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You want to make women in comedy cringe?
Say the phrasewomen in comedy.
It brings to mind mid-market morning-radio shock jocks asking, Whats it like being a woman in comedy?
when you know they just want to find out if you sleep with fans.
Or overly earnest journalists asking the same question and hoping the answer is traumatically bad.
over and over again.
you’re able to read an edited excerpt from the transcript or listen to the full episode below.
Tune in toGood Oneevery Thursday onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Stitcher,Overcast, orwherever you get your podcasts.
I assume we are not the only people to have noticed that there are lots of women doing comedy!
And thats a phenomenon.
The Lets talk about the funny ladies thing is something I feel really mixed about.
I feel very conflicted about it as a kind of project.
Jesse: What did you think of thedocumentary?
Kathryn: Its by a filmmaker named Andrea Nevins, who has done other feminist-leaning documentary work.
She asks people about their childhoods, and you get a bunch of different perspectives.
She asks people about comedian terminology.
Like, Whats it like to be on the road?
My feeling watching the documentary was a combination of longing and frustration.
I love archival stuff.
I love historical stuff.
I love really specific deep dives that I have not seen before.
It was:Here are the collective issues of what women have when they attempt to do comedy here.
you’re able to see them all speaking to it.
You have to do a joke like this.
And then the next episode someone will say the exact opposite thing.
I give a shot to leave it as thats their perspective.
So as a whole, youre like,Oh, theres 9 zillion ways of doing this.
Theres also a variety of books and tons of academic coverage.
Its partly because, as comedy is covered, theres four ways of canonizing comedy history.
They are effectively ghettoized as sort of a different history.
How do you feel about that?
Where do you think that tendency comes from?
Kathryn: This is where I get very conflicted about this as a kind of project.
Jesse: The downside of that, I think, is pretty clear.
Youre saying theres the main narrative and theres this other one.
Kathryn: As soon as you frame it that way, thats how it gets treated.
Thats how the money works.
A lot of this is institutionalized, right?
This is the way that journalism often works too, and documentaries often work the same way.
This is the way you get your project made.
It is the organizing choice.
And you and I have both written lots of lists in our lives.
But also the lists ghettoize the things that you are designating as that one topic of the list.
If Im making a list of women comedians, Im saying its a separate list than the main comedians.
But this is the way that people find stuff.
This is the way that histories that are often lost get remembered.
So separate lists, separate projects like this have to write back against what the main narrative was.
What it really succeeds at doing is it just retells time periods.
You dont read it and come away with thinking,This is the history of women in alternative comedy.
There are documentaries about specific women.
Theres aJoan Rivers documentary, which is one of the gold standards of what a comedy documentary is.
Theres aMoms Mabley documentary, which is fantastic.
I just want so many more of those because I do think they have specific stories to be told.
Theres this question that comes back often: Whats it like to be a woman in comedy?
There are different versions of that question, but that is the main underlying question.
Theres also Are women funny?
which is another version of Whats it like to be a woman comedian?
Isnt being a comedian something men do?
Thats what Joan Rivers had to answer all the time.
Because I understand there are differences, and I want to hear what its like.
Its not,Who are all the other guys?
Who are the Louis C.K.s who we dont know about yet?
The question is inherently progressivist.
Jesse: Do you have an assessment of what we should look at when we look at these projects?
Where is the misconnection or the fuzziness happening there?
I am certainly not above doing exactly the same kind of thing.
Even if, on the surface, both of those things could be summarized as women in comedy.
Jesse: One central question we keep returning to is, What is lost?
Thats a story that doesnt get told enough.
