TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110890/1108590.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 157 lines

                                                                                PUBLIC IMAGES, Page 62

SHOW BUSINESS

Sauce, Satire and Shtick


Today's freshest funnywomen don't just tell jokes -- they also
tell it like it is

By STEFAN KANFER -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    "It isn't over until the fat lady sings."

    -- Sports proverb


    Well, the fat lady sang, and it's over. When Roseanne Barr
screeched an off-key version of the national anthem, scratched
her groin and spit at a ball game recently, she crossed the line
between comedy and crudity. For an emerging group of female
laugh getters, grossing out audiences is left to the likes of
Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison. Coven-like hairstyles are
passe; so are Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes, delivered Uzi-style
a la Joan Rivers, and the kind of masochistic self-deprecation
that kept Phyllis Diller in face-lifts for two decades. The
freshest funnywomen have power smiles, well-toned bodies and
social commentary that ticks before it detonates.

    "My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for 40 years,"
says Elayne Boosler, shaking her Botticelli curls, "because even
in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions."

    Rita Rudner's wide-eyed, lighter-than-air delivery brings
the news that "men with pierced ears are better prepared for
marriage -- they've experienced pain and bought jewelry."

    Reno, born Karen Renaud, is one of the women who pulls,
pummels and stretches comedy into the field of performance art.
The tornado with dark roots asks, "Remember when safe sex meant
doing it when your parents were out of town?"

    Carol Leifer, a blond with a flexible voice and metronomic
timing, complains that her ex-husband tricked her into marrying
him. "He told me I was pregnant."

    "There's a real reversal going on," says Regina Barreca, an
assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut
and the author of two books on female humor. "Women's comedy
used to be local and specific -- `Oh, look at my hair, look at
my legs, I'm so fat.' Now male humor seems to be taking a step
back to `Take my wife -- please,' and women comics seem to be
much more subversive."

    This reversal reflects some shifts in American culture,
argues Nancy Walker, who teaches English at Vanderbilt
University. Back in 1981, Walker recalls, writer Erma Bombeck
told her that more men were coming to her talks and breaking up
at columns addressed primarily to women. Bombeck's conclusion:
"That means they are doing laundry. They understand that washing
machines eat socks." In the '90s these changes are amplified on
the nightclub circuit, where 20% of the comics are female, up
from perhaps 2% a decade ago. Even that minuscule group used to
give itself the short end of the shtick: "When I was born I was
so ugly, the doctor slapped my mother." In comedy's Paleolithic
era, notes Budd Friedman, impresario of Los Angeles' Improv
comedy club, "stand-up was traditionally a white male enclave.
But today there are no restrictions. Women are able to use their
intelligence and their femininity and their strength to say what
they want."

    What Rudner wants to say is couched in whispers and stares
toward the horizon -- of Mars. She describes her grandmother as
"a very tough cookie. She buried three husbands. Two of them
were just napping." She was afraid to expose herself at a
topless beach: "They'd never been in the sun before. They might
catch fire."

    Leifer has a wide range of sauciness and satire. Her
routines prove that contemporary female comics are secure enough
to lampoon other women, especially fast-track yuppettes: "Hi!
I just had a baby an hour ago, and I'm back at work already. And
while I was delivering, I took a seminar on tax-shelter
options."

    In the postfeminist era, however, women's issues are not
always Topic A. Today's female comics, says Leifer, also perform
"material that a man could do." A case in point is Boosler on
airline absurdities, doing an Alan King staple her way: "The
pilot says, `We are currently hurtling through the air at 500
m.p.h. Please feel free to move about the cabin.' Then you land.
You're rolling to the gate at 1 m.p.h. and you hear: `You must
remain seated for your own safety! Sit down!' I'm wondering,
could we take off again? I need my coat from the overhead."

    Boosler's kind of routine, as Professor Barreca sees it, is
one thing that tends to separate the girls from the boys. "Women
tell stories," she says. "Men do one, two, three, bop." The new
funnywomen are anything but rote jokesters: like Robin Williams
or Billy Crystal,they invent routines as they go along. Paula
Poundstone, whose stand-up is a sprawl across a stool, ad-libs
about 30% every night. When she was too broke to redeem her
outfits from the dry cleaner's, she included the angst in her
monologue: "It's like, the clothes are in jail. I go in every
so often and say, `Could I just see the pants?'" Reno goes
directly to the Supreme Court and for the jugular. On the
abortion ruling: "Soon a cop will be at the door saying, `So,
I hear you had a miscarriage. Prove it.'"

    Leifer talks "for better or worse, about my personal
experiences. I have a new joke about going out to dinner. You
know, you order a bottle of wine, and they give you the cork?
I feel like a jerk, sitting there sniffing and going, `Yep,
that's cork.' I said that to a waiter and he laughed. I thought,
Gee, maybe I should try that in my act."

    Says Rudner: "If I do a whole set and I don't have anything
new, I really am depressed, no matter how well it went. I would
rather try a new joke and have it bomb than play it safe." Like
her colleagues, she finds plenty of pratfalls in autobiography.
She recalls her overprotective parents: "My tricycle had seven
wheels. And a driver." She speaks about pets with fancy trims:
"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird
religious cult." And she fondly remembers an apartment near New
York City's Central Park. "I couldn't actually see the park, but
if I concentrated I could hear the screams for help."

    To some audiences -- and even to some producers -- a woman
comic is an oxy moron, like a wise fool. Whenever Rudner has
been considered as the potential star of her own TV show, she
says, "the first thing that happens in all of my interviews is,
`We'll assign writers to you, and they will follow you around.'
I say, `But I am a writer. Can't I make a contribution?' And
they say, `Well, you're not really network approved, because you
haven't written anything yet.'" No wonder that Rudner is off in
Britain now, shooting a series for the BBC.

    Ann Magnuson resents being hemmed in by critical
preconceptions. She is supple enough to do a routine about a
biker chick at the Red-Neckorama, or to perform a mock-heroic
ballet to the theme of the NBC Nightly News. But versatility has
not brought happiness: "PEOPLE magazine accuses me of being too
hip and arty." On the other hand, recalling her 1987 special on
cable TV, she says, "The Village Voice condemns me for selling
out to Cinemax, as if Cinemax were run by Jesse Helms."

    Of course, every watcher of Carson or Letterman has seen
male clowns air the same kind of grievance; provoking mirth for
a living has never been a laughing matter. The difference today
is in who does the complaining. Observes Poundstone: "A comic
was telling me the other day that she thought she had started
too late in life. I thought, Geez, this is one of the few areas
where that doesn't mean a thing anymore. This has become an
ageless, genderless job." Funny she should say that. This is the
year that Paula Poundstone becomes 31, and Henny Youngman turned
84.