Comedian Lizz Winstead has opened for Roseanne Barr, co-created both Air America Radio and The Daily Show, and in May, she published her first book, the essay collection Lizz Free or Die. I loved her tour of Minnesota comedy clubs and behind-the-scenes look at standing up one of the defining progressive cultural institutions of the last decade, and when Daniel Tosh became the center of a wide-ranging conversation about comedy, gender and etiquette this week, she was the first person I wanted to talk to. We talked about the social contract between comedians and their audiences, owning—and executing—material on the highest level, and what she learned from Roseanne. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you talk about in Lizz Free or Die was how, when your friend Christine suggested you try stand-up, you realized it hadn’t occurred to you that your life could be material because so many of the stand-ups you saw were men.

They weren’t necessarily the comics I love. I wasn’t necessarily an aficionado, but they were the guys I saw doing comedy. I would be watching Carson with my family and there would be a bunch of guys in ties. I think it’s changed dramatically because of everything and the internet. Late night is still notoriously male, the women comics featured to the men comics featured are notoriously low. But women have said “If you’re not going to book us, we’re going to start our own web pages…[When people talk about new female comics they like] I ask, did you find them on late night? And the answer is no, I saw them on Funny or Die, or these cool pop-up shows. Women are forging their own paths. They get to hone their own voices and present what they want outside the limits of a ten-minute routine.

Carlin still throws a long shadow over the industry. Because he could pull off things like rape jokes with a high level of precision, a lot of people seem to miss the point that the key to doing that kind of material is doing it well.

Where I agree with Daniel Tosh is that everything can be funny…people have made all of these things funny. The movie The Aristocrats was hilarious, trying to one-up the most horrible joke ever. Every joke would put the most vulgar, horrible things within the confines of that joke. If there’s funny, there’s no controversy. And if there’s not, there is. I don’t defend anyone who apologizes [for their material], because if they apologize, they didn’t believe it when they said it. Louis [C.K.] and Patton [Oswalt] can be edgy, and Sarah Silverman can be edgy, but they’ve crafted these jokes and they believe in them. If you don’t believe in it, I don’t find it very interesting. Every time, and I can only speak for myself, the question I ask myself is “Do I believe it? And can I defend it?” When you’re a political comic, you’re immediately going to piss off half the people because America is divided. I get death threats from telling my abortion story once a month. Someone wants to rape me or wishes I was dead.

Well and that raises a central question here. How do you think comics should deal with hecklers without getting into ugly territory?

One is how was the audience reacting to the whole thing. Daniel Tosh hasn’t responded and neither has the woman, so we don’t know how this horrible thing was received. That would add a layer, this horrible thing was acceptable to this audience. If Daniel Tosh thinks anything is fair game, just tell those jokes, then. If he’s going on and on, there’s a constrast for a comic and a comedian.

If it’s a comedy club, the contract is the person’s going to get on stage and explore comedy however they see that comedy is. And the contract for the audience member is to come and see that, and you don’t get a guarantee it’s going to make you laugh, but the comedian is going to attempt to make you laugh. But if they’re not attempting to do material, and the article made [it seem like Tosh was discussing concepts rather than telling jokes]…

A comic should have the freedom to go on stage and say whatever they want. The only control you have is what passes your lips. After, you’re saying “I’ve passed this up to be judged.” Everyone else gets to decide whether it’s funny…all the comics say don’t laugh or leave. Those are your options as an audience member. The bigger discussion for me, is if someone walks into a comedy club and gets a lecture about what’s funny or not funny, has that comedian broken the social contract? That’s the question that I would ask because I don’t have any information about the context he was talking about it. It’s all very confusing. The whole thing, we’re talking about so many issues of what people get away with and what they don’t, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to do material that pushes boundaries, you better be fucking funny and know the purpose of why you’re saying those things.
Read more

We’ve had a lot of conversation on this blog about the way Daniel Tosh handled a woman who told him rape jokes weren’t funny at a recent show. There are a lot of threads to parse here—how people handle heckling (and how clubs should handle them)*, whether rape jokes can be funny under any circumstances, why comedians close ranks around their own. But I want to separate those issues out and talk very specifically about another strain of argument. One thread of conversation here has suggested that the woman who related her story was wrong, or oversensitive to feel threatened when Tosh suggested it would be funny if she were gang raped. The idea behind those objections is that no one would ever act based on Tosh’s words, and that because there isn’t a real prospect of her being actually assaulted, there is no impact to his words.

This is wrong on two levels. First, if you’ve never had someone visualize raping you out loud, and I’m talking about actually visualizing performing sex on you without your consent, not use of sexual violation as metaphor for victory and defeat, I can tell you, it is not pleasant. It’s unpleasant randomly on the internet, and I can’t imagine having it happen in a crowded room. If we stripped away the circumstances, if Tosh had just singled out this woman as an example during his defense of rape jokes, maybe that would be clearer. But because the point of a comedian’s response to heckling is to shut the person interrupting the set down as quickly as possible, there’s an idea that the most effective way to do that is to be as gross and mean as possible. As the anonymous OffensiveComic told me during a long, and for me, useful conversation about heckling on Twitter, “If the thing a comedian says to a heckler isn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever said to them, the comedian lacks imagination.” Daniel Tosh meant for this woman to be uncomfortable. Whether she consented to it or not is another question.

Read more

After Daniel Tosh responded to a heckler at a recent show who told him rape jokes weren’t funny by laying out a scenario that involved her getting gang raped, he tweeted an attempt at an apology. “All the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize,” he wrote. “The point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. ‪#deadbabies‬.”

There are two issues here. First, is that the main thing Tosh needs to apologize for is what he put the audience member through. She felt threatened and humiliated, and he targeted her in front of an audience. It’s be nice to see him use that power to impress an audience to explain why what he did wasn’t funny or insightful. I’d even be interested to hear him explain his thought process in formulating his response or his emotional reaction to the audience member’s comments, like Jason Alexander did when he apologized for his comments about cricket being a “gay sport” earlier this year. The best apologies involve conversation rather than deflection.

Which is the second problem with this response. Tosh restates the point that he was trying to make, which is that it’s possible to make jokes about rape. Again, that’s a subject that needs parsing. Jokes about sexual assault seem, to me, to fall into a category that requires heightened scrutiny. Reveling in someone else’s vulnerability or humiliation is not an inherently funny thing, and it’s upsetting to a lot of people. If you’re going to upset a lot of people, and defend upsetting a lot of people, you have to have more than a pedestrian joke to offer up. You have to have a point, and you have to execute it with a high degree of precision. That doesn’t appear to be something that Tosh understands in a lot of his schtick. But it’s particularly obvious here that he doesn’t seem to understand either his heckler’s original criticism, or why what he did to her subsequently was so upsetting, or feel the need to offer a specific elaboration of his point or exploration of his thinking. There is a genuine and interesting conversation to be had about how comedy works in this space. But it doesn’t seem like we’re in a place where we’re close to having it.

I’ve been watching screeners of Louie‘s absolutely terrific third season over the past few days—y’all have a real treat coming in your direction at the end of the month—and it got me thinking. Television often revels in the father as a clueless or disconnected figure, whether it’s the cheerful bigotry of Peter Griffin on Family Guy or the raft of shows that treat the very prospect of men raising children as if it’s inherently comedic. In this environment, Louis C.K. has to be the best father on television. That doesn’t mean he’s the most competent father in pop culture, or the best provider—among his bits are his discomfort over the fact that he doesn’t own a home. But his mix of honesty, tenderness, and attempt to pass something like wisdom and honesty along to his daughters, on television and off, make him remarkable. Here are five of the best reasons to hold up Louis C.K. as a role model on Father’s Day.

1. He thinks hard about how to teach his kids about prejudice, America, and the virtue of living life to its fullest: In “Country Drive,” Louie takes his daughters to see an aged female relative—who turns out to be a virulent racist. The lessons he gives in the episodes about how to love your country, respect even your most difficult relatives, and take responsibility for your privilege should be a textbook for all parents who want to raise their kids with awareness of American racism.

2. He’s willing to bury his bitterness about his divorce for his children’s sake: Watching Louie bite his lip as his youngest daughter explained in the first episode of the last season of Louie that she likes her mother’s—Louie’s ex-wife—house better than Louie’s was an exemplar of staying civil, if not together, for the kids. The show is a constant reminder that children have the power to wound as well as to delight. Being a good parent means working through the pain.

3. He’ll protect his daughter’s duckling on a USO trip through Afghanistan: In “Duckling,” one of the best episodes of television of 2011, Louie got saddled with his daughter’s elementary school class ducklings the night before a USO trip—and touched down in a war zone to find he had a baby duck on board. Rather than trying to pass off the responsibility on someone else, Louie nurtured it through Afghanistan. That’s devotion to the family pet, and your child’s happiness.

4. He’ll reconcile with Dane Cook to get his fictional daughters concert tickets: In “Oh Louie / Tickets,” Louie sat down to work out his character’s (and real life) beef with frat comedian Dane Cook to get his daughter concert tickets. Given Cook’s general wretchedness, and the widespread assumption that he stole jokes from C.K., that’s a pretty awesome sacrifice to make for your kids.

5. He’s teaching his daughters that his love for them isn’t linked to their looks: When I interviewed C.K. at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he told me that he tries never to tell his daughters that he loves them because they’re pretty. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t tell them that they look nice, but he’s trying not to make his love for them feel conditioned on their appearance. It’s an awesome example of thoughtful, feminist parenting.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

While it is an office comedy, It’s Messy has a strong female lead. By last November, before the majority of the pilot scripts commissioned by NBC, including Kaling’s, were in, the network had already given early pilot orders to three pilots with female leads, the Sarah Silverman project, Save Me and Isabel. Save Me‘s order was cast-contingent and it looked touch-and-go for awhile but, after a long search, on January 19 Anne Heche signed on to star. Four days later, NBC made the bulk of its pilot orders, including a fourth female-centered comedy, the Roseanne Barr-starring Downwardly Mobile. It may have been Roseanne vs. Mindy for the fourth and last female-lead comedy slot on NBC’s pilot slate as around the time of the Downwardly Mobile pickup, the network passed on Kaling’s script, which had made it to the final round of consideration at the network.

If this really was a choice between Kaling and Barr, Barr was, to me, the wrong bet. There’s no question that Roseanne is brilliant. But it’s been a long time since it went off the air, and Barr’s most recent project, a cracked reality show about her macadamia nut farm did more to suggest that she was not the person to bring in to be the voice of a recession comedy than to confirm her old bona fides as a working class prophetess. Instead, she’s been running that venture, campaigning for the Green Party nomination and futzing around on Twitter, all worthy pursuits to be sure, but ones that read more as her coasting on her past success than gearing up for new ones.

Kaling, on the other hand, has been doing yeoman work holding up The Office, a comedy NBC should have cancelled years ago but that is worth tuning into occasionally almost solely for her presence on it. How nice would it have been for NBC to recognize that work, as well as her charming social media presence, her successful other enterprises like her blog and book, and to affirm the value there. Kaling may not have been able to speak for working-class women, as Barr did so effectively for so many years, but she could have been part of the explosion of South Asian women on television, one of what are still very few female show creators. It may have been that in between sending off 30 Rock and renewing Whitney, NBC felt like it had made its contribution to the female-comedy boom, and it was set. But picking up Kaling’s show would have moved that boom forward into its next iteration, beyond white women, and beyond a particular kind of hot-but-clumsy-or-awkward white woman. NBC bet on its past, instead, and ended up with neither Barr’s show on its schedule, nor Kaling’s. And Kaling’s, though it needs a name transplant, looks fantastic:

I think Jeff Labrecque may be technically correct here that there are few women in Hollywood who gets to have careers that are as multi-faceted as the best careers for men. But I still find the idea that not being “limited by those constraints” applied to women means that Stone is like a dude:

There have been many other actresses who have experienced similar success at her age, 23, but Stone seems to be a different creature. Even when she’s cast as The Girl, she’s never been limited by those constraints. From Superbad to CSL, she’s imbued what might have been clichéd female characters into something indelibly richer. And as she increases her clout, she’s finding the unique roles that enhance her growing stardom without making her a prisoner of any specific genre or pre-fab persona.

I guess what I’m getting at, and I mean it as a high compliment, is that Stone is a dude — in the sense that she is building a career typically allowed to only serious actors in Hollywood. Guys in the industry unfairly get more leeway, whereas actresses are so easily boxed in at an early age, and few have been allowed or earned the freedom Stone currently enjoys. She can literally do anything, and she’s getting opportunities to prove it in period dramas, high school comedies, adult romantic comedies, and comic-book epics. She’s on her way to becoming a lucrative brand, an ironic but nevertheless well-deserved achievement considering her multiple talents and eclectic taste.

I actually think it’s more apt to suggest that Stone is on a trajectory to escape the permanent girlhood Hollywood foists on most actresses. Limiting actresses to stories that pit jobs v. love as if they’re a choice, or that makes the question of whether or not someone is the One isn’t just a female thing, or what femininity is made up of. Instead, it’s a way of trapping actresses in the black-and-white terms of teenagedom, of walling them off from the full range of problems and joys women get to experience. If there was one thing I liked about The Help it’s that it’s a love story where the female lead chooses her career over her dude and feels absolutely no ambiguity about it: racial justice is more important to her at the moment than romance or respectability is. Women aren’t just wives and mothers and people with jobs: they’re citizens.

Sady Doyle points out something critical in her latest In These Times column on the power of Bridesmaids and the greatness of Melissa McCarthy:

Critiques of this development are worthwhile. In her Bridesmaids review, critic Michelle Dean points out that “almost every joke was designed to rest on [McCarthy’s] presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type.” That’s fair. But it reminded me, in a comparison that would horrify Dean, of Christopher Hitchens’ infamous 2007 essay in Vanity Fair on women and humor, which concluded that men are funny because humor makes them attractive, whereas funny women are… well, read for yourself: “There are some impressive [funny] ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” Obviously, this is offensive. But it left me wondering whether Hitchens had ever actually seen a photo of Rodney Dangerfield, John Belushi, Woody Allen or Patton Oswalt, or, or…
…
McCarthy is hefty, and yes, part of her performance is a certain blunt pragmatism that could be read as “butch.” She’s also playing a key Apatovian role – Jonah Hill’s role, in fact. She’s a twin sister to Hill’s characters in Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall: aggressive, hypersexual, crude and given the broadest, most popular bits. Hill’s not conventionally sexy, or conventionally well behaved. Neither is McCarthy. They’re comedians; being pretty and nice is not their job.

What makes comedians transgressive, from Lucille Ball to Ken Jeong, is their willingness to look bad in public. Women have never been encouraged to cultivate this fearlessness. There are exceptions – Ball or Joan Rivers come to mind – but they tend to prove the rule. Lady Loser Comedy opens up the game. Women who have the profane deadpan of McCarthy, or the cool prickliness of Fey or the off-rhythm intensity of Wiig: They’re not excluded any more. They embarrass themselves, they’re completely inappropriate, and that’s fine; it’s comedy.

The interesting question, though, is whether comedians like McCarthy and Fey can get entire careers at the level they’d like to have out of playing obscene, or sloppy, or unapproachable, or emotionally unstable. Fey, after all, went through a very deliberate transformation, involving losing a bunch of weight and rebranding herself as glamorous, as part of her move in front of the camera, and her movie career’s involved playing her sex appeal to the edge of its capacity. McCarthy won her Emmy for a role that posited her as conventional-but-heavy object of romantic attention, and the branding around her since has played her up as an unconventional beauty queen. Sarah Silverman is an interesting counterpoint: she’s built her brand on a combination of immaturity and sexual unease, but she’s pitching a network show based on her breakup with Jimmy Kimmel that will have her in a more conventional role.

When Seth Rogen started losing weight and taking on different kinds of roles, the sense seemed to be that it wasn’t actually a necessary transition, that he could carry the amiable schlub thing as far as he cared to. Could a woman do the same thing? Or is this just another realm where women have a sense that they have to try to have it all, and as a result, aren’t quite as good at either plumbing disgust and embarrassment or embodying the highest standards of glamour?

In light of yesterday’s conversation about rappers’ personas, I was interested to read this profile of Odd Future in Spin. Two things stuck with me. First, there was Syd tha Kid’s decision to formally come out with her video for “Cocaine.” I think Julianne Escobedo Shepherd may be somewhat overstating the importance of that decision — Odd Future, for all their critical acclaim, aren’t exactly a mainstream hip-hop group. And more importantly, given the differences in the way gay men and lesbians are perceived, I sort of suspect that — Fat Joe’s protestations to the contrary — it will take a gay man who is a significant, established, mainstream star coming out to really change hip-hop’s attitudes towards gay people.

The other thing that caught my eye was two paragraphs towards the end of the piece:

In a few days, though, Tyler will release a video for “Bitch Suck Dick,” Goblin’s most lunkheadedly brazen song. It’s an absurd, spoofy clip featuring, among other things, Jasper rolling around in a tracksuit and Lionel ripping apart his shirt. “It’s an ignorant-ass song,” says Tyler, anticipating backlash. “If I’m not listening to cheesy indie-jazzy rock shit, I’m listening to ignorant-ass rap shit like Waka Flocka and OJ Da Juiceman. And I made a song that sounds like that energy, but in my world. I think making a song about punching a bitch in the face is funny, because if you’re a regular person, just hearing that is fucking crazy, and 90 percent of the people know I’m just fucking around.”

But as Odd Future’s new projects are released — and as they become an ever bigger force in hip-hop — will his approach shift away from contrarianism and provocation? “Talking about rape and cutting bodies up, it just doesn’t interest me anymore,” he says, contemplative and sincere, looking directly into my eyes, now sitting cross-legged on the hotel bed. “What interests me is making weird hippie music for people to get high to. With Wolf, I’ll brag a little bit more, talk about money and buying shit. But not like any other rapper, I’ll be a smart-ass about it. Now it’s just girls throwing themselves at me and shit, but I got a girl back home. People who want the first album again, I can’t do that. I was 18, broke as fuck. On my third album, I have money and I’m hanging out with my idols. I can’t rap about the same shit.” The look on his face is uncompromising. The man knows where his power lies.

The thing that’s intriguing to me about this on a structure-of-humor-level is the assumption that people hear lyrics about, say, abusing women, and assume they’re funny or crazy because they’re implausible. I don’t believe Tyler or anyone else in Odd Future goes around assaulting people in their private lives. And I would really like to live in a world where the societal taboo against domestic violence or sexual assault was so high, and education and enforcement were so good that the prospect of a man abusing a woman was genuinely ridiculous. But we don’t actually live in that world. I don’t think that, say, rape jokes are an impossibility. But it’s hard to argue that you’re raising the bar, being “not like any other rapper,” if your edgy jokes mostly reinforce tired fallacies.

All that said, if Tyler and company are moving beyond “talking about rape and cutting bodies up,” I’m curious to see what he does next — and if the strong sense of identification fans have with the group will give Odd Future permission and space to do things that are genuinely daring. Turning Syd into an out lesbian hip-hop superstar beyond the group’s critical acclaim would be awesome. Ditto for speaking some actual truths about sex and gender.

Christopher Hitchens’ ridiculousness about men being funnier than women has been debunked by science:

While men were deemed ever so slightly funnier (0.11 points out of a theoretical possible score of 5.0), they were mostly considered funnier by other men. There goes the peacock theory. Other differences? Men tended to use profanity and sexual humor slightly more often than women (only slightly, thank you, Melissa McCarthy), though neither sex necessarily considered those types of jokes funnier.

In a second, related experiment, the judges’ memory bias was tested to see whether men were given more credit for their witticisms than women. Predictably, men and women remembered the funny captions better. But when asked which captions were written by men and which by women, both sexes tended to misattribute the funny ones to male authors and the unfunny ones to female writers. Moreover, women were far less confident about their gag-writing abilities than men. When asked how they thought their efforts would rank, men believed they would receive a 2.3; women, a 1.5.

It’s particularly interesting that men would be given more credit for being funny even though they tend to rely more heavily on categories of jokes that aren’t considered funnier than average. But then that’s sort of the point of this whole stupid debate, which in a way I’m frustrated we’re still having — men aren’t objectively funnier than women for all audiences. Different people find different things funny, but larger industry trends mean that men are given a wider range of opportunities to be funny in different ways — I can’t really imagine a woman getting a chance to do a true equivalent of Louis C.K.’s routine about how ridiculous men look during sex and not encountering a wave of body criticism, or being treated like she’s pathetic rather than hilariously honest. But as with all things, in entertainment and elsewhere, the fact that things are a certain way — or that dude columnists believe them to be a certain way — isn’t proof that they’re immutably true.

Tom Junod’s profile of Jon Stewart in this month’s Esquire is an incredible piece of cultural criticism. First, there’s the indictment of Stewart’s comedy as vastly less revolutionary than it seems, a critique that essentially reaffirms that the country is an okay place and things that are not uniquely worse now than they were in the past and don’t require extraordinary remedies:

Kids who couldn’t sleep at night worrying that their president was a bad guy and that their country was doing bad things could now rest easy knowing that their president was just a dick, and that their country, while stupid, was still essentially innocent. It was like you could get upset about what was going on but still live your life, because there was Jon Stewart right before bedtime, showing you how to get upset entertainingly, how to give a shit without having to do anything about it. He denied having a message — admitting to a “point of view” but not an “agenda” — but of course he did, and it was this: that life goes on, and that politics may change but stupid always stays the same.

Then, there’s the way Stewart’s set himself up as someone who gets all the benefits of being powerful without any of the responsibility:

Invulnerable. Unassailable. Unimpeachable. The most sacred of liberalism’s sacred cows. The man whom a certain percentage of the country doesn’t just agree with but agrees on, more than they agree on anything, more than they agree on health care or President Obama. He protests, often, that he “doesn’t have a constituency”; what he does have, though, is a consensus, a presumption of unanimity anytime he walks into a room, unless that room is the greenroom at Fox News. Bill Maher is an atheist; Jon Stewart is a humanist, and by his humanism he’s become the strangest of things, the influential comedian, the admired comedian, the eminent comedian, the comedian who feels it necessary, always, to disavow his power. He’s been saying for ten years that he’s just a guy in the back of the classroom throwing spitballs; but he never gets spitballs thrown at him in return. [...]

Fox gives Stewart a reason to exist, and he’s been obsessed with Roger Ailes ever since he went to O’Reilly’s studio and was summoned into Ailes’s office. He stayed an hour and came out a freaked-out admirer, like the crazy newscaster in Network once Ned Beatty got through with him. It wasn’t just that Ailes asked him, right off the bat, “How are your kids?” and then berated him for hating conservatives; it wasn’t even that both men are intensely concerned about what people think of them and have no qualms about trying to influence how they’re portrayed. It’s that Ailes is all about power and so has accepted the obligation that Stewart has proudly refused. You want to know the difference between the Left and the Right in America? The Right has Roger Ailes, and the Left has Jon Stewart; the Right has an evil genius, while the Left contents itself with a genius of perceived non-evil.

I don’t tend to think that you should judge the success of a work of art by whether or not it inspires someone to action (though I always think it’s really interesting when such works do). But what about if the implicit premise of a work of political art is that we’re okay? That the best thing to do is not do anything? Or opt out? Or treat the system like it’s ridiculous and invest instead in a parody of it? I don’t think Jon Stewart is evil, or anything, and I think The Daily Show can be very, very funny. But Junod is right that there’s something odd about the limbo Stewart’s been able to maintain between art and public life, and something is distasteful about Stewart denying that he plays a larger role than simply as a comedian.