“Chaplin in Skirts”? Niní Marshall and the Female Comic Voice in Argentina, 1935–45

Comedy, like oratory, has historically been performance reserved for men. Women lacked a sense of humor, so the argument went, and in any case comedic performance was incompatible with proper female decorum. Yet in the mid-1930s writer and performer Niní Marshall took Buenos Aires radio by storm with her satirical and incisive caricatures of working class female archetypes, carving out a new place for the female comedic voice in rioplatense radio and becoming one of Argentina’s most-beloved comics.  In 1935 “Niní” developed the first of her famous comedic personalities, Cándida, a maid who spoke with malapropisms and carried the accent of Galician immigrants in Argentina. Two years later, Catita, a brash working-class porteña who spoke in lunfardo and dreamed in tango, was born. Before Niní Marshall, women by and large did not do comedy on Argentine radio; even more unusual was the fact that Niní wrote her own scripts.  Niní’s characters spoke directly to the growing pains and changing soundscape of Buenos Aires: European immigration, urbanization, and the new place of women in the workforce. With these and other outspoken but “uncultured” characters, Niní Marshall exemplifies the plural and contradictory ways in which the “feminine” might speak from within patriarchy.  While Niní went on to enjoy a long and important career in both film and television in Argentina and beyond, this paper will focus on Niní’s earlier radio work and her historical significance as a female ‘voice comic’. Part of a larger study of women/gender and golden age radio broadcasting in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, this paper seeks to place Niní’s comedy within the larger history of radio and corresponding changes and challenges to the gendered soundscape in the Río de la Plata in the 1930s and 1940s.