Women are funny...without being grungy

A couple weeks ago in class we discussed women in comedy and talked about what makes them funny. I was really shocked when the question of looks came up. "Is it just funny because she isn't beautiful?" This question kind of bothered me for quite some time because one part of me thought "no! it would still be funny if she was beautiful," but as I got thinking, I couldn't really think of an example of one of my favorite woman comedians being funny when they aren't dressed up or acting off track.

Then I got to watching some clips of women in humor for another class the other day and I found this clip. It is from the Emmy Awards last year. Julia Louis-Dreyfus won Best Female Comedian and had a little skit up her sleeve with the help of Amy Poehler. Award shows tend to get very dry and boring and I'm glad they mixed it up a bit, but they did it in ball gowns, while they both looked incredibly beautiful.

Neither of these women fit the stereotypes that Christopher Hitchens talked about in his article "Why women aren't funny" in Vanity Fair. I feel that current women comedians are defying these stereotypes more commonly than they fall into them. Comedians such as Whitney Cummings, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Zooey Deschanel and of course Melissa McCarthy. These women are all beautiful, well put together and hilarious.

I don't feel as though Christopher Hitchens was on point at all with any of his arguments and that this video is just one example of how he is wrong, along with a wide variety of others examples. Women are funny, even if they have been blessed with good looks. There is no rule that beautiful people can't be funny- if this flipped over to men, George Clooney wouldn't be allowed to be funny. Now how would that go over ladies?