This week was Women in Comedy week, in which we focused on the wonderful female contributions to the world of comedy over the years. It's been great! And before we get back to the 51 weeks of the year that I dedicate to Men in Comedy (Just kidding! Please don't throw me to the Jezebel commenters! I can't take it, I'm too weak!), I figured it'd be a fun to run through everything lady-centric that went up this week, just in case you missed anything.
Women have proven they could be funny since the beginning of television; there were female comedy stars on shows like SNL, Lilly Tomlin on Laugh In, Carol Burnett. But the sitcom was different — the mothers, girlfriend and secretaries were secondary characters. Women were never the comedic force on a sitcom. They never had the punchline, they were the punchline. But all that changed in the 1980s.
I was born in 1982, and 7 years later I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. While most girls my age wanted to be doctors, teachers and princesses, I wanted to work in a bar. I [...]
The Road. It surfaces in every conversation about stand-up comedy. It’s concrete and tangible, but it’s also metaphorical and can take on an abstract, ethereal identity. To learn the craft of stand-up comedy and become a successful performer, the conventional wisdom is that comics must surrender to the road and figure things out.
I imagine young jesters in ancient Athens received the same advice when they asked how to go about performing for emperors: “Embark on the road my son,” said the white-haired, bearded guy in my imagination. “There, you will find that which you seek.” The road is a physical and spiritual journey.
For Women in Comedy week, [...]
“Golf is not a sport. Golf is men in ugly pants, walking.”
If you were in my presence in Southern Indiana in the early 1990s, you might, incorrectly, attribute this quote to me, due to my constant need to repeat this joke, regardless of the time or place. However, the joke belongs to Rosie O'Donnell, a comedian I'd often watch on VH1's Stand Up Spotlight. I can't say why I loved that jokes so much. Surely, golf was not such a big part of my life that I felt it needed to be taken down a peg. Rather, I think my love for the joke was based in [...]
The notion that women aren’t funny is as old as the people still bringing it up. These days in comedy, funny women are everywhere. And yet the men writing comedy still outnumber the women by a wide margin. So while the idea that women aren’t funny has been soundly defeated, a new question has taken its place — since we know women are funny, why aren’t there more female comedy writers?
My immediate reaction to this question is a residual, vague resentment, aimed at absolutely no one in particular. Someone, somewhere, is deciding women aren’t funny! This is an outrage! Show yourself, you amorphous oppressor! I want to know [...]
I had no idea whether current events would overlap with Splitsider's Women in Comedy week, but then Michele Bachmann happened. At first I was like, that's great! Her Tea Party State of the Union response was like a media coverage suicide bombing. Bachmann blew herself up for a greater cause: to keep Obama’s speech from dominating the news cycle.
This should be political comedy gold, right? Indeed. On Thursday afternoon there were four video parodies of Michele Bachmann's rebuttal just on the Huffington Post Comedy page, plus one of those things Andy Borowitz does. It worked!
The appeal for comedians is clear: Bachmann is a nut job. This is [...]
In the rush of the 80s-90s stand-up boom, newly-emerging pay-cable began augmenting their normally scheduled soft-core pornography and repeated showing of horror movie Cat's Eye with stand-up showcases. Dyna Moe watched every one of them and presents a week-long tribute of the comediennes of era.
Rita Rudner is a petite, pretty brunette who delivered thoughts on men, family, and love with a measured, but spacey delivery staring somewhere ten feet above the audience's head.
Groucho Marx called her “practically the fifth Marx Brother” and she appeared in nearly 60 films in a career spanning four decades, but the name Margaret Dumont is relatively unknown in today’s pop culture. What a shame; she only essentially invented the “straight-woman” character, paving the way for Ann Perkins and Pam Beasley, among dozens of others, years later.
Margaret Dumont was born Daisy Juliette Baker in 1888. She first lived in Brooklyn, NY, but moved to Atlanta, GA as a child to live with her godfather, Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remis stories. As a teenager, she became an opera singer, then a stage [...]
In the rush of the 80s-90s stand-up boom, newly-emerging pay-cable began augmenting their normally scheduled soft-core pornography and repeated showing of horror movie Cat's Eye with stand-up showcases. Dyna Moe watched every one of them and presents a week-long tribute of the comediennes of era.
You all know who Ellen DeGeneres is. I just want to draw attention to the fact that in her 1990 HBO One Night Stand she wore a Fido Dido t-shirt.
(Ghostwritten by Alex Scordelis, a man)
3 AM: My alarm goes off. Women in comedy have to be early risers! My alarm clock is a giant TV screen that plays this, the perfect sketch, to wake me up and inspire me.
3:30 AM: Commence the baking! I pop a batch of blueberry muffins in the oven, and then listen to the Louis CK episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.
4:25 AM: Ding! As soon as Louis CK starts crying about how beautiful it was when his children were born, I know my muffin crusts have turned a golden brown and are ready to be pulled from [...]
Say the phrase “chick flicks” and usually everyone around you, male or female, will roll their eyes. The prevailing notion is that “chick flicks” are fluffy, romantic, silly piles of goo that no one should ever consider high-quality cinema. The thing is, I can’t name a single comedy film starring primarily women that someone couldn’t dismiss as merely a “chick flick.” For instance, even though Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion is hilarious and boasts the talents of Janeane Garofalo, Lisa Kudrow and Justin Theroux, it’s somehow weird to call it a pure comedy. Because it’s about girls and because it’s about high school and because it has a [...]
Anyone who took the “Mr. Show Boys Club” sketch at face value might be tempted to skype Gloria Steinem immediately after watching it. The scene opens with the male cast members lounging in silk robes and cravats, brandishing martinis. They’re surrounded by scantily clad young ladies who are identified as The Mr. Show Objects. Soon a female cast member emerges wearing sparkly short-shorts, a tank top that reads “OBJECT”, and a tiny barrel of brandy around her neck like a storybook St. Bernard. When she accuses the show’s two main stars of running a “boys club,” they respond in the most literal way possible, with footage revealing how Mr. [...]
In the rush of the 80s-90s stand-up boom, newly-emerging pay-cable began augmenting their normally scheduled soft-core pornography and repeated showing of horror movie Cat's Eye with stand-up showcases. Dyna Moe watched every one of them and presents a week-long tribute of the comediennes of era.
Maybe better known today than in the '90s thanks to the Prairie-Home-Public-Radio-Industrial Complex, Paula Poundstone's signature style is a conversational mix of audience interaction and observations on mundanities of snack food, cats and television. Underlying the laid-back delivery is her performance posture of shifting between sitting, leaning and flopping around on a stool.
Seeing as how it’s Women In Comedy week here at Splitsider, I thought it would be appropriate to watch a comedy from a female writer and/or director. Fortunately I’ve been staunchly gender-neutral in my gross negligence of cinema’s best comedies throughout my life, so there were plenty to choose from. But which one? A League of Their Own? Too obvious. Juno? Too recent. Clueless? Tailor-made for my generation, well-regarded among friends and colleagues, seen by almost everyone but me. Just right.
First, Clueless is a great movie, and very funny. It’s also a movie that is designed to make anyone born between 1975 and 1985 feel stupidly giddy. It [...]
