There are people who lament that no women now are as funny as Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck in the screwball comedies of Lubitsch, Sturges, and Hawks. They are missing the point: today’s comediennes are on television, where they are often responsible for their own material. Tina Fey, for instance. The former head writer of Saturday Night Live, who wrote the film Mean Girls before creating the sitcom 30 Rock, is one of the leading voices in a new generation of comediennes—women who not only play comic roles but also perform stand-up and write and direct comedy.
Lombard and Stanwyck were great comic actresses on-screen, but they had about as much to do with the joke writing as Jennifer Aniston or Courtney Cox did on Friends. Off-camera Lucille Ball was about as funny as lead. 30 Rock is often compared to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but James L. Brooks created and wrote that classic sitcom with Allan Burns; Moore and the rest of the cast were talented actors, not comedians. There were always exceptions, sui generis performers such as Mae West and Gracie Allen and Carol Burnett. The difference now is that funny is closer to the norm for women.
“There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be,” says Nora Ephron, the writer and film director. “But everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Ephron knows exactly why female comedians are currently much more successful than they used to be. “Here’s the answer to any question: cable,” she says. “There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women.”
The humor of women has been a sensitive topic ever since the first one cracked a joke. (In Genesis, Sarah, pregnant long past her childbearing years, says her son is named Isaac, Hebrew for “laughter,” because it’s funny she would have a child at her age.) Throughout time, prominent, deeply serious men have argued that women have no sense of humor. Shakespeare didn’t agree, and the 19th-century English novelist George Meredith suggested that without the tempering wit of women there could be no real comedy at all. His examples were the Middle East and Germany. (“The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous,” Meredith wrote, “never a laugh of men and women in concert.”)
But the suffragette movement must have taken a toll on the male ego: by the late 19th century the humorlessness of women was a staple of club toasts and magazines such as Punch. Jerry Lewis picked it up again in earnest in 2000, telling an audience at a comedy festival, “I don’t like any female comedians.” When Martin Short, also onstage, said that he surely must have liked Lucille Ball, Lewis flatly replied, “No.” (Lewis later softened his assessment on Larry King Live but not by much.)
Video! Behind the scenes of Annie Leibovitz’s shoot.
And the question was recently reopened in this magazine: the polymorphously polemic Christopher Hitchens argued that, in general, women are not funny, and certainly not as funny as men. “For some reason,” he wrote, “women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson’s comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all” (“Why Women Aren’t Funny,” January 2007).
Dissecting the nature of women’s humor, or supposed lack thereof, is a joyless and increasingly moot subject, but it boils down to the point Virginia Woolf argued in her essay about Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own, and it’s analogous to the case Larry Summers made so clumsily with regard to women in the sciences that it cost him his job as president of Harvard: namely, that society has different expectations for women. Summers sealed his fate by also suggesting that women’s innate aptitude for science and math might be weaker. The nature-versus-nurture argument also extends to humor. It’s a shame that Margaret Mead never made it to that tribe in Papua New Guinea where women tell the jokes, and men pretend to find them funny.
Certainly, the rewards of wit are not nearly as ample for women as for men, and sometimes funny women are actually penalized. Not everything has changed since 1885, when educator Kate Sanborn tried to refute the conventional male wisdom in her book The Wit of Women. Sanborn pointed out that women have good reason to keep their one-liners to themselves. “No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady’s lips,” she wrote. “What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws the merry dart or engages in a little sharp-shooting. No, no, it’s dangerous—if not fatal.”
Or as Joan Rivers puts it, “Men find funny women threatening. They ask me, ‘Are you going to be funny in bed?’ ”
It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.
At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.
And it doesn’t help to point out that Lucille Ball began her Hollywood career as a model and starlet or that Elaine May was—and still is—fetching. Onstage and even on-camera, funny women in the old days didn’t try to look their best; they tried to look comical. Lucille Ball would wear almost anything—Carmen Miranda dresses, muumuus, and crazy hats—to transform herself into the childish and braying Lucy Ricardo. When Phyllis Diller stripped off her false lashes and cotton-candy wigs, she actually looked attractive. Nowadays, Fey cultivates a “sexy librarian” look on 30 Rock, with foxy glasses and décolletage that slyly defies the show’s premise that her character, Liz Lemon, is a homely nebbish.
In her stand-up act and on her show on Comedy Central, The Sarah Silverman Program, Sarah Silverman is as crude and cruelly insensitive as any male comedian, but with a sexy, coquettish undertone—a Valley Village version of Brenda Patimkin, the Jewish-American Princess in Goodbye, Columbus. In one scene, Sarah calls her sister “gay,” then apologizes to her two gay neighbors. “I don’t mean gay like homosexual,” she says sweetly. “I mean gay like retarded.”
Even Lisa Lampanelli, a husky comedy-club veteran whose Donna Rickles act is an all-offenses-made smutfest, crammed with jokes about gays, blacks, and “fisting,” does stand-up on Comedy Central in a low-cut, blue satin cocktail dress, with Jimmy Choo shoes and her hair long, honey blond, and tousled. Lampanelli says her Sex and the City look is part of her act, but she may also want to look hot.
How this evolution happened is not entirely clear. The backlash school of feminism would argue that it’s the tyranny of a looks-obsessed culture that promotes sex appeal over talent, be it in comedy, pop music, or even sports. Joan Rivers blames the entertainment industry and the men who still control it. “Oh, please,” she says. “Nowadays, you can’t even get on open mike with less than a C cup.”
On the other hand, the comedy business offers more opportunity and cachet for women than ever before. It could be that after decades of insecurity—and self-derision—women finally feel they can look good and still be taken seriously as comics.
“Maybe pretty women were always funny but only now decided to go into comedy,” argues Patricia Marx, a humorist who in the 1970s became one of the first woman writers on The Harvard Lampoon. “Maybe pretty women weren’t funny before because they had no reason to be funny,” she says. “There was no point to it—people already liked you.”
It has become a supply-and-demand issue: the supply of good-looking female comedians is growing, and the industry demands that they keep growing prettier. Chelsea Handler, the host of Chelsea Lately, a talk show on E!, has long legs, short skirts, low-cut shirts, and puffy blond hair—her look is Beverly Hills bimbo, with a Borscht Belt mouth.
“With television, it’s just expected that every person be better-looking,” Fey explains. “In the 90s, it seemed like every person on a sitcom—think of the cast of Friends—was just really foxy. I know our show and The Office have normal people. If anything, it’s shifted back.” Fey says she doesn’t really see herself as a looker. “If I am one of them, it’s just under the wire.” But she concedes that it was gratifying to be told by a stylist during a group photo shoot for this issue, “Oh, you don’t look like comedians.”
Amy Poehler, who’s been on S.N.L. since 2001, says much the same thing. “For funny ladies, we’re attractive. But when you open us up to real, professional attractive people—I do not want to run with those horses.” And yet, they increasingly do.
Obviously, though, pretty comics still have to be willing at times to put their looks aside. Cleaned up, Amy Sedaris is a bubbly champagne blonde with a seditious edge, like Kyra Sedgwick; in Strangers with Candy, her Comedy Central series, Sedaris squinted, slumped, and drooped her mouth downward so deeply she looked like Martha Raye with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Cheryl Hines, who plays Larry David’s now estranged wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm, remembers being hazed in her early days studying comedy at the Groundlings, in Los Angeles. “I was supposed to be a cave woman or something,” she told The New York Times. “And I was in the middle of my improv, and my teacher shouted out: ‘We know you’re cute. C’mon! What else do you have?’ ” The heckling teacher was Mindy Sterling, who later played Frau Farbissina in the Austin Powers movies.
It’s hard to remember or fathom, but there was a time when Phyllis Diller had to dress in drag to attend a Friars Club roast. There has been an epochal change even from 20 years ago, when female stand-up comics mostly complained about the female condition—cellulite and cellophane—and Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr perfectly represented the two poles of acceptable female humor: feline self-derision or macho-feminist ferocity. (The fact that both those pioneers are now almost as well known for drastic cosmetic surgery as for comedy is either a cautionary tale or a very sad punch line.)
Comedy has changed on sitcoms, in clubs, and on Saturday Night Live. The repertoire of women isn’t limited to self-loathing or man-hating anymore; the humor is more eclectic, serene, and organic. “The consciousness changed” is how Lorne Michaels explains the difference. Michaels should know. He began his career as a writer for Diller, among others, and got his break as a producer thanks to Lily Tomlin, jobs which eventually led him to Saturday Night Live. There, starting in 1975, he presided over decades of male-dominated sketch comedy (brightened by the likes of Gilda Radner) until he named Fey the head writer in 1999 and in 2000 made her “Weekend Update” co-anchor opposite Jimmy Fallon. (In 2004 two women anchored the mock news desk when Amy Poehler replaced Fallon.) Suddenly, S.N.L. sketches were written by women, for women; the biggest stars were Poehler and Maya Rudolph; and the oh-God-I-hate-myself-so-much routines seemed passé. The satire shifted outward, with parodies of everything from “Mom Jeans” to Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. When Rachel Dratch, another strong cast member, introduced her whining Debbie Downer character, in 2004, Michaels says, “It was almost old-school.”
As comedy has opened up, women who once might not have dared write comedy, or writers who hadn’t considered performing, have been emboldened to become writers and get onstage, “sort of the way singer-songwriter happened in the 1960s,” Michaels says. Now the patriarch of S.N.L. is holding auditions for the next generation of female stars. “Two or three are really funny. And they are totally confident and don’t feel any need to do ugly-girl comedy. They do skits like ‘Angelina Jolie on an airplane.’ ”
“It’s not that these girls are better than the girls who preceded them,” says Fran Lebowitz. “They’re luckier. They came along at a time when the boys allowed them to do this. In comedy, timing is everything.”
There are still limits to how high a female comedian can climb—the crass ceiling. Late-night talk shows, from The Tonight Show to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, all have male hosts and huge writing staffs that, when gathered onstage at awards shows, are startlingly white and male, like the Whiffenpoofs of 1961 or Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. On the other hand, cable has whittled away at the primacy of the biggest shows. The Tonight Show, now in its 53rd year, is a little like the American presidency—still sought after but sadly diminished in power and influence.
The same can be said for movies: they cost more and more, studios make fewer and fewer, and, thanks to the Internet and other technological advances, the era of seeing them in theaters may end any day now. At the moment, though, big-budget comedies are still a reach for most women. Comedians such as Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, and Sacha Baron Cohen are major movie stars in a way that their female counterparts are not. Looks, for them, aren’t important: pudgy Jack Black and Seth Rogen are tapped as romantic leads opposite Kate Winslet and Katherine Heigl.
Poehler argues that, despite the changes in television and comedy clubs, Hollywood has made it harder than ever for comediennes to play leads in romantic film comedies. “I guess I’m not able to play the girlfriend of guys my own age anymore,” she says. “I play the bitchy older sister. And who doesn’t love the bitchy older sister who gets it in the end?” Poehler speaks wistfully of the days—20 years ago—when “Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler could open a movie, Teri Garr and Diane Keaton were movie stars and they looked like they lived in your building; you felt you could kind of know them.” Today’s movie comedies—think of Ellen Pompeo playing sweet and bland in Old School, or Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers—often shortchange women’s roles. “Female parts are underwritten as it is,” says Poehler. “You don’t need to be that funny, so you might as well be good-looking.”
It’s oddly cultural but not really much of a mystery: ticket sales are driven by young men (18–24), whereas television, especially network television, is more of a woman’s world. (Female viewers outnumber men by approximately 30 percent during prime time.) So it is something of a milestone that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have teamed up to make Baby Mama, a comedy about a single career woman (Fey) who wants a child and hires a working-class surrogate (Poehler), who moves in; they then clash like The Odd Couple. In a market that favors boy-girl romantic comedies such as 27 Dresses, a female buddy picture is bold. There have not been many successful ones since Bette Midler and Shelley Long starred in Outrageous Fortune in 1987. (Thelma & Louise had its funny moments, but that final pratfall was deadly.)
Fey says she is aware of the risks. “Women drive what’s on television, and husbands and boyfriends decide on movies,” she said. “I’m doing it backwards: I have a TV show for men and a movie coming out for women.”
The dynamic of female comedy duos does seem to have changed a little since the days of ironclad Mary/Rhoda rule—a pretty heroine and a plainer, funnier best friend. (The 1997 comedy Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was more of a cult favorite than a box-office hit, but the movie made a joke about the pretty girl/ugly friend principle: the characters played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow fall out after a heated dispute over who is the Mary figure in their friendship.) That is apparently not the pattern in Baby Mama. “Amy and Tina have transcended that,” says Lorne Michaels (who’s one of the film’s producers). “Neither is pinned down to that archetype—either one could play either role.”
Nor is it present on 30 Rock. In the pilot, Rachel Dratch was cast as Jenna, the star of the sketch-comedy show written by her best friend, Liz Lemon. (Dratch and Fey are friends in real life as well.) But at NBC’s instigation, for whatever reason, Dratch was dropped and replaced by the more glamorous Jane Krakowski—perhaps unfairly but also wisely, as it turns out: Krakowski is hilarious as the slutty, self-deluded Jenna and a perfect comic foil to Fey’s Liz. In an episode in Season One in which Liz admits to Jenna that she sometimes wishes she could be an on-air star, Jenna is bewildered. “You couldn’t be serious about acting for a living,” Jenna says. “You have brown hair.”
There is obviously a difference between witty writers (Mme. de Staël, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz) and stand-up comics. Stand-up comedy was always harder for women, because it is aggressive—comedians have to dominate their audiences and “kill,” by common metaphor. Male listeners might make allowances for sparkling repartee—which is, after all, instinctive and responsive and manslaughter at the very worst. But a premeditated joke or routine can be murderous in the first degree.
Women either had to compete—head-on, in the aggressive style of Paula Poundstone or Lisa Lampanelli—or subvert the form and make themselves offbeat and likable, the way that Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres do. As Elaine May used to say regarding improv, “When in doubt, seduce.” By and large, however, stand-up comedy is tougher and meaner, and the women who do it play by men’s rules.
Sitcoms are a collaborative art that can showcase a single talent, and always have. Television didn’t produce only Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett; there are scores of others, from Ann Sothern and Eve Arden to Bea Arthur and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Sketch comedy opened doors to women who were comedians more than actresses. But behind the curtain the writers’ room has remained a male-dominated clubhouse. “The girl in the room,” the lone woman writer on a white, male staff, is a long-standing and long-suffering tradition in comedy. It can seem benign and kind of fun—Rose Marie as one of the fellas on The Dick Van Dyke Show, or, in real life, Merrill Markoe when she was the head writer of Late Night with David Letterman. But especially in the no-holds-barred era of drugs and Lampoon humor, those writing rooms turned toxic, as Laraine Newman and other S.N.L. women have attested. Catherine O’Hara was hired away from SCTV in 1981, but quit before she had a chance to perform—appalled by a particularly dark and demented diatribe by S.N.L. writer Michael O’Donoghue.
Sometimes political correctness can overshoot. In 1999 a young female writing assistant tried unsuccessfully to sue the producers of Friends, claiming that the male writers were sexist and disrespectful, which was a little like suing Pepsi because its carbonated soft drinks are so bubbly.
Video! Behind the scenes of Annie Leibovitz’s shoot.
But the nastiness of male comedy writers is still an operative conceit. The writers of the HBO series The Comeback worked in a plotline that seemed inspired by the Friends lawsuit: Lisa Kudrow’s character, fading sitcom star Valerie Cherish, walks into the writers’ room on her new show to find one of them simulating a sex act on another, who is pretending to be Valerie. (But when Shayne, the young African-American actress on the show, threatens to quit because of the writers’ disgusting jokes, Valerie talks her out of it.)
This is also a theme on 30 Rock: Liz is constantly having to tone down and tame her team of socially crippled, uninhibitedly sexist male writers, which she does with the kind of good-humored forbearance Mary Richards maintained with Ted Baxter. In real life, Fey says she expects her writing staff—two women (plus Fey) and seven men—to be more tempered and sane. “Brilliant comedy writers sometimes have loud and dangerous personalities, and I wish them great success—somewhere else.”
Comedy writers, and comedy clichés, don’t always go quietly. Fey says that there are people who continue to insist that women are not funny. “You still hear it,” she says. “It’s just a lot easier to ignore.”
Alessandra Stanley is the television critic for The New York Times.
