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190 Ellen DeGeneres PRetty funny butCh as giRL next dOOR COVER GIRL This bOOk began with the questiOn Of hOw POPular culture has pictured women in comedy. The traditional placement divides them into the pretty ones, cast in perky romantic comedies , and the funny ones, the female comedians Hollywood has been reluctant to picture in the most popular stories of heterosexuality and romance . In the previous chapters I have argued that many women comics draw on mainstream notions of pretty as material for their comedy, seen in Tina Fey’s smart-aleck Bossypants cover photo, for instance, and complicated in the cover-girl histories of Fey and Sarah Silverman, whose conventional good looks confound the usual pretty-or-funny way of thinking about women entertainers. Kathy Griffin’s comic D list satirizes and grudgingly acknowledges the power of the cover girl and feminine ideals, while Margaret Cho and Wanda Sykes ferociously expose the whiteness of those ideals and the dynamics of spectatorship, of white people looking. Pretty/Funny concludes with Ellen DeGeneres, whose looks and the question of how she is looked at open alternative ways of thinking about women and comedy, as can be glimpsed in her famous breakthrough performance in 1986. The occasion was her guest spot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992), her first network television appearance . Born in Metairie, Louisiana, in 1958, DeGeneres had been doing stand-up comedy for four years when she was spotted by Jay Leno and referred to Carson. Clips of that performance, easily available on the Internet , show the young DeGeneres in sneakers, a bad haircut, baggy slacks, and a loose polyester top, a careless look that matches her low-key patter about innocuous topics—family, petrified wood, fleas. In hindsight, it c h a p t e r S I x 191 ~ Ellen DeGeneres would beeasy to read the sneakers and oversize clothes as signs of the butch lesbian, but it would be just as easy to read her as funny as opposed to the glamourous women who usually appeared on The Tonight Show. DeGeneres made history with her Tonight Show spot: she was the first female comic ever to be invited by Carson to join him at his desk, after her routine, for a follow-up chat. The coveted invitation to Carson’s desk after a first-time appearance, signaling approval by one of the most influential men on television, was every comic’s dream; it meant invitations to highprofilevenues and more television talk shows, as in fact happened with DeGeneres . Carson’s history of favoring male rather than female comics for this star-making gesture followed from his famous assertions that women aren’t funny, despite his own help with the career of Joan Rivers. In his casual chat with DeGeneres after her debut on his show, the topic was gender, with Carson and DeGeneres agreeing that stand-up comedy is tougher for women because audiences can accept aggression from men more easily. DeGeneres’s routine was hardly aggressive, but the aggression and hence presumed masculinity of stand-up comedy is the act itself and its authority to make an audience laugh.Carson’s invitation to thedesk and his comment about gender and aggression acknowledged that DeGeneres was good enough to be one of the boys, befitting a comedian who did not dress or coif or primp herself to look the way women looked on 1980s television , the era of Heather Locklear and Victoria Principal. The masculine slant to DeGeneres’s image throughout her career heightens the irony in DeGeneres’s significant appearances as a cover girl. In 1997 she made television and pop-culture history by appearing on the April 14 coverof Time magazinewith the headline “Yep, I’m Gay,”followed a few weeks later by the much-publicized coming out of Ellen Morgan, the character she played on her sitcom Ellen (1994–1998), making that series the first to feature a gay leading character. But the Time magazine debut was not the only surprising turn in DeGeneres’s cover-girl career. By 2010 she had become such a popular and beloved celebrity that she regularly appeared on covers of women’s magazines, from Redbook to Ladies Home Journal, cast as the wholesome girl next door. And in the previous year, the CoverGirl cosmetics corporation asked her to become a spokesperson and model, the first time in history a self-identified butch lesbian became the face of a major beauty-product line. Margaret Cho...

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