In 2020, the online educational platform Lectera published a step-by-step guide to teach women how to be charismatic. According to the article, there are several components of the “charismatic woman,” most notably, the perfect balance between “male” and “female” personalities. “Sure, emotions are a very important part of any personality, but logic and rationality are some of the main friends of charisma,” the writers explain.
“Charisma” by its very definition implies an organicness that cannot be cultivated or rehearsed, making any “guidebook” null. All the same, no such article exists for men—charisma involves ego, something women are not meant to express. With “charisma” one of the most important qualities in a good comedian, and women supposedly “uncharismatic” unless they tap into a “masculine personality,” it is no surprise that the “women aren’t funny” stereotype exists.
Since the beginning of comedy, men have always been at the forefront. In fact, women were not allowed to perform on stage until the mid-17th century, according to the Women’s Museum of California—all roles, even those written for women, were performed by men. Pseudo-drag of this type would often be part of the joke; the play-within-a-play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for example, serves to mock “bad actors,” and the fact that the desperately devoted Thisbe is played by the male character Flute lends to the hilarity. (Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film rendition captures this dynamic well, for reference.)
In the modern world of comedy, particularly stand-up, men share anecdotes about the expenses of college or the new millennium of music (as John Mulaney does in “Kid Gorgeous”), or bulldozers or food poisoning (as Seth Meyers does in “Lobby Baby”). Male comedians are storytellers. Women comedians, on the other hand, are self-deprecating.
Men are granted different comedic permissions than women. In her essay “Self-deprecatory Humour and the Female Comic: Self-destruction or Comedic Construction?” Danielle Russell reviewed a randomized selection of 150 comic routines in 2002. From the 113 male performers, she found that 4.4 percent used self-deprecating humor. From 37 female performers, 21.6 percent used self-deprecating humor.
While digesting these statistics, it is necessary to consider how self-deprecating humor is different between men and women. In his special “Little Big Boy,” Nick Kroll jokes about being a late bloomer: “Does anyone remember the first time they said I love you to someone?…I was 32.” He goes on to describe his awful first heartbreak. But Kroll performs this bit at the 1,900-seat Warner Theater in Washington D.C., standing proud—he’s “made it,” in spite of love-life adversities. Taylor Tomlinson, in her show “Look at You,” approaches dating drama very differently. She jokes, “[A]fter a really bad breakup a few years ago, I finally took a long hard look at myself and said, ‘Okay, Taylor, five out of five dudes all think that in fights, you behave like a raccoon trapped in a trash bag.’”
For women, self-deprecating humor serves to make them the object of the joke. They are laughed at more than they are laughed with. Their embarrassment and self-hatred is in the present tense. And it is almost exclusively related to appearance.
Amy Schumer, the first woman to make Forbes’ “highest-paid comedians list,” is a perfect example of this type of humor. Her 2018 movie “I Feel Pretty” follows an insecure woman’s journey to self-love as a result of brain damage, every joke revolving around this awkward character’s newfound confidence. And her sketch “Compliments,” from the show “Inside Amy Schumer,” is about a group of young women deflecting praise, ending with a mass-suicide once one woman finally says thank you when told she has a nice jacket.
Schumer isn’t the only one. Ali Wong opens her stand-up special “Baby Cobra” talking about her resentment towards 18-year-old girls. “I’m jealous, first and foremost, of their metabolism…They got that beautiful inner thigh clearance where they put their feet together and there’s that huge gap here with the light of potential just radiating through,” she quips. Each episode of Nicole Byer’s podcast “Why Won’t You Date Me?” begins with an extremely explicit joke about her “decades-long” single status, despite her self-described low standards. In “I’m Your Girlfriend,” Whitney Cummings talks about how on dates she always mentions her career success, to justify her appearance: “I know I’m not adorable and coy, but I can pay all your bills.”
Why this obsession with appearance?
Marie Claire’s article “We’ll show you who’s FUNNY” opens with the sentence, “We ask the pros: can a pretty woman be funny?” While the premise of the article is ridiculous, the series of interviews with women comedians strikes an important point: A performing woman is either the love interest or she is comic relief. “When I started, I had a broken nose, my teeth were crooked, and I was very skinny. And you know what? It all helped,” Marie Claire quotes the late comedian Phyllis Diller. When women are reduced to two mutually exclusive categories, “beautiful” or “funny,” the insistence for gendered humor grows—the humor of the “funny woman” is, in this way, contingent upon her unattractiveness and her awareness of her unattractiveness.
And somehow, this dynamic is spun as empowerment. In a review of “The Mindy Project,” Natalie Ryder, a reporter from Forest Lake Times, states, “[The TV show] speaks volumes to who Mindy Kaling is, because the confidence it takes to write your own character in a self-deprecating way is somewhat inspiring, especially because she is funny doing it.” But women are expected to be self-deprecating. It is easier for a woman to be self-deprecating than it is for her to be egotistical.
Of course, to say that all women comedians rely on self-deprecation is to make a massive generalization. Wanda Sykes devotes much of her special “Not Normal” to satirical remarks about American politics, and Iliza Shlesinger’s “Hot Forever” mocks men. But self-deprecation is the standard formula for women in comedy—a formula which, by nature, perpetuates misogyny. As stated by Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby in their Netflix special “Nanette”: “Because you do understand what self-deprecation means from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”