In high school, I once told a drama teacher I was considering trying out for the improv team. Her eyebrows flew up and she replied, “Isn’t improv a boy thing?” Rage flared to life in my chest so instantly and intensely that I had to end the conversation, lest I burst into flames. The smoke coming off me would’ve smelled like the musty barrooms in the comedy clubs I was already frequenting even then, laughing til my ribs were sore, forging the sense of humor that would buoy me through the decades to come.
I thought about that drama teacher today when I heard the terrible news about Catherine O’Hara, the legendary Canadian comedienne who is no longer with us. By the time that drama teacher criticized my apparently unfeminine improv ambitions, I had already absorbed the work of countless funny women, from O’Hara herself to Wanda Sykes to Ellen DeGeneres to Sarah Silverman to Amy Poehler to my own mother, a writer who’d instilled her biting wit in me from a young age. There was no part of me that doubted women could be funny, and so, after my anger passed, that teacher’s comment rolled right off me. It certainly didn’t discourage me from trying out for the team. In fact, it motivated me even more.
The assertion that women are not funny has always been absurd on its face, in no small part because so much humor is borne from oppression and subjugation. Similarly to how comedians of color can be hilariously incisive in roasting whiteness and its perilous excesses, women have the funniest takes on the patriarchy. (Jacqueline Novak’s one-woman show about blowjobs is a favorite example of mine.) Women have long used comedy to cope with our circumstances – but we’re funny even when we’re not talking about that bullshit. Anyone who thinks otherwise is stupid. It’s as simple as that.
The funny women in my life have saved me. When I’ve fallen into a pit of depression over a man, or the world, they have hoisted me out with the strength of their jokes. When the patriarchy has fucked me over, they have comedically commiserated until the tears streaming down my cheeks were the good kind. Even just this very week, while I was enduring a tough chronic illness flare-up, my wife kept making me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe. “You’re making me laugh too much,” I managed to pant between guffaws, to which she replied, “I don’t think I can do it too much! Laughter is the best medicine, and you need a lot of medicine!” and she was correct about that.
