Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship.
Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be, “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to, women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship. Elayne Boosler, a comedian popular in the 80s, talked about asking the powers that be why she hadn’t yet gotten her own cable comedy special. The executives told her that featuring her in a special of her own was out of the question, because she touched her breasts during her act. When she watched the specials of other comedians popular at the time, like those of Robin Williams she said, “I realized I had my hands on the wrong thing.”
Later when Sarah Silverman was with Saturday Night Live, she wrote in response to legislation that required abortion waiting periods: “I think it’s a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty.” Even though SNL, then as always, was in dire need of lines that actually make people laugh, she wasn’t allowed to include it. She made it part of her stand-up act instead.
The protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, an aspiring stand-up comedian in Brooklyn namedDonna (Saturday Night Live’s Jenny Slate) starts out the film doing a routine that breaks the taboo about women speaking about their own body parts and functions (which leads to a great payoff scene later in the film) as well as making fun of her relationship with her current boyfriend. After she comes offstage, triumphant, her boyfriend informs her he’s dumping her: he and her best friend have been having an affair and want to get together. Instantly Donna is reduced to a pile of tears and insecurity, soothed at home by her level-headed, caring roommate, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann).
Jenny Slate as Donna
One night, still vulnerable, Donna gets drunk with her gay comedian friend Joey (Gabe Liedman) after she bombs onstage and meets Max (Jake Lacy), a blue-eyed computer nerd, who is dazzled by her. Although the trailer often shows Slate in unflattering hats and poses, we can see why Max is drawn to her: even though she’s still an emotional mess, she looks great (while not at all resembling most kewpie-doll model-actresses) with her long, dark, hair loose, wearing a tight sleeveless t-shirt, and, after she embarrasses herself onstage, has a fun, nothing-left-to-lose affect. He gets drunk with her and they end up having a one-night stand (after raucously stumble-dancing in his apartment to Paul Simon’s title song).
Weeks pass and a casual remark from her roommate causes Donna to think that she might be pregnant. She tells Nellie of her drunken encounter with Max, “I remember seeing a condom. I just don’t know…what exactly it did.” After a pregnancy test confirms her suspicions, she schedules an abortion at a clinic.
Here Obvious Child also veers away from other films, which sometimes mention abortion as an option for unplanned pregnancy, but make sure it’s never something nice girls, like Juno, the Michelle Williams character in Blue Valentine, or the character Katherine Heigl played in Knocked Up ever go through with–even though, in real life, 30 percent of women in the U.S. opt to have an abortion during their reproductive lifetimes. In keeping with that reality, Nellie has had an abortion (when she was much younger) and tells Donna what to expect.
Donna and Max
In the middle of this crisis, Max reappears and he and Donna still have a spark between them, but she’s reluctant to go out with him because she doesn’t want to tell him about the abortion–and risk his disapproval. During a wine-fueled dinner Nellie, Joey, and Donna debate what she should do. Nellie offers a spirited defense that the abortion is none of Max’s business, after which Joey tells her he agrees with her but adds, “You’re scaring the dick off me right now.”
As interviews and other reviews have mentioned, no one in Obvious Child is anti-choice, again a nice respite from other movies, but this film, which hews so closely to the romantic comedy formula in most ways (except in its attitude to abortion), could use some tension. Everyone, even Donna’s business professor mother (Thirtysomething’s Polly Draper), who disapproves of Donna’s unremunerated comedy career, supports Donna wholeheartedly in her decision to abort, so the stretching of this film from its origins as a short begins to show. Max, in particular, could use some fleshing out, but instead with his big, clear eyes and irreproachable behavior at every turn he’s more like a fantasy of the perfect man than a character.
Where Obvious Child succeeds is in letting women be funny, not in the faux-humor of humiliation that too many comedic actresses in movies are subjected to these days, but in actual laugh-out-loud funny lines and situations (most of which are woven deeply into the context of the movie, so they don’t make it into the trailer) that reminded me, in spirit if not in content, of Roseanne Barr during her 80s heyday (before her current incarnation as an unfunny, anti-trans crank). Slate is wonderful as Donna (the role she also played in the short) and pulls off a late laugh line about the abortion (yes, there is one) with aplomb. Former child star Hoffmann who radiates no-nonsense kindness and compassion makes us wish more movies featured her. And Lacy, although he isn’t given much to do, is a believable Max and has a nice chemistry with Slate.
Nellie and Donna
My main quibble with this film is one that many of us bring up repeatedly with similar works, but it still doesn’t seem to ever be addressed. In a film that takes place in Brooklyn, the only person of color who has a name is Donna’s Asian American gynecologist. The only Black people we see are, first, a woman with no lines who crosses a street (really) and, second, a comedian onstage who talks about his father being a crack addict. In a film that rights so many wrongs about gender-stereotyping a lot of us would like (and, at this point, expect) a cast that better reflects racial as well as gender (and sexual orientation) diversity especially when that film takes place in Brooklyn. Hoffmann is actually part Latina (her father’s last name was Herrera), but we never get any hint that her character is less than 100 percent white.
Geena Davis recently wrote that screenwriters could automatically achieve gender parity in scripts simply by making half of the characters women, and the writers of Obvious Child (along with Robespierre, Karen Maine, Elisabeth Holm and Anna Bean) could have done something similar with this script to make it less white: Nellie could easily have been made a Latina (instead of just played by a part Latina actress), Joey could have been played by a Black actor (a Black comedian from Brooklyn is not terriblyunusual). Hoffmann even could have played the lead with a Latino actor cast as Donna’s father instead of Richard Kind: although in many ways, Slate is the incarnation of Donna, Hoffman and Draper would make a more believable daughter and mother, both physically and temperamentally.
Yes, women should support Obvious Child when it opens in theaters this coming weekend, but as more filmmakers attempt to expand the limits imposed on white women in film and on television, we (critics and audiences) need to continue to put pressure on them to provide roles for others who have traditionally been ignored or stereotyped. White people shouldn’t be the only people we see as fully formed characters onscreen, any more than white men should be.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast,xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Too many times, films singularly depict abortions as religious immoral decisions or heavy emotional burdens, but such a topic does not always have to be heavy hitting and controversial.
In the saccharine land of rom coms, plots can be trite, characters undefined and sappy sweet endings all too predictable for most movie-goers. And the worst part is that rom coms are usually geared toward women. No one wants to watch the same movies with the same formulas. If you’re like me, you’ve been looking for something different, endearing, and more in touch with reality.
That’s where Obvious Child (2014), by writer and director Gillian Robespierre, comes in. Unlike rom coms centered around getting the boy or choosing love, Obvious Child is about what a woman chooses for herself–in this case, an abortion. It follows Brooklyn comedian Donna Stern (Jenny Slate), who “gets dumped, fired, and pregnant just in time for the worst/best Valentine’s Day of her life.” The best part about the film’s description is that it focuses on the nature of Donna’s choice and how after everything, she ends up all right.
With the help of Robespierre’s friends and coworkers, Anna Bean and Karen Maine, they wrote and produced a short film version in 2009. Robespierre said, “We were frustrated by the limited representations of young women’s experience with pregnancy, let alone growing up. We were waiting to see a more honest film, or at least, a story that was closer to many of the stories we knew.” Too many times, films singularly depict abortions as religious immoral decisions or heavy emotional burdens, but such a topic does not always have to be heavy hitting and controversial.
What I loved about the idea to this film (and why I chose to donate to it) is how imperative it is to see women’s issues addressed in different ways–with humor and wit. I also loved the women power behind this film, something we seldom see. Kathryn Bigelow is not the only female director tackling hard issues in interesting ways.
The film has been accepted to the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, but it still needs financial support to be complete (donations support final touches and distribution). It is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. $10 gets you an online screening of the original short film. It’s a few thousand dollars short and just has 11 days to go! Sometimes, women have to go to extra lengths to support their sisters and get better pop culture representation. Ladies, give the gift that will give back to yourself! The best part is that you can do this from the comfort of your own home. In a time when abortion rights and access become increasingly limited in the United States, sometimes it’s movies like Obvious Child that can entertain us, but also send an important message that when it comes to abortion, whatever we choose, we’ll be all right.
Read Bitch Flicks’ review of the original short film here.
_____________________________________ Katrina Majkut is the founder and writer of the website TheFeministBride.com. As a “wedding anthropologist,” she examines how weddings and relationships are influenced by history, pop culture and the media. Her goal is to bring to light the inherent gender inequality issues that couples may not even be aware of within wedding traditions and the wedding “industry,” and to start dialogue around solutions that empower women to take positive action toward equality in their relationships and marriages.
Obvious Child made its way around the blogosphere last month, but I just watched it today. Here are some general thoughts.
Abortion is a legal medical procedure, and it’s presented as such in this film. That alone is a welcome change–as others have stated–from recent film and television. Obvious comparisons have been made to Knocked Up and Juno, as both completely failed in their representations of options for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy (the former refusing to even speak the word abortion, and the latter representing a dumpy and disturbing clinic).
The star of Obvious Child, Donna (played by Jenny Slate), is a freelancer who lives in hipster Brooklyn. Others have mentioned the “indie sensibility” of the film, and Donna is the kind of privileged hipster many of us love to hate–and she’s a little bit like Juno in this regard, with toned-down dialogue and ten years added. She has an immature sense of humor (her use of “fart-face” and “fucktard” come to mind), and she just wants to go out and have a good time after the ugly end of her two-year relationship with Joe.
But her maturity level is kind of the point. She is an obvious child. Not a woman who is ready to bring a child into the world. It’s okay that she’s childish, because she’s mature enough to recognize where she is in life, and what her priorities are. She might be a tad immature, but she’s smart and independent. What could have been a self-destructive one-night-stand was handled about as responsibly as possible, and when she learned of her pregnancy she didn’t break down. She handled it.
There are some weaknesses in the film. Donna’s phone conversation with her mother–which was the ethical high point of the film–fell flat. I like that little was made of the revelation–and comparison–of abortion pre- and post-Roe, but the acting left something to be desired. And, there is the whole privileged-white-hipster-with-easy-access-to-a-clinic issue. While the tone and tenor of the humor isn’t my favorite, I like the film and its smart, sweet nature.
