Feminism and the Problem of Women’s Comedy
Andi Zeisler / BITCHfest 2006
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I SET OUT TO WRITE A PIECE ON WHY THE potential of feminist humor has never been fully realized in modern pop culture. I considered the history of comedy as an “outsider” format, discussed the enduring legacy of the humorless-feminist stereotype, and went off on a tangent about the importance of fart jokes. Pages and pages of notes and half-finished drafts later, I gave up and stuffed it all in a folder. It would have all stayed there safely were it not for the fact that I went and watched, just the other night, Comedy Central’s
Roast of Pamela Anderson.
Pamela Anderson? I know. She’s not a comedian. I don’t think you could even pay her the backhanded compliment of calling her an inadvertent comedian. There are people who consider
Baywatch, Barb Wire
, and especially Anderson’s late-’90s series
V.I.P.
to be camp brilliance, it’s true. But there’s little evidence that she’s ever been the generator of a joke rather than just the butt of them. (Her two “fiction” books? They don’t count.)
I’m no roast expert, but from what I’ve seen of the Friars Club roasts broadcast on TV over the years, they honor comedy greats like Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, and they involve friends and colleagues of the roastee trading naughty humor and inside jokes as part of a shared collegial bond; at the end, the roastee gets to counter-roast the people involved. It’s sort of like high-school debate club, but with no stopwatch and more penis jokes.
For Pam, there was no shared bond. (There were penis jokes, though,
most of them directed at Anderson’s ex-husband Tommy Lee.) In fact, with the exception of Lee and a hopped-up, splay-legged Courtney Love, none of Anderson’s roasters seemed to know her as anything more than the image she projects to the rest of the world—namely, a walking, talking blow-up doll. And every witticism aimed at her couldn’t help but point that out.
So what do the hours I spent gawking at a raunchy tribute to a plasticky sex icon have to do with the problem of feminist comedy? I suppose it’s this: Despite all we know about the rich history of women’s humor, women’s place in the comedy world is still, almost always, as the subject of the joke. And—as if it needed saying—the joke is almost always at her expense.
SO, TO DRAW ON ALL THOSE HALF-FINISHED DRAFTS AND START over: Being an outsider is not automatically a negative thing in the realm of comedy. Much of the most celebrated American wit has its roots in the realm of marginalized and oppressed folks—most notably Jews and African Americans—whose traditions of identity-based humor helped to temper the racism and ostracism they historically faced. Over time, it has been assimilated into the larger lexicon of funny. Think of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Dave Chappelle, ecstatically embraced by the very white folks they lampoon. The Marx Brothers, whose physical antics and caricatures of immigrant confusion became black-and-white classics. The observational shtick of Borscht Belt stand-ups Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and Shecky Green, which evolved into the comedy-of-nothing aesthetic of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, who parlayed Jewish stereotypes of passive aggression and sexual neurosis into big, mordant yuks.
With long associations of social/cultural otherness and potent, often politically relevant humor, women have the potential to be the life of this party. From Jane Austen and Dorothy Parker, Fanny Brice and Lucille Ball, Elaine May and Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin and Fran Lebowitz, Gilda Radner and Whoopi Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard and Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and Wanda Sykes, Kate Clinton and Lea DeLaria, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph, the Guerrilla Girls and Amy Sedaris, there’s plenty, and I’m even leaving out a whole slew of them just for lack of space. Feminist humorists are also a well-anthologized bunch, appearing in such collections as 1980’s
Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire,
edited by Mary Kay
Blakely and Gloria Kaufman (which excerpts sources from
The Autobiography of Mother Jones to Rubyfruit Jungle
), and Roz Warren’s collections
Women’s Glib, Women’s Glibber and Revolutionary Laughter
. Simply put, women’s humor does not lack a canon. It’s the recognition of the canon as such that’s the problem—and the problem behind that is the lack of recognition of women as funny in the first place.
Just as radio DJs refused for years to play female artists back-to-back for fear that their target audience of males would switch the dial, so do comedy-club owners, TV bookers, and magazine editors structure their offerings to woo a primarily male audience. Out of fifty-four humor writers featured in 2000’s
Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor
, a whopping nine were women. And as authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards point out in their book
Manifesta, The New Yorker’
s celebrated humor column “Shouts & Murmurs” went almost a year without featuring the writing of a woman. So the challenge for women is to gain acknowledgment and respect, and avoid simply existing in the chick-humor ghetto of menstrual-cramp jokes, boyfriend complaints, and refrains of “Am I right, ladies?”
Even when it doesn’t have to be, humor is understood to be an inherently gendered communication—and one that privileges a male worldview. If a woman doesn’t laugh at a man’s joke, it surely isn’t because the joke itself isn’t pants-peeingly funny; it’s that the woman isn’t equipped with enough of a sense of humor to appreciate it. And while women have always used humor as a means of bonding with each other—whether out of a conscious shared oppression or just because it’s fun—this humor has generally been regarded as too narrow to register within a male definition of comedy. Dick jokes are universal; childbearing jokes are not.
The zen koan of humor and gender—If a woman makes a joke and a man fails to laugh, is the joke still funny?—has persisted in the world of professional comedy, and the gender assumptions in humor are still taken as a given even as female comedians abound. “All the women comics I know work and are as successful, if not more successful, than our male counterparts,” said Margaret Cho in a 2000 issue of
Bust
. “Yet we’ll never get the respect from the boys, ever. None of us do—not me, not Ellen, not Roseanne or anybody. Never, no matter how famous you are, it just doesn’t register with them. They don’t give it up to you; they don’t validate you as
being anything … They don’t want women to be their peers.” (This point was amply illustrated by legendary schnook Jerry Lewis at 2000’s Aspen U.S. Comedy Arts Festival: When asked by Martin Short what female comedians he admired, Lewis answered, “I don’t like any female comedians. A woman doing comedy … sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”)
The most acceptable role for women in performed comedy has historically been as part of a predominantly male sketch or improv-comedy troupe—like Elaine May, who with Mike Nichols and Alan Arkin, among others, founded Chicago’s now-legendary Second City; Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, featured performers on the ’60s free-form TV show
Laugh-In
; and Gilda Radner, Julia Sweeney, Ellen Cleghorne, and the many subsequent female cast members of sketch-comedy standard-bearer Saturday Night Live. More recently, indie-comedy ensemble shows—including Fox’s long-defunct Ben Stiller Show and former MTV offerings The State and The Upright Citizens
Brigade
—have exemplified the “Smurfette” model, in which there’s one woman in a group of men, often as the reactor to, rather than the instigator of, the humor.
The problem with this setup is that it allows for the perpetuation of the idea that every funny woman is simply an anomaly, an exception to the “women aren’t funny” rule. Indeed, even with women as a crucial part of the comedy-troupe structure, their contributions have often been perceived as less central than that of their male counterparts (John Belushi, for one, was notoriously averse to performing with female castmates on
Saturday Night Live
), or even assumed to be tokenism, a nod to political correctness in casting. Even after infiltrating comedy’s long-running sausage party, women are still left telling their jokes mostly to each other.
BACK TO PAM. YOU CAN IMAGINE THE JOKES THAT WERE TOLD at her expense at this roast: Pam has big tits. She’s a dumb blonde. She’s had Tommy Lee’s huge penis inside her, so she must have a big giant vagina. Oh, the hilarity! And Pam just sat there and smiled, but not in an “Oh, you got me, Jimmy Kimmel! That twenty-seventh big-boob joke was a real zinger!” kind of way. More in kind of a pained, just-keep-smiling way. And she did not zing back.
I don’t know what I wanted from Pamela Anderson. But her very presence up on that dais was a succinct illustration of what Gloria Kaufman, in her introduction to
Pulling Our Own Strings
, posited as the difference between female humor and feminist humor. The former “may ridicule a person or a system from an accepting point of view (‘that’s life’),” while the latter demands a “nonacceptance of oppression.” (Handy example:
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, in detailing the comedic trials of a woman to control her appetites, both physical and emotional, in service of achieving a stereotypical ideal womanhood = female humor. Gloria Steinem’s 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy,” in which she reasoned that menstruation as a male activity would be a point of pride and a means of power = feminist humor.)
Female humor, in its que-sera-sera acquiescence, may offer plenty of male ridicule, but it also depends on a vision of gender that’s limiting to all of us. Female humor tropes are, like Pam Anderson jokes, circumscribed by prepackaged ideas of what supposedly makes a woman both attractive and open to ridicule: big breasts, small skirts, limited intelligence.
Feminist humor, on the other hand, has as its goal a revisioning of gender roles that acknowledges stereotypes but ultimately rejects them. These reactive vs. proactive definitions are often confused, as we know from the people out there who consider mass e-mails like “50 Reasons Why Cats Are Better Than Men” to be examples of shrewd feminist analysis. But ultimately, feminist humor posits that women see themselves not as the butt of the joke but as its instigator—and doesn’t see the broad category of men as the butt of the joke, either. Defined as an outsider humor the same way African-American or Jewish-American humor has been, feminist humor demands both an identification of outsiderness and a vision of transcending it.
To tell a joke is to flex power—the power to make someone laugh, the power to make someone feel exposed, the power to hurt. This goes some way toward explaining why it’s so easy to deny women the ability to be funny—by dint of gender socialization, we’re not supposed to be. With the acquisition of their first doll baby or stuffed animal, young girls are encouraged to play nice, be nurturing, and not hurt anyone’s feelings. A pattern emerges: Discouraged from training their wit on others, girls grow up to aim it at themselves, building up a repertoire of stories of their social
failures, physical shortcomings, and general inadequacies and inviting others to relate, to laugh with, but also, maybe, to laugh at. That’s why Pamela Anderson was just sitting there in her see-through shirt at the Comedy Central roast, smiling away. She was embodying female humor: laughing at herself, because, given that everyone was already laughing at her, it was the right response. Like Janeane Garofalo, who in her stand-up days undermined her burgeoning political fervor with descriptions of her less-than-Hollywood figure (“I have the physique of a melting candle”), or Phyllis Diller, who once commented that her Living Bra “died of starvation,” Anderson was employing the classic anticipatory retaliation of the female in comedy. Of course, self-deprecation itself has never been strictly girls’ territory—right, Woody?—but women make it the crux of their act for different, more indelibly socialized reasons than men.
It’s not that self-deprecation can’t be funny, but it rarely translates well into political subversion. We can laugh at female comedians’ riffs about their weight—say, those of Anderson roaster Lisa Lampanelli—but also feel a twinge of disappointment that the riffs seem so inevitable, reactive instead of proactive. The thing about outsider humor is that while it has that much-needed capacity to unite any given group of oppressed people, another thing it provides is a way for an individual or group to exert power or superiority over another—coincidentally, something that women are socialized not to want or need.
“We are expected, somehow, not to offend anyone on our way to liberation,” wrote Mary Kay Blakely in her introduction to
Pulling Our Own Strings
. “There’s an absurd expectation that the women’s movement must be the first revolution in history to accomplish its goals without hurting anyone’s feelings.” Humor offered by men, in all its varieties and permutations, shares one commonality—an entitlement to piss off, gross out, and instigate. And at least one, maybe all three, of these things is necessary if feminism is to truly achieve any of its goals for equity, laughter being but one.
Feminism has slowly, incrementally widened the cultural lens through which society views women—their ideals, their accomplishments, and even (though admittedly, not often enough) their appearance. That lens needs a lot more broadening, especially when it comes to humor. Indeed, the road to feminist consciousness is for many women paved with multiple instances of other people whining, “Can’t you take a joke?” when we refuse
to laugh at the many references to women—smart women, dumb women, sexually stereotyped women, fat women, nagging women, strong women, and odd women—that have always peppered our pop culture as comic relief. If only we crazy, wild-eyed buzzkillers would just let people have their jollies without getting all whiny about it, all would be well, right?