So why hasn’t that assumption trickled down to the improv class level?
by Candace Mittel
In improv class, the teacher tells me to be more assertive, less hesitant in scenes, “especially as a woman” because “improv needs confident women,” and “there aren’t many of them.” I’ve been asked to “speak up” and to be “louder” and “bolder,” directions the men in the class don’t need to be told. At a Moth Storytelling event recently,
out of the ten people picked to tell stories, I was the only woman. By the time I was called to the stage toward the end of the night, the MC introduced me with a “thank God for these ovaries” so that “the evening is no longer a dick-fest!”
I’ve been taking improv classes for almost ten months now at The Second City, the largest and most famous comedy club and training center in Chicago. In the last 50 years, Second City has developed some of the best comedic talent in the country — Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Dratch, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Joan Rivers, just to name a few.
My boyfriend teases that I signed up for improv classes “to get funnier,” but I say I signed up to take advantage of what my city has to offer besides deep-dish and frostbite. The truth is, of course, a mix of the two. Either way, I find myself now about to start Improv E (the final level before conservatory auditions), and although I’m used to being a minority in the classroom (I was a math major, after all), I am continuously perplexed by my position as a woman at a comedy training center.
Perplexed, not surprised.
The entertainment industry, especially Hollywood, has always had a gender discrepancy. A recent study from the University of Southern California Annenberg reported that, in the 100 top films of 2014, less than one-third of all speaking characters were women. Roughly 20 percent of these films had a female lead or co-star. A wimpy two out of the 107 directors were women. Only 11.2 percent of writers and 18.9 percent of producers were women.
However, I was surprised to learn that out of all the genres (action, adventure, animation and comedy), women fare best in comedy, which has the highest percentage of female characters (36 percent in 2014).
Don’t get too excited. Thirty-six is not fifty and regardless of the numbers, women in comedy still face gender-based prejudices and pitfalls. This past summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner spoke onstage to Goldie Hawn: “In the history of the motion-picture business, the number of beautiful, really beautiful women — a Lucille Ball — that are funny, is impossible to find.”
Or as The Atlantic appropriately summed it up in a title: “Michael Eisner to Goldie Hawn: Most Beautiful Women Can’t Be Funny.”
Try to consider the comment in reverse, and you realize how ridiculous it is: “In the history of the motion-picture business, the number of handsome, really handsome men — a Ricky Ricardo — that are funny, is impossible to find.” Can you imagine?
You can’t. Because as Linda Mizekewski argues in her 2014 book Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics, “Male comics don’t need to deal with their status as visual objects to make themselves heard.”
There is a long history, from Katharine Hepburn to Ellen DeGeneres, of judging female comedians according to an unreasonable binary: either you’re pretty or you’re funny. It’s no surprise then, Mizekewski says, that many female comics use these “cultural expectations about femininity and the female body” for brilliant material in their work.
Humorist Patricia Marx, one of the first woman writers in The Harvard Lampoon joked that, “maybe pretty women weren’t funny because they had no reason to be funny. There was no point to it — people already liked you.” In a 2008 Vanity Fair article Amy Poehler remarked about herself: “For funny ladies, we’re attractive. But when you open us up to real, professional attractive people — I do not want to run with those horses.” Tina Fey tells of a time when a stylist told her, “Oh, you don’t look like comedians.”
As a result, “Women’s comedy has become a primary site in mainstream pop culture where feminism speaks, talks back, and is contested,” Mizekewski claims.
And that’s really powerful.
It also helps explain why everyone is so psyched about actress, writer and comedian Amy Schumer who “deftly addresses sexism in many of her skits for Comedy Central” and whose summer blockbuster Trainwreck “breaks new ground for both female protagonists and romantic comedy as a genre,” writes Pacific Standard’s Carla Frankenbach. “She [Schumer] uses her body and her sexuality as a calculated affront to the ridiculous standards women are held to,” according to Frankenbach.
Inside Amy Schumer is one of Comedy Central’s most popular shows, and its audience is split 50-50 male-female. Right behind it is Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s sitcom Broad City, which The Wall Street Journal long ago dubbed “Sneak-Attack Feminism.”
A typical Second City team probably has two or three women. What’s most interesting to me is that, in the beginning levels, my classes were essentially split evenly, but term after term, the women seemed to slowly trickle away. In one of my most recent classes, there were three women out of around 15 students. To understand the trend of women trying and then abandoning improv comedy would involve some serious behavioral research, but in scanning some of the comments of a Second City blog post, “7 Things I Learned Being a Woman in Improv,” I found one explanation:
“Great article, but I think one important thing that this article misses is that for the most part it’s not the guys in improv that are keeping the women down…it’s those other guys, the ones you date, who don’t want you ‘making a fool of yourself.’ I’ve been in improv for a really long time, and have far too often seen talented women just disappear because the guy they’ve started dating doesn’t like them being on stage.”
The validity of a lone anecdote is clearly impossible to quantify, but it’s an interesting (and disturbing) theory nonetheless and also fits in with Mizekewski’s claim in Pretty/Funny. In improv, you will, undoubtedly, at some point make a fool of yourself — that’s just part of the process, and maybe the boyfriend can’t stomach his beautiful woman also acting foolish (read: funny).
Maybe other women drop out of improv because they don’t believe they have what it takes. In one of my classes, I could often only get a few lines in because, vocally, I was no competition to that particular group of guys. In fact, when Brad Sherwood, from the improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway, was asked the question, “Why are women so bad at improv?” he calmly responded, “They are playing with men, who bulldoze over them.” Sherwood continued, “Watch how many times a woman is trying to say something in a scene and gets over-talked by a guy…it’s kind of like playing mental football with big, loud, impolite, excited ‘man-boys.’”
But I know now that to be funny isn’t to be loud, although it sometimes works well. So when my teachers tell me to “speak up,” I wonder why they don’t, instead, tell the others to “speak down.”
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Candace Mittel lives, writes and works in the Windy City, where she is currently an intern for NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! In addition to spending her days searching for offbeat news stories, Candace is the Ed-Tech Journalist for eSpark Learning, tutors math and performs improv at Second City. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here.
