In the April issue of Vanity Fair, writer Alessandra Stanley fights back at Christopher Hitchens' provocative Why Women Aren't Funny article with a hilarious and insightful piece on the evolution of television's queens of comedy:
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.
At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.
And it doesn’t help to point out that Lucille Ball began her Hollywood career as a model and starlet or that Elaine May was—and still is—fetching. Onstage and even on-camera, funny women in the old days didn’t try to look their best; they tried to look comical. Lucille Ball would wear almost anything—Carmen Miranda dresses, muumuus, and crazy hats—to transform herself into the childish and braying Lucy Ricardo. When Phyllis Diller stripped off her false lashes and cotton-candy wigs, she actually looked attractive. Nowadays, Fey cultivates a “sexy librarian” look on 30 Rock, with foxy glasses and décolletage that slyly defies the show’s premise that her character, Liz Lemon, is a homely nebbish.
In her stand-up act and on her show on Comedy Central, The Sarah Silverman Program, Sarah Silverman is as crude and cruelly insensitive as any male comedian, but with a sexy, coquettish undertone—a Valley Village version of Brenda Patimkin, the Jewish-American Princess in Goodbye, Columbus. In one scene, Sarah calls her sister “gay,” then apologizes to her two gay neighbors. “I don’t mean gay like homosexual,” she says sweetly. “I mean gay like retarded.”
Read the full story in Vanity Fair.
