Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics

Introduction. Pretty/Funny Women and Comedy’s Body Politics: Funniness, Prettiness, and Feminism

1 Pretty/Funny Women and Comedy’s Body Politics funniness, PRettiness, and feMinisM In 2007, eMinent jOuRnaList ChRistOPheR hitChens published a widely circulated Vanity Fair essay called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” making the provocative argument that humor is more natural, pervasive, and highly developed in men than in women. Women don’t need to be funny, he claimed. It’s not a trait men find attractive in women, while funniness is a trait women value in men. Funniness for Hitchens is like height or good teeth—advantages for natural selection. There are very funny women comedians, he conceded, but they tend to be “hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” He explained this remark by claiming that lesbian and Jewish humor, as well as the humor of large-bodied comics like Roseanne Barr, is “masculine” and thus does not actually fall into the category of women’s comedy. But given his theory of attractiveness and natural selection, it is clear that he is drawing on the stereotypes of large/Jewish/lesbian women as unappealing to men. The essay provoked the feminist outrage Hitchens no doubt intended, but the gist of his argument—that women are rewarded for what they look like and not for what they say—is one of feminism’s most basic cultural critiques. Because of this bias, “pretty” versus “funny” is a rough but fairly accurate way to sum up the history of women in comedy. Attractive actors with good comic timing, from Claudette Colbert and Lucille Ball to Meg Ryan and Debra Messing, have had plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and sitcoms. These women weren’t known for their own wit but for their performances of witty comic scripts. Most of all, they had to be pretty. In contrast, women who write and perform their own comedy have been far fewer as mainstream figures in modern popular culture, and most often they’ve gotten far because they were willing to be funnylooking : Fanny Brice, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin. Or, like I n trodu c t I o n 2 P R E T T Y| F U N N Y Mae West, they were willing to camp up or otherwise make fun of traditional femininity. Stand-up comedy, meanwhile, which developed into the premier venue for comedians, was where the bad boys played—Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor—and they didn’t have to be pretty. As late as 2005, a New Yorker essay opined that “comedy is probably the last remaining branch of the arts whose suitability for women is still openly discussed” (Goodyear). However, by 2005 comedy’s “suitability for women” was a pertinent question because women were increasingly visible in the comedy scene— in clubs and comedy troupes like Second City but also on network and cable television. Women stand-up comics like Sarah Silverman, the topic of the New Yorker profile, were taking on the foul language, political incorrectness , and gross-out humor that had once been a boys-only zone— hence the issue of suitability. These women were expanding into other terrains as well. In 1999 Tina Fey became the first woman head writer on Saturday Night Live (1975–), which soon featured a number of talented women whose careers took off over the next decade—Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon, Rachel Dratch. A 2003 New York Times article about this promising group was titled “It’s the Revenge of the Ignorant Sluts,” referring to an SNL skit from the 1970s, an era described by female cast members as singularly unfriendly to women comics and writers. The show may have been groundbreaking, but they complained it was also “a stinky boy’s club” (Nussbaum). In fact, a number of women comics who became mainstream stars between 2000 and 2010 were gritty survivors of similar “stinky” television experiences in the 1990s. Margaret Cho and Ellen DeGeneres made dramatic comebacks after failed network sitcoms in the previous decade. Kathy Griffin, declining the fate of the eternal sitcom sidekick, turned the tables by transforming the sidekick into the cranky D-list would-be star. Fey, meanwhile, skirted the dreaded sitcom wife/girlfriend roles by creating 30 Rock (2006–2013), a metacomedy about mainstream television; and Silverman, her comedy famously unfit for network TV, was able to launch her own R-rated sitcom on cable, The Sarah Silverman Program (2007–2010). By the time Hitchens published his essay in 2007, Emmy awards had been...