While female comedians have been a mainstay in American entertainment since I Love Lucy, it seems that the presence of comediennes on pop culture is stronger than ever. The summer of 2011 was the season of the funny girl, with Tina Fey releasing her New York Times bestseller Bossypants, Kristen Wiig getting much deserved praise for her role in Bridesmaids, among other notable achievements. These ladies represent the new guard of female comedy in the twenty-first century. While comedians such as Rosanne Barr, Joy Behr, and Joan Rivers have definitely paved the path for these rising stars, women such as Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig are quickly becoming the poster child for what it means to be female comedian in this decade.
What sets these women and their colleagues apart from their predecessors is a brand of humor that relies on wit, that is snarky without being abrasive, and does not undersell or undervalue the female experience. Instead of underplaying it, they utilize consistently as source of fodder and inspiration in their work. This inclusion of “female-specific” experiences strengthens their work because it makes the content more relatable for an audience/experience that had been largely ignored in serious comedy. While they are amazing and downright hilarious male comedians, no amount of hilarity can compensate for certain experiences or thoughts that are gender specific. Thus it has been refreshing to see an emergence of not only female comedians, but also ones that utilize their lives or mundane everyday experiences for the basis of their work.
Tina Fey is the originator of such a brand of comedy. While she had been an SNL staple for several years, consistently delivering news facetiously on the Weekend Update, what catapulted her into a household name is 2004’s Mean Girls. This movie marked the first time where there truly was a film that accurately portrayed the female high school experience of jealously and rivalry, without relying wholly on stereotypical characters or scenarios. Instead Fey’s script enabled all the actors to flesh out their characters, anticipated or not. Such a nuanced script and talented cast really brought this kind of comedy to the forefront because they were able to deliver spot on insights in heavily quotable one-liners.
This film was successful because of Fey’s sense of humor. She has an uncanny ability to take common, everyday observations that everyone makes in their mind, add a few adjectives here and ta-da, produce highly insightful but still incredibly funny moments. The universality of what she says hits home with a wide variety of people, regardless of political, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Such widely applicable and appreciated insights is not only what made Mean Girls successful, but truly marked the beginning of a cultural shift towards a greater appreciation of female comedians and what they had to say.
Fellow SNL cast member, Kristen Wiig, has greatly contributed to this cultural acceptance and approval of this brand of female comedy as well. Like Fey, she was an SNL mainstay for several years, but it was writing and starring in a film that really fermented her and her sense of humor in America’s psyche. This film is none other than the sleeper hit of this past summer, Bridesmaids. According to Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch, the movie garnered $149.4 million in 49 days, making it producer Judd Appatow’s highest grossing movie ever. The popularity of this film lied in its “delightfully, deliriously, awesomely messed-up and pathetic [main] character” Annie Walker as succinctly put by Flavorwire’s Judy Berman. Much like Mean Girls, the film operated on a highly relatable experience, a woman down on her luck. What made this movie different from Mean Girls was its ability to fuse Fey’s tell-it-like-it is attitude with classic gross out humor, a feat that has been largely difficult for female comedians to do given gender stereotypes.
Another aspect to its success is the fact that it is so much more than a chick flick. Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey made the astute observation that romantic comedies catered to women have become “increasingly oppressive for the women who work within it as well as for those who consume its product”. In other words, romantic comedies tend to rely on the most textbook formulas insulting not only the audiences’ intelligence, but the actor’s as well. Bridesmaids does not do that, instead it plays to all moviegoer’s taste, supplying obvious and clever humor as well as a touch of sentimentality.
This trajectory of rising female comedians stars is not only limited to Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig; The Office’s Mindy Kaling is set to release a memoir in November, and Amy Poehler’s Parks and Recreation is one of NBC’s highest rated shows. One has to ask why these shows and actors are so successful and why now? It isn’t as though female driven comedy projects have existed in the past, but why are they popular now? An answer lies in these rising star’s ability to take aspects of humor that have traditionally been assigned to male comedians, such as sarcasm and bluntness and fusing it with their own comedic senses. Such a fusion has made men such as Splitsider’s S.E. Shepard admit to his comedic chauvinist ways and “that comedy is a lot more fun once you quit depriving yourself of laughs based solely on the topography of the performer’s genitalia”.
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