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Beaten to the Punch Line
Lampanelli starts to sob at that. At first you think she might be joking. But she's anything but.
"It sucks for us, you know?" she says through her tears. "If you're a woman [comic], you don't have the option to have a nice wife who stays home and has the kids for you. There's just this mind-numbing schedule, and you can't believe there's nothing else out there in life.
  Maria Bamford, above, a California-based comedian, says the unspoken rule of having no more than one female comic on a bill is "a prejudicial hiring practice." Comics such as Lisa Lampanelli, left, and Sarah Silverman, right, have taken a more male-oriented approach to their acts. (By Marsaili Mcgrath -- Getty Images) |
"I'm jealous of the male comics who have kids. Who have wives. Who have a life. I cried on Valentine's Day because I had nothing going on."
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The odds of making it in comedy might be rising -- and rising faster for women.
Television -- once the surest way for a comic to gain national exposure -- isn't such a sure thing anymore. Although there are plenty of TV showcases for stand-ups these days, the proliferation of them has diluted the impact of any particular performer, says Phyllis Diller, the pioneering comic who turned her life as a wife and mother into a 47-year-and-counting stand-up career.
Back in a three-channel universe, "it was much easier to become known," says Diller, 89. "The exposure you got [on TV] was real exposure. Today, with 500 channels, who sees you often enough to remember your name? It's hard now, much harder.
"It used to be, one shot on 'The Tonight Show' and you had it made. Or thought you did."
A decade or so ago, a woman who succeeded in the clubs might land her own sitcom. This vaulted the careers of a number of women, such as Cho, Butler, Barr, DeGeneres, Griffin, Garafalo and Thea Vidale, a veteran stand-up who in 1993 starred briefly in an ABC sitcom called "Thea."
Talk shows were another vehicle. O'Donnell and Rhea had their own. Behar, a longtime club comic, is far better known for her quips on "The View."
But the broadcast networks have moved away from sitcoms -- reality shows and one-hour dramas now dominate. The few that remain feature men (such as "King of Queens," "Two and a Half Men," "George Lopez," "Scrubs," "Rules of Engagement") or have ensemble casts of men and women ("The Office," "My Name Is Earl," "30 Rock," "How I Met Your Mother").
Other than Behar, O'Donnell and DeGeneres (who hosted this year's Academy Awards), female comics have all but disappeared from daytime television. And outside of Rivers's run as a guest host on "The Tonight Show" and as the headliner of her own Fox talk show, no woman comic has ever really cracked the late-night talk-TV arena. The late-night shows on weeknights feature the likes of Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Carson Daly and Bill Maher.
