There’s an interesting post up at Huffington Post about the women of Saturday Night Live and why their careers never seem to take off like their male counterparts, even when the culture awards them comedy-legend status (the writer’s foremost example is Gilda Radner). 
The writer, Alex Remington, says a partial explanation is that the women of SNL are plagued by the same problem as all the other women in Hollywood: Despite their talent, their careers are jeopardized by their ages.
The women on Saturday Night Live have often been fine comedians, but the show doesn’t give them a good platform to be funny themselves. So after they leave the show, each becomes yet another thirtysomething woman struggling to make it in Hollywood, still looking for her one big break amid a sea of younger, hotter girls.
It’s no big shocker that a woman in Hollywood is only as useful as her looks will allow. The dominant culture demands youth and beauty in all its women, but ethereal, immutable youth and beauty from its women on the silver screen. One would think that in the comedy world, there would be just as much room for schleppy, aging women as there is for schleppy, aging men (Will Ferrell, anyone?). But the truth is, there’s not much room for women in comedy, period.
Remington says:
Everyone knows that comedy is a very male-dominated field, and it’s no surprise to find that SNL upholds that trend. (Sadly, it’s also not much of a stretch to imagine that the few women who do make it may not be treated well.) But SNL could do a much better job to raise the profile of the women it has, instead of burying them. Given the quality of the show these days, they might also want to try to hire some good writers and good performers and put more effort into the end product. The show’s attitude toward women, treating them as props, means to an end, especially when the jokes are awful to begin with, may help explain why the show hasn’t worked in a long time.
Some would argue that the dearth of women in comedy can be chalked up to biology: Women just aren’t funny. Or as funny as men. Cultural critic and all-around red-nosed know-it-all Christopher Hitchens counts himself among those who think women are missing a funny chip because they’re too busy fussing with the serious aspects of life, like childbirth.
I don’t buy it, of course. I tend to think that the idea that men are funnier than women exists because, in part, of the cultural tendency to identify the male as universal and the female as other. As Fran Lebowitz told Hitchens: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?”
SNL may have an iffy track record when it comes to women, but there’s at least one comedy show out there that regularly showcases the talents of its female cast members: MadTV. Of course, I haven’t seen recent episodes of the show, so I can’t speak to the treatment of its current cast members. I’ve just caught about a million reruns on Comedy Central, all of which prominently showcase the female talent: Debra Wilson, Mo Collins, Nicole Sullivan, Stephanie Weir, Alex Borstein, etc. And, while I think the show is mostly hit-or-miss (a problem SNL has too, of course), it’s still leaps beyond SNL in the gender parity department.
[Click here to see a bit of Mo Collins doing her character Lorraine.]
