What does a documentary about women in comedy look like in the #MeToo era? What should a documentary about women in comedy even look like? Hilarious stand-up comedian Jessica Kirson executive-produced this latest attempt at answering these questions, Hysterical, which premiered at SXSW before arriving on FX on Hulu.
HYSTERICAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Andrea Nevins, who previously directed documentaries that prompted viewers to rethink punk rockers (The Other F Word), NFL Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez (Play It Forward), and the Barbie doll (Tiny Shoulders, Rethinking Barbie), now focuses her lens on the women who perform stand-up comedy.
Among them: Kelly Bachman, Margaret Cho, Fortune Feimster, Rachel Feinstein, Marina Franklin, Nikki Glaser, Judy Gold, Kathy Griffin, Jessica Kirson, Lisa Lampanelli, Wendy Liebman, Carmen Lynch, Bonnie McFarlane, Sherri Shepherd and Iliza Shlesinger.
Divided into segments by topic, we learn what motivated these women to get into comedy in the first place, as well as what hurdles they faced in the beginning and still face, particularly due only to their gender and expectations of them because of it. The title credits open with a series of common do’s and don’ts that only women hear: Be Pretty. Be Softspoken. Don’t Be Bossy. Be Nice. Don’t Be Messy. Smile.
That’s followed by a clip of the late great Joan Rivers, explaining: “Very hard for a woman who has been brought up to be sweet and clingy to stand up in front of 2,500 people and say, ‘OK, now listen to me.’ You have really a tremendous sense of power when you’re up there, commanding them to listen to you. You must be a very strong woman.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: This isn’t the first modern documentary to try to explain what it’s like for a woman in comedy. A slew of them came out in the past decade, including Why We Laugh: Funny Women; Makers: Women in Comedy; and Women Aren’t Funny, a satirical take from Bonnie McFarlane, who’s featured in Hysterical.
Memorable Jokes: Even though this documentary is about women, or perhaps precisely because of this, some of the most memorable quotes come from the men in comedy. We’re exposed 18 minutes in, not only to the clip of the late Jerry Lewis at Cannes describing why funny women bother him so much, but also footage a few minutes later of Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange bashing funny women on a Howard Stern Show episode in 2009. We also see montages of men introducing women to the stage with all sorts of sexual or gender innuendos, undermining them before they even take the mic.
Wendy Liebman greatly flips the script on the very question, declaring: “There are funny men and funny women. But I do understand that men might not want women to be funny.”
We get extended takes on recent events surrounding the “cancellation” of Kathy Griffin over her photo shoot with a bloody fake Trump head, as well as newcomer Kelly Bachman discovering Harvey Weinstein in her intimate audience.
Margaret Cho serves as a prime example for just how much and how little has changed for women in show business over the decades. When she got her own ABC sitcom, All-American Girl, in 1994, Cho felt pressured by studio executives to lose 30 pounds in two weeks, and her kidneys collapsed. How often are TV notes telling funny men to go on a diet? And in 2016, when a gig at the Stress Factory in New Jersey went awry, outlets from TMZ to Page Six made her out to have lost it. When funny men are angry, they’re celebrated for it.
The doc reminds us how the first women to break through in stand-up on TV all had to dress down or add wigs and costumes to ugly it up, from Moms Mabley to Phyllis Diller, and Totie Fields and Rivers in between. As Cho explained: “A lot of really established comedians, men, would say: Don’t be so pretty. You can’t be too pretty. You can’t be too pretty because they’re going to be mad. The women will be jealous because you are so beautiful. The men will just want to have sex with you. So, don’t be too pretty. A beautiful woman is a threat.”
Our Take: What makes this documentary different from any of the others we’ve seen recently about women in comedy?
For one thing, the title, which hints at the uniquely ironic wordplay that underlies the problem. Reminds me of how Hannah Gadsby named her 2020 Netflix special Douglas, in part, because of man’s misunderstanding of female anatomy. Similarly, Hysterical comes from the word hysteria, from the Greek term for uterus, and the Egyptians took to diagnosing “abnormal” female behavior as a “wandering” uterus. Ergo: Hysteria. The American Psychiatric Association only discarded this diagnosis in…checks notes…1952. Before then, women could be institutionalized or forced into hysterectomies for all sorts of symptoms. Not exactly laugh out loud.
Another thing the doc does, which you might blink and miss it, is denote when each of the comedians participating in interviews began her career. So we see Carmen Lynch: Stand-up comedian since 2001. Sherri Shepherd, Stand-up up comedian since 1995. Cho, stand-up comedian since 1984. Feimster: 2007. Feinstein: 1999. Iliza: 2005. Franklin: 1997. Glaser: 2003. Kirson: 1999. Gold: 1981. McFarlane: 1993. Liebman: 1984. Lampanelli: 1990. Bachman: 2018. Griffin: 1978. All of it reinforces how long these women have served in the trenches of open mics, comedy clubs, road gigs and everything that comes with it.
Which leads us back to men. The problem remains men. Whether it’s performing with them on the road, where they might expect sex in return for offering a gig, or dangerously bad advice on where to stay or with whom to work, or outright sexually assaulting them offstage. Shepherd begins tearing up as she reveals that a comedian once assaulted her. “It’s rough,” is about all she can say. Two scenes at The Olive Tree Cafe (above the Comedy Cellar) also illustrate the differences for the genders in this line of work. In one, Sam Morril only realizes after the fact that he failed to clue Marina Franklin in on a seedy motel’s pitfalls. Later, Jeff Ross can only make a crack about Franklin’s breasts once she reveals she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Speaking of which, there’s a brief montage of headlines calling out Ross, Bill Cosby, Bryan Callen, Chris D’Elia, James Veitch, Louis CK, and T.J. Miller for their crimes and misdeeds. That the doc doesn’t do more with or about Ross…is that intentional, or a missed opportunity? Nevertheless, Bachman gets included precisely because she did speak out when in the presence of a bad actor, and her courage has empowered her older peers to speak up for themselves.
And that means supporting fellow women, too. As they readily acknowledge, that hasn’t always been the case.
Hysterical isn’t the be-all, end-all for documentaries about women in comedy. But it’s a step in the right direction. May the future be brighter and better.
Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re not already a comedy nerd and need an awakening, this is a good start. But for a deeper dive, I’d recommend the singular documentaries of legends such as Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, or Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley. For what it’s like now, Amy Schumer’s Expecting Amy on HBO Max is a revelation.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
The Link LonkApril 05, 2021 at 05:00AM
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Hysterical' On FX On Hulu, Or Why Men Cannot Handle Funny Women - Decider
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