Queens of Comedy

It’s oddly cultural but not really much of a mystery: ticket sales are driven by young men (18–24), whereas television, especially network television, is more of a woman’s world. (Female viewers outnumber men by approximately 30 percent during prime time.) So it is something of a milestone that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have teamed up to make Baby Mama, a comedy about a single career woman (Fey) who wants a child and hires a working-class surrogate (Poehler), who moves in; they then clash like The Odd Couple. In a market that favors boy-girl romantic comedies such as 27 Dresses, a female buddy picture is bold. There have not been many successful ones since Bette Midler and Shelley Long starred in Outrageous Fortune in 1987. (Thelma & Louise had its funny moments, but that final pratfall was deadly.)
Fey says she is aware of the risks. “Women drive what’s on television, and husbands and boyfriends decide on movies,” she said. “I’m doing it backwards: I have a TV show for men and a movie coming out for women.”
The dynamic of female comedy duos does seem to have changed a little since the days of ironclad Mary/Rhoda rule—a pretty heroine and a plainer, funnier best friend. (The 1997 comedy Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was more of a cult favorite than a box-office hit, but the movie made a joke about the pretty girl/ugly friend principle: the characters played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow fall out after a heated dispute over who is the Mary figure in their friendship.) That is apparently not the pattern in Baby Mama. “Amy and Tina have transcended that,” says Lorne Michaels (who’s one of the film’s producers). “Neither is pinned down to that archetype—either one could play either role.”
Nor is it present on 30 Rock. In the pilot, Rachel Dratch was cast as Jenna, the star of the sketch-comedy show written by her best friend, Liz Lemon. (Dratch and Fey are friends in real life as well.) But at NBC’s instigation, for whatever reason, Dratch was dropped and replaced by the more glamorous Jane Krakowski—perhaps unfairly but also wisely, as it turns out: Krakowski is hilarious as the slutty, self-deluded Jenna and a perfect comic foil to Fey’s Liz. In an episode in Season One in which Liz admits to Jenna that she sometimes wishes she could be an on-air star, Jenna is bewildered. “You couldn’t be serious about acting for a living,” Jenna says. “You have brown hair.”
There is obviously a difference between witty writers (Mme. de Staël, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz) and stand-up comics. Stand-up comedy was always harder for women, because it is aggressive—comedians have to dominate their audiences and “kill,” by common metaphor. Male listeners might make allowances for sparkling repartee—which is, after all, instinctive and responsive and manslaughter at the very worst. But a premeditated joke or routine can be murderous in the first degree.
Women either had to compete—head-on, in the aggressive style of Paula Poundstone or Lisa Lampanelli—or subvert the form and make themselves offbeat and likable, the way that Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres do. As Elaine May used to say regarding improv, “When in doubt, seduce.” By and large, however, stand-up comedy is tougher and meaner, and the women who do it play by men’s rules.
Sitcoms are a collaborative art that can showcase a single talent, and always have. Television didn’t produce only Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett; there are scores of others, from Ann Sothern and Eve Arden to Bea Arthur and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Sketch comedy opened doors to women who were comedians more than actresses. But behind the curtain the writers’ room has remained a male-dominated clubhouse. “The girl in the room,” the lone woman writer on a white, male staff, is a long-standing and long-suffering tradition in comedy. It can seem benign and kind of fun—Rose Marie as one of the fellas on The Dick Van Dyke Show, or, in real life, Merrill Markoe when she was the head writer of Late Night with David Letterman. But especially in the no-holds-barred era of drugs and Lampoon humor, those writing rooms turned toxic, as Laraine Newman and other S.N.L. women have attested. Catherine O’Hara was hired away from SCTV in 1981, but quit before she had a chance to perform—appalled by a particularly dark and demented diatribe by S.N.L. writer Michael O’Donoghue.
Sometimes political correctness can overshoot. In 1999 a young female writing assistant tried unsuccessfully to sue the producers of Friends, claiming that the male writers were sexist and disrespectful, which was a little like suing Pepsi because its carbonated soft drinks are so bubbly.


But the nastiness of male comedy writers is still an operative conceit. The writers of the HBO series The Comeback worked in a plotline that seemed inspired by the Friends lawsuit: Lisa Kudrow’s character, fading sitcom star Valerie Cherish, walks into the writers’ room on her new show to find one of them simulating a sex act on another, who is pretending to be Valerie. (But when Shayne, the young African-American actress on the show, threatens to quit because of the writers’ disgusting jokes, Valerie talks her out of it.)
This is also a theme on 30 Rock: Liz is constantly having to tone down and tame her team of socially crippled, uninhibitedly sexist male writers, which she does with the kind of good-humored forbearance Mary Richards maintained with Ted Baxter. In real life, Fey says she expects her writing staff—two women (plus Fey) and seven men—to be more tempered and sane. “Brilliant comedy writers sometimes have loud and dangerous personalities, and I wish them great success—somewhere else.”
Comedy writers, and comedy clichés, don’t always go quietly. Fey says that there are people who continue to insist that women are not funny. “You still hear it,” she says. “It’s just a lot easier to ignore.”