By Linda Mizejewski
My favorite feminist moments in comedy would have to begin with Fanny Brice and her parody of the Ziegfeld showgirls in the 1920s, and then move to Mae West, Lily Tomlin, and episodes of Roseanne. The list would turn into another book! So I’ll focus instead on the new generation of women comedians who, since 2000, have grabbed headlines, turned heads, and in some cases made history with their political comedy about gender, sexuality, race, and class. The performances listed below are not in any order because all of them are amazing, but the Fey-Poehler performance is listed first because it’s the one that’s gotten the most mainstream attention.
1
The Saturday Night Live Tina Fey/Amy Poehler skit on Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton (2008)
At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, Fey and Poehler impersonate Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton “crossing party lines to address the now very ugly role that sexism is playing in the campaign,” as Fey’s Palin piously puts it. This skit wittily contends that no matter what women look like, their looks will always be more important than what they say, as far as mainstream media is concerned. For the topic of international politics, Fey/Palin’s contribution is that she can see Russia from her house, while Poehler/Clinton, a brilliant politician, complains about journalists sniping that she has “cankles.” The skit was part of a series of Fey’s Palin impersonations on SNL which, some pollsters suggested, influenced the 2008 presidential election.
Watch the sketch: www.hulu.com >>
At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, Fey and Poehler impersonate Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton “crossing party lines to address the now very ugly role that sexism is playing in the campaign,” as Fey’s Palin piously puts it. This skit wittily contends that no matter what women look like, their looks will always be more important than what they say, as far as mainstream media is concerned. For the topic of international politics, Fey/Palin’s contribution is that she can see Russia from her house, while Poehler/Clinton, a brilliant politician, complains about journalists sniping that she has “cankles.” The skit was part of a series of Fey’s Palin impersonations on SNL which, some pollsters suggested, influenced the 2008 presidential election.
Watch the sketch: www.hulu.com >>
2
Wanda Sykes’s routine on Michelle Obama in her performance concert I’ma Be Me (2009)
Sykes begins this routine with her childhood memory of her mother’s rebuke that Wanda and her sister shouldn’t “dance” in the car because “White people are looking at you!” She develops this into a scathing and hilarious commentary on the white policing of black bodies, especially black female bodies. When she uses the new First Lady as her extended example, the comedy is a coup of fierce race/gender critique. High points include Sykes lampooning the stereotype of “the angry black woman” and shrewdly pinpointing the racism underlying journalists’ probing question, “Who is the real Michelle Obama?”
3
Sykes begins this routine with her childhood memory of her mother’s rebuke that Wanda and her sister shouldn’t “dance” in the car because “White people are looking at you!” She develops this into a scathing and hilarious commentary on the white policing of black bodies, especially black female bodies. When she uses the new First Lady as her extended example, the comedy is a coup of fierce race/gender critique. High points include Sykes lampooning the stereotype of “the angry black woman” and shrewdly pinpointing the racism underlying journalists’ probing question, “Who is the real Michelle Obama?”
3
Margaret Cho’s All American Girl segment of I’m the One That I Want (2000)
In this segment of her first performance concert, Cho tells from a feminist perspective the story of her failed 1990s sitcom All American Girl. During her experience with ABC network executives, she was told her face was “too big for the camera”—that is, too Asian—and that she needed to lose 30 pounds in two weeks in order to look acceptable for primetime. In this virtuoso comeback, Cho castigates the racism and sexism of the entertainment industry and also tells how the ideal of the thin white body nearly killed her. Her exuberant manifesto at the end of this concert is a high point in feminist pop culture.
In this segment of her first performance concert, Cho tells from a feminist perspective the story of her failed 1990s sitcom All American Girl. During her experience with ABC network executives, she was told her face was “too big for the camera”—that is, too Asian—and that she needed to lose 30 pounds in two weeks in order to look acceptable for primetime. In this virtuoso comeback, Cho castigates the racism and sexism of the entertainment industry and also tells how the ideal of the thin white body nearly killed her. Her exuberant manifesto at the end of this concert is a high point in feminist pop culture.
4
Ellen DeGeneres hosts the Emmy Primetime Awards (2001)
In the months after 9/11, the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony had been canceled twice and was finally re-scheduled in November, with DeGeneres as its host. She won overwhelming acclaim for a performance that hit exactly the right notes, respecting the ongoing national trauma and gracefully pointing to the future. This role was also the turnaround for DeGeneres’s career, which had faltered badly following her groundbreaking coming-out in 1997. Her television series Ellen (1994-98) had been picketed by protesters, slapped with censorship warnings, and eventually cancelled. But at the Emmys just four years later, she stepped into the role of affable host that turned out to be her niche, eventually launching her to international fame with her daytime talk show. At the 2001 Emmys, she cites her butch lesbianism as the key to the award ceremony’s political meaning: “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?” The line cleverly recruits the visibility of Jewishness, Hollywood liberalism, and homosexuality as signs of patriotism and calls attention to her gay identity as her claim to citizenship.
