peterbyrnes:
The formidable @trixieboots has responded to the recent piece by @witstreamdotcom on women in humor. I promised Trix when we started to have a debate/discussion on the piece on Twitter (which was maddening due to the forced brevity) that if she would create a tumblr account to say her piece, I…
I shall attempt to respond here without referencing my extensive experience in Vietnamese guerilla warfare. But the ‘Nam never leaves you, my friends.
I recognize that the focus of Witstream’s original post was to argue for Twitter’s relevance as a medium for emerging female comic voices. Embedded in this argument was, as you’ve noted, a list of things women, specifically, are funny about. Omitted from this list was anything outside the domestic or corporeal (that’s Vietnamese for “body-related”). I find this a troubling omission, and I chose to address it. This doesn’t mean I missed the point of the post. It means I found this a troubling omission, and I chose to address it.
Certainly it’s the case that comedy—like so many facets of culture—has been dominated by elites, and what that has meant in many cases is male, Harvardian (a word I learned in Danang), and white. That’s not the same as saying it’s gendered. By gendered, I mean referring to gender or referring to issues that are stereotypically associated with a particular gender. Politics is male-dominated, yes, and political humor is therefore dominated by a perspective that has historically been male. This is not what I mean by “gendered,” as my examples of fart, burp, sports, and hardware jokes illustrate pretty clearly.
I disagree emphatically with the claim that this kind of discussion is “sad” because it opens conversation about productive and unproductive avenues for women’s activism. I know others have made this claim, and I disagree emphatically with them as well. It’s hard for me to see how civilized discussion of what constitutes activism is inherently anti-activist. I don’t want to see women’s voices reduced to bodies, particularly given the new, liberatingly disembodied media that are available for us to make those voices heard.
This is not to say that bodies aren’t funny or that there isn’t a place for things like scatological and sexual humor. My point was that the upper echelons of entertainment power—especially the Conan and Letterman examples originally cited—aren’t dominated by these modes. If the question is how women break into these arenas, I doubt that mastering the fart joke is going to do the trick.
I have to get back to my day job, so I’ll make one last point. I don’t disagree with Witstream’s original claim that Twitter opens up new possibilities for women to express their senses of humor. I do think that it’s also a place where women rehearse many of the same old behaviors—such as exhibitionism—that make it difficult to move forward. So there are new and exciting things going on there, and there are old and depressing things going on there. If you’re looking for “a rather sad and profound irony,” there it is.
(via peterbyrnes-deactivated20111211)
witstream:
A) I used the examples of menstruation (men don’t do it), kids (men don’t make ‘em), and trepidation over finances (ok, that’s all of us, but only relatively recently) to illustrate things that women (Sometimes! Not always!) experience that are *different* and therefore somehow threatening to…
While I agree with much of this, I again take issue with the suggestion that what it means for men to work with women—in comedy or otherwise—is for them to have to reconcile themselves to the potential parsing of periods. Women are not the sum of their biological processes, as misogynist traditions have insisted. My period isn’t exactly central to my self-concept, and I find myself fully able to participate in a professional environment without introducing the subject. If men find this avenue of conversation unproductive or off-putting, I have to say that I don’t especially blame them. I find it rather tedious myself, and it’s hard to imagine that there remains anything interesting or original to be said about it. If men are laboring under the misconception that this is what it means to work with women, we can certainly mitigate this by demonstrating otherwise, rather than by insisting that they need to make room for our biological processes. In turn, we thereby earn the right to ask that they likewise check their itchy balls and ailing prostates at the door.
I don’t have a Tumblr. Usually. But I found Witstream’s recent post on women’s humor provocative enough to break this rule, and I admire and appreciate its thoughtfulness. Here are my two cents on the matter:
I agree with the author’s assessment of why more women don’t cultivate funniness: indeed, it’s historically been a trait dangerously contiguous to shrewishness and mannishness, those twin hobgoblins of the monstrous feminine. However, I’m bothered by the boundaries of “women’s humor” that the Witstream post maps out. It’s true that “women’s humor isn’t just ‘my thighs are fat and I can’t get a date.’” But I’m not sure that extending the limits of the category to include menstruation, child-rearing, and financial dependence on men—used here to illustrate what women’s humor can do—gets us much further. In fact, I would argue that mapping the domain of what female humorists have to offer according to subject territory that is so explicitly, narrowly, and conventionally gendered undermines rather than supports the assertion that women are a funny force to be reckoned with.
While it may be the case that an “executive producer with an all-male writing staff” is concerned that his frat-party of a writers’ room will be negatively affected by the encroachment of the feminine, this doesn’t describe a problem that’s specific to comedy. As UncleDynamite points out in his clever spin on the issue, this weak protest has been lodged and discredited in domains like the military that have historically been far more rigidly masculine than comedy. Perhaps Letterman’s writing team do sit around making an endless stream of fart and burp jokes; their product, however, is neither that kind of material nor otherwise explicitly gendered. Letterman is not a show ridden with such content nor dominated by subjects that might stereotypically be called “masculine” such as sports or quips about the hardware store. To make it as professional humorists, these writers have to be able to reflect on the broader world outside a fraternity dynamic. In other words, effective humor that’s relevant to a broad audience isn’t gendered.
This is why it’s problematic to define or imagine “women’s humor” in terms that are explicitly gendered. Women have periods, yes, and women feel things about that. Women raise children and feel things about that. But women are also citizens of the world who can and do reflect on that world, a world that isn’t bound by the limits of the domestic or the corporeal. To describe what we bring to humor through the circumscribed domains of domesticity and embodied femininity is to rehearse exactly the terms by which women have for centuries been marginalized. I would go so far as to argue that to do so actively re-fortifies the boundaries that have excluded women from the broader-reaching discourses to which men have always had access. These are not restrictions enforced by male entertainment executives. Often, they’re limitations enacted by women themselves. As I’ve suggested, one version of this self-impediment is women’s perception that their ken extends only so far as the edge of stereotypically feminine territory. Another is the use of humor as a means of exhibitionism or sexual provocation—a mode that’s depressingly pervasive on Twitter. Neither of these modes extends the reach of women’s influence. On the contrary, each is merely a means by which women put themselves back in the well-worn box, where they once again find themselves limited by the age-old female subject positions of mother, wife, or object of sexual desire.
Our voices aren’t worth hearing because we have funny things to say about menstrual cramps or because we can jest about masturbation and then bask in the prurient, marginalizing male attention we’ve provoked. Our voices are worth hearing because many of us are people who read, think, work, love, hurt, vote, earn, create, and reflect with equal authority alongside men. And many of those men are more than happy to have thinking women in the writers’ room.
