Why Comedies about Pregnancy Matter

by: Christa van Raalte , November 10, 2025

Pregnancy is funny—as are the attendant matters of conception and childbirth. Many women’s best comic anecdotes (albeit not always those recounted in mixed company) begin with the words: ‘When I was pregnant with…’ Yet, the socially sanctioned comedy offered by commercial screen entertainment has often had a skittish relationship with the topic, even in the context of ‘gross-out’ comedy. Therefore, a piece of sustained scholarship that unpicks the relationship between pregnancy and comedy over time and on several levels is well overdue.

Many academic publications claim to address new or underexplored topics: Victoria Sturtevant’s book It’s All in the Delivery is one of the few that deliver on that promise. She is to be congratulated on having produced a comprehensive and politically committed account of how US film and television comedy have represented pregnancy and associated themes. The book explores how popular American screen titles engage with ideologically fraught topics, such as infertility, unwanted pregnancies, and abortion, as well as the physical and cultural challenges of childbirth. Sturtevant’s analysis of the narratives and imagery co-opted to illuminate (or obfuscate) these topics touches on a range of imbricated social issues, including gender, sexuality, race and, of course, the bizarre (to most European observers) obsession of the US political establishment with the fate of the human foetus.

In her introduction, Sturtevant foregrounds the political context of her intervention—Roe v. Wade was overturned less than a year before the book was written. The consideration of this Supreme Court decision justifies the need for the study; thus, from the beginning, Sturtevant emphasises the importance of recognising ‘what is at stake when popular media fall short of real candor in narratives about childbearing’ (2024: 3). Taking a critical view of US screen comedy and its treatment of pregnancy from the days of silent cinema onward, her book documents how the euphemisms, myths, and falsehoods about pregnancy that have historically circulated in American film and television implicitly support the narrowing of reproductive choices by oversimplifying a complex physical, emotional, and social experience into a set of sentimental or sexual tropes (Sturtevant 2024: 4).

At the same time, this study celebrates the ability of comedy and satire to expose political blind spots and lampoon social hypocrisy about human reproduction. While some comic treatments serve to reinforce reductive representational norms, others, she argues, actively challenge them. These strategies support social change by critiquing and reframing entrenched social and political issues, by activating social bonds around shared experience and laughter, by resisting dogmatic and straightforward modes of thought and by refusing a discourse of shame in relation to social taboos around the body. Citing Kathleen Rowe’s work on the ‘unruly woman’ (1995: 30), Sturtevant reminds us that one of the ways a woman may be unruly is simply by being pregnant. The author suggests that the increasingly candid presentation of the physical details of pregnancy over a century of screen comedy is complicated by three ideological threads, which she identifies as ‘surveillance culture, whiteness, and the ‘free-range fetus’ (2024: 16), each of which is discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow.

The first two chapters of the book take a broadly historical approach to the representation (or erasure) of pregnancy in film and television texts—whether comedies or melodramas with comic elements. Chapter One, ‘Confinements: Enter the Stork,’ charts the story from pre-code film to post-war sitcom and from taboo to cliché. Some memorable stops along the way include Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1896 fantasy sequence of babies growing in a cabbage patch, Gloria Swanson knitting baby socks as a reliable euphemism for pregnancy, a succession of mothers-to-be sporting a conspicuous absence of baby bumps, and many cartoon storks. The chapter culminates in a discussion about two key works: the chaotic and irreverent The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943, dir. Preston Sturges)—something of an outlier in its portrayal of unwed-conception—and the 1952 season of I Love Lucy, in which the writing team decided to deal with the lead actor’s pregnancy by making the titular character pregnant as well. By this stage, the baby bump had come out of hiding to function as a visible, and often comically inflected, costume element.

Chapter Two, ‘Hysterical Fatherhood: Male Pregnancy on Screen,’ first addresses the way in which so many comic texts represent pregnancy, and particularly childbirth, as something that happens to men—from the shock engendered by the whispered announcement at the start of a pregnancy to the frantic rush to the maternity ward and the variously stressed, panicked or fainting fathers at the end. In some cases, Sturtevant points out, ‘the father … simply replaces the mother as the suffering patient’ (2024: 68), which, apart from its comic potential, is a neat way for texts to sidestep the unrepresentable horror that is actual childbirth. The chapter also addresses a small but significant set of texts featuring men who actually become pregnant, ranging from Joan Rivers’ Rabbit Test (1978) via a 1989 episode of The Cosby Show (Season 6, episode 8), to Junior (1994), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as an oddly androgenous test subject. Such texts, she argues, have some potential to challenge social assumptions and regimes of control, as do the handful of screen stories that explore male reproductive anxiety through the personification of sperm, including the inimitable Woody Allen sex comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid To Ask (1972)

Chapter Three, ‘Bad Pregnancies: Social Problems and Bad Seeds,’ explores comedies about pregnancies that are deemed socially unacceptable, usually marked by being unplanned, out of wedlock, or lacking either in economic stability or social—often specifically, racial—privilege. Sturtevant contextualises these texts within a political discourse informed by the logic of eugenics and fantasies of social control. She traces the treatment of nonmarital pregnancy through comedies of the 1960s into overtly feminist texts of the 1970s, and the more socially conservative outputs of the 1980s—noting in particular how such texts avoid or skirt around the phenomenon of non-white pregnancies. The issue of adoption is also briefly addressed, primarily as a ‘solution’ to the problem of teen pregnancy, with a fascinating examination of the independent film, Juno (2007). This leads neatly into Chapter Four, ‘Baby Bust: Infertility and its Discontents,’ in which the writer explores how film and television comedies have supported or debunked some of the myths around infertility, including claims that it is not a genuine medical condition by blaming it instead on a woman’s independence, overachievement or failure to relax. This chapter also addresses related issues like miscarriage, adoption, surrogacy and fertility treatments—including those involving improbable romances between sperm donors and the mothers of their teenage progeny. As with childbirth, a notable number of these infertility narratives appear to be centred on the comic potential of the male experience, while avoiding the potentially unsettling representation of the more invasive procedures experienced by the female partner.

Chapter Five. ‘Shmashmortion: Terminating Abortion Stigma through Comedy’ borrows its title from the euphemism coined by the male protagonist’s immature friends in the gross-out comedy Knocked Up (2007)—friends, as Sturtevant notes, who can apparently discuss all other bodily functions with a complete absence of reserve or subtlety. The topic of abortion, she argues, with its moral and political baggage, is better suited to melodrama than comedy—but within that genre is almost inevitably presented ‘as a moral problem to be solved’ (2024: 154). She cites Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport’s content analysis study (2014), which concludes that fictional characters who even think about abortion run a significant statistical risk of death, despite the negligible actual risks of properly conducted terminations. Here, Sturtevant celebrates comedy’s potential not only to challenge the myths and prohibitions surrounding the topic but to offer a happy ending for characters who decide to end an unwanted pregnancy. Of course, some comedies, like Amy Heckerling’s Look Who’s Talking Too (1990), tend to support the myth of the independently viable ‘free-range fetus,’ as characterised by the author (2024: 167). Still, many make a point of debunking it. Sturtevant cites, among others, the episode of Girls in which Hannah (Lena Dunham) solemnly studies a lentil, which a pregnancy website tells her is the same size as the newly fertilised embryo inside her. Some of the most interesting examples of comic approaches to the topic discussed by the author are Citizen Ruth (1996) and The Sarah Silverman Program (2007-2010), both of which use the strategy of ‘playing dumb’ to expose the disingenuous arguments and ideologically informed logic of the ‘pro-life’ lobby.

In her concluding chapter, Sturtevant briefly explores the increasingly common appearance, over the past two decades or so, of the visibly pregnant female stand-up comic. In addition to comedy’s potential for unpacking the topic of pregnancy, she argues for the importance of pregnancy to women’s comedy. She references the way in which the possession of a womb has been implicated in arguments for why women cannot (or should not) be funny, as indeed it has been in arguments for most proscribed qualities or activities throughout women’s history. An explicit focus, then, on the gestating womb as a source of comedy seems a good start to debunking such notions once and for all.

This eminently readable volume is written with a wittiness that, while always cognisant of the very serious implications for women’s reproductive rights and their position in society in general, also holds on a sense of the absurdity manifest in some of the ideological and representational knots into which texts tie themselves when attempting to ‘manage’ the socially challenging and politically dangerous topic of women having (or indeed, not having) babies. The book’s achievement is to provide a range of thoughtful textual analyses while making it explicit that pregnancy (together with associated issues of reproductive rights and reproductive health) is a feminist issue.