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Who Says Women Aren't Funny?

Tina Fey's 'Bossypants' Proves Feminism Is Not Dead Yet

The other day during my running group I asked the women jogging along, “whatever happened to feminism?” After a few cursory remarks like, “yeah, we’re still earning less than men,” and “yeah, younger women don’t seem to wonder about it much,” we turned to more pressing matters such as Margot’s upcoming trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro and her need to do some high-altitude training.

If Tina Fey had asked that question, I’m sure we’d still be talking about it. Without using the dreaded F-word, feminism, Fey reminds us how far we’ve come in her new book, Bossypants.

Aside from her great good luck in resembling Sarah Palin and her uncanny impersonation on “Saturday Night Live,” Fey owes a lot of her success in the male-dominated comedy field to intelligence and hard work. In addition to creating and starring in one of the funniest shows on television, “30 Rock,” she’s married and pregnant with her second child. “I’m having an alien baby!, she shouted in a promo for this past week’s SNL where she was guest host.

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 In Bossypants, Fey chronicles her career in progress, from her high school days as a theater geek in Upper Darby, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, to her apprenticeship at the Second City comedy improvisation troupe in Chicago to SNL and beyond.

One of my favorite sections of the book is called “The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat.” One of the rules is Make Statements instead of asking questions all the time. Asking questions puts the onus on the person you are speaking with to come up with all the answers

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“Make Statements also applies to us women,” Fey writes. “Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, ‘I’m going to be your surgeon?  I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins?’ Make statements, with your actions and your voice.”

 In 2007, writer Christopher Hitchens famously expounded in Vanity Fair magazine: “women aren’t funny.” A talented writer who has examined weighty topics like torture in the military, why would he bother trying to convince us women aren’t funny? Has he never seen Lucille Ball?

 “Of all the places I’ve worked that were supposedly boys’ clubs, The Second City was the only one where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense. For example a director of one of the main companies once justified cutting a scene by saying, ‘The audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women. Whaaa?”

Fast forward to Fey playing Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton on SNL just a few years later. Now THAT’S funny.

“My dream for the future is that sketch comedy shows become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest. You might see four women and two men. You might see five men and a YouTube video of a kitten sneezing. Once we know we’re really open to all the options, we can proceed with Whatever’s the Funniest….which will probably involve farts.”

I think I’ll go see the movie Bridesmaids this week. Funny women doing their thing. And they owe a huge debt to Tina Fey.

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