Tag Archives: comedy

Joan Rivers: Icon, Mean Girl, and Feminist All at Once

Debbie says:

220px-Joan_Rivers_2010_-_David_Shankbone

I never liked her performances; I’m allergic to mean comedy–I see plenty of meanness out there without intentionally adding more to the mix. At the same time, I understand the role of mean comedy–for other people–as catharsis, as outlet for feelings otherwise repressed. So I try not to write off the Joan Rivers, and Richard Pryors of this world, especially when they come from some kind of marginalized, one-down perspective.

I certainly never liked her plastic surgery, but I always liked the way she was open about it. Since she died, a lot has been written about the documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (full film available for free at the link). When Roger Ebert reviewed the film in 2010, he said:

She’s a woman who for various reasons depends on making audiences laugh. They walk in knowing all of her problems, knowing her age, eagle-eyeing her for the plastic surgery, ready to complain, and she forces them to laugh, because she’s so damned funny. I admire that. Bernard Shaw called it the Life Force. We see her in the film’s first shot, without makeup. A minute later, ” Joan Rivers ” is before us. Her life is a performance of herself.

Yes, she’s had plastic surgery. Well, why not? I think it’s wrong for most people. But show business is cruel and eats its old, and you do what you have to do. She talks about it. She talks about everything.

We’re short on women who talk about everything. We’re short on women who tell the truth about their own relationships to their bodies. And most of the ones we do have are political people with fairly small platforms, speaking mostly to audiences who already agree, or come close to agreeing. Rivers had the national stage. As a household word, she could tell (problematic) jokes about aging and millions of people would hear them, and some would think about them.

No more Botox for me. Betty White’s bowels move more than my face.

Nasty (or at least intrusively personal) to Betty White. Honest about Botox. Honest about bowels. Kind of funny.

My vagina is like Newark [New Jersey]. Men know it’s there, but they don’t want to visit.

Heterosexist. Racist and classist, since many or most East Coast people know how black and poor a town Newark is. Honest. Funny.

My breasts are so low now I can have a mammogram and a pedicure at the same time.

Honest. A little bit privileged (pedicures are a token of affluence, which may be part of why millions of women scrimp and save to get one). Quietly encouraging women’s health. Funny.

Philip Maciak wrote a fine piece about her at Slate.

But if show business was cruel to Joan Rivers—and it was—Joan Rivers was cruel right back. In 1994, just two years after Leno took over for Carson, Rivers founded the institution with which she will likely always be associated. The format of Fashion Police has evolved, it’s jumped around to various networks, and the fawning foils surrounding her have been cast and recast, but the basic idea has remained the same: Joan Rivers has a TV show where she mercilessly, gleefully denigrates what other celebrities look like. For 20 years the show has proven to be the perfect platform for Rivers’ one-liner-at-a-time battle with show business. Like Rivers herself, the show has a weird insider-outsider perspective. Is it the party organ of Hollywood’s systematic war on women? Or is it a suicide attack from within Hollywood itself?… At its best, Fashion Police was a fun, backhanded celebration of all the forms beauty can take in Hollywood from America’s premier insult comic. At its worst, the show was mean-spirited fluff. …

For her whole career, Rivers has been self-consciously pushing boundaries. In recent years she’s often spectacularly pushed the wrong ones, but we shouldn’t forget that, at one time, she was pushing the right ones—and doing it virtually alone.

After reading around to write this post, I’m going to make time to watch the whole documentary, which is a huge surprise to me.

I may not like mean girls, and maybe you don’t either. Writing Rivers off as “just a mean girl” isn’t a whole story; one of the things she did is forced us to see her as a whole, complex person who could not be easily written off or pigeonholed. I wonder what she would have to say about the fact that both writers I found to quote about her are male.

Thanks to Alan Bostick for insisting there was something worth writing about following Rivers’ death.

When Is a Joke not a Joke?

Laurie and Debbie say:

(Cross-posted on Feministe)

Our internet neighborhoods are buzzing over a particular piece of April fool nastiness, in which a movie reviewer, whose April Fool’s pseudonym is the rather descriptive L. Ron Creepweans, for Locus Magazine (the most prominent news magazine in the science fiction/fantasy world) thought he could be funny by posting a satirical little piece about WisCon (the world’s first and largest feminist science fiction convention, which both of us go to and love). We’ve written about WisCon before.

To tell the end of the story first, Locus staff immediately apologized and took down the article and has since pulled Mr. Creepweans’ posting privileges. As a reviewer, he had the ability to go onto the site and post material no one else had seen. He’s trying to riff off an incident a few years ago in which an invited guest of honor said some Islamophobic things on her blog (not, as our joker says, “in the mildest possible terms”), deleted the comments when people showed their anger, and was disinvited as a guest. His April Fools’ “story” relates how WisCon’s “ruling committee” was going to force all attendees to wear burqas “in sizes small to 5X” to keep from offending Muslims by the “by the amount of sinful and wanton flesh” on display at WisCon, and also to “eliminate ‘rampant looksism.”

To ice the cake, he used the name “Belle Gunness” for the WisCon chair. Unknown to most folks, the real Belle Gunness was a serial killer at the end of the 19th century.

Since the story was pulled, Mr. Creepweans is feeling very good about himself. Traffic to his own blog spiked, and we’re sure he’s getting a lot of adulatory fan mail, along with the angry letters and comments from WisCon members and supporters. And he gets to feel all censored and attacked since the piece was taken down so quickly, but lives on in Internet screen captures.

It’s almost impossible to read this story and not think about last week’s Internet storm around Adria Richards, who decided to take some pix of the guys at the tech conference telling “big dongle” and “fork” jokes while sitting behind her, and tweeted the pix to the world at large. She has since been fired for this incident. She has also joined the legion of women bloggers who have received volumes of nasty rape and and death threats when they speak out.

But, hey, it was April Fool’s Day! But, hey, those guys were just sitting in the audience talking to each other! But, hey, you’re just perpetuating the stereotype that feminists have no sense of humor!

(If you believe feminists have no sense of humor, come to WisCon sometime and check out Ellen Klages, Tiptree award auctioneer. But we digress.)

What makes a joke funny is a combination of the actual wit and humor used and the context. It’s really easy to get laughs about groups or stereotypes (or individuals) that you and your audience both hate or despise. The right audience will love whatever you say about “those people.”

When your audience is diverse, then you have to be genuinely funny. On an Internet news site, whether it’s a specialty news site like Locus or a general news site like CNN, it’s impossible to keep your jokes from finding the “wrong” audience, the one that doesn’t appreciate how you trash their culture.

Creepweans took everything he’s ever heard–and hates–about WisCon: Feminists go there! They were mean to a potential guest who was just telling the truth about Islam! Lots of them are fat! They get angry easily! They claim to be welcoming! He then tried to wrap his stereotypes up into one finger-pointing, body-shaming, misogynistic anecdote. It is extremely difficult to be mean-spirited and funny at the same time. Creepweans isn’t.