We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy
By Yael Kohen
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
No matter how many times female comedians buck the conventional wisdom, people continue to ask: "Are women funny?" The question has been nagging at women off and on (mostly on) for the past sixty years. It's incendiary, much discussed, and, as proven in Yael Kohen's fascinating oral history, totally wrongheaded.
In We Killed, Kohen pieces together the revolution that happened to (and by) women in American comedy, gathering the country's most prominent comediennes and the writers, producers, nightclub owners, and colleagues who revolved around them. She starts in the 1950s, when comic success meant ridiculing and desexualizing yourself; when Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller emerged as America's favorite frustrated ladies; when the joke was always on them. Kohen brings us into the sixties and seventies, when the appearance of smart, edgy comedians (Elaine May, Lily Tomlin) and the women's movement brought a new wave of radicals: the women of SNL, tough-ass stand-ups, and a more independent breed on TV (Mary Tyler Moore and her sisters). There were battles to fight and preconceptions to shake before we could arrive in a world in which women like Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey can be smart, attractive, sexually confident—and, most of all, flat-out funny.
As the more than 150 people interviewed for this riveting oral history make clear, women have always been funny. It's just that every success has been called an exception and every failure an example of the rule. And as each generation of women has developed its own style of comedy, the coups of the previous era are washed away and a new set of challenges arises. But the result is the same: They kill. A chorus of creative voices and hilarious storytelling, We Killed is essential cultural and social history, and—as it should be!—great entertainment.
Yael Kohen
Yael Kohen is a reporter and editor in New York City. A contributing editor at Marie Claire, she covers books, pop culture, and issues important to working women. She has written for New York magazine, Salon, The Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, and The New York Sun.
Related to We Killed
Related ebooks
Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of "The View" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider's Journey Through Hollywood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShow Me the Funny!: At the Writers' Table with Hollywoods Top Comedy Writers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5PEOPLE Saturday Night Live! 45 Years Later Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLIFE The Mary Tyler Moore Show Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sick in the Head: Conversations about Life and Comedy | Summary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kathy Griffin's Celebrity Run-Ins: My A-Z Index Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Funniest One in the Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Know I Am, But What Are You? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRadio On: A Listener's Diary Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dear Mr. You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Director Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI'll Be Here All Week Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rubber Balls and Liquor Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir through (Un)Popular Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for We Killed
19 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I seriously recommend this to anyone even remotely interested in standup or improv (regardless of whether you prefer to perform it or just to watch it).
It's an unusual format; the author's commentary is sparse, consisting of scattered italicized paragraphs that give a bit of additional information when necessary. But really, this is the history of women in comedy in the words of the people who made that history. So you get to read Joan Rivers and Ellen DeGeneres's comments on their early successes in the comedy clubs, and it gives you a better sense of "what it must have been like" than any outsider's description ever could. And then you get something like Susie Essman's comments on the rise of Sarah Silverman or Chelsea Handler, and it's like having a bunch of gossipy comedienne best friends, and it's fascinating.
The format also made it a great before-bed or occasional-read book, because there's not really a plot to keep track of, and it's easily digested in small bites over a length of time. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I wasn't sure I was going to like this book at first; it was totally written as a collection of interviews, but the author put all the quotes together in a way that is entertaining and engaging...and very readable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I wasn't sure I was going to like this book at first; it was totally written as a collection of interviews, but the author put all the quotes together in a way that is entertaining and engaging...and very readable.
Book preview
We Killed - Yael Kohen
Introduction
You’ve heard it before: Women aren’t funny. The opinion has been appearing and reappearing in various guises for decades. John Belushi said it to Gilda Radner; Johnny Carson said it to Rolling Stone; the National Lampoon’s founding editor, Henry Beard, said it to his magazine’s first female editor, Anne Beatts; Del Close, the Upright Citizen’s Brigade guru, listed it as number thirteen on the list of comedy rules he circulated back when he was at Second City; and Jerry Lewis told an audience at the Aspen comedy festival that a woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me but sets me back a bit … I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies into the world.
Behind the scenes, the comment has been made by comedy club owners, bookers, fellow comedians—male and female—and television executives. Then, in 2007, to incendiary effect, Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay in Vanity Fair about it. But few assertions are easier to disprove than this one. It’s as simple as saying that women make us laugh. And right now, at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are plenty of women who do.
Evidence from the past ten years alone is abundant. Tina Fey emerged as a major comic icon, with a shelf full of Emmys and the honor of being the youngest person ever to win the prestigious Mark Twain Award for American Humor. Chelsea Handler had four bestselling books and a highly rated late-night talk show anchoring the E! network. The cofounder of the now-ubiquitous Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, Amy Poehler, anchored one of the most respected sitcoms on television, Parks and Recreation. Joan Rivers reignited her career by upstaging Donald Trump on his own show, The Apprentice, and then starred in a riveting documentary about her life as a stand-up. Sarah Silverman unleashed YouTube videos with millions of hits and garnered an Emmy for her video I’m Fucking Matt Damon. Kathy Griffin’s hit reality show earned her two Emmys. Ellen DeGeneres, with her own hit daytime talk show, was dubbed the new Oprah. Wanda Sykes spent 2009 with a reputation for being the most controversial comic of the year after a provocative performance at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. And three out of five of The View’s hosts are stand-up comedians: Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sherri Shepherd. Funny up-and-coming ladies can be seen all over prime-time, daytime, and late-night TV; they come in a variety of shapes, ages, sizes, and colors; pretty and plain; lesbian and straight.
Then, in May 2011, the success of these women seemed to culminate when Saturday Night Live star Kristen Wiig did what, despite all these successes, was still considered the impossible: lead an all-female cast to blockbuster success. Bridesmaids, the bawdy comedy that Wiig cowrote (with a female partner) and starred in hauled in $26 million its opening weekend, just behind the action extravaganza Thor. By its fifth week the movie had surpassed the ticket sales of another benchmark comedy, Knocked Up. It didn’t just make bank: the movie was hailed by critics as groundbreaking—it proved that women could pull off a good fart joke as well as the next guy, and was nominated for two Golden Globes and, amazingly, two Oscars. By the fall of 2011, the four major networks had given the green light to nine female-driven comedies, and the networks continue to bet on women to fill their lineups. The success of Bridesmaids, it seemed, was a watershed moment, a film we could all point to as final proof that Hitchens’s infamous diatribe Why Women Aren’t Funny
was history.
And yet, annoyingly, it remains unlikely that all these successes will be the last word on the Are women funny?
debate. For one thing, funny women continue to face challenges in the comedy arena. Out of one hundred and forty-five writers working across ten late-night shows, sixteen writers are women (five of them for Chelsea Lately); out of twenty-four writers on Saturday Night Live, six are women; and out of fourteen performers, four are female. Female stand-ups continue to be left off major stand-up lineups; and Comedy Central, which has a woman as president, targets male audiences eighteen to thirty-four years old. Perhaps even more important, though, it seems no matter how many times women buck the conventional wisdom, the debate continues to rage. The question Are women funny?
is older than Phyllis Diller, and has been nagging at women on and off—mostly on—for the past sixty years. Didn’t Tina Fey drive the final nail in that coffin when she skewered vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin back in 2008? Or how about when Poehler joined Fey as co-anchor on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update desk in 2004? Or when Whoopi Goldberg donned a nun’s habit in the box office success Sister Act in 1992? Or when Roseanne took the first season of her self-titled sitcom to the number one spot in the ratings over The Cosby Show in 1988? Or the time Joan Rivers became the first permanent guest host on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1983? Or when Private Benjamin, a movie starring Goldie Hawn and written by Nancy Meyer, was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1980?
Women have always been funny. It’s just that every success is called an exception and every failure an example of the rule. And as each generation develops its own style of comedy, the coups of the previous era are washed away under the set of new challenges a younger group of women inevitably face. And yet, despite all the hecklers, boys’ clubs, and old-school notions about women in comedy, the result is always the same: They kill.
1
Mothers of Invention
Among the politically charged, foulmouthed, and confessional comics who revolutionized the entertainment establishment in the 1950s and early 1960s were two women who upended the image of the traditional comedienne: Phyllis Diller and Elaine May. In style and substance, neither woman had much to do with the other. Diller was a stand-up who built her act around seemingly trivial husband barbs and self-deprecating housewife jokes; May was an improvisational sketch artist who injected her vignettes with highbrow intellectualism and sharp, incisive observations about middle-class life. And yet, both women laid the groundwork for a new kind of female comic. Until Diller and May hit the New York nightclub scene in 1957, comediennes were expected to sing and dance. But that all changed. Diller—the prototypical female stand-up—proved that women could tell jokes just like a man,
while May—the mother of sketch comedy—introduced the country to improv. While each woman practiced different comedic art forms, both set future generations of funny ladies on one of these two separate but equally important paths to comedy success. And rather than make their names on the vaudeville circuit like many of the best-known comediennes of the past, Diller and May shot to national prominence from a group of small clubs in New York that were slowly changing the face of entertainment.
SHELLY SCHULTZ, talent coordinator and writer, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson In New York at that time, you had the Copacabana, you had the Plaza Hotel, you had the Empire Room in the Waldorf, you had the Latin Quarter. And the Copacabana was the kind of place that had a line of dancing girls, it had an orchestra, and it had a big-name act and a supporting act and you could eat there. The Latin Quarter was more of a Las Vegas-y kind of thing, also had a line of girls, but they did more production. Barbara Walters’s father owned that: Lou Walters. And then the smaller clubs were the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel, and they had the hipper acts. And the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel were very similar. They were both small, they both sat maybe a hundred people, they both had little tiny tables and a cover charge of five, six, or seven dollars. Food was secondary: couldn’t get a meal there, really. People came to drink and watch the show. But you had some jazz clubs; you had piano bars. I mean, there was just tons of nightlife, just tons of nightlife. And in those days an agent would need to be out four or five nights a week or