Chicks Aren't Funny: the work vs. family edition

Posted at 2:26 PM Aug 18, 2008

By Andrea Grimes

Hot-button issue alert: women balancing their family lives with their professional lives! Who's the villain, stay-at-home mommies or workaholic wives? I'll leave it up to Fox News or a catchy-cover-line writer to assign blame and merely state the obvious: it's complicated. Particularly for funny women who've made it their professional business to get laughs. Family life, or a lack thereof, is a topic addressed in many thoughtful (and not-so-thoughtful) explorations of the "chicks aren't funny" theme.

Being a comedian, not to say a famous Hollywood one, just doesn't lend itself to family life for either gender: there are a lot of late nights, months on the road and substance-related temptations that make funny people less fun to date and marry. This goes badly for women because providing is still, on the whole, seen as a man's job. Ladies stay home with the kiddos, for better or for worse. So a woman getting laughs and getting paid for it and making her own way in a male-dominated biz just doesn't scream relationship success.

Which means that the recent good news for Amy Poehler and Ellen Degeneres is all the more excellent: Poehler, in her third trimester with her first baby, recently told the LA Times that she'll be doing a live episode of SNL and immediately flying to Los Angeles for an appearance at the Emmy Awards, less than a month before her baby is due. She's a sweetheart of the tallest order in a Times podcast, wherein she talks about being the only SNL cast member -- and a female OMG -- nominated for an Emmy. And Degeneres married fellow funny lady Portia de Rossi this weekend and appears to be galavanting about like a giddy schoolgirl. Rightly so. What's it like, Ellen? Tell us. Tell us please.