Women in Comedy

I'm reading New Yorkers in batches, but since we were speaking of women in comedy ... the April 11th New Yorker has a must-read article on Anna Faris, of The House Bunny fame.  The article is entitled "Funny Like A Guy."  You can kinda access it here, but Faris is appearing in a movie entitled, "What's Your Number," which is apparently about a woman who learns (in Marie Claire) that if she sleeps with more than 20 guys, she'll never get married, so she goes back to each of the guys she has slept with to see if they're The One.  We could parse *that* premise, but first, interesting quotes:

The makers of "What's Your Number" were anxious about the number itself.  "We thought, Would twenty guys be too many for the audience to relate to her?"

Faris on rejecting certain female rom-com movie roles:

When Pratt [Faris' husband], tidies the house, he often finds discarded scripts with cover notes offering his wife a million dollars--which to Pratt, a regular on the NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation," seems like a lot of money.  Faris calls such parts "the girl," or "counce-card roles," after the reflective sheet that softens the light around an actor, because the whole job is to giggle, simper, and coo.  She told me, "I feel like I did that in 'My Super Ex-Girlfriend' " -- a 2006 film in which her role consisted of allowing Luke Wilson to admire her ass and then turning with melting eyes as he ran off to have sex with Uma Thurman.  "I hated being on that movie so much I was glad when it bombed," she said.  "These roles are destroying a generation of boys, who think we'll forgive any kind of assholey behavior."

On audience expecations of female characters:

Nicolas Stoller, the director of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," ... says, "There's a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likeability for women stars.  You need to make the actress completely adorable, or else she'll be thought of as the straight man or the bummer ..."  To make a woman adorable, one successful female screenwriter says, "you have to defeat her at the beginning.  It's a conscious thing I do--abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun.  It's as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie."

F YOUR GENDER BINARY

Street activism, alive and well.

And there should be free condoms everywhere, not just in the RA's room.

"The Institute of Medicine report is out earlier than expected, after an embargo was broken. Among other things, it recommends that the federal government consider putting "the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods" on the list of services for women that would be covered by insurers without a copay."

Read more via NPR here.

Brilliant quotes from Tina Fey's Bossypants

To read about a woman embrace feminism without having to specify what feminism is - that is so wonderful, especially nowadays with all this inter-generational feminist clashing over how to define the term, and how to live it. 

Tina Fey on the brilliant Palin/Clinton SNL sketch (press conference cold open):
"You all watched a sketch about feminism and you realize it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!"

On being a female comedian with The Second City in the mid-90s:
"In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women.  When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. 'You can't do that.  There won't be enough parts to go around.  There won't be enough for the girls.'  This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury.  We weren't doing Death of a Salesman.  We were making up the show ourselves.  How could there not be enough parts?"

Things are starting to get out of hand.

How can incidents like these happen after 4 young people under the age of 19 committed suicide in a matter of a month or so. Anyone feel like they are becoming more and more alienating Other People in the World? Just stop it!

On the other hand, this is "cute."

"It seems, though, that you're obsessed with this gay, young man."

That's what she said.

No, really. This is really what she said.

"And if he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?"

And you can read more about it here.

"I think it's important for medical reasons and for ... other reasons."

Laura Bush on Larry King.

An excuse to type out very long Kristeva quotes

Maybe I'm sliding into a deep depression, but I've been avoiding the world lately, which is probably why I didn't discover this Slate Freaky Friday switcharoo project, called Freaky Fortnight, where a go-to-work husband and work-at-home wife with two little boys switch places for a month, until last Saturday night. I promptly spent the next hour of my life reading the entire collection of posts documenting their experience. It was addictive.

There are a few things that make this project tidier than it could have been: 1). both husband and wife are writers/editors, which makes the wife doing the husband's job more reasonable than if say, Lucy had tried to do Ricky's (if that wasn't an I Love Lucy episode, it should be). 2). they do have a part-time sitter, which (as I am a part-time sitter), many families in NYC have, but when you have someone available to you who knows the routines of children, it alleviates some of the pressure of figuring that out (i.e., made an easier transition for the dad).

The project, whether its original intention or not, becomes primarily focused on the complicated feelings of privileged mothers or potential mothers (i.e., women) in the States: to work, or to stay at home? How to Mommy the best way for your children? Are you fulfilling the expectations, cultural or biological, of your gender or betraying them?

The conclusion of the project is superficially satisfying: father/husband admits that mother/wife has a more "difficult" (because it can be qualified and compared) job: taking care of the children (and freelancing, at that). Mother/wife admits that she likes going to an office--it gives her a sense of place, ownership, pride in her self away from her identity as mother/wife, and it is easier than being at home, but the rewards reaped being at home with children are worth it. See? Everyone wins.

But what does it solve? The questions about gender roles and expectations and social pressures, frustrating in how they haven't seem to change since the 1960s, are still here. And it feels like women seem even more reluctant to acknowledge and deal with that question. The most interesting point, I think, is when Susan wonders if she would feel more strongly about being in an office if she was raising girls instead of boys, as if a daughter would interpret her actions differently than a son. This seems to be a place where we make major missteps--this expectation for women to shoulder the impetus for change. Michael Agger admits that staying at home makes him feel emasculated, which is a step, but how will he challenge that? If Susan Burton does enjoy being in the office, will she and her husband find her a way back to it? And if they don't take those steps, why? It's a pain in the ass to redistribute domestic and professional responsibilities, not to mention hard to find a job in this economy, and it changes the entire familial relationship.

I started reading Julia Kristeva's Possessions, and it was hard not to think of the Slate project when I encountered her pages about Gloria's redirected devotion to her deaf son. "Devotion is a kind of devouring," Kristeva writes.

In the end the child came to possess Gloria. Her whole world--sex, ambition, personal appeal, professional success, feminine charm, sessions at the gym, riding, visits to the hairdresser, outings, dinner parties, cocktail parties, social contacts of all kinds--virtually everything had gone, disappeared. There was nothing left. But Gloria had hardly noticed. She had no regrets. She was living her life to the full. Posession can take the form of a single love absorbing the entire universe. Absorbing you as well; whether that leaves you in the world or outside it, it makes no difference. When you're possessed you're ruled not by external forces but by inner self-evident necessity.

And then this:

Gloria had no partner for the verbal joustings, literary fireworks, and philosophical flights she'd once hoped to enjoy with the people around her. ... She had to cope with the demands of everyday life. An endless series of details, large and small, to be dealt with: social security, school, ailments, doctors, taxes, parking, gasoline, breakdowns, plumbing, electricity, accountants, mailmen, checkbooks, telephone, bakery, butcher shop, dry cleaner's, stationer's, more schools, more doctors, more things to be repaired in the house, a spot of gym, a drop of perfume, a game of tennis, fitness classes, a translation, two translations, three translations, a publisher, two publishers, three publishers, a lunch, two cocktail parties, three dinner parties, train or plane tickets, two one-ways, three round-trips, are you sure, yes, we're sure, please do your best, I am, let's go, we're off. Agencies of all kinds: travel agencies, rental agencies, agencies for hiring staff, for finding real estate, for moving your furniture into it. Buying, maintaining, escorting, earning, spending, coping. Deadly dull? Not really, Gloria had attained the numb efficiency of matter moving at supersonic speed. Once past Mach 2.9, motion is subject to more and more incidents, but there's no surface resistance by which to measure the stress. It was as simple as that: she carried out her tasks with the ease of a robot operating beyond the sound barrier. For in fact it wasn't "she" anymore. But if not, who was it? Didn't such interstellar anonymity conceal disturbance, alienation, even madness? But by some miracle Gloria managed to quell any demons that may have inhabited her, without ever letting them emerge into the light of day.

This is the female gendered burden: to bear children or to not bear children. To fulfill purpose? To remain empty? And then after, who to become? It's admirable that the Slate Freaky Fortnight team switched roles for a month--the fact that they would do it, is a good sign. But there's got to be more than this reality. And how to work or write our way out of that? This is what I'm trying to figure out.