PDF Pretty/Funny Women and Comedy's Body Politics

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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 funny- looking: Fanny Brice, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin. Or, like

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Mae West, they were willing to camp up or otherwise make fun of traditional femininity. Stand-u p 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-b e 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 picked up by 30 Rock, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List (2005?2010), and the daytime talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003?); the roster of popular women comics included, in addition to the ones mentioned above, Wanda Sykes, Amy Sedaris, Mo'Nique (Imes), Kristen Wiig, Janeane Garofalo, Susie Essman, Lisa Lampanelli, Chelsea Handler, Sheryl Underwood, Joy Behar, Rita Rudner, and Cheryl Hines.

Citing this extensive history, Vanity Fair published a response to Hitch-

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ens the following year with a lushly illustrated cover story by Alessandra Stanley: "Who Says Women Aren't Funny? For the Defense: Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Nine Other Queens of Comedy." Countering Hitchens's assertion that funny women aren't attractive, campy Annie Leibovitz photos pictured Fey, Poehler, Silverman, and the others as tarted-up vamps lounging in limousines, plunging necklines, and dimly lit hotel rooms. Stanley's essay refuted Hitchens's argument, but it also developed a feminist argument that for women comics, the issue of looks has always been crucial. Recently, as more women comics have entered a previously "masculine" field, she points out, a sexist dynamic has kicked in: because U.S. culture remains obsessed with image and looks, the better- looking comics have an advantage. "It used to be that women were not funny," she writes. "Then they couldn't be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty--even sexy--to get a laugh" (185). The latter part of this quotation refers to the booming careers of Chelsea Handler, Olivia Munn, and Whitney Cummings, for example, gorgeous women whose sex appeal is intrinsic to their commercial appeal as comics.

However, the dynamic of pretty versus funny, the default description of how women are usually perceived in the history of comedy, is richer and more nuanced than the Stanley summary suggests. In fact, notions of "pretty" are often what women's comedy exploits as funny. Mae West made an entire career of camping up all notions of femininity. The pseudofabulous Leibovitz photos in Vanity Fair exemplify the same point, parodying edgy clich?s of femininity from the femme fatale to the scandalous female celebrity ? la Paris Hilton. A similar comic strategy is evident in the cover photograph of Tina Fey's best-selling book Bossypants (2011), a collection of personal essays about show business and motherhood. The book's title as well as the photo refer to Fey's well-known position as "boss," first as SNL's head writer and later as the creator, writer, producer, and star of 30 Rock.

The medium-close-up photo spoofs the traditional author glamour shot. Fey poses serenely, wearing tasteful makeup and lipstick, her hair arranged in loose waves down to her shoulders, but her head sits on a male torso wearing a white dress shirt and a tie. More than that, the sleeves are rolled up to reveal huge, hairy, male forearms and hands--an unnerving way to picture the woman who "wears the pants" as secretly, monstrously male. More subtly, given Fey's reputation as a feminist, the photo alludes to and satirizes the popular T-shirt claiming "THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE." The photo is also a parody of Fey's magazine cover-girl images that have relentlessly emphasized her attractiveness, an ironic twist on her celebrity, given that she became famous for what she says rather than

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Given Tina Fey's reputation as a feminist, the cover photo of her 2011 book, Bossypants, is a comic take on the T-shirt slogan "This is what a feminist looks like."

what she looks like. For both the Fey photo and the Leibovitz shoot, the joke turns on the high stakes of what these women look like--and that's a joke specific to the genre of women comics because funny-looking male comedians have never been an issue or problem. The pretty versus funny clich? about women comedians is so commonplace that Steve Martin used it in a joke introducing Fey as the winner of the 2010 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Spoofing her cover-girl status, he said, "Isn't it refreshing to find a female comic who's both really good and funny-looking? Excuse me--that should have read, `Really funny and good-looking.'"

The major premise of Pretty/Funny is that in the historic binary of "pretty" versus "funny," women comics, no matter what they look like, have been located in opposition to "pretty," enabling them to engage in a transgressive comedy grounded in the female body--its looks, its race and sexuality, and its relationships to ideal versions of femininity. In this strand of comedy, "pretty" is the topic and target, the ideal that is exposed as funny. And although the pretty/funny tension is a way to characterize the comedy of a number of women past and present, I am particularly interested in a group of high-profile comics who emerged into mainstream stardom or made dramatic comebacks between 2000 and 2010, the decade when liberal political comedy also came into the foreground of a bitterly divided American politics. My topics in this book are Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, comics who draw on the pretty/funny binary by targeting glamour, postfeminist girliness, the Hollywood A list, feminine whiteness, and romanticized motherhood as fodder for wit and biting satire. Except for Fey, who was trained in improvisation and usually performs as a fictional character, these women are stand-up comics who have also starred or co-starred in television sitcoms and occasionally in films, though my emphasis in the following chapters is on the work they wrote themselves in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

These women are successful performers, but they are most of all writers of their own material. They are comic auteurs whose work cuts across multiple media--television, film, theater, and books, including witty autobiographies by Griffin, Silverman, and Cho and collections of anecdotes and jokes by Sykes and DeGeneres. So while most of their writing is performed as scripts, some of it is also widely available as texts that can be read and reread; Fey's Bossypants was at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks when it was released and sold a million copies within six months. Following the cinematic meanings of auteurism as vision, we can see the style or signature of Fey's and Silverman's comedy even in the episodes of 30 Rock and The Sarah Silverman Program, respectively, that

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they did not write. Likewise, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List, Griffin's reality television series about her scramble for stardom, bears her authorship through its choice of topics, its tone, and the editing of scenes, shots, and transitions. These comedians are stars and celebrities because, beyond having the acting chops and good comic timing of a Carole Lombard or Lucille Ball, they are exceptional writers of comedy.

My subsidiary claim in this book is that women's comedy has become a primary site in mainstream pop culture where feminism speaks, talks back, and is contested. I am not claiming that all the writer-performers covered in this book identify as feminists or should be seen as feminist spokespersons. Far from being politically correct, they often take political correctness as their target. And their articulations of gender politics cover a wide spectrum, from Cho, who openly embraces feminism as her politics, to Griffin, who is the most removed from feminist rhetoric even though she has openly campaigned for political causes--gay marriage and the end of the military's policy on homosexuality--that are aligned with contemporary strands of feminism. Overall, the political impetus of their work reflects the strategies, trends, and contradictions of the women's movement since the 1970s.

That is, their work reflects feminism as a diverse set of discourses that range from "women's lib" to the queer-friendly politics that veer away from acknowledging "women" as a category at all. We can hear the latter when Kathy Griffin jokes about identifying as a gay man or when Margaret Cho embraces the identity of a fag hag.1 The comedians covered in this book were born between 1958 (DeGeneres) and 1970 (Fey and Silverman), the era when Second Wave feminism emerged primarily as a fight for legal equality. The division of feminism into three "waves" is a blunt and problematic way to historicize women's activism over the past five decades, so the following summary is offered not as a history but as a general guide to the ways feminism has been thought about and talked about as a context of these women's comedy. The Second Wave, named to acknowledge its follow-up to the first large-scale American feminist movement early in the twentieth century, was popularly associated with Betty Friedan's trapped housewife, Gloria Steinem's liberated career woman, and later, more radical figures like Shulamith Firestone and Robin Morgan who demanded full-scale institutional changes to marriage and the family. These "women's libbers" of the 1960s and 1970s campaigned not only for shifts in traditional gender roles such as child care provider but for equality in the workplace and for reproductive rights; they also targeted pornography as part of their larger attack on objectified images of women in culture. So the generation of women who came of age in the 1970s reaped many legal and social

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benefits of Second Wave activism, including antidiscrimination laws (Title VII), the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the wider availability of birth control, and a guarantee of equal athletic facilities for women and men in schools (Title IX).

This is the equality feminism often spoofed on 30 Rock, with its flashbacks of a teenage Liz Lemon, who sued her school district to let girls play football. The episode "Luda Christmas" reveals that she played on the team for just one day. "But I did change everything forever," she rhapsodizes in happy self-delusion. As this suggests, one of the ongoing subtexts of 30 Rock is that 1970s equal-r ights feminism has remained uneven in its effects and benefits; Liz Lemon is able to rise into a powerful position as a network executive, but the networks persist in hopelessly sexist content, featuring series like MILF Island (Mothers I'd Like to Fuck Island). The popular status of feminism entails both its successes and the ongoing resistances to those successes. On the one hand, feminist-influenced legislation and institutional changes beginning in the 1970s made such an impact that feminism understood as gender equality became "Gramscian common sense," Angela McRobbie notes, even though feminism remained in some spheres of public life "fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated" (28). The widespread circulation of Rush Limbaugh's term "feminazi" well into the second decade of the twenty-first century testifies to feminism's continued ability to trouble the status quo through its baseline resistance to traditional gender roles.

Even though women of color were active during this time in other liberation movements, Second Wave feminism was tethered to its popular image of liberating suburban housewives and was perceived as a white, middle-class phenomenon. This is the liberal, do-good feminism satirized by Wanda Sykes in a skit about performing for a feminist benefit event. In the version captured in an episode of her sitcom Wanda at Large (2003) titled "Clowns to the Left of Me," one of the WASPy feminist organizers gushes, "You're an African American woman, I'm a liberal. We're practically twins." Revolt against this myopic whiteness was a major dynamic in the formation in the 1990s of Third Wave feminism, which protested the racism and heterosexism of the earlier movement.Third Wave feminists like Rebecca Walker, Naomi R. Wolfe, and Donna Haraway advocated a more inclusive social critique--global, multicultural, media-savvy, and attuned to the needs of women of color and all varieties of sexual orientations.2 Criticizing the Second Wave as "victim feminism," Third Wave feminism was aligned, although not entirely synonymous, with the girl power movement of the 1990s that found compelling role models of female clout in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997?2003) and Xena:

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Warrior Princess (1995?2001). Third Wave feminism similarly drew on this model of female strength as opposed to male oppression as its axiom, but while girl power tended to reproduce middle-class whiteness as an ideal, Third Wave feminism prioritized difference and diversity--sexual, racial, class, ethnic, physical. The pro-sex stance of the Third Wave, including its embrace of popular culture and pornography, is evident in the gay male audience cultivated by Kathy Griffin, the gay visibility of Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes, the exuberant LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) rhetoric of Margaret Cho, and the bawdy irreverence of Sarah Silverman. And as I discuss in Chapter Two, feminists who identify along these lines attacked Tina Fey in 2011 for representing, on 30 Rock, a feminism that was disengaged from queers, disability issues, and racial politics and that was conservatively aligned with the cisgender or "cis" (gender- normative) body that is unquestioned in 1960s-style equal-rights feminism.

However, contemporary feminism is far more complicated than this Second versus Third Wave schematic would suggest. In a 2009 retrospective, gender-studies scholar Carisa Showden summed up the current feminist mash-up as "postfeminism, power feminism, third-w ave feminism, do- me feminism, libertarian feminism, babe feminism, I'm not a feminist, but . . . `feminism'" (166). To that list we can add what J. Jack Halberstam describes as "Gaga feminism," named after but not limited to the Lady Gaga persona, which disposes of stable gender identities, looks to "new forms of politics, social structures, and personhood," and is not about sisterhood but rather about "shifting, changing, morphing, extemporizing political positions quickly and effectively" (27?29). Analysis of this complicated picture is beyond the scope of this introduction.3 Instead, I hope to map out in the next few paragraphs the various feminist issues in which the women comics in this book engage. The contradictions of their politics are the contradictions of contemporary feminism; when Wanda Sykes makes fun of feminism as white and bourgeois, she is taking a position popularized by the Third Wave, but when she incorporates abortion-rights advocacy into her stand-u p acts, she draws on a legal-rights rhetoric associated with white, bourgeois, 1960s feminists.

The most salient feminist issue in Pretty/Funny is postfeminism, popular versions of which are widely derided in these comedians' satires of "pretty" femininity. McRobbie argues that postfeminism both appropriates and disregards feminism's successes; just as feminism became "common sense" or "taken into account" as an achievement, it became disposable as a past event. The empowerment rhetoric of feminism, originally directed toward social change, was instead easily funneled into an empowerment of the individual through sexuality, femininity, money, and cultural capital. In

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