A while back I read We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, which consists mostly of interviews with/about famous female stand-up comedians. (It also covers sketch comedy and to a lesser extent sitcoms.) I remember that a number of the interviewees talked about the double-edged sword of beauty in the comedy world. There’s a lot of pressure on female entertainers of any kind to be physically attractive, and a female comedian considered to have zero sex appeal may not get the same opportunities as an equally funny, equally unattractive guy. But at the same time, being beautiful doesn’t do much to help a female stand-up get a laugh. The consensus seemed to be that if anything it hurts you as a stand-up to be perceived by the audience as coming from a place of privilege rather than being some sort of underdog or outsider.
I agree. While I think the there are fewer funny woman standups by percentages and numbers, I think it’s for a few reasons; not woman being unfunny.
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Being a good standup means living in a big city and/or going on the road constantly. You often make little money, get almost no positive reinforcement, and constantly take abuse. Most sane people if either gender don’t want to commit to that lifestyle for the decade of so it usually takes to become good enough to make a proper living. For many women, you have the added safety element that makes it even less appealing.
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Being a great standup is a long shot, and women don’t commit to long shot careers as often, or to the same extent. That’s why the top people in most similar pursuits are men. The best billiards players, bowlers, and chess players are men not because of inherent differences between genders, but because more men are willing to risk almost certain failure to commit themselves to an endeavor like that.
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Men tend to find “woman’s humor” less funny because society generally presents “men’s humor” as “humor”, and anything outside that box as less funny and less relatable. It’s the same for race too.
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Our culture tells men it’s normal to want to be the center of attention, and rewards us more often for being funny.
I watched the movie a few weeks ago and thought it was absolutely terrible. Assuming it’s a true stereotype, either she needed to have her lines written and have it professionally produced or it needed to be done by someone who can think on their feet. Each time a male comedian agreed that a woman isn’t funny, she needed to say ‘yeah, what about Lisa Lampanelli? What about Joan Rivers? What about Ellen? What about Paula Poundstone? What about Wanda Sykes’ I don’t think you’d be able to get all the way through that list before most of them would be able to say ‘okay, some of the women are funny’ and someone in the comedy world shouldn’t have a hard time coming up with a handful of Kenny Banyas as male counter examples.
The only discussion that I felt hit the mark was the one (that the husband started) where it was stated that there’s just so many less female comedians so when a female comedian isn’t funny, you remember that and you might apply it to all of the women, whereas when a male comedian isn’t funny, you don’t write off the entire gender.
I made this comment in another thread. Imagine going to a comedy festival with 200 comedians, 6 of them are female (3x the 10% number given). If two of them bombed, it’s easy for you to walk away saying ‘it was really good, but the women weren’t that funny’. OTOH, if all the women were amazing, think about how many of the men would have to be horrible before you’d say ‘it was really good, but the male comedians weren’t that funny’. 30? 40? Half of them maybe?
I think it would have been much better if it was done by someone like Wanda or Lisa or even Sarah, people who aren’t going to take it and have no problem tearing right back into someone that says stupid crap like that.
What I got most out of it is that it seems to be self perpetuating. People think women aren’t funny so promoters don’t book them. Promoters don’t book them so they don’t get a chance to be funny and so on and so forth.
Let’s wait for someone who’s actually funny to say if he’s wrong or not.
Ten percent of 200 is 20, and 3 times that (30%) is 60. I think the numbers matter a lot, but it’s not as stark as your making it out to be.
I don’t find it is the same about race. I can enjoy Chris Rock when he’s telling jokes about being an African-American. I can enjoy Akmal Saleh when he’s telling jokes about being an Egyptian-Australian. I cannot say the same is true of the jokes female comedians choose to tell about being women.
I will say, having watched the documentary some time ago, the narrator is certainly not funny. Though, neither is her husband.
The question asked in the documentary is really, ‘are females good stand up comics?’. There are so few to start with for all kinds of reasons that I don’'t think that movie got anywhere in actually answering it. It was made to start that woman’s career.
You’re absolutely correct, I was off by an order or magnitude. So let’s go back to the original numbers. 10 women, 190 men. If 3 bombed, the audience may think ‘the women weren’t that good’ but it would take over 60 men (about a third) for it to be the same ratio and even then I would doubt people would think ‘the men weren’t that good’. It just came down to the fact that there’s so many more men in comedy than women, that when A woman does bad, it might be a while before someone who goes to a lot of comedy shows sees another female comic so they may for an impression of females in general.
Maybe I’m doing a bad job explaining it, but it made sense when I watched it.
Either way, like I said, I don’t think the documentary was done well. At best it did nothing for the stereotype, at worse it drove it home a bit more. I’d be surprised if anyone watched it and had their mind changed if that’s how they felt to begin with. Certainly no one she interviewed (think of the Patrice O’neal interview) walked away thinking 'ya know what, maybe she’s right).
It seemed like it was stereotype that had been bothering her for years (and so it should) and she decided to do something about it, she just did a poor job executing it. There’s a reason they have professional camera operators and writers and producers, it’s because when people make ‘films’ themselves they turn out dreck like this.
Also, it bugged me when she would get annoyed that people recognized her husband but not her. He, at the time, was on Last Comic Standing and she was just doing the night club circuit. She really internalized that.
Assuming that were true it would be a cultural thing, because both Lina Morgan and Rossy de Palma have claimed that part of the reason they went into comedy was that “they had the face for it”. Other Spanish female comedians had the voice for it; I can’t remember her name right now, but one who worked a lot during the 60s and 70s had the second most whistly voice I’ve heard, with Melanie Griffith at number one.
Stand up is a relative novelty here and some of the women doing it begin by being in age ranges that lots of men don’t consider fuckable unless the woman in question is already their wife. You know, over 40.
I don’t know about any of that, but I have noticed that the women stand-ups I find funniest are lesbians:
Ellen DeGeneres
Wanda Sykes
Paula Poundstone
Sarah Silverman is the exception.
I think it may just be because their humor doesn’t focus on relationship issues as much as is the case with other female comics.
It isn’t that novel a turn of phrase, I don’t think it really needed to come into being. It’s just like anything else that had been mostly done by men, that there would have been a resistance to accepting that women could do it simply out of mere sexism.
For what it’s worth I can pre-date your hypothesized 80s/90s by at least a decade: Jane Curtain has said in interviews that during tables reads for SNL, John Belushi would refuse to really deliver 100% when reading sketches written by women because he was adamant that women aren’t funny.
Article from a little while back by a female comedian. I don’t watch enough stand up to comment. Her tl;dr thesis: male audiences don’t respond as well to the type of humor that many female comics use. She believes it is due to the type of humor. While both genders draw on their own lives to inform their jokes, male comics use it as a jumping point while females make it their topic. Scientific, no, but interesting theory.
ETA: a lot of similar comments above that appeared between the time that I started the post and when I could finally get some free time away from my screaming infant. She’s not very funny.
I’m going to mention Gilda Radner and Madeline Kahn also.
It does seem like a lot of women comedians tend to fall back on the “boozy single gal” shtick.
That seems odd to me.
I see you’re familiar with Chelsea Handler…
Women writers and actors are funny. I’m not as extreme as some, but when it comes to standup I’d definitely side with the “not as funny” camp. It’s a sizable gap too.
Not sure if beauty matters much. No one’s creaming their jeans over Roseanne and Lampanelli and they’ve had plenty of success.
The social psychology between the sexes is different when it comes to humor. There’s little pressure for most women to be funny. They don’t need it for male attention, whereas dudes have to be funny if they’re lacking elsewhere. Guys also use humor to break each other’s balls and exert their status. Guys are the class clowns. In relationships men don’t seek out funny women. It’s a low priority, a bonus at best. When you hear a guy talking up his girlfriend you rarely hear him say, “oh, and she makes me laugh!” Women say stuff like that about their man.
Or maybe women are just terrible at telling stories.
It’s been getting better over the last couple years, but a big problem for female standup is limited subject matter. Male comedians talk about most anything: history, politics, religion, drugs, science, war, movies, video games, random news stories, whatever. Most female comedians tend to focus on family, relationships, and their whacky girlfriends.
Some of the (so called) funny women have eye rolling gimmicks, like cursing like a sailor or going on and on about how they’re huge sluts and they suck dick all day and how many abortions they’ve had or whatever. I suppose the shock may surprise more sensitive viewers, or they see a gulf between their cute appearance and the filthy language and edgy material and comedy is often about mismatched expecations, but it doesn’t do much for me. Maybe it started as a reaction against the idea of female comedians being soft or safe, but it seems more desperate than anything.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a woman who strung together so many jokes I ended up having to pause to compose myself. The last Bill Burr special killed me, and had funnier insight into women’s sexual psychology than I’ve seen from most women.
For women it’s usually a good joke or zinger here and there. Guys link their bits together, make references to earlier material, and craft a better gestalt. They also tend to be better at rapid fire delivery, where it feels like they’re assaulting you.
One place where women are way behind is audience interaction and handling a room. Men don’t back down and they’re top tier trolls. Try to imagine a female Andy Kaufman. Has a woman ever viciously ripped into a crowd like Burr did to Philly? Or how about Patrice O’Neal regularly deconstructing the couples’ relationships in the audience on the fly. Lampanelli is alright at this, but for most women most of the time it’s basic, 4chan level insults. Oh, you called him a faggot. You sure showed him.
I’d echo the earlier thought that most funny women in standup are lesbians. Or Jewish. It’s a different mindset.
There’s a disconnect between the pro/anti camps, where the pros list all these women they find hilarious but the antis just don’t see it. For example:
Didn’t laugh once. I smiled at the Mark Twain racist line, that was clever. The Tea Party rifle range joke was alright too. Other than that, meh.
Feels weird to write all that because I often find myself white knighting for a woman’s humor in other media, e.g. I have a soft spot for Sam Bee on the Daily Show, but most people seem to hate her and call her the worst correspondent.
Now that’s funny! Some of the most successful and celebrated comedians of all time are black guys doing race based commentary. Think Pryor, Murphy, Rock, Chappelle, and Patrice O’Neal. Even a hack like Carlos Mencia got famous off that shtick.
All this hand-wringing and these attempted explanations seem silly to me.
Ask yourself this question, and try and think about the answer while considering that no one will hear what you are thinking: In your daily life, which gender is generally the funnier one? I posit that if this is reflected upon honestly, most of the time the answer will be that males are.
And why shouldn’t it be this way? There are clear gender differences in so many other things like strength, ability to read facial cues, statistical risk of being a psychopath, etc etc. It would seem odd if sense of humor was a thing where the genders were exactly equal.
We also know from studies that the sense of humor of the genders are different. Women favor wordplays and puns more than men, while they dislike jokes involve “involve aggression, sexuality or offensiveness”. Or, as put by Dave Barry, ''the three building blocks of humor".
This is what I’ve found with some female stand-ups - they go for the crude. Personally, I don’t find it funny, no matter who delivers the material, and least mostly not. Every once in a while, I’ll be in the kind of mood that lends itself to laughing at things I otherwise consider to be juvenile. But for the most part, this stuff just doesn’t do it for me.
Kathy Ladman used to crack me up, especially her bit about the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to the stable. I liked most of what Maria Bamford did, altho her recent offering where she performed in her living room just fell flat to me. Ellen cracks me up. I thought early Roseanne was funny, but she just became obnoxious. Early Joan Rivers was a hoot, then she got bitter and nasty. I never liked Lisa Lampanelli - she’s just gross. We saw Paula Poundstone twice in person - once she killed, the next time was kinda *meh *- so maybe I’ve caught some women on their *meh *days.
To be fair, I don’t find men funny when they rely on the crude side of humor. Foul language and poop and fart jokes should be kept in junior high school locker rooms. I’ll take clever and subtle over lewd and “shocking” any day. All humor should conform to my standards! :rolleyes:
Jeffrey Dahmer limited his victims to men and boys, reportedly because women “taste funny”. So there’s that.