Chicks Aren't Funny: Leading by example
Posted at 4:41 PM Jan 25, 2010
By Andrea Grimes
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| Ryan Russell, www.ryanrussell.net |
| Morgan Murphy, one of late night's lone ladies |
Conan's Tonight Show send-off was poignant and classy and funny. (Full disclosure: it is also the only episode of The Tonight Show that I can ever remember watching, ever. I was raised on Letterman, though the late-night show format generally never interested me--Craig Ferguson is doing wonderful things, though.)
Anyway, let's start over: Conan's Tonight Show sendoff was poignant and classy and funny. It also featured exactly one woman, Will Ferrel's wife. Ugh. And also ugh.
Yes, Conan, you might be successful if you ditch cynicism for kindness. But it doesn't hurt to be a handsome, straight white male (from Harvard!) playing the comedy game. In the upper echelons of comedy writing, it's no secret that women are in the vast, vast minority. A couple weeks ago, I speculated that a solution might be to just have women do comedy rather than sit around worrying about why they don't.
But it's hard to take that first step alone, and so today I'm going to do some serious linking to the comedy of Morgan Murphy, in the name of leading by example. Murphy's a writer on the Jimmy Fallon show, making her one of the only women comedy writers in the late-night scene. Verily, she is hilarious.
Murphy's bio is impressive, and the above clip is from her appearance on the Comedians of Comedy tour (which is, to oversimplify: a conglomerate of alt-comedy folks--you may also know the likes of Patton Oswalt and Maria Bamford--who take a geeky, DIY approach to comedy. No Jay Leno here, if you know what I mean.)
There are a multitude of clips of Murphy's work on her MySpace page, and any woman considering getting into stand-up would do well to find inspiration in this curly-haired lady.
Comments
Conan didn't feature a woman when he started the Tonight Show either until I think the third or fourth day. Women don't exist on any of the late night shows unless their displayed as sex objects. Ever notice how Conan would cat call every time he introduced a female guest?
Posted 01/25/2010 at 05:49:13 PMIf anyone cares, a woman won Comedy Central's Standup Showdown last night.
Posted 02/01/2010 at 12:04:00 PMI wouldn't have picked her (Maria Bamford would be a better choice for me), but still....