I’ve been wanting to blog about this post by Holly about whether or not the social stigma attached to aggression in women explains why women’s humor has also been traditionally discouraged, to the point where there’s a noticeable gender gap in just the sheer numbers of male and female comedians out there. Holly grants that those who make this point have something of a point, including this insightful point by Drew Carey.
…] despite the fact that his ABC comedy employed numerous funny women, comic Drew Carey says the prejudices are real. It’s not so much that women aren’t funny, he explains, as that men don’t want them to be funny. “Comedy is about aggression and confrontation and power,” says the stand-up comic. “As a culture we just don’t allow women to do all that stuff.”
Holly is uneasy with the idea that humor is an aggressive thing, stating:
Smart guy, that Drew Carey. But is comedy really only ever about aggression and confrontation and power? Jessica at Feministing already posted an incredible clip of the hilarious Wanda Sykes in response to the BBC’s article. Sykes’ routine provides plenty of proof that women can be funny (oh oops, she’s gay) as well as that even if humor somehow originated in aggression, it can “eventually become separated from it as wit, jokes, and other comic forms, which then take on an independent life of their own,” as the dermatologist-turned-unicyclist Dr. Shuster pointed out in his misconstrued paper.
As a properly self-effacing woman, I’m going to say that I try to write humor a lot, and while I’ll humbly punt the judgment of my successes to you, the audience, I’m going to argue that my experiences make me think that yes, humor is usually aggressive and if it’s not aggressive, then it’s not funny. (Even the joke that started off this paragraph has an element of aggression to make it work, which is that I exaggerate my humility to make a snotty, angry point about how women aren’t generally allowed the same space to make comments that even smack of bragging, including fairly straightforward statements like, “I write humor.” ) Because I’m a semi-nice person on occasions, I often hit a bump when trying to write something funny, because I realize that X percentage of any audience will probably find it offensive, and I have to steel myself and remember that if it doesn’t have the potential to piss someone off, it’s not funny. Sometimes it’s not an issue, like when I’m mocking public wingnut types, but sometimes you have to go for the kill on stuff that might make some people you like uncomfortable, like mocking religion. As for “wit” being something that might be distinguishable from aggressive humor, I’ll just say that the most common modifier to “wit” is “biting” for a reason.
The piece that Holly links to by Wanda Sykes is extremely aggressive, in my opinion.
The joke only works if you accept that the routine objectification of women in our culture is a burden that women are right in wishing we could reject. If you are an anti-choicer, Hugh Hefner, a purity ball organizer, Wendy Shalit, Ace of Spades, a D.C. pundit who can’t handle that a woman is running for President, or any other person who pushes forward a worldview that does in fact reduce women to their girly bits, then the joke’s on you. Granted, a lot of those people would laugh at this routine, but that’s mainly because they don’t think their power is all that threatened, and they’re probably right. But I bet this would make Chris Matthews squirm, and it would definitely piss off the religious right.
It’s well-worn to a cliche now that women’s traditional road to being humorists has been the self-effacement route. Which is to say that, traditionally, women could be funny if they directed their aggression at themselves, women’s sexuality, or just women in general, “safe” targets that men could laugh at. From the CS Monitor article:
Certain roles have been acceptable for women since the rise of mass media: the sexy vamp (think Mae West) or the ditzy klutz (everyone from Carole Lombard to Lucille Ball and Debra Messing). “These roles aren’t threatening to men,” says actress Jennifer Coolidge who has made a career of crafting cunning but klutzy airheaded females. She adds, “they play into men’s stereotypes of women as sexpots or stupid.”
Self-effacement is part of the vast majority of comedian’s toolkits. It endears people to you and softens them up for jokes that may offend their sensibilities by saying, in essence, “I can take a joke, can’t you?” I can’t think of many male comedians that don’t have jokes at their own expense in their routines. In fact, I’d say one reason Sacha Baron Cohen pisses so many people off is that because he’s hiding behind characters, he never really makes jokes at his own expense (just at his characters), and he gives off this sense that he’s a smirking know-it-all behind it all. That doesn’t bother me, because he’s such a different beast than most comedians and being willing to bury yourself utterly in characters is also a form of self-effacement, but in the hostile blowback to “Borat”, I saw a lot of the anger stemming from that attitude of “How dare you mock other people without mocking yourself just a little?”
But female comedians have to self-deprecate a lot more. Some comedians’ entire routine is self-effacing to the point where you wonder if said comedians hate themselves or what, especially in the past. Nowadays, it’s not that women can’t make fun of others or take on powerful targets, but they still have to double up the jokes at their own expense just to soothe easily flustered supporters of our sexist order.
Take for instance, our new DVD infatuation in this house, “30 Rock”. Tina Fey is the shit; she has this awesomely mean sense of humor and they certainly color outside the lines on the show. But man, does Fey have to quadruple the self-deprecating humor on there to make the show palatable for a mainstream audience, or at least for the nervous ninny network executives. Now, a lot of the self-deprecating humor is appropriate. The jokes about how she’s a workaholic that has no social life are great, because they function as a good character flaw and because they subtly send up a culture where women have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. Her staff management problems are self-deprecating jokes on the surface, but under that layer, there’s some interesting stuff about being a woman in charge of men going on there. Her intense nerdiness is a pretty standard self-deprecating joke, nothing you wouldn’t see in a male character in a similar role.
And then there’s the self-deprecating humor that is distracting and unfunny, because it’s clearly injected to pander to the sexist portions of the audience (and funding stream). Especially irritating are the non-stop jokes about Fey’s looks, her weight, and some over-the-top jokes that assume that it’s obvious to the audience that Tina Fey is somehow not wildly attractive to men. The jokes fall flat, in no small part because I’m guessing upwards of 95% of the straight male audience of that show has a huge crush on Tina Fey. But it’s hard to begrudge the writers for writing those ridiculous and unfunny jokes, because they know whose sensibilities need to be flattered in order to keep the money flowing. Hell, you know they know that because a lot of the jokes involving Alec Baldwin’s character are about how the upper offices at various networks are stuffed with wealthy men who firmly believe that “hot” and “intelligent/funny/interesting” are mutually exclusive categories of women.
Still, as American attitudes towards gender ever-so-slowly trudge along towards a more progressive outlook, we’re seeing female comedians get closer to male comedians in terms of the ratio of self-deprecating and outwardly aggressive humor. And we’re seeing female comedians who do interesting things with the self-deprecating tradition, like Margaret Cho, who writes these great jokes that initially seem just to be self-deprecating and then unwind into social criticisms. And this post is already insanely long, so I’m cutting it off here and leaving the speculations about aggression and absurdist humor for the commenters.
92 Responses to “Mean girls and funny girls”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Wow. This may be one of the few times I’ve ever agreed with Drew Carey.
It’s not that women are expected to be humorless, it’s just that we’re supposed to have enough to laugh at guys’ jokes (even if they’re misogynist) but not enough to make any jokes up ourselves. If a woman makes jokes, she may be joking about you, and that can’t be allowed.
I remember watching reruns of the old Laverne and Shirley series; a true rarity because a) it centered on two women, and b) it centered on the blue collar set. Yeah, it had a lot of slapstick, and yeah, it did have some commentary on how difficult life could be for women in the 1950s, but most ot the time, L and S were portrayed as man-hungry idiots or ditsy broads. You take what you can get.
Yeah, Blue Jean, remember that study/survey about what college women fear from the opposite sex (rape) and what college men fear (being laughed at).
This post reminded me of one the other day at World O’Crap in which I’m assuming Janice Shaw Crouse watched Sarah Silverman (she never specifies what movies or shows she watched that I saw) and it really set her the hell off.
There are two types of humor: with a target and without a target. The untargeted humor is not trying to do anything more than amuse. I can come up with a sociological impulse behind Carrot Top or The Family Circus, but I rarely give a the half-a-shit it would take. Targeted humor involves stating something, applying it to something else, and letting the audience agree or disagree. And targeted humor requires aggression.
I’m thinking of many instances of aggressive women being funny, though rarely from positions of power. I think of the archetypical character of the Fat Black Woman of Film, who is allowed to say anything she wants, gets a chuckle, makes a point, and then is forgotten. People will quote her later, since she said something with a certain flair: “Sister, you’ve got to stop wearing them shoes if you don’t want to get yourself pregnant” or something similar, but her character is only filler. The similar character in a black man is either a doorman, janitor, or Morgan Freeman.
The idea that women aren’t aggressive simply isn’t true. The stereotype is that women aren’t in power or getting there or must suffer because they pursue it. The aggression in humor based on those principles goes both ways: it can enforce the patriarchy or it can undermine it from within. The shows such as 30 Rock, Murphy Brown, Mary Tyler Moore, and others featuring women in the workplace always teeter on the edge between pissing off the traditionalists and pissing off the feminists. But to say there’s no aggression in those women is dead wrong.
And yes, Tina Fey is very very hot. Her glasses, her cuteness, and the fact that she could wittily cut me up one side and down the other while not deviating from that smile? Sexy.
You’re right, I was initially kind of uneasy about the idea that comedy always stems from aggression, but I see the point. I guess what I’d like to believe is that some forms of comedy have evolved away from the kind of jibe that I was originally reacting to — the crude, hostile “anti-unicycle comments” written about by Shuster. But I guess that doesn’t mean that there’s still not an element of aggression. Absurdist comedy, whether it’s the idea that you could take your genitals off or something wildly more surreal, starts to veer off into the territory of anger or rebellion against everything, even reality. And that’s often because life sucks somehow and one ought to be pissed off, obviously the case with social-commentary comedy too.
I was also just talking to a comedian friend about this, and she pointed out that self-deprecating humor is really just anger directed at yourself. But her claim, as yet another self-deprecating female comedian, is that more intelligent, self-aware comedy of this sort has the potential to illumine, unravel and attack the reasons for self-deprecating and showing how they’re either absurd or that there’s another culprit out there somewhere.
That’s probably why Margaret Cho and some elements of Tina Fey’s character (aside from the obnoxious TV-market pressures) make good examples… and also why I like Maria Bamford, who I embedded in my post. On the surface she seems like a classic disheveled “unattractive” self-deprecating type, but you get this feeling that there’s this seething frustration and contempt right behind her characters’ bewildered stare, trying to deal with all of these double binds and frustrated feelings. (And then she also switches into the roles of everyone else in her life, which is much more directly aggressive. Or at least… passive-aggressive? Heh.
I would have to say that Lisa Lampanelli takes the cake. She is so raunchy and…. just… out there. And I almost pee myself every time I watch her.
Years ago there was a female comedian who want to do shows where her audience was only women. . . because the topics she covered were things that same from a female point of view and were things that only women experienced.
Men howled about how unfair it was that she did these kind of shows or wanted to do these kind of shows . . . I believe she shot back with “how many jokes about menstruation can men listen to?”
She wanted to be a “woman’s comedian” without the kind of aggressive and pandering self-deprecating humor that must be smattered in to appease a male audience. She wanted to do comedy that spoke to issues that women deal with every day for a woman’s perspective, the kind that is threatening to men. I can’t remember her name and I don’t think she’s doing stand up or even comedy any more.
The fact that female comedians to even survive on par in the male dominated feild of comedy by using aggressive and largely self-deprecating seems to underscore this.
I was just on daretowearwhite.com and watched this video
http://www.daretowearwhite.com/view-videos-container.asp?VIDEO=1
now this is something that speaks to me since I deal with “the period from hell” — I want to laugh at it, make jokes about it with other women, but I know the men in my house wouldn’t find it funny at all … they wouldn’t relate.
I’ve noticed that a lot of comedy is just plain MEAN. It’s about anger. And a LOT of male comedians are viscerally angry at women — whether it’s their mom, their wife or their girlfriend.
The easiest shot to take (pardon the phrasing) is at the vagina and its issue. They don’t understand it, they don’t like it…
Most of the routines I’ve seen lately (on Comedy Central) seems to be extended riffs on “never trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die.”
Thanks, Holly. I loved your post and felt like I was mostly building on it. You’re absolutely right that a lot of humor is so multi-layered that the aggression at the center of it might not be immediately apparent. It’s why I think Sarah Silverman is so hit or miss—she just loses control of where she’s aiming her humor sometimes.
I’d say about 75%-90% of the hostile trackbacks, comments, and emails I get accuse me of being “angry”, which says a lot about who gets to be angry and who doesn’t. (After all, their own anger at me is acceptable anger, in this view.) It goes a long way to explaining the existence of the Ann Coulters of the world; they have found a way to be angry and get away with it, by being angry on behalf of the oppressors.
Lucille Ball.
Carol Burnett.
Lily Tomlin.
Gilda Radner.
Madeline Kahn.
Roseanne Barr.
Erma Bombeck.
Bea Arthur.
Rita Rudner.
Paula Poundstone.
Whoopi Goldberg.
Ellen DeGeneres.
Goldie Hawn.
Funny, funny women all. I find most of current TV “humor”, be it male or female, stand-up or sit-com, to be pathetically poorly written by comparison. Drew Carey has all the charisma and humor of a rock.
Making somebody laugh is making somebody do something. Men hate to have women have any power over them. He who makes others laughs is the center of attention and has some power.
Well, I think it’s also the idea of women laughing at a woman’s jokes, too, regardless of men’s reaction. The spectacle of a group of women laughing at a private joke is often invoked to make men uneasy; perhaps him or something dear to his privileges is the target?
I watch a LOT of modern comedy. There’s something wrong with what’s going on with female comedy, and what’s socially acceptable, and this post really hits on it. It’s often said that it’s not funny when the comedy is directed beneath you..for comedy to work, you need to “punch up”. Too much comedy done by females comes across, because of the self-depreciating..as punching down. It’s making fun of themselves, which in context because of the sexist nature of the culture at large, just doesn’t work very well at all. At least to me, it just feels unnecessarily cruel.
A good example is The Sarah Silverman show. I think she’s funny, has great timing, and really puts a fine point on her satire, but her show..just ouch. It’s picking on the mentally disabled kid, to be honest. It’s too painful for me to watch. Yet, up here in Canuckiland, we had a promo for the show that was HILARIOUS, basically she was wearing riding gear, talking about how her new-found success hasn’t gone to her head, and she still puts on her jeans with the help of her assistants one leg at a time and so on. It was a great takedown of the aristocratic lifestyle.
That Wanda Sykes bit is very aggressive - she flat out states that having a pussy is an obstacle to enjoying the kind of freedom that men have, and it’s men who’ve arranged that.
She’s also funny as all hell. I (heart) the idea of being able to keep my vagina in a safe deposit box.
“I (heart) the idea of being able to keep my vagina in a safe deposit box.”
I don’t think Detachable Vagina flows quite as well as Detachable Penis. But it’s a good thought…
Oh wow, that clip was Totally Fucking Awesome. I don’t usually view the youtube clips that you embed because sometimes I’m at work, and plus it’s impossible to skim and see what the good part is and if you really want to view the whole thing — well, I think from now on there needs to be a Totally Fucking Awesome tag that accompanies embedded videos when appropriate, so I’ll know that I really ought to watch those.
She wanted to be a “woman’s comedian” without the kind of aggressive and pandering self-deprecating humor that must be smattered in to appease a male audience.
Or the kind of aggressive and intelligent humor that amuses a female audience. Since, as you note, you can’t remember her name and she’s not doing stand-up anymore, it’s just barely possible that most women like humor that references their lives from the crotch up, too.
Menstruation jokes shouldn’t be any more taboo or startling than fart jokes, obviously. And you know, exactly like fart jokes, they’re just not that fucking funny. Please to not be assuming other women find bodily functions to be the summit and apex of humor, okay? I’m happy to acknowledge that some people laugh like crazy at the Three Stooges and vaginal bleeding, but it doesn’t really define the female sensibility, you know?
I’m thinking of many instances of aggressive women being funny, though rarely from positions of power. I think of the archetypical character of the Fat Black Woman of Film, who is allowed to say anything she wants, gets a chuckle, makes a point, and then is forgotten.
That’s actually a classic character in comedy: the Wise and Funny Servant who gets to say whatever they want to their superiors. In opera, the classic one is Figaro, who outmaneuvers and manipulates his employers. We were watching the Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet the other day (which is pretty good, actually) and I finally realized that Polonious holds that position in the film: he’s presented as comic relief, but he’s actually completely right about what’s going on and part of the tragedy is that he gets killed off, because he’s the only one who could have prevented it.
Now, what does it say about our society that we routinely put African-Americans into that “funny servant” role even in the year 2007? Nothing very nice, frankly. Though I think our view of them in previous eras needs to be a little more balanced. Stepin Fetchit is embarrassing, but Rochester (who was Jack Benny’s sidekick) was much more in the classical role of being smarter than his employer. Plus it was pretty radical for Benny to employ an actual black man on his radio show and give him the prominence that he did in the 1930s. Everyone else was using white guys to do “funny” voices, as with the radio version of “Amos and Andy.”
Sorry, getting away from women in comedy a bit here. Gracie Allen is probably the premier comic ditz, IMO.
Oh, and anyone who thinks that Carole Lombard only played ditzes needs to see To Be or Not To Be. Actually, everyone should see it. In the film, her character is not a ditz, but she plays one to get information from the Nazis. It walks a very careful line between humor and terror, because you’re perfectly conscious that everyone’s lives depend on her playing this part to perfection.
Tina Fey went to my old high school!
I point this out in every post she gets mentioned. Especially when I have nothing to add because I agree with the rest of the post.
Blue Jean @ #1:
I actually disagree a bit with your second point. Not that L&S wasn’t about blue-collar folks, but that that focus made the show distinctive. Here’s a list, off the top of my head, of very popular 1970s sitcoms that were about working class or poor people:
All in the Family
Good Times
Sanford and Son
Chico and the Man
What’s Happenin?
Welcome Back, Kotter
Alice
Taxi (which I think started in the 70s)
You could also argue that One Day at a Time fits in here, since Ms. Romano was a single mom living in an appartment (and not a Friends luxury suite, a regular appartment) in Indianapolis, IIRC. Also, don’t forget that one of the most popular dramas was The Waltons, which was also about poor people.
That list is just off the top of my head. I’ll bet someone who’s studied American tv in the 70s could come up with a whole lot more examples.
As I remember it, the reason that Dallas and Dynasty were such groundbreakers was that they were about rich people living in mansions. These days, that seems like most of what’s on — or, at least, shows about “regular” people involve allegedly middle class people living livestyles that would require enormous incomes. It’s a little simplistic to say that Reagan made it okay for Americans to be unabashed greedheads, and that his ideology showed up on tv, but it’s not inaccurate.
I think Sarah Silverman does something really interesting - she mixes classic ditzy comedy - the time of thing Lucile Ball did, or Gracie Allan - with contemporary aggressive comedy. That is why her routines are, I’ve always thought intentionally, filled with flat bits. She strives to make some part of the routine not work. I can’t believe this isn’t intentional - and it is brilliant, because it is using the routine as a whole thing, instead of a aggregate of bits. When she blows it, she is building on the persona of being a woman who blurts things out.
So I think aggression doesn’t quite cover the entirety of comedy, especially the female tradition in comedy. Chelsea Handlen, who for some reason isn’t as well known as she should be, does these brilliant bits on her show in which she interviews old people, and at first one thinks she’s making fun of old people - which isn’t exactly cool - until you see the give and take there, and you realize in what a ghetto tv and popular culture put old people. She’s amazingly comfortable and non-patronizing, even when she is taking the piss out of them. That would be a much harder thing for a young male comic to do, given the tradition male comics work in.
However, it is true that aggression in women is subject to a double standard. A good example is the video that went around showing Lily Tomlin blowing up on the set of I heart Huckabees also shows the director acting absolutely insane, but the onus of shame seemed to be directed at Tomlin.
clytemnestra -
The “comedian” you’re thinking of was Jenny Jones - yes, THAT Jenny Jones. The one who later had the sleazy talk show that was eventually shut down because one of her guests murdered another one over admitting a gay crush on her show. I used to work at a comedy club where she performed once…we had all the protesting by men over the show, etc. beforehand. But you know what the worst part was? She was really not a nice person to all the female staff that worked at the club…she spoke to everyone in a very snotty manner, and when someone (that would be me) called her on it, she tried to use PMS as an excuse. I basically told her that PMS was not an excuse for being a condescending bitch. And frankly, she was NOT VERY FUNNY EITHER.
I think there’s a lot to be said for dividing humor into humor that upholds the social order and humor that criticizes it. Most self-depricating humor falls into the former category, either pointing out ways in which one deviates from the expected norm (eg fat/ugly jokes) or pointing out negative ways in which one fits the norm, like being a dumb klutzy girl. Along with that comes the mysogynist/racist/hateful stuff that I can’t stand, and that leads to me being accused of being “too PC” because I’m not willing to sit through it. On the other side you have things like the Wanda Sykes clip, clearly criticizing the social role of women.
The targets of any kind of humor tend not to find said humor funny, or at least it makes them uncomfortable, but I have much less of a problem with that when the targets are people in power doing things I don’t like, than when it’s people already at a disadvantage in society, being made fun of because…that’s their “role”.
Oh, yeah, men fear women laughing in groups. Why do they always assume they’re the subject of the conversation? Do the powerful always fear the powerless?
I don’t find male comics and their issues especially attractive. There’s something about privileged white guys kicking at people who are lower than them on the totem pole that is incredibly disgusting. Meanwhile, they hate getting laughed at by the lower ranks. Sucks to be them.
That was along the lines of my first thoughts upon reading this, too. Monty Python never aimed at direct satire (OK, maybe in Life of Brian, though even that was aimed at all religions, the human desire to follow, and the practical inability to effectively rebel), and generally used broad types to crash reality with massive absurdity. I’m trying to think of routines that may have just been pure absurdity for the beauty of it, but nothing comes to mind. Even Graham Chapman’s most anarchic bits generally take the form of mocking the upper class or the military.
It’s interesting, as well, that Carol Cleveland was the only female regularly associated with the group, and always in a supporting role. She’s said the group just didn’t know how to write for women, and I wonder if that’s why it was always just simpler for the guys to suit up as women themselves. I’m not sure if the Pepper Pot skits would have been any less funny if actual women had portrayed the characters.
It gets kind of complex, though, hanna. Take Margaret Cho’s routine about how she was taking diet pills and ended up crapping her pants in traffic. It’s a self-deprecating joke, like, “Oh my god, I failed myself by falling for these oppressive and unhealthy beauty standards yet again.” But it’s also aimed squarely at said beauty standards and the real greatness of the joke is that her caving into those standards is so understandable. And you in the audience can laugh at yourselves without hating yourselves for giving into these standards, because you’re only human and you’re being exploited, you know?
Agreeing with the rest of the post & comments here, and just popping up to say mmmmmm, Tina Fey! *sigh*
Most self-depricating humor falls into the former category, either pointing out ways in which one deviates from the expected norm (eg fat/ugly jokes) or pointing out negative ways in which one fits the norm, like being a dumb klutzy girl.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to say how unfunny Carlos Mencia is, and that he uses the word ‘beaner’ way too much.
I just want to add Margaret Smith and Kate Clinton to the funny list. Smith is weirdly deadpan. Maybe that’s what makes her form of aggression less weird. Or maybe it doesn’t: maybe that’s why she doesn’t have her own Comedy Central show and isn’t a household name. I remember a bit of one of her riffs about her parents. She recited a poem she wrote when she was 15. It was all emo, but ended with the out-of-nowhere line “I hate my parents”. Then she calmly explains. “Yeah, it was a phase. Just a phase they were going through. Everybody hated them….” It was highlarious, honest.
But some guy comedians and the scary vaginas: oh for pity’s sake. I went to a local club once, and the guy hauled out the “OMG what’s in that dark mysterious place…wait, car keys? And….” Blah blah blah. I was going to heckle him with “Oh, write some new material, you scaredy cat”, but I was with my sister, and my sister is fat, and I wasn’t willing to risk setting her up for vengeful fat jokes. Although he went on to those any way. But just not directed specifically at my sister.
Great post, Amanda.
(Personally, I’d find it difficlt hard to trust a heterosexual man who doesn’t have a crush on Tina Fey)
The frentic Tina Fey character feeds into that cultural stereotype, in that a female funny character has to have self hatred and lack of sexual success — sorta like Mary Tyler Moore. I enjoyed the recent line where she had a younger guy after her.
I’m more disturbed by the comment that Amy Sedaris said once about younger women in test audiences hated her ugly characters more than any other group. I hope that we get over this someday, but there is an imperative that actresses be somehow reassuringly pretty, and oddly, that is more important to young women in their twenties, apparently. Maybe this is fallout from their Disney youth where the cartoon female characters are always pretty, where the guys can be some sort of cartoonified old shoe or something — the pal. It’s like on Halloween, girls can’t be witty or funny with their costumes, even as kids, they are always princesses, brides, or hot.
I think it’s because it’s a reminder that what power young women get from being young and beautiful is so easily snatched away, Sally. I am not surprised women who have that privilege would prefer a blissful denial of how easy it is to lose it. Sedaris mocks the importance of beauty and sexual allure in our culture, and therefore makes those who have it very uneasy. I appreciate her irreverence, but I also can appreciate that young women who spend 2-5 hours a day maintaining that beauty don’t necessarily enjoy having it exposed as basically silly.
Also, young women are often still in that phase where men are genuinely fooled by the illusion of beauty. And it is an illusion—all of us fart and grow body hair, you know? And Sedaris is basically undermining the illusion for humor’s sake. Disco Ball bless her for it, but I can see how young women feel that threatens their status.
I’m trying to think of routines that may have just been pure absurdity for the beauty of it, but nothing comes to mind.
Crunchy Frog? Lumberjack?
I hope that we get over this someday, but there is an imperative that actresses be somehow reassuringly pretty, and oddly, that is more important to young women in their twenties, apparently.
It’s interesting that you say that, because it’s only very recently that women have been allowed to be both pretty and funny. Before that, the “funny one” was always a woman trying to compensate for being not pretty enough. Carole Lombard is pretty much the only genuinely beautiful woman in classic Hollywood film who was also funny — everyone else was at least a little odd-looking. Lucille Ball certainly wasn’t presented as being pretty or glamorous on her show — quite the opposite.
I’m not quite sure what the diagnosis is, but I don’t think you’re right about the reason. I think I need to ponder it a bit more.
djw, you got that right. Ooooooo, bayyyyyby.
Re: working class shows…. later on, but “Roseanne”, which also nicely brings an aggressive f. comic into the mix.
I take the Tina Fey stuff as the fact that even if you are kinda great and smart and pretty, as a woman, society will still do everything in its power to make you feel bad about yourself or not have confidence. I also love how 30 Rock doesn’t make it easy with Jack- Jack is eccentric but not necessarily incompetent all the time. The show is borderline genius, and I think if it were more in tune with some issues, it could be even better- Tina Fey mocks her character’s feminism, but underneath that is an even harsher view of its real importance.
/me really appreciates everyone’s commentary here…
/me queues up Newsleecher for some comedians shah8 might like…
okay, so above is like the robot voiced guy in Grandma’s Boy, which I’ve only recently realized is very strangely confucian…, but, anyways…sue me.
Amy Sedaris and Silverman ought to get a galactic award, because they are the equivalent of space heroes for going out to the wild places people wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for them.
As to the young women hatin’ on the ugly actresses, some of this I think we can get over. Seriously, I’m not in my twenties, but I remember women having some wit in their costumes in college. We didn’t come up with thongs in elementary schools. Of course, we had the “goths.” I mourn the reduction in the Goth tribe. Being hot in a commericially appealling way wasn’t the end all of your existence, so this is cyclical.
I’m all for the good sex and all, but there is a new prudery among young women in their twenties for getting off the straight and narrow and being funny in a way that isn’t conventionally pretty.
Sarah Silverman is a thorn to me. When she’s good, she’s great, but on the whole, I find her stuff kind of eh. I like her show, but the secondary characters almost always have better plots. I love her sister and her sister’s ridiculous boyfriend.
All that said, this abortion montage made me pee my pants a little, what with the laughing:
Wanda Sykes gay? Umm, no.
I was an entertainment reporter covering comedy for over 20 years, and not to my knowledge (not even in backstage gossip, and I “knew” Ellen was gay a good decade before it hit the MSM.)
But I guess that’s the latest smear: Sykes must be a dyke, because she’s funny, and in an aggressive manner (more testosterone), and does a positive bit on gay marriage.
Oh and because Sykes admits she “has a big gay following.”
Here from an interview in the Advocate:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_2004_Dec_21/ai_n8642048
“Are you aware that you have a gay following?
Now that I’ve been touring, I’ve noticed, and I couldn’t be happier. There’s usually a large group of guys together, and I know that I’m not to the frat-boy taste. I’m 40. Frat boys aren’t coming out to see me.
What do you think gays like about you?
I think gay people like the fact that I pretty much say what’s on my mind and I don’t hold back. Also I’m hard on the [Bush] administration, so I think they appreciate that…”
Unless you consider this blip on her heterosexuality (which included a long marriage to a man, after college.)
“Have you ever had a fling with a woman?
I went to college, so of course. That’s what you do in college.”
But no, I think the “Wanda Sykes is gay” meme, is based solely on the idea that only testosterone is funny.
To refute that lie, here’s the 99% het Wanda on gay marriage:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/wanda_sykes_on_gay_marriage/
Wanda Sykes gay? Umm, no.
I was an entertainment reporter covering comedy for over 20 years, and not to my knowledge (not even in backstage gossip, and I “knew” Ellen was gay a good decade before it hit the MSM.)
But I guess that’s the latest smear: Sykes must be a dyke, because she’s funny, and in an aggressive manner (more testosterone), and does a positive bit on gay marriage. (
Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, just the guy notion that only supposedly higher testoserone levels could create Teh Funny.)
And then there’s the fact that because Sykes attracts “a big gay following.”
Here from an interview in the Advocate:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_2004_Dec_21/ai_n8642048
“Are you aware that you have a gay following?
Now that I’ve been touring, I’ve noticed, and I couldn’t be happier. There’s usually a large group of guys together, and I know that I’m not to the frat-boy taste. I’m 40. Frat boys aren’t coming out to see me.
What do you think gays like about you?
I think gay people like the fact that I pretty much say what’s on my mind and I don’t hold back. Also I’m hard on the [Bush] administration, so I think they appreciate that…”
Unless you consider this blip on her heterosexuality (which included a long marriage to a man, after college.)
“Have you ever had a fling with a woman?
I went to college, so of course. That’s what you do in college.”
But no, I think the Wanda Sykes is gay meme, is based solely on the idea that only testosterone is funny.
To refute that lie, here’s the het Wanda on gay marriage:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/wanda_sykes_on_gay_marriage/
Wanda Sykes gay? Umm, no.
I was an entertainment reporter covering comedy for over 20 years, and not to my knowledge (not even in backstage gossip, and I “knew” Ellen was gay a good decade before it hit the MSM.)
But I guess that’s the latest smear: Sykes must be a dyke, because she’s funny, and in an aggressive manner (more testosterone), and does a positive bit on gay marriage.
Oh and because Sykes admits she “has a big gay following.”
Here from an interview in the Advocate:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_2004_Dec_21/ai_n8642048
“Are you aware that you have a gay following?
Now that I’ve been touring, I’ve noticed, and I couldn’t be happier. There’s usually a large group of guys together, and I know that I’m not to the frat-boy taste. I’m 40. Frat boys aren’t coming out to see me.
What do you think gays like about you?
I think gay people like the fact that I pretty much say what’s on my mind and I don’t hold back. Also I’m hard on the [Bush] administration, so I think they appreciate that…”
Unless you consider this blip on her heterosexuality (which included a long marriage to a man, after college.)
“Have you ever had a fling with a woman?
I went to college, so of course. That’s what you do in college.”
But no, I think the Wanda Sykes is gay meme, is based solely on the idea that only testosterone is funny.
To refute that lie, here’s the het Wanda on gay marriage:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/wanda_sykes_on_gay_marriage/
Well, Lumberjack does upend the persona of the manly man. Maybe the entry sketch of Michael Palin as a homicidal barber, though it also plays on the Lynchian idea that underneath all our everyday, genial interactions, there’s a good chance that a psycho is about to stab you with a pair of scissors.
Crunchy Frog might qualify. Perhaps the Argument Clinic. Oh! Spam and the Dead Parrot sketch of course. Again, you’re still left with the idea that absurdist comedy is inherently aggressive against convention, complacency and reality. I don’t know if that qualifies as making it “angry” humor, though.
Certainly, a lot of humor involves a certain amount of aggressiveness. But I don’t think that’s necessary for humor, and I feel that it’s absent from the things I find most funny. For example, I don’t think that most of the laughs I get out of the Onion, or from Eddie Izzard, require any noticeable degree of aggression on the part of the author.
None of the major theories of humor strike me as perfect, but the one that makes the most sense to me is the incongruity theory. A specific form of the incongruity theory (I think Georges Bataille had something like this) would be that humor involves building some kind of structure, and then introducing some kind of incongruous element that turns it inside out.
I generally don’t see The Onion as being aggressive in its humor. But I see tons of incongruity going on. Take the old Herbert Kornfeld columns about the middle-class white accountant who thought he was a gangster.
Or to take a classic moment from Buffy, there’s the scene when the Mayor looks at his day planner and it says:
Greet Scouts
Call Temp Agency
Become Invincible
Meeting With PTA
Haircut
When he checked off “Become Invincible,” it had me laughing — not at him in some kind of way that demeaned him, but with sheer delight at the perfect fusion of incongruous things that is the Mayor of Sunnydale. I suppose that some incongruities are bad ones, which brings the aggression and incongruity points together. But they don’t necessarily have to be, which pulls them apart.
This isn’t to disagree with you about the real issue — that double standards make it hard for women to engage in a certain kind of humor. My point is just that there’s plenty of other kinds of humor out there.
The spectacle of a group of women laughing at a private joke is often invoked to make men uneasy; perhaps him or something dear to his privileges is the target?
It’s doingit with the hand gestures that terrify us.
I don’t have a TV; is there anything with Sarah Silverman out on DVD yet? I saw her in “the Aristocrats”, and was quite impressed.
And let us not forget Christopher Hitchens’ infamous essay in in Vanity Fair about why women aren’t funny unless they’re “hefty or dykey or Jewish.”
Well, this is ridiculously long, but what the hell…
Here’s what made me laugh in Sykes’ bit:
-the thought of a rapist jumping out and being told “I left it at home,” and probably thinking “SonofaBITCH!”
-”My pussy’s not even in the BUILDING…I’m just here to talk about your jump shot, now look…”
-The part about her calling her friend to pick up her pussy and bring it to her, which I first laughed at when it dawned on me where it was going and which I laughed at again when she actually asked the favor out loud.
-”Guess you can, um, leave your pussy at home…? I’ll watch it!”
-The description of what it’d be like after getting home, plus the buildup with the sad shaking of the head.
-Not really a laugh but an “oh my god!” at the “some of the fellas came by” excuse.
None of it’s really aggressive IMHO, and the only people I can imagine it pissing off are people who object to hearing the word “pussy” and/or any talk about sex. If Chris Matthews or anybody else squirmed because they were thinking “she isn’t self-effacing enough! That she is not making fun of herself disturbs me!” I wouldn’t understand why they had that reaction.
Humor’s obviously subjective so I’m not going to claim to be an authority on the subject, but instead just give my own personal impressions.
Humor without a target can work; if it didn’t, Jerry Seinfeld’s brand of observational humor would’ve never found an audience. George Carlin can offend with the best of ‘em, but he can also be funny without targeting anybody specific, such as his “Seven Words You Can’t Say On TV” bit or this one.
Carlin thinks religion is bullshit too, of course (and to me this bit isn’t as LOL funny so much as it’s just true and makes you ask “you know, that’s a really good fucking question” repeatedly) but the difference isn’t “he’s a man, you’re a woman, so it’s okay for him to make fun of it.” Here’s the difference.
First, the audience. After being in the business for decades, people pretty much know where Carlin stands and those who’d be offended by it won’t go to his shows. The people in the audience pay to see him primarily because he makes them laugh, and not necessarily because they agree with him on everything. If he makes an astute observation or a good point, then that’s a bonus, not the primary reason they’re listening to him. With Pandagon, the reverse is true. I’d bet most people don’t read the blog every day thinking “I bet there’s something in here that’ll make me piss my pants laughing.” They read it to stay informed and for observations, not for humor. If something does make them laugh, then it’s a bonus, but it’s not expected that you bring the funny in every single paragraph of every single post.
Second, how something is going to be taken depends on who is delivering it, and how. If Chris Rock says something, it’s going to be taken differently than if Dan Rather says the exact same thing. The reason is that one is a comedian by trade, and the other is in the news business. Rock can go on Larry King or something and talk about things seriously, and Rather could try his hand at stand up comedy (although for his sake I hope that he doesn’t), but when Rock’s on stage he’s not going to be taken entirely seriously and when Rather’s reporting on something people aren’t going to assume he’s joking. One is paid to not be serious, and the other is paid to be serious most of the time, so when Rather says something everybody knows that he is dead serious. When Rock says it, you don’t know for sure if he’s kidding or not. When Kathy Griffin said “suck it, Jesus! This award is my god now!” everybody with a sense of humor assumed she was kidding, instead of assuming–as I guess Bill Donohue did–that she really, truly hated Jesus. That’s because she’s a comedian.
Third, humor is more than just snarky comments. If somebody makes a joke that works, people are going to laugh and it’ll put them at ease, possibly even if the joke offends them. If somebody just makes a snarky comment that isn’t LOL funny, it comes across as mean-spirited. Andrew Dice Clay is a great example of a guy who was trying to be funny, but didn’t enjoy long-term success because people considered him more mean-spirited than funny, and they were right. South Park is sometimes more mean-spirited than funny, as with the Christopher Reeve stem cell episode which put me off the series for good. If you actually make people laugh their ass off, even the ones who don’t like what you’re saying will be willing to overlook how you’ve offended them. If you fail to make them laugh, they’re just going to dislike you.
Fourth and last, it’s just a bad idea to expect people to laugh at your jokes in general. It’s a better idea to just say what’s on your mind and see whether or not people think it’s funny. Hope that they do, but be prepared for them not to. I know that I’m not one of the brilliant comedic talents of my generation or anything, which is why I pretty much just deadpan all the jokes I make in real life instead of acting enthusiastic or acting as if I’m on the verge of cracking up at my own joke. If I say something to somebody that way and it makes them laugh, great. If it only makes them smile, also great. If it doesn’t amuse them at all, that’s fine because I wasn’t acting as though I expected them to be amused and I don’t come across as somebody who was trying to make the other person laugh and failed miserably. Few things are sadder than somebody who laughs at their own joke only to find that they are the only one laughing.
OK, now I have no idea how you’re going to take this, given that this comment could easily be dismissed by you as the observation of somebody who Just Doesn’t Get It or somebody who Just Plain Hates Me And Would Never Think Anything I Said Was Funny, but: I don’t think comedy is one of your strengths. The funniest thing I’ve seen you write was the post about the guy who conducted the unicycle experiment and even that just made me smile instead of causing me to laugh out loud.
I think you’re going about it the wrong way. For starters, you’re assuming that all good jokes have the potential to piss somebody off, which isn’t true as demonstrated above (unless you think that somebody who works for an airline might be pissed off by the first Carlin bit I linked to above, or if you think somebody might actually think he was serious when he described his planned route out of the plane). That’s not saying “it’s never a good idea to make fun of anybody, ever,” but rather that you don’t necessarily need to. If you do make fun of somebody, something that I’ve heard or read often is that satire is most effective when the object of that satire is somebody powerful and somebody who has it coming. That would explain why there are so many billions of jokes involving Richard Nixon. If you pick on somebody who can be viewed as an underdog or somebody who doesn’t deserve it, the number of people who find it funny goes down. Take Andrew Mayer; if you make fun of somebody getting tasered, half the audience won’t laugh because they’ll either feel sorry for him or they’ll be angry that you were making fun of somebody who was the victim of excessive force.
You might be thinking: “What are you talking about? Christians aren’t underdogs, and they DO deserve it.” Well, that’s partly true. Some Christians are actually very Nixonian in terms of dickishness level and in terms of power wielded. Robertson is one, Dobson is another, Phelps is an example of somebody who’s very possibly the biggest dick alive but thankfully is too crazy to have as much power as the bigger names. If you made fun of them specifically, or if you made fun of them and their brain-dead foot soldiers, I’d be totally behind you–either laughing or smiling or just mentally saying “Yeah!”
The problem–for me anyway, if you care–is that it wasn’t just those guys or people like them who were the targets. It was everybody, seemingly. Everybody who attended any church, everybody who believed in any form of Christianity, even the people who totally rejected Dobson, Robertson, et al. Even the people who are tolerant, who don’t judge, who don’t proselytize, who aren’t pushy assholes. That includes my immediate family, who I love even though I don’t agree with all of their beliefs. That includes some of my friends. You’ve just gotta take me at my word when I tell you that if they were anything like the religious right in the States, I would not want to associate with any of them; I’d even be estranged from my family. Some members of my extended family are Republicans, and I don’t want to spend any time with those people. I wouldn’t react as strongly as I did–and I did overreact, in retrospect, for which I apologize–if I hadn’t felt like people I loved and respected were being insulted, and made out to be bad people or stupid people when I knew that they weren’t anything like that.
Oh, it’s not just limited to the straight male audience (which is only half said in jest since there are plenty of bi male viewers…and, no, I don’t think that’s funny enough to make anybody actually laugh). But yeah, jokes about somebody with Fey’s looks being considered unattractive either by herself or by others aren’t just unfunny, they’re unrealistic.
wow, that sarah silverman bit you embedded was truly great, amanda. i thought it was going to be the old one about “i thought i wanted an abortion, but it turned out i was just thirsty” — which i do love but have seen a lot — but this, though in the same vein (women who have abortions enjoy it / are being frivolous), was unexpected and perfect. thank you so much. for whoever asked upthread — that one ought to have a “totally awesome” marker on it too.
you can say this 1000 times and each time i would cheer inside. i go to junior college, and i am dumbfounded at how many girls are obviously blatantly faking stupid, so as to not appear unattractive. i mean, i kno its not harvard, but this is college level, youre paying for it, you would think it would be more important to impress your professor and get good grades than pretend your an idiot in order to not threaten some neanderthal who cant deal with smart women. my cousin does it too, i dont even kno where she learned it becos her mother is an incredibly intelligent woman who has dedicated her life to teaching special needs children. it makes me cry inside seeing girls fake stupid. pretty and smart arent mutually exclusive, they arent!!!!!!!
also, this is why i really like “mama’s family” even tho i kno most people despise the show. vicki lawrence was a pretty woman in her 20s who put on that costume and made herself older and heavier, crimes for women in our culture, to play this smart ass grandma who liked to drink beer and spoke her mind to anyone in her path, be it her family, the mayor, or taking down the man who stole her purse when she saw him try to do it to someone else. i’m sure alot could be said about how wrong it was that she had to wear a costume faking “unnatractive” to say those things, but that was damn brave of her as an actress to abandon the prescription to look pretty and young.
i like ab fab too, and coupling. it seems like there is a broader idea of what a woman can be over in the UK. i like ugly betty too, for pretty much the same reasons, different types of people all allowed to be funny and smart and desirable.
{grmbl} damn “streaming” (as if!) video from ComCentral…
Part of why I love “Boston Legal” is the hilarious, smart writing and that the women in the cast are extremely talented litigators and judges… while one of the named partners is a sexist, Republican buffoon. DEK rocks…
Which reminds me: add Candace Bergen to the list of funny, smart women on TV! Both as Murphy Brown and as Shirley Schmidt.
It’s true that a lot of humor is aggressive, but I think this is complicated by the fact that so much of it in real life is (for practical purposes) passive-aggressive. From the court fool right down to everybody making snarky comments in a meeting, there’s a crucial tradition of humor being the way that people at the bottom of the hierarchy get to express their hostility toward the folks in power without getting beheaded/fired/whatever. So public comedy is often a Walter Mitty kind of thing. Which in turn means that a certain subset of men (and patriarchal women) have to be particularly hostile to it, because only disempowered men should be allowed to use an outlet like this…
Or I could be hallucinating.
Tomato Nation has a great article about funny people who don’t like it when other people are funny. It’s extremely threatening to insecure people who need to be “the funny one” to have someone else tell a joke and take attention away from them. As insecure as some men are about women, the ones who think of themselves as “funny” must be especially threatened by a woman they think is trying to steal their thunder.
I have nothing to add, except that this possibly my favorite post/thread combo ever at Pandagon. It’s a subject I’ve never thought much about, but I think you all nailed it. And it gives me a little insight into why I’m generally not funny except when I’m too drunk or tired to keep my sarcastic thoughts to myself. But that happens about once every 3 years. I’m DEATHLY afraid of not being nice. It’s probably not healthy. Though I’m getting over the (erroneous) assumption that men in my grad school classes who state their opinions forcefully actually know more than I do. They don’t. They’re just louder about it, and now I argue with them. Baby steps, baby steps…
(Those two things are related only by my being too chicken to come out and say what I’m thinking.)
Carey is not wrong but he is not complete in his theory of humor either. This is my theory of humor but I don’t know that it is complete either. Joan Rivers, used self deprecation like a chainsaw…one tired after a while but not without a lot of laughing first. George Carlin often does the merely gross along with the more cerebral “unexpected point of view” of common experiences. There is a lot of things beside our discomfort and insecurity around power that can make us laugh. But you never laugh at any joke without first allowing the comic to take control of your expectations and attention…and that submission to the comic’s spell may be at the heart of the gender divide in stand-up trade.
Thanks for sharing that clip, I haven’t laughed that hard in a while. (Also, what hole have I been living in that I didn’t know Wanda Sykes is gay?)
Back when I had cable, I finally got some opportunities to watch Roseanne. I don’t know if I just appreciate it more now because it’s a show about working class folks, but damn I thought most of the humor on there was sharp. Roseanne Barr’s delivery always walked the line between self-deprecation and a vicious, biting anger at being poor. Plenty of people have panned Roseanne Barr’s brand of humor for being too loud, too raunchy, or too low class, but I love that shit.
I haven’t had a chance to see any 30 Rock, but I’ve seen a few appearances of non SNL Tina Fey that make me think I’d love her. On SNL I could never get over her looking into the camera and smirking, which was only made more unbearable because half the rest of the damn cast had the same problem and she seemed smarter than that. Of course, she had crap to work with for writing so who knows, maybe she was sharing the audience’s pain. I’m probably a bigger fan of Ana Gasteyer, but I haven’t seen much of her in a while.
I think that it’s just gossip that Wanda Sykes is gay. She supports gay marriage and has a big gay following, and I don’t think she’d have a problem declaring herself. I haven’t seen anything about her declaring herself. She was married for seven years and does a lot of comedy about having sex with men and hasn’t dabbled with comedy about lesbian sex, like Cho has. She has done comedy about not liking kids, which may make people think she’s gay. So I think she’d probably not gay, but when people see a single, loud, childfree person, that does a lot for the gay community, they assume gay.
Thomas Hobbes has the definitive quotable on this topic:
“Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”
In this discussion, i think what we are referring to as “aggression” is rooted in superiority. If we accept that humor is tied to expressing superiority, then “aggression” just describes how vigorously superiority is being expressed.
Since our society says women are inferior, it follows that women are barred from being comedians; because comedy requires a women to express her own superiority , or to judge the relative superiority of others (which assumes a position of superiority).
Also, the comedy world is hyper-competitive; our society also says it’s selfish for women to compete, which is maybe a more immediate barrier to women comedians.
I favor the Asimov theory of humor arising from the unexpected, or from overturning conventions; aggression obviously is one way to do this, but it covers other things that make me laugh, too.
Sing a little song:
They tore down the El, so our mayor did say,
For to build in our city a bright new subway.
Twould be new, twould be clean;
Twould be white, twould be green,
So let’s give three cheers for our bright new subway.
No El! No El! No El! No El–
Let’s give three cheers for our bright new subway.
I’ve always gotten a laugh with it. You have to sing it, because the laugh comes as a moment of delighted surprise as the listener realizes the chorus sound *exactly* the same as in the original, but somehow you hadn’t seen it coming. I suppose you could say it gets the listener to laugh at themselves and it is therefore aggressive, but it’s really the same sounding laugh as a child makes at a good surprise.
Though I’m getting over the (erroneous) assumption that men in my grad school classes who state their opinions forcefully actually know more than I do.
they don’t. i’ve been told quite often that grad school is all about insecurity and trying to prove that you ARE good enough to be working with these professors, you really are… right?
you seem to be aware of that already but i thought i’d lend my support (as an outsider looking in on the grad school life).
Samantha, you’ve gone and cited an authority for the kind of theory of humor I was groping to express. Yep, that’s it, I think–funny is about realizing that all the neat preconceived catagories and definitions and rules break down. “Absurd” literally means “nonsense,” but we recognize that the things themselves make sense, it is our understanding of them that has proven inadequate. It’s what Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called a “Quality” experience–reality itself, prior to our naming and classifying or even appreciating it.
It has other aspects, but these are related I think. Heinlein suggested in Stranger in a Strange Land that we laugh at the stark tragedy of our existence–it was when Valentine Michael Smith fully understood that that he first laughed and became truly human. All true I think but a little bit grimmer than we have to see it.
But the kind of humor that really is a form of aggression is grimmer still, and much stupider, and barely qualifies as humor at all. If one’s mentality demands seeing the world as a conflict between rival hierarchies of thugs, then of course the attempt to bring down rivals and promote oneself is a form of category conflict, I guess, but the most elementary–not Him in charge, but Me Me Me!!! Look at how stupid They are, let’s beat them up! Hardy har har, good old fun wrasslin’.
But the really funny people are the ones who are most likely to get beaten up, because they threaten the whole system of categories, and not being focused on mere self-promotion mock themselves as much as others.
Vice versa, when one learns to laugh with them, the whole game of Us versus Them begins to look kind of silly in perspective.
I just tried to read the Feministing post, but there is something screwed-up with the formatting lately–now the text of the post is all mixed up with the right-hand column of links and I can’t really read it. But it seems that Holly finds that the “aggression” theory of humor, whatever that is, is taken seriously and for granted, despite its obvious weaknesses. Here I was thinking that the aggression theory, as expressed in the unicycle article, was just a whimsical part of that whole not-so-funny “joke” of an article, and therefore not worth engaging.
But apparently there is no “theory of humor” worthy of the name and something as primitive and half-baked as the idea that it’s all about “aggression” somehow has currency in lieu of a real attempt at a theory?
I for one have wanted to talk seriously about humor and what it is for some time, but been afraid of being ridiculed for being so absurd as to talk about a “theory of humor.” But apparently someone has to!
It might as well be the likes of Asimov (who definitely knew how to be funny) we cite.
But I’d really like Margaret Cho’s insights even more. She’s funnier.
Carole Lombard wasn’t the only woman in classic Hollywood who was both funny and gorgeous–back in the thirties/early forties, it was an embarrassment of riches: Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Roz Russell, Constance Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Jean Harlow–each in their own way all kinds of beautiful, and all kinds of funny (from martini-repartee to outright slapstick).
I think they ended up playing beautiful *and* funny courtesy (in part) of the Hayes code (a blessing in retrospect, imo). Women being forbidden to do anything labeled salacious or unfit (number one being naked or near naked) meant there was no cinematic equivalent of a “show us yer tits!” moment (as a shitty shorthand for why the hero / audience might be enthralled by the female lead) and the only way left to establish charisma and character and inevitability was through dialogue.
So beautiful women talk smart and fast and funny (Roz Russell in “His Girl Friday”, Jean Harlow in “Dinner at Eight”, Ginger Rogers in “Stage Door”) or talk cool and calm and witty (Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve”, Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night” and “Tovarich”) or talk savvy and sarcastic (Irene Dunne in “The Awful Truth”, Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”) and on and on and on: classic Hollywood is breathtaking because women in comedies talk back, talk up (and under and over and through whatever obstacle they face) and the talk is funny and smart and goofy and charming and dead to rights.
Love, in that era of the movies, is all but defined by the sound of a woman talking (when was the last time you felt that way, upon leaving a movie? Felt that her voice and words and mind were the most important thing about her–the rest a bonus to be appreciated, but her words? Like water and air).
So as much as I love Lombard, no–she wasn’t the only beautiful, funny woman in Hollywood. The town was once thick with such women (and the writers, directors and producers who got that funny and beautiful were par for the course, not uber-threatening black magic from pussy-land).
Rosalind Russell also in “Auntie Mame”- Lucille Ball’s version is also good, but RR made the role HERS.
Two things- I have two jobs one in video production and one in human services. I worked on a commercial shoot last summer that involved a number of college-age guys who were totally enamored with their own brand of agrressive humor. I refer to it as the Dane Cook-effect where mildly attractive, slightly charismatc guys just shout a lot of offensive things and it equals instant comedy. Anyways, I was prepping one of the actos for the shoot and he asks me if he can say the word “fuck” and I’m like, no, not if we want it to air. He says, “So, you don’t want this to be funny then?” And I said, “Well, I guess if you think that just saying the word fuck equals instant hilarity, then no, it probably wouldn’t be funny according to your standards. You could try to use a something with a tad more originality, though.” The entirely male camera crew got a kick out of that and a kick out of me for saying what needed to be said to this douche. Long story short, the actor refused to work with me from there on out, because “my intensity scared him.” Hokay. Sour grapes, kid, he didn’t like being one-upped by a woman in front of a bunch of dudes with cameras.
Second story- I work at a residential treatment center with adolescent girls, many of whom have a wide range of aggressive behaviors ranging from verbally abusive to physically assaultive to sexually predatory. They can be a scary group of girls. But I found a way to break through with most of them- I use humor. If a girl gets worked up about something, more often than not, the best way to de-escalate her is to use humor. If I can make her laugh, I can make her talk about what’s upsetting her and we can move on and deal with her anger appropriately. Granted, some girls don’t respond to it at all, but a lot do. People respond to humor, boys, girls, men, women.
I also had a guy break up with me once because his friends thought I was really funny and really cool. They didn’t know the real me, he said. He also accused me of not being “nice.” I think that might be it, partially, a woman with a cutting sense of humor is often not a “nice” person since being nice is passive and being witty is active.
Seriously, though, men need to get over this shite.
There is a serious inconsistency here. Both news and comedy come to us mostly via the Main-Stream Media (MSM).
We seriously challenge (on blogs, for instance) that the MSM really represents America. Then why should anything else on MSM be taken to represent America?
I’ve been wanting to blog about this post by Holly about whether or not the social stigma attached to aggression in women explains why women’s humor has also been traditionally discouraged, to the point where there’s a noticeable gender gap in just the sheer numbers of male and female comedians out there.
How do I know that “women’s humor has been traditionally discouraged” ? All I can say is “women’s humor has been discouraged in MSM”.
Is humor aggressive?
Is food spicy?
Is nudity gratuitous?
Is music loud?
Is weather unpleasant?
Is humor aggressive?
How about if I answer that with an anecdote.
A few years ago, I took a class at the community college in Comedy Writing. Among the things we were instructed in were:
1. try to poke fun at groups that you yourself belong to instead of at groups you don’t identify with - it offends fewer people.
2. Start out your comedy set with less offensive and more self-effacing material - it makes people sympathize with you enough that they’re not so shocked when you pull out the sharp material.
and 3. To generate material, start by listing some emotions you’ve felt recently and situations which provoke those feelings. Usually things like anger, anxiety, irritation, etc - happy emotions are harder to work with.
So yes, comedy has a lot of aggression in it. Material is often generated based off of things that anger, annoy, irritate or make the comic and/or writer nervous.
FYI, the class was not female-only, but about half and half. It was led by a wonderful female comic (see accidentalcomic.com for some of her work) and that may have influenced how we were taught in regards to offensiveness and self-effacing.
While the American kind of humor seems to me to rely a lot on aggression, I have a hard time understanding what’s aggressive about absurdist humor. In particular I think of Monty Python, and its descendants. Most of the new breed of Quebec comics are Pythonesque absurdists, though it’s true that the rest are heavily influenced by American ‘edgy’ humor (meaning: complete choads saying offensive crap).
In particular, I’m thinking of a new humorist here called Jean-Thomas Jobin whose skits are almost entirely based on the fact that he speaks like a vulgarizer (from a documentary, or a conference) but explains utterly banal things. His breakout performance was when he explained “what’s a restaurant?” I have a hard time finding the aggression in this brand of humor.
Mark Foxwell, I think you said something a tad profound, in that much of what you said could be applied to religeon. Do you think that the comment at 57 had a great deal to do with religeon as well?
Well, I don’t know that I’d consider Monty Python as entirely without aggression. I’m told that just about everything that Americans think is just “absurd” is a specific reference to some aspect of life in Great Britain.
Is the Pope Catholic?
Do bears poop in the woods?
The thing about self-depreciating humor is that, at least in my experience, it seems to be most capable of bridging the gap between humor and drama, and with possibilities of emotional connection with the audience.
Looking beyond the rather stunted genres of standup and sticoms, Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi are the only artists who have made me both laugh and cry (I’ve not tackled Fun Home yet). And a part of that is that their characters feel authentic to me in a way that I just don’t get from Trudeau, or Groening, or Schultz. I think the danger of attack comedy is that the characters just become 2-dimensional mouthpieces for a set of opinions. (And many standup performers talk about their on-stage personas as quasi-fictional characters.) When you read Doonesbury it’s painfully obvious that Mike, Mark, Zonker and BD are political strawmen set against each other in some rhetorical game. Its the same with Akbar and Jeff.
You know, I’m blanking on a Python sketch that’s really aggressive too. The dead parrot one would possibly offend people who preferred their birds among the living, but that’s reaching.
There’s the “Every Sperm is Sacred” number from The Meaning of Life and the scene preceding it, which might be offensive to Catholics. It does state an undeniable truth, however, which is that years and years of fucking without using birth control or contraception may not be such a good idea if you don’t have too much money.
There’s also The Life of Brian, which caused a lot of fuss when it came out. But you’re right, there often is no target in Python sketches, and thus no aggression.
I favor the Asimov theory of humor arising from the unexpected, or from overturning conventions;
Edward De Bono, when I read it.
Is our children learning?
I think it’s obvious that the brunt of the dead parrot sketch is the way in which businessmen will go to great lengths to avoid admitting to selling a defective product. But most frequently the target of Monty Python satire was the conventions of documentary and news television of the time. So many sketches involve an insufferably smug talking head narrating either some completely banal or obviously absurd situation while taking it entirely too seriously.
And of course the followup to “Every Sperm is Sacred” is a sketch showing English Protestants as being smart enough to know how to use a condom, but so sexless in their relationships that they never need to use one. The movie also attacks gourmets, game shows, vacationers at exotic resorts, American obsessions with country cottages, avant garde film, and documentary filmmaking.
I’m told by people who actually saw Python in context that there was no doubt that their sketches were rather harsh and biting satire of English media and culture at the time, because everyone had a bad experience with dishonest or evasive shopkeepers, arts and culture programming on television, and government bureaucracy which were the staples of Python sketches.
Some classic Monty Python for y’all.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode02.htm
Or to put it another way, Python sketches seem absurd and without a target because they have survived quite a bit longer than the television programs they lampooned.
Godless Heathen on Tina Fey: “Of course, she had crap to work with for writing so who knows, maybe she was sharing the audience’s pain.”
Hate to say it, but Tina Fey was one of the main writers on the show while she was on it. If it was crap, it was probably her crap.
Putting on a show and having to fill it with material always leads to some hits and some misses. I get aggravated with all the “SNL isn’t as funny as it was when so-and-so (Belushi, Radner, Murray, Chase, whoever) was on it” crowd. Those people aren’t remembering the shows as they were, but only remembering the best-of compilations. There were duds in every season, though of course some years were better than others.
Hmm, that does make sense. Now I’d kinda like to get a glimpse of one of those lampooned programs…
Well, jon, to be fair I was never too keen on the older vanguard of SNL either. I’m not one of those people that pines for the good ol’ days when television comedy didn’t suck so much, because I can’t remember a time when it didn’t. I have a fickle funny bone that way, I prefer most of my humor very dry, with brief periods of watermelons being smashed with sledgehammers and the like, and it’s hard to find that anywhere.
Thanks for the Python, nothere!
Actually I think you don’t need to have specific knowledge of the actual shows or general format of the BBC in those days to get that Python was satirizing. That sheep thing for instance–I hadn’t seen the British media, but I did know that the Concorde SST was a joint Anglo-French venture, and that was enough to clue me in to the specific point of the French part of the skit, and recognize the nesting sheep part as a set-up. Presumably the Concorde project, which needed and got massive financial support from the British government, was heavily promoted on British TV.
Obviously the more you know about the cultural setting of any piece of art, the more you will get it. But vice versa, people learn stuff from context and a lot of what I know, or think I know at any rate, about British society in the mid-20th century is from watching Python shows.
Just as a lot of what I know about US history and culture in general turns out to have first been presented to me via Warner Brothers cartoons. I found that invaluable in grad school.
By focusing on the points where culture goes whacky, comedy tends to be a very efficient sketcher of Big Pictures. You can largely infer the boring parts by seeing how people are imagined to handle the weird.
As for the degeneracy of SNL; well, I hardly ever watched it live after I went to college in 1983. Unlike jon and his acquaintences, I am in the opposite position: I saw most of the run of the original NRFTP cast when they first aired in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And yes there were duds but by and large the show reliably killed. Well of course I was just in Jr High and HS. Still, years later, those eps often still have bite and freshness, whereas every replacement cast I have ever glanced at since seems incredibly lame and stale in comparison. I think it was that the 70s were a sort of brief pop cultural Indian summer before the general chill of the 80s and after drove good stuff out of the mainstream. For whatever reason, while a few good people seem to have emerged as fugitives from the latter generations of SNL, by and large these people represent what I despise about how mainstream, big-budget TV/movie culture has evolved.
But then I haven’t even seen a “best-of” compilation of any SNL post 1983. I’ve heard of the Church Lady and Wayne’s World; that’s about it. I saw Mean Girls having not a clue who Tina Fey might be.
Godless Heathen, your local library probably has the collected works of Jeeves and Wooster, wherein you can see a plethora of dry wit with the occasional pratfall. As for your watermelony wishes, I’m led to believe you don’t find those in Spike Lee or 1930s musicals.
Is humor aggressive? it depnds on what youre using as a measurement of aggression.
Is it always offensive? No.
Some of the best, the truly genius, are not offensive:
mitch hedberg, the guys from flight of the conchords, etc… they get the funny done without trying to be offensive & they manage to do it with little true aggression. the ones that go for offensive are going for the cheap, & i tire of them quickly because theyre inferior, & in the end, they dont make you feel any better for having watched them.
“It’s well-worn to a cliche now that women’s traditional road to being humorists has been the self-effacement route. Which is to say that, traditionally, women could be funny if they directed their aggression at themselves, women’s sexuality, or just women in general, “safe” targets that men could laugh at”
I dont think sarah silverman is that far from joan rivers, at base. both of them i find self-hating in different ways, & some alike. and they both fuck/ed really repulsive men –that has got to be a form of self-loathing.
what pisses me off about tina fey’s character (& too many other similar ones out there) is the agism moreso than the looksism. they trowel on the supposed cliches & self-hatred in relation to her looks & how she must feel as an aging woman, etc.. & i sit back & think, Wtf?! theyre telling ME & other women how we should think about aging, & i never felt that –until they put the fucking thought into my head! Fuck THEM!
There’s non-aggressive incongruous humor like puns, but it’s not very funny unless in service of more aggressive humor. The Mayor on Buffy checking off “become invincible” was an incongruous joke in service of a much larger satire on the evil lurking in the hearts of sentimental politicians.
Flight of the Conchords mocks all sorts of sacred cows. I have yet to laugh at one of their jokes where I couldn’t tell you exactly who or what is targeted. Whether or not it’s “offensive” usually depends on whether or not a target has a sense of humor about him or herself. Mitch Hedberg—again, depends on the joke, but I suspect he’s not the “gentle” comedy you’re implying.
The Sarah Silverman show had a brilliant send-up of “gentle” comedy, by the way. The send-up, of course, was aggressive humor and hysterical.
Oh shit, I remember that. I felt mortified for that guy.
Sarah Silverman is brilliant
The difficult thing is: she is not an adult. The beginning of menstruation doesn’t make you an adult. The possibility of having sperm meet egg doesn’t make you a parent.
If we get beyond the debate about whether young women have sex drives and have any entitlement to explore…there is a disconnect in the minds of young women, particularly teens and even young twenties, on what it takes to raise a kid. To tell them is to be the crabapple at the ball, when, really, that IS responsiblity.
The public at large wants a “just say no” campaign, and the anti-choicers want the scene to fade to black after taking the picture of new mother with baby in delivery room.
Feminists have a bone to pick with those approaches, but I’d also have a bone to pick with feminists saying “leave her alone” when people try to tell a young pregnant woman that certainly, now, she’s written a check that her family will have to help pay in care and money (not that they should have any plans) and society has to pay in welfare. It’s really not full responsibility if you cannot support and care for a child. Financial resources has something to do with it, maturity has something to do with it. And somehow, to say so, breaks that lovely foggy, misty picture that people want to paint about the whole “I’m keeping my baby” heroism.
Just as women should have the right to chose, older parents should have the right to not have to raise another set of kids basically left at their doorstep, which is often where this “I’m keeping my baby” goes when it is a very young mom. I’ve seen older parent emburdened with their aging parents, their kids, and then their “noble” girl’s kids who did the right thing and “kept” the baby. Sometimes these noble people are noble on another person’s resources and life.
For the record, yes, I do have a crush on Tina Fey
. But I always thought those jokes knew that too–that they were send-ups of the unrealistic image expectations. After all, Tina Fey is widely regarded as gorgeous, but it isn’t quite the “traditional” image of the bimbo.