If you heard the phrase “women in comedy,” you’d probably think of stars like Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig or 30 Rock’s Tina Fey. While women like these have set the path for other female comedians to follow, startup comedians like the members of Hamilton 100, a trio of UNC alumni who founded their own comedy group in L.A., know from experience that more steps need to be taken to reach gender equality in the comedy scene.
“As far comedy goes, I'd be lying if I
said everyone is open minded and you're never treated differently anymore,”
admits Mary Sasson, Hamilton 100’s only female group member.
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UNC alumni Mary
Sasson, Ben Greene and Robert Stephens, the members of L.A.-based comedy group
Hamilton 100. Photo courtesy of Hamilton 100
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“When I've done open mics for stand-up,
I've often been annoyed with MC’s announcing me as the first woman comic,
instead of the next comic,” Sasson says.
Hearing a young comedian like Sasson
speak so openly about gender bias in comedy might come as a shock considering
the strides that female standup comedians have taken in the past year.
Both Whitney Cummings and Chelsea
Handler, two prominent females in the standup comedy scene, have secured
full-season orders from NBC for sitcoms based on their comedic performances.
Cummings produces and stars in her show, aptly titled Whitney, in addition to co-producing the highly-rated CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which Entertainment
Weekly ranked sixth in
their list of TV shows to watch this past fall.
Chelsea Handler doesn’t star in Are You There, Chelsea? (the show’s main
character, Chelsea Newman, is played by Laura Prepon), but don’t let that fact
fool you into thinking she’s not amazingly successful. Handler is the show’s
executive producer and has penned four bestselling books, three of which have
reached the top spot on the New York
Times’ list of best sellers. Her second book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, inspired the name of her show.
With successful women like Cummings and
Handler dominating the comedic arena, it’s difficult to imagine that female
comedians might still be considered separately than their male counterparts.
And in some situations, they aren’t.
Lauren Lapkus, who plays Dee Dee on Are You There, Chelsea?, is also an
improv and sketch comedy actress at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los
Angeles. She says that during her involvement in comedy, she’s never
experienced discrimination on the basis of gender.
“I have not personally felt that I had
to work harder in the comedy world solely because I’m a woman,” Lapkus says.
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| Lapkus on the Are You There, Chelsea? set with Laura Prepon. Photo by Jordin Althaus / NBC Universal, Inc. |
“I have always just striven to be the
best performer I can be, and I never really looked at it as a competition
between men and women. I admired so many male comedians when I was growing up,
but it never crossed my mind that I couldn’t be as funny as them because I'm
not a guy.”
While Lapkus’s positive statements are
inspiring for gender equality in comedy and in other industries, not everyone
in the entertainment industry is as open-minded as Lapkus. According to Mark
Washburn, an entertainment writer and reporter who currently writes television
and radio commentary for the Charlotte Observer, the issue of gender inequality
in the comedic realm is one that’s as old as comedy itself -- and one that’s
still in progress.
“In Elizabethan England, men were required
to play the women's roles,” Washburn says.
“But women were in the entertainment
business from the start in the colonies. Most people don't know it, but even by
the mid-19th century, women were stars in both drama and comedy.”
“John Wilkes Booth was a great actor of
his time, but it was the great Laura Keene whom Lincoln went to see the night
of April 14, 1865 at Ford’s theater. She was one of the leading comic actresses
of her time. Gracie Burns -- she played dumb, and you have to be really smart
to succeed at that -- still has an award named after her that is one of the
highest honors to women in media.
“Lucille Ball, one of the greatest of
the physical comedians, set the template for modern sitcoms in 1951’s I love Lucy, and was one of Hollywood’s
smartest producers as well.”
Yet even with all of these female comedic
accomplishments, women are still compared to men in the subject material they
choose to feature in their works.
When Bridesmaids
was released in 2011, many critics said the film proved that women could be as
funny as men, implying that this was still a question under dispute. Others
said that because the women in Bridesmaids
relied heavily on typically male humor, i.e., jokes about bodily functions,
women were still relegated to comedy that is defined by men.
Ben Greene and Robert Stephens, the
remaining two (male) members of Hamilton 100, provided male opinions on the
topic of women in comedy, agreeing with Lapkus that gender shouldn’t be a
consideration when evaluating a comedian’s work.
“It feels weird to talk about whether
women are as funny as men ‘cause it’s such a no-brainer,” Greene says.
“The same way it would feel weird to
talk about whether women are as smart as men. For every funny man I know I can
point to a woman who’s just as funny or funnier… but at this point it feels
silly to even have the discussion.”
Stephens agreed with Greene, echoing the
critical response to Bridesmaids and
gender-specific humor. “I think that in mainstream comedy -- what we see on TV
and at the movies -- we see the biggest difference between how men are
portrayed to be funny and how women are,” Stephens says.
“The man always seems to be set up,
while the woman is only allowed to be funny in certain roles and situations. It’s
outdated, weird and ultimately not that funny.”
In the context Stephens suggests, then,
the crude humor of Bridesmaids can be
seen as progress, because the cast wasn’t limited to jokes typically reserved
for female roles. By using humor that would typically be created by men, women
are proving that they can be just as funny and diverse as male comedians. But
for many women, this is not a compliment, because they want to be considered as
their own entities, not as women who aren’t afraid to act like men.
Katie Perry, a UNC junior, is a member of
the student comedy group CHiPs, where the members of Hamilton 100 got their
start. Perry says that she doesn’t normally experience gender bias in campus
shows, though one interaction with an audience member at a CHiPs show this
semester did leave her perturbed at the gender gap in comedic performances.
“I had an audience member walk up to me
and tell me I was his favorite performer of the evening. At first, I was
pleased to hear that, but he went on to say it was because I surprised him
because I am a female who is not afraid to drop f-bombs,” Perry says.
“At the end of the day, I want to be
remembered because of the scenes I created, not because I have no problems
using expletives. And I truly think he wouldn't have thought the same thing if
I had been a male player.”
But even aside from the potential gender
gap in what’s considered “male humor,” it’s hard to ignore the progress that
women have made in the comic sphere even in the past year alone.
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| Zooey Deschanel on the New Girl set. Photo courtesy of Fox |
Zooey Deschanel’s Fox sitcom New Girl is one of the highest-rated
programs among the 18-49 demographic of both men and women and has been
nominated for two Golden Globe awards. Betty White made a fantastic comeback in
2011, starring in multiple movies and producing her own NBC sitcom, Betty White’s Off Their Rockers. Julia
Louis-Dreyfus, the comedy actress of Saturday
Night Live and Seinfeld renown,
is currently starring in the new HBO series Veep
as the vice president of the United States.
One of Deschanel’s most high-profile
friends is Mindy Kaling, another woman whose comedic achievements have reached
an all-time high this year. Kaling earned her comedic chops playing Ben Affleck
in an off-Broadway musical and writing for NBC sitcom The Office, pitched a sitcom idea to Fox earlier this year. While
the project has not received an official title, the pilot episode is rumored to
feature comedy greats Bill Hader and Ed Helms.
Krysten Ritter, an actress whom you may
recognize from small roles in shows like Breaking
Bad and Gossip Girl, was set to star in the 2009 Fox sitcom Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23,
but the network dropped the show before it aired. This year, however, ABC
picked up the series and released the first two episodes as a midseason
premiere. In addition to getting her sitcom off the ground, Ritter also
co-wrote and starred alongside Kate Bosworth in the independent comedy film L!fe Happens, which was selected for the
Tribeca Film Festival in 2012. Even though only two episodes of the show has
been released so far, Ritter has already been featured in Nylon and Bust magazines
for her performance on the show, which reflects positively for comedy’s future.
“In general, I think that we are in a
golden age of women comedians, in part because successful women comediennes
make more room for successful comedians,” Sasson says.
-- SIDEBAR--
Top
five female-driven sitcoms to watch this season
·
New Girl, Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.
EST
·
Parks and Recreation, NBC,
Thursdays, 9:30 p.m. EST
·
Don’t Trust the B---- in
Apartment 23, ABC, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. EST
·
30 Rock, NBC, Thursdays, 8:30
p.m. EST
·
Are You There, Chelsea?, NBC,
Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. EST
|
“Hollywood is a business and when they see something work, they jump on the chance to replicate it. 30 Rock, in some ways, begets New Girl, and New Girl’s success will certainly beget more female-driven comedies.”
Where, then, is the future of comedy in
regards to gender?
To answer that question, one needs to
look no farther than IFC’s Portlandia,
a sketch comedy sitcom that won a Peabody Award in March and has been renewed
for a third season.
Portlandia stars Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen and
singer / actress Carrie Brownstein as hipsters living the “dream of the ‘90s”
in Portland, Oregon. While some of the sketches, such as “Cacao,” offer
gender-bending performances by Armisen and Brownstein, the show never makes
jokes about the fact that Armisen is of Hispanic descent or that Brownstein is
a woman. They’re just two funny, talented people, and one of them happens to be
a woman.
Both Sasson and Lapkus had similar ideas
on the future of comedy -- they both, like anyone else, want to be recognized
for their talents and not for their gender.
“As far as the whole, ‘are women funny?’
debate goes, I know female comedians are sick of it, and every intelligent,
modern male comedian is, too,” Sasson says.
“It’s a silly, misguided, sexist debate
that only allows certain outdated, narrow viewpoints to surface.”
Sasson’s on-point remark is in good
company. In the conclusion of her book Is
Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy Kaling says she didn’t address the
question of women in comedy in the book because she doesn’t like to “seriously
discuss nonsensical hot-button issues.”
Sasson and Kaling’s words here echo the New York Times review of Tina Fey’s
novel, Bossypants.
“She doesn’t need to make an
intellectual argument that women are funny. She just is funny,” writes Curtis
Sittenfeld.
Citing her favorite female comedians,
Lapkus agrees with Sasson that the question of women in comedy is a non-question.
“I am incredibly inspired by many women,
including Kristen Wiig and Lena Dunham, who have so recently achieved great
success,” Lapkus says.
“Knowing that Bridesmaids and Tiny
Furniture were Kristen and Lena's first screenplays, respectively, made me
want to pursue new avenues I might have otherwise kept in the back of my mind.
“They are just two more people proving
you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to -- and they happen to be
female.”
Further reading:
Bossypants, Tina Fey
Is Everyone Hanging
Out Without Me?, Mindy
Kaling
Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, Chelsea Handler
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Sasson and
Lapkus (center) with friends in the Hamilton 100 sketch “Secrets, Secrets.”
Photo courtesy of Mary Sasson.
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