Hey Fox News: Women Don’t Need ‘Banging Bodies’ To Be Hilarious
SOURCE:
A recent Fox News column implies female comediennes need both “funny bones” and “banging bodies.”
Lucille Ball just isn’t sexy enough for today’s cutthroat comedy industry, or so says a Fox News entertainment and pop culture columnist in an article that implies female comediennes need both “funny bones” and “banging bodies.”
The article by Hollie McKay actually has more to do with what kind of humor men think women need to use—and what they have to look like—in order to be perceived as funny. It’s fittingly titled “New Crop of Comediennes Combine Funny Bones With Banging Bodies,” and although it was published several weeks ago, remains worth a closer look.
McKay hinges the piece on a few confusingly out-of-touch and offensive quotes from Patrick Wanis, who she calls an “entertainment expert,” but is actually just a frequent FOX News source and “celebrity life coach.” (What qualifies you as a celebrity life coach? For Wanis, it’s a “Bachelor of Science in Communication, Associate Degrees in Dramatic Arts (Media) and Speech, Script-Writing & Communication from Australia,” according to his website. Wait, Australia gives degrees now?)
“For women, frump isn’t funny any longer,” Wanis tells McKay. “The new female comedian has to be the sexual aggressor, sexually provocative, dominant and successful."
He continues:
Hollywood is now portraying women as the dominant force – the boss, the rescuer, the heroine, the hunter. Now women are being sexually provocative and sexually aggressive, rude and funny without the femininity or the class. Lucille Ball would never have played the aggressive, domineering nymphomaniac that Jennifer Aniston portrayed in ‘Horrible Bosses.’
That’s all to imply, as McKay then notes, that “funny women who aren't all that sexy may struggle in the new comedy landscape.”
It’s ironic—and says a lot about Wanis’ perceptions of women and comedy—that he picked Horrible Bosses as his example of a female-driven comedy done well, since it’s actually a strikingly misogynist and offensive film.
A. O. Scott of The New York Times writes: “[Horrible Bosses], in addition to being expectedly vulgar, is noisy and preposterous, and its humor flirts with racism, goes steady with misogyny and pretty much marries homophobia.”
The movie’s promotional poster advertising Aniston as a “Maneater,” is exactly the problem. The filmmakers (and Wanis) don’t know the difference between sexy and sexually predatory—Aniston’s character sexually harasses her employee but the filmmakers find it funny instead of offensive because she’s a woman.
It’s not funny when a male character tells his female employee that he drugged her and then, while she was passed out, took photographs of himself pretended to have sex with her. But if that predator is Jennifer Aniston, the filmmakers think we’ll all laugh along.
Wanis then elaborates on the not-sexy funny women might struggle argument;
‘Rosie O’Donnell and Janeane Garofalo will be relegated to playing the female versions of Chris Farley. Hollywood doesn’t want a woman that is not sexually enticing like Rosie; it wants the sexual alpha female,’ he said. ‘The same trend is being seen on reality TV [with] Snooki and all the ‘Housewives.’
If Wanis really thinks that Snooki is America’s standard of sexy and funny, Wanis is woefully confused about the mainstream appeal of Jersey Shore. (As in, there is none.)
What’s most offensive about the article is the assumption that female comedianscanonly be successful if their comedy is based on sexual gimmicks and their “banging bodies.” There’s the implication that there’s no difference between sexually provocative and sexually aggressive, rudeness and funniness, and that sexuality has to be the center of that entire occasion.
McKay cites Anna Faris, Mila Kunis and Olivia Munn as women who follow this formula, but what about the female comedians that most people think of when they think of “funny gals?” I’m talking about Tina Fey, whose humor often deals with feeling awkward instead of sexy. Or Kristen Wiig, whose film Bridesmaids became the top-grossing Judd Apatow production ever, raking in $169 million domestically.
Though Bridesmaids has its share of gross humor—no one looked sexy in that dress fitting scene—the film is, at its core, about the unique friendships between women.
Or Mindy Kaling, the first female writer on the staff of NBC’s The Office who later became a series regular and an executive producer and authored a humorous book.
And most notably, there’s Amy Poehler, whose character on the hugely successful Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope, is a politician—and not a silly airhead one. Knope is a total feminist icon who played with a Geraldine Ferraro action figure as a kid and has a framed photo of Madeleine Albright on her desk. Knope’s appeal isn’t that she’s sexy or sexually aggressive or hot; she’s loveable because she’s an earnest and dedicated nerd and political enthusiast.
Of course, that’s not to say any of these women aren’t sexy—that’s just not what their humor is about.
Wannabe-feminist articles like McKay’s on FOX News don’t tell us anything new about female comedians—they merely rehash old sexist tropes about what types of women can be funny, suggesting the type of bodies women must have to be successful, and demanding a certain kind of humor from these women.
But the real new “crop of comediennes” is completely breaking that mold.
Hats off to you, Leslie Knope. (And you, too, Lucille Ball!)
Dahlia Grossman-Heinze is a staff writer for Campus Progress. Follow her on Twitter @salvadordahlia.
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