Top 5 Funny Women

McBane here. Apparently we're a couple more posts away from changing this blog to "Disciples of Judy Chicago."

One of the mysteries of science that has long stumped researchers is: Why aren’t women funny? Vanity Fair columnist/overbearingly pushy atheist/smarmy British asshole Christopher Hitchens tried to explain the issue earlier this year. His lame conclusion was (is) basically this (more or less): generally, women have more important things to do than to be funny. (He doesn’t make the big bucks for nothing, folks.)

Poised to insert myself once I discovered Hitchens couldn’t keep himself up to the task, I was all set to thrust through a snarky Top 5 on why women aren’t funny…but that’s the coward’s way out, isn’t it? Plus, it would obviously be mean and be completely out of line with what I’m (generally) trying to do with this blog: make the world a better place.

On top of all that, I also kind of think I’d be wrong, you know? I mean obviously, some women are funny. And the more I think about it, the more it seems that Hitchens’ line of reasoning that women are inherently missing some funny bones just doesn’t hold up. Case in point: I recently saw Knocked Up and Walk Hard on my teevee back to back, and I walked away from the experience with Sanity bludgeoned into my brain. More specifically, I came away thinking, “why the fuck is Kristen Wiig rotting her 30s away doing turgid sketches at Saturday Night Live? Why can’t she get a fucking lead in anything? Chris Kattan was (is) less than 3% as funny as her and I’m pretty sure even he got his own movie, which means Norm MacDonald was completely right to constantly badger him about being gay.” This experience also led me to remind myself that, “it’s also pretty much already accepted that the only funny people who are on Saturday Night Live anymore are the women. This would be a bit of a blow to your silly Top 5, wouldn’t it? (And yes, Wiig and the SNL ladies are not that funny, but they get extra points when considering what a difficult gig SNL has become. Besides, no one on SNL is ever really that funny.)”

After my self-centered parenthetical conversation, I decided that obviously, there are some funny women out there. There’s no denying it. And this goes way beyond SNL. First of all, I obviously can’t write a list saying women aren’t funny when

1) Sarah Silverman

is unassailably, undefeatedly, undisputably, unconfunktifly the funniest person alive by a factor of nine (and I’m reasonably sure she has two X chromosomes). Plus, the list of funny women outside SNL isn’t just Silverman and no one, not by a long shot; in fact, none of the five funniest women are SNL performers. All of them are employed elsewhere and have all done great stand-up (I am a reformed Comedy On Demand junkie) in addition to doing other things.

This got me to thinking some more. Maybe the problem of low levels of funny women, I theorized, is that it’s just harder for women to stay funny. (Like it is for them to stay pretty.) But there were (are) holes in this logic, too. Consider: as we all know, George Carlin died recently. In his later years, some of Carlin’s stuff got pretty mean-spirited, but no one seemed to hold it against him (he earned his throne, after all). But then I started contemplating how younger, much less talented guy comedians can get away with this crap, too: consider a dude like David Cross (who has earned nothing). He is certainly no longer funny (if he ever was), yet he still makes a living as a “comic.”

Let me expound on Cross, so you can understand what a big leash we give this guy. First of all, it seems as though Cross is confronting the same problem Carlin ran into: he’s gone from being the sane guy talking to a sane audience about nutty things into being the venomous, self-absorbed bastard who skewers the people he hates (which is pretty much everyone), and is so full of himself that by this point he thinks anything that amuses him must be funny to other people. (That’s his persona, anyway. But I don’t think he separates the two in his mind, which again illustrates how much he sucks; pure authenticity as a performer is self-flagellating bullshit, and typically just means that you’re lazy or that you’re boring. Would the wonderfully funny

2) Kristen Schaal

ever say the performance aspect of being funny isn’t important? But I digress.)

Giving Cross some slack is not just some recent trend, either. I mean, no one wants to admit it, but Mr. Show was horribly overrated…but people gave Cross a pass. (Because hipsters thought it was cool or something, I guess. Hipsters are also generally not funny.) Then, it seemed like Cross was only relevant for picking fights with Larry the Cable Guy (way to stick it to that socially irrelevant comic who still gets more laughs than you, tough guy!)…but people gave Cross a pass. He’s put out bile-infested “comedy” albums like It’s Not Funny (ha ha it’s not funny! because it’s sarcastic! because we thought it was going to be funny! but Cross said it’s not funny! and he’s right! so it’s doubly sarcastic! and it’s still not funny! ha ha!) and Shut Up You Fucking Baby (also unfunny)…and still people gave Cross a pass.

It’s come down to this…if you like David Cross at this point, it’s probably because you’re a) a completely evil person or b) want other people to think you’re cool. Yet he lives still (and indeed makes a comfortable living), probably even more comfortable than

3) Wendy Liebman

who is obviously much funnier.

So I got to back to thinking. Does this kind of thing happen to women? Frankly, I’m unconvinced that it does. The most egregiously overexposed “funny” woman I can think of is Molly Shannon, and she made just one bad movie, Superstar, before being launched to Pluto. Don’t get me wrong, Molly Shannon on Pluto is by no means a bad thing…but there does seem to be a different standard here.

Back to the thinking board. Maybe, I postulated, the deal is this: if you’re a woman, you won’t necessarily even get a shot to fail big-time, and you most definitely won’t get another one. Jimmy Fallon, conversely, has gotten multiple shots. So has David Spade. Even Louis C.K. got his own HBO show, which by the way had a minor supporting role for

4) Laura Kightlinger

in it (the show has since been cancelled).

But I mean look: I am, after all, just a man writing about women. So maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about; maybe I’m like the reverse of one of those shitty supermarket magazines that have articles by women trying to explain men. Stuff like “Top 5 Ways to Please Your Man, By Some Lady” (to paraphrase Dave Chappelle). I mean yeah, from an objective standpoint, I’ve progressively decided to contribute to gender equity by writing an article about women, but I accept that some people are too closed-minded to see this. It’s possible to them that I’m just a douchebag like Hitchens, who wrote that most funny women are:

“hefty or dykey or Jewish or some combo of the three.”

Maybe a woman’s viewpoint, like an article in the same magazine (by Alessandra Stanley) will shed some insight on things:

“It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.”

Okay, forget it. Back to me.

Both Hitchens and Stanley are missing the point. (Surprise!) I mean, let’s say maybe you agree with Hitchens, which is fine. The thing is, his statement pretty much describes most male comedians, too (everyone knows Adam Sandler is a homo). Seriously, though, comedians typically don’t go into the biz by looking for a side income to supplement their lucarative underwear-modeling career, male or female. Right?

But maybe you agree with Stanley. That’s fine, too. Maybe being more photogenic is more important nowadays than it used to be, now that comedians tend to want to act more. And again, it seems ugly male comedians would face the same kind of problem.

Luckily, I’m smarter than you and will agree to nothing. Seriously, what’s the point of getting into an argument as regards the Top 5 Funny Women based on what you think of them physically, whether you think they’re pretty or not, or whatever? (Yeesh. Talk about a fucking no-win scenario. Possible responses from the five: a) You bastard! I’m not funny just because I’m pretty! b) You bastard! How can you say I’m not fucking pretty? c) You bastard! How dare you judge me one way or the other on if I’m pretty or not!)

Look, can’t we just live in a world where female comics can just be damn funny? Does absolutely positively everything that makes you a complicated, interesting, funny person always have to be inexorably linked with gender if you’re, say,

5) Caroline Rhea

or any of the other comics I've listed? Can’t we, for example, just say Hillary Clinton is an opportunistic political carnivore (in addition to her many good qualities, I'm sure) and leave her ovaries out of it? (Obviously not. And I’m a misogynistic bastard for it! I’m sorry.)

Here’s the conclusion, folks, the nitty-gritty of the whole thing, the thing that Hitchens and Stanley don’t get: the problem with women and comedy, the only problem, is that there’s still sexism in comedy, but it’s not really overt. It’s institutionalized. That’s right, there are even glass ceilings and glass escalators in the comedy wing of the humanity building. So what we need to do is to be more conscious of unintentional institutional sexism in comedy and thus give good female comics more of a look; this would in turn enhance the talent of the comic pool and would thereby increase our odds of being happily entertained by the funniest available people at all times. I mean, that’s really all I’m trying to get at. (What? Did you think I was going all feminist on you or something?)

And you know what, I would actually say something about why these five comics are so gut-bustingly awesome, I really would, but frankly, I’ve written a lot here already.

I’m sure someone else will look into it.

Besides, reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond are coming on.