprinkle cake,” my name is yeh, September 9, 2014, accessed July 8, 2021, https://mynameisyeh.com/mynameisyeh/2014/9/funfetti-cake. ↑
As of 2021, truTV’s lineup of programming consists mostly of comedy reality programming such as prank shows, hidden camera shows, and programming on “life hacks.” ↑
Gregg, Counterproductive, 2018. ↑
Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 194. ↑
Noliwe M. Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 72–73. ↑
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 102. ↑
Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher, 75. ↑
Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 27. ↑
Sharpless, 65. ↑
Berlant, Cruel Optimism. ↑
Maureen E. Ryan, Lifestyle Media in American Culture: Gender, Class, and the Politics of Ordinariness (New York: Routledge, 2018), 112. ↑
Ryan, 3; and Laurie Ouellette, Lifestyle TV (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6. ↑
Ryan, Lifestyle Media, 179. ↑
