Written by Leigh Kolb.
Being an angry feminist is hard sometimes.
I mean, I had some breakthrough spotting on Monday, and I think it’s because my uterus was protesting the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision.
The life of a Feminist Killjoy is an intense one.
One of the most difficult arenas to navigate while feminist is comedy. Misogynist, male-centric comedies are a dime a dozen. I think back to the comedies of my youth–Dumb and Dumber, American Pie, anything with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey–and while some of those films may have seemed funny at the time, revisiting them through a feminist lens is pretty horrifying.
I hadn’t seen There’s Something About Mary for well over a decade, and I stumbled across it last weekend. Holy shit. When Woogie–who stalked Mary in college so severely that she had to change her name and move–spits out at her at the end, “Shut up, cocktease,” it was all I could do to keep my head from spinning and short-circuiting while screaming “RAPE CULTURE,” “MISOGYNY,” “PATRIARCHY,” “MALE GAZE,” “LAURA MULVEY SAVE ME.”
Watching while feminist is exhausting. The Onion points this out in their satirical “Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show,” and I’m sure most of us can relate.
I get tired of constantly pointing out that something is Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™; I want to enjoy, not eviscerate. I want to laugh.
So I’ve been writhing around in feminist television and film lately, and damn, does it feel good. These are popular and critically acclaimed comedies and they are feminist as fuck. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. As we watch, I frequently look at my significant other with a shit-eating grin on my face as if to say, “Can you even believe that this exists?”
Broad City–starring Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer–debuted on Comedy Central in January and was quickly picked up for a second season. The pair started Broad City as a web series, and Amy Poehler took them under her (feminist superstar) wing and produced the TV show.
As many feminist commentators have already pointed out, this show is great. The writing, the acting, the story lines… I simply can’t get enough (really–I’ve seen all of the episodes multiple times). Abbi and Illana love sex, weed, and more than anything, one another. They also love themselves. It’s incredibly refreshing to see young women on screen who are so comfortable, even in their most uncomfortable moments.
Abbi and Ilana identify as feminists, and care deeply about diversity in media (which the show reflects in an organic way). In her Bitch article about Broad City, Andi Zeisler says,
“…Broad City‘s feminism isn’t so much sneak-attack as baked-in, with an emphasis on the ‘baked’: Ilana and Abbi are as aimless, goofy, boring, and entitled as any guy of their generation. And they’re striking a blow for equality just by subverting the image of the striving young woman who, well, sees her every move as a blow for equality. “
It’s hilarious, it’s relatable, and it’s inspirational–I’m inspired to be more confident by watching them, and I was inspired by their interior design to finally buy that Urban Outfitters quilt that I’d been lusting after (I understand this is a Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™ company, but I really wanted that quilt).
Sometimes watching young 20-somethings in the city (when I’m a 30-something in the country) can make me feel wistful, or bitter, or jealous, or judgmental, or any other cocktail of quarter-life psychoses. Broad City doesn’t evoke any emotion but joy. And maybe it’s because I can relate to a few of the story lines, but more likely it’s because it’s a universally great show.
Broad City–somewhat shockingly–isn’t the lone feminist wolf on Comedy Central (a station not known for progressive, feminist comedy).
We don’t have network or cable TV, so I sometimes have no idea what’s going on on stations I don’t frequent. Algorithms on Netflix and Amazon Prime probably have me pegged as a clear Feminist Killjoy, and avoid recommending comedies to me (“Feminist Killjoy logging in. Suggest ‘Obscure Dark Foreign Female-Centric Dramas'”).
After falling in love with Broad City, I thought we should try that Amy Schumer show I’d vaguely heard about, Inside Amy Schumer. It didn’t look like something I’d like, and if I’ve learned anything in my almost 32 years, it’s to always judge a book by its cover.
However, what I got was an onslaught of hilarious, biting feminist commentary.
When I was waxing poetic about it to a friend, she admitted that she was a fan but didn’t think that I would like it at all, seeing signs of it being, perhaps, Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™. I explained that I loved it, and what makes satire work for me is self-awareness. I can understand why it might be confusing that I hate on-screen gender essentialism, but cannot stop watching and quoting the parody commercial for SandraGel.
As Willa Paskin writes at Slate,
“In its second season, Inside Amy Schumer has become the most consistently feminist show on television, a sketch comedy series in which nearly every bit is devoted in some capacity to gender politics. But Schumer channels her perspective through an onscreen persona that is insecure, self-proclaimedly slutty, crass, selfish, glossy—onscreen, Amy Schumer thinks feminism is the ultimate F word… This pairing is extremely canny. Schumer hides her intellect in artifice and lip gloss—that’s how she performs femininity. By wrapping her ideas in a ditzy, sexy, slutty, self-hating shtick, her message goes down easy—and only then, like the alien, sticks its opinionated teeth in you.”
In “I’m So Bad” and “Compliments,” Schumer parodies stereotypical female behavior (connecting morality to food and being self-deprecating, respectively). The message, however, isn’t “Aren’t these bitches crazy?” Schumer’s comedy sketches show the insidious social construction of these ultimately ridiculous and self-destructive behaviors.
Certainly one could watch these sketches through a different lens, and think instead about the possible audience perception. If a Tosh.0 fan tunes in to Inside Amy Schumer, I’m not confident that he/she will understand the commentary in the comedy.
But I do. And I love it. Being able to laugh at ourselves and the ridiculous behaviors and norms that we are socialized to embody is powerful.
And in the Upper Northwest, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen parody feminism in their “Feminist Bookstore” sketches on Portlandia. Portlandia turns a hilarious mirror on a certain segment of American society in front of the backdrop and personality of Portland, Oregon. In the bookstore sketches, Toni (Brownstein) and Candace (Armisen) run Women and Women First (which is based off Portland’s In Other Words, a feminist community center).
They are absolute caricatures of radical feminists, and it’s glorious. They are not mean-spirited in their depictions (in fact, they have a working relationship with In Other Words, which manned–I mean womanned–Portlandia‘s Twitter feed to live-tweet the Oscars and the Super Bowl).
Watching Portlandia gives me ample opportunity to laugh at myself. When we were contemplating putting an NPR sticker on our new used Subaru, I realized that my life is pretty much filled with Portlandia sketches that would be too boring to air. I recognize many of Toni and Candace’s scenes as extreme versions of my own thoughts and conversations. The blurring of lines between fiction and reality was clear when Toni and Candace met with gender studies professors to “debate” feminism; they brought irreverence and comedy to an otherwise serious, analytical conversation.
Contemplating blatantly satirizing women and feminism is enough to make most of us prickle a bit, and be validly concerned about further marginalization of issues that affect our lives. Laughing about the effects of estrogen on our emotions might feel dangerous when we have Supreme Court justices who don’t understand how contraception works. Hearing women repeatedly align feminism with man-hating might make chuckling at Toni and Candace feel depressing.
However, it feels empowering to laugh in the face of adversity, and put ourselves–as women and as feminists–on the line for good comedy. There’s a clear difference between comedy aimed at feminists and comedy created by feminists, and I’m so thankful that I can bask in the latter. These shows are aimed at wide audiences full of men and women, and they lift women up and laugh at them without tearing them down.
Pure joy.
I’ve been rolling around in a lot of other TV and film that’s getting me all stunk up with feminism: Obvious Child shows how incredibly moving and entertaining women’s lives are; Orange is the New Black overwhelms me with so many women’s stories, such diversity, such power; House of Cards shows that feminist media isn’t always what we think it is; and Parks and Recreation is a consistent delight.
It’s easy to get caught up in all of the terrible, misogynist bullshit that infiltrates our screens and sound waves. Seeing just the trailer for Seth McFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West almost unwound the hours and hours of feminist film and television that I’d stocked up as a defense. The Feminist Killjoy rises again and again–and she’s an important voice–but damn if sometimes it doesn’t feel good to just revel in the excellence of feminist comedy.
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
