It often happened that by the time a new crop of comediennes arrived, their predecessors and would-be role models were already quaint relics of an ideology that had already gone out of fashion. Like travelers equipped with out-of-date maps, female comedians in every era were forced to simply assess their surroundings and make a plan from there.

They did, however, have one another to compare notes (and commiserate) with in the meantime. While not every encounter between comedy contemporaries was warm or sisterly or uplifting (far from it, in fact), many comediennes mentored and inspired one another along the way.

In her childhood years, sketch comedian Nora Dunn watched Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In. Dunn would grow up and appear on Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1990, but it was Tomlin who first taught her that comedy was, indeed, for grown-ups too. "As a kid, I did characters," Dunn recalls in the book. "So did my sister; my brother Brian had several. We'd ask each other questions in these characters; I didn't realize that adults did that too. So when I saw Lily Tomlin doing Edith Ann I was like, 'Oh my God.' ... It was like seeing a baseball pitcher and going 'Oh, I can be a pitcher too. I can be in the majors.'"

Valerie Harper, who played the brash Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff Rhoda, never forgot a poignant moment she witnessed while watching Emmy-winning screenwriter Treva Silverman negotiate the politics of a joke with her male co-writers. "There was a joke where the boys, [creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns], had said something like 'I have a date, I better look under 'B' for blonde, 'BR' for brunette, and 'R' for redhead," she says. "It was a joke, and everyone laughed. [But] Mary is standing there. And Treva said, 'Guys, guys, you can't leave it at that. Take Mary out of the shot, but Mary can't hear that and not comment or have a rejoinder.' And so she did. And it was funny, so there was a double laugh. They were making a consciousness moment for everybody."

Comedy writer and stand-up Carol Leifer watched a late-night appearance by Elayne Boosler in the 1970s and saw the first tiny sparks of a movement ignite. "I remember she went on the Tonight Show with a guest host, Helen Reddy, who said to her, 'You are really an inspiration to so many women out there. It's great to have a young female comic on.' And Elayne said something like, 'Well, I hope I'm just an inspiration to all comics.'"

Mr. Show alum Karen Kilgariff saw something she'd never seen before in Janeane Garofalo—and afterward, she went home and changed her entire act. "The first time I saw Janeane, I was like, oh my God. She was wearing her black tights with her cutoff denim shorts over them and her Doc Marten boots. And she walked out and then starts doing all this brilliant, amazing observational comedy. I had just started to do comedy three weeks before, and after I watched her, I realized that I was speaking in a really high register onstage, almost in a baby voice, like 'Be nice to me, I'm the girl!' After I saw Janeane do stand-up, I immediately talked much lower and did much more of a pulled back too-cool-for-school character. [...] Up until that point, the only people I ever saw were like, I'm Rita Rudner, I'm the sexy ditsy mom, or I'm wearing a pantsuit."