Beaten to the Punch Line
The Odds Against Female Stand-Up Comedians Are No Laughing Matter

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 31, 2007

Maria Bamford, a stand-up comedian for the past 14 years, knows the rules of the laughter business. And one of the rules of comedy-club booking goes like this:

Only one female comic can play on the bill each night. Few clubs will ever exceed that quota.

"It's just a prejudicial hiring practice," says Bamford, 36, of the unspoken practice. The only exceptions, she says, are special "theme" nights, when women or non-white comics are featured as "The Ladies of Laughter," "Urban Night" (for African Americans) or "ChopShtick" (as one Los Angeles club promoted its all-Asian American bill).

The one-woman rule may help explain a striking fact about the state of stand-up comedy these days. Although there's never been a great time to be a female comedian, fewer women are breaking through to stand-up's top ranks.

Most every comic deals with aspects of the job such as constant travel. And working nights in boozy joints. And the nonexistent job security, wildly variable pay and isolation from friends and family. But for female comics, there's also the facet of being in a culture -- and a business -- that's uneasy with the idea of a woman generating laughter.

Bamford, a California-based comedian, says that after any performance, female comics "will have at least five guys coming up to [them] and saying there aren't many funny women, that [they're] the funniest woman they've seen.

"It's sort of a compliment, but" -- she pauses and sighs -- "okay."

Such encounters might help explain why there are far fewer women than men on the comedy trail -- and why relative to their male counterparts, few women have ever become nationally known as stand-up comics.

Excepting comic actresses, which is a very different thing, the list of famous female stand-ups is a short one.

Almost all the best-known from the past couple of generations can be listed in short order: Joan Rivers, Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller, Minnie Pearl, Elaine May and Moms Mabley in the Sullivan era. Lily Tomlin was a comic queen of the 1970s. Then came Whoopi Goldberg, Elayne Boosler, Sandra Bernhard, Roseanne Barr, Rita Rudner, Brett Butler, Paula Poundstone, Ellen DeGeneres. Then there's Caroline Rhea, Joy Behar, Margaret Cho, Rosie O'Donnell. Also emerging largely in the '90s: Janeane Garafalo, Wendy Liebman, Kathy Griffin and Wanda Sykes, as well as Sarah Silverman (whose Comedy Central show is a new hit). Add in a few up-and-comers, such as Lisa Lampanelli, and you've about covered the field.

Just 25 names. In 40 or so years. The equivalent list of male comics would run almost as long as Bob Hope's or George Burns's careers.

A few years ago, Comedy Central surveyed a panel of comedians to draw up a list of the 100 "greatest" stand-up comics of "all time." Despite the admittedly subjective nature of the exercise, a limited time frame (the list was heavily weighted with names of the past 20 years) and absurd omissions (Tomlin, Steve Allen, Danny Kaye, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis), the results seemed to certify a chromosomal dominance in comedy:

Ninety men made the list, compared with just 10 women.

* * *

Aren't women just as funny as men?

Well, apparently it's not that simple.

"My gut tells me that society doesn't like to see a woman in power, and standing on a stage [telling jokes] is a powerful position," says Eddie Brill, a veteran stand-up comic who scouts and books comedians for David Letterman's show. "Some of the best comedians on the planet are female. But a lot of men are afraid to laugh at a woman. It sometimes can turn insecure men into even more insecure people."

Legendary comic Joan Rivers has a theory about why women haven't succeeded as often as men as stand-up comedians: "Most girls, when they're young, realize that they don't get attention for being funny," says Rivers, 73, whose stand-up career goes back to the borscht belt and "Ed Sullivan Show." Girls "want to be pretty or sexy. Funny isn't sexy. Comedy isn't sexy."

Stand-up comedy, she adds, is "a very masculine form. You're taking an audience and dominating them. You're like a ringmaster in a lion's den. You have to be very strong."

In addition to the hardships of the circuit, the pay is attractive only for headliners with TV credits (depending on the city and the club, a top comic might earn $2,500 for a Tuesday-Sunday run; opening acts typically earn just a few hundred dollars per week). The accommodations are hardly glamorous, either. Traveling comics usually stay in "comedy condos," the shabby apartments provided by club owners.

It's difficult under such circumstances to maintain a marriage; raising children is more complicated still. Bamford, who is single, decided to take a year off from traveling this year to rest, and, she says, to "develop some kind of family, whatever that means. . . . It was starting to be so depressing to be by myself for such long stretches."

Lisa Lampanelli can relate. Ask her how many times she's performed her act during the past 16 years and she starts to calculate. "Sometimes I did six shows a night, sometimes three or two," she says. "Figure an average of two shows per night for the last 16 years. How many is that?"

Well, a lot.

"There's no substitute for stage time," she continues. "But I need rest. I need to stay home. I need to get my mind off this [expletive] grind, you know?"

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.

"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."

* * *

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.

Comedy Central, perhaps the most reliable outlet for stand-up talent on TV, isn't a much better place for women, either. That's primarily because Comedy Central's target audience is young men, and young men generally have been shown to prefer an edgy, sometimes crude style of humor -- in other words, the humor that male comics are more likely to produce. An early Comedy Central hit was, indeed, "The Man Show."

Over the years, Comedy Central's breakout stars have been such men as Dave Chappelle, Stewart, Colbert, Lewis Black, Steve Carell, Dave Attell and Carlos Mencia. The network was also instrumental in promoting the career of Dane Cook, possibly the hottest stand-up comic of the past few years.

"In all of the programming we do, we're always looking for something original and innovative," says Lauren Corrao, who heads original programming and development for Comedy Central. "But at the same time, it has to be provocative and edgy. That doesn't preclude a woman. It's just more of a male style of comedy."

Comedy Central's newest star is Sarah Silverman, whose self-named sitcom was so popular in its short run this past winter that it has been renewed for a second season this fall.

Silverman's shtick is to play broadly against type. Sweet and innocent in manner, kewpie-doll adorable in appearance, Silverman specializes in unexpectedly outrageous situations and utterly shocking observations. During the show's debut season, for example, Silverman scoffed at dying children, sneered at a wheelchair race and had a sexual relationship with God.

Yep, crude and earthy -- in traditional comedy terms, more like a man than many men.

That's been Lampanelli's ticket, too. The 45-year-old comic is often billed as a female Don Rickles, who ridicules just about every ethnic and racial group in her act (her 2002 concert DVD is titled "The Queen of Mean"). She can be particularly savage toward women, typically referring to them by a crude word for a certain part of the female anatomy.

Her "tough-broad" persona is starting to pick up a wide following. Lampanelli's stand-up special on Comedy Central in January was third highest-rated in the network's history, after a special featuring the four "Blue Collar" stand-up comedians and another special starring George Lopez.

Lampanelli says fewer women succeed at comedy these days because of their material. She faults other women for staying with safe and predictable subject matter: shopping, PMS and "their Coach bag collection."

"I push the envelope all the time," Lampanelli says. "Most guys can't get away with what I do. I get away with it because people like me. I'm lovable. I'm not angry. Well, we should push it. We're not senators. We're comics."

Ah, that crude thing again. Yes, men love it, Lampanelli says: "Men respond to my kind of comedy." In true Lampanelli fashion, she adds, "If a guy wants to hear a yapping bitch, he'll just stay home with his wife."

Appealing to the male sense of humor might not be just shtick; it's practically an economic strategy. Lampanelli, who has graduated from clubs to playing bigger theaters, notes that fans of stand-up comedy tend to be male. "Women aren't buying the tickets," she says. "It's the men, really the men who are 18 to 39, who are spending the money at the clubs."

But vulgar isn't for everyone, says Allyson Jaffe, manager and part owner of the D.C. Improv, the city's premier comedy club. Although acknowledging that female comics do have to combat audience expectations that they will present predictable "female" material, she says the best performers -- male or female -- have a universal appeal.

Jaffe cites a comedy-club veteran such as Kathleen Madigan: "A man or a woman could say what she does and it would be funny.

"It doesn't matter what sex she is. It's just funny."