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Category: Friends
Written By the Lovely Robert Drake....
Thanks Robert...we love you too!!!!
Women! Funny, People, and Equal! The sad thing about comedy is that when its glass ceiling shatters the remaining shards don't break into amusing shapes and carve out the hearts of chauvinists. There are still morons out there who think that women aren't funny. They are wrong and have been so for centuries. How do I know? One name: Dorothy Parker. However, in the past, there were people who claimed that a funny woman was probably a 'funny women' ala Tallulah Bankhead and that such women were anomalous. This is one of those moments in which we should all thank our lucky goddesses for Feminism. Over the past weekend, I witnessed definitive proof that women are funny and deserve equal square footage in the comedic pantheon with men. First, I point you to the Gorgeous Ladies of Comedy who did two popular nights of a funny improvised musicals! Hundreds of people laughed this weekend at the scenes completely constructed exclusively by women. They designed the show, made the choices, sang the songs, tossed the one liners, and they did the interpretive dance. They teched it, chose the house music, and they got the standing ovation. No 'Y' chromosome necessary, thank you very much!'Yes', I hear the morons cry, 'but it was just women! They just played with each other... if there were men there, surely they'd not be as funny!'Ahhh, the social construct of gender rears its ugly head. I believe that one of the reasons that women came to be thought of as the less funny sex has nothing to do with biology, but the social constructs of gender placed upon them by a society that was once more patriarchal.... And let's be honest here... the US and most of the west was pretty patriarchal until about 40 years ago. Women have not even yet had the right to vote for 100 years. In some states, they could not legally get a drivers license until the 70s or file for divorce. Because of the social expectations artificially placed on women, they were less free to be charming by being smart and witty. They were expected instead to be merely pretty. It is what made Dorothy Parker stand out. Then, even after the first wave of feminism, the pendulum swung very quickly to the other side. Women were stridently against their own objectification. This meant that women were now frowned upon for setting up jokes in which they were being laughed at. Again this circumscribed their ability to use all the tools at their disposal. Now, however, we're third wave on and women have the social freedom to be as funny as they want to be. Which brings us to the other example. Once a month at the Academy Theatre, Laughing Matters holds a competition called 'BattleActs' with improvisers from across Atlanta. A woman named Lowrie has won three times in a row. She's defeated players from Laughing Matters, Dads Garage, the Basement, and Blacktop Circus. She's defeated straight men, gay men, straight women, gay women, etc. Why? She brings the funny. Simone De Beauvoir famously claims that when women start acting like people they're accused of impersonating men. One of the elements that defines our humanity is humor, and to deny women the full force of using it is to deny women their humanity. So, the next time someone tells you women aren't funny, call them a chauvinist pig, but be funny about it.
1:08 PM
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