Like it or not--and for a good many reasons, I do not--Betty White is officially hosting the sinking ship that is SNL on May 8. There has been some requisite hand-wringing about her age (88) and whether she'll be able to keep up with the grueling rehearsal schedule. Because, you know, people get to be 88 and incredibly spry because they are both delicate and lazy.
But since we've got the wonderfulness that is Betty, even in this problematic form, I invite Dolls to speculate: who do you want to see Betty impersonate on SNL?
SPRING BREAK! Time to whip out your tits, patronize an underprivileged country by purchasing large amounts of tequila and watch an Amy Poehler spoof about spring break culture. Load up your suit with sand and get ready to be titillated! And by "titillated," I mean "a little confused about what Poehler is doing with this thing." Via Bitch mag, here's the trailer for Wild Girls Gone, a film that will be released on ... iTunes. Hmm. Anyway, here you go:
I am lost. I am confused. I feel incomplete. Unfulfilled. For the Olympics are over, and I'll now have to return to sleeping in my bed instead of the couch, and not spending every evening crying for several hours in response to overblown human interest stories.
But then I was like, oh wait, Kathy Griffin's on Law and Order: SVU this Wednesday, and I'm pretty sure she makes out with Stabler on the show, since I've seen the teaser about six gazillion times between snowboard runs and speed skating laps. Let's check out some clips from the comic's appearance after the jump!
Last week, the buzz was that, after much internet clamoring, Betty White was finally being considered to host Saturday Night Live. The former Golden Girl has had a pretty impressive run lately, starring in a Super Bowl ad and that one movie with Sandra Bullock and some guy, in addition to being lifetimely awesome.
Now, it looks like SNL is taking White Fever even farther into the bowels of lady comedy. Somebody at NBC told somebody at Entertainment Weekly that White would be appearing on a women of comedy special event with Tina Fey, Molly Shannon and Amy Poehler.
As a fan of those women, I'm excited about it. As a comedian and feminist, I couldn't be more irritated. This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps women othered in comedy.
Let's say you're a gaggle of self-congratulating, mainly white kings and queens of buzzwords, synergy, entrepreneurship and Ideas! with a capital "I" and exclamation mark, for good measure. Let's say you're the kind of people who yammer on about edginess, and paradigm shifts and ____ being the new _____, but mainly you just want people to tell you how awesome you are by handing over big-time contracts and dollars.
Do you hire Sarah Silverman to address your overly serious, masturbatory masses? Or do you hire the safe-space likes of Natalie Merchant, James Cameron and Sir Ken Robinson? Or do you do both and--wait for it--bitch and whine about how Sarah Silverman's talk was controversial and offensive? Via Gawker, here's what TED bigwig Chris Anderson Tweeted after her talk:
Apparently at TED2010 (basically, Conference for Wankers Who Wipe Their Asses With Cash--And Those Who Aspire To Be Said Wankers), being a forward-thinking, Ideas! person is not consistent with knowing one's ass from a hole in the ground, which explains the confusion over Silverman's blue content. (She got a standing ovation, for the record.)
Brace yourselves: David Letterman has hired a woman to write for his show. It's all downhill from here, folks--there's gonna be nothing but period jokes, shoes and yogurt on Letterman from now on. Opening monologue? More like vagina monologue, am I right you guys?
Jill Goodwin was a writer's assistant, but now she'll be presumably having a writer's assistant of her own--as the sole lady writer in late night television today. I'm pumped for Goodwin, and glad to see even this tiny drop in the late night bucket. But I'll reiterate what I said a few weeks ago: women will remain a minority in writers' rooms unless more women start doing comedy. So do comedy, you guys.
Which is also why I'm hoping to inspire funny women with a series of leading-by-example posts featuring women who write and perform comedy. Last week it was Morgan Murphy, a writer for Jimmy Fallon, and this week, I'd like to give big-ups to Megan Ganz, a former Onion writer, stand-up comic and present writer for Important Things With Demetri Martin. I met Ganz last summer while researching my thesis (it's on lady comics, y'all) and she's brilliant. Behold:
Last night, comic Tammy Pescatelli won Comedy Central's Stand Up Showdown, which is kind of a big deal. Her competition included Lewis Black, Doug Benson, Josh Blue and Maria Bamford.
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.
Since more late-night-in-the-loop folks than I are no doubt penning the latest in Team Conan news as we speak, I figured I'd go with this Avatar sex spoof from last weekend's Saturday Night Live for today's Chicks Aren't Funny comedy exploration. I haven't seen the film, and I'm unlikely to see it for a number of reasons, the least of which involve its questionable dealings with race. Mainly, it just looks boring. But hey, add animated goofy sex to anything, and I'll fork over 3 minutes, if not $30 for tickets and popcorn.
This is me, the first time I ever bombed hard at a gig.
The hand-wringing and speculation about the lack of female comics and comedy writers has gone on long enough. Instead of hemming and hawing about why there aren't many female comedy writers, in late-night or otherwise, and in lieu of pondering and speculating and worrying, let's do what needs to be done. We can sit around and bitch and study about why women are the extreme minority voice in comedy, or we as women can step up and start talking.
Funny women of the world: get off your asses and start saying, doing and writing funny things in public, in front of people.
I'm fucking sick of it. I'm sick of being one of five women at a 50-comic open mic. I'm tired of taking improv classes with one other woman. I'm fucking tired of being introduced as "your female comic for the evening" or "lady comic Andrea Grimes." Women of the world: if you are funny, it is time to show it.
Because it boils down to this: there are so few women in comedy because so few women do comedy. We can wonder about why (heck, that's what my master's thesis is about), but in the meantime, let's just solve the damned problem by getting more women on-stage, on blogs and in writers' rooms making jokes.
What's your excuse? I know I had a ton of them before I bit the bullet and decided to become a comic.
For many women, 2009 may have felt like a big joke (see Reform, Health Care and Bus, Being Thrown Under) but it's a safe bet that the winner of Time Out: New York's "joke of the year" poll won't be told by a woman. Why? Because only one out of nine contestants is female. Which is statistically consistent with my experience in stand-up, wherein about a tenth of the performers in any given room will be female.
The singular lady in the poll is Chelsea Peretti, whose "Some people talk during sex. I like to be dead silent. Except sometimes I will say, 'Thank you for dinner.'" is fairly funny, but not as funny as much of the rest of her act and her work with NYC's excellent lady-only comedy troupe Variety Shac. Much of Peretti's quality stuff can be found in various locations on the YouTube. For example:
(Incidentally, I voted for Sean Patton, who provided me with many chuckles when I spent the summer in NYC this year, because his shark joke is awesome.)
Today we addressed the issues of old people (hopefully not) filming their sex acts and old people peeing their britches, so why not include some old people--and specifically, old ladies--being funny? All in the name of sexual health education, no less.
The Don't Drop The Ball campaign would like you to remember not to text grandma and, oh, yeah, use emergency contraception if you accidentally bang a dude raw dog on New Year's Eve.
I like the message. Emergency contraception is a wonderful thing. But Jebus H., must we always put the burden on women to be in charge of the un-fun, risky parts of sex?
It doesn't take the highest level of intellect to come up with a reasonably astute critique of Saturday Night Live these days, but man, I'm not sure it's even worth saying that Gilly is awful, awful, awful. And yet, the show recently decided the character was deserving of an "A Very Gilly Christmas" episode.
Kristen Wiig, you are so talented. WTF?
Multiple people sign off on every sketch chosen to go on SNL every week. So not only is Wiig thumbs-upping this heinous character over and over, but her cast members and fellow writers are, too.
Last week, Gawker's Mike Byhoff called out Wanda Sykes and George Lopez for telling the "same exact racist joke" about Woods recent car crash. The premise is obvious and thereby, pretty lame. Black people are criminals and Asian folks can't drive. Here's Sykes:
I realize it's hard to write tons of material day after day for a late night comedy show. You're going to get some flops. But is it okay for Sykes (or Lopez) to tell a racist joke--and yes, I consider thought-free jokes that use racial stereotypes as punchlines to be "racist" to some degree--just because she's a minority?
The Heartless Dolls are Andrea, Kathleen, Kiala, Merritt, Nicki and a hifalutin array of notable guest contributors from around the web. We dig pop culture and ladythings.
