I don’t quote him often enough here, but Maclean’s critic Jamie Weinman is one of the people whose work I’m always most interested to read. And this meditation on how, narratively, popular cuture tends to overvalue looks because movies and television don’t do enough to establish other aspects of characters’ personalities, is a great illustration of why I feel that way about his work. Weinman argues persuasively that it’s actually quite hard to translate why couples come together for a mass audience without going to looks as a primary motivator:

The main reason for this is that in real life there are many different reasons why people would get together, beyond looks – which, after all, are subjective. But the actors are often playing characters who don’t have any of the redeeming qualities they have in real life. Woody Allen in real life is smart, talented and successful. But the people he plays in films are usually not very smart, talented or successful. (He was most plausible as a romantic lead in Annie Hall, one of the few movies where he really played someone on more or less his own level.) You can believe that the real Larry David could attract someone for reasons other than his money, while it’s hard to believe that of the fictional Larry David, since his bad qualities are so exaggerated.

It’s also very hard to establish any other reason beyond looks why characters are attracted to each other. It can be done, it’s just very hard, and maybe impossible to judge until you see the actors on film together. Writers try to do this all the time; any time there’s a couple, they try to establish some reasons why they’re in love, so it’s not just a superficial physical attraction. And a lot of the time, the reasons are unconvincing: they’re compatible because they engage in “witty” banter that isn’t witty at all, or they both like some poet the scriptwriter vaguely remembers hearing of.

This is probably also one of the reasons that so many shows in particular get themselves stuck on implausible will-they-or-won’t-they relationships. People have a lot of intangible reasons for staying apart from people who would actually be a good match for them—a newly-single Jess and Nick on New Girl are a good example of this apparent irrationality—but it’s very hard to communicate that kind of internal hedging. But because will-they-or-won’t-they relationships are one of the biggest form of stakes that comedies in particular can play with, sitcoms will keep going to that well, even if it’s something that’s hard to do well.

Bridesmaids succeeded because it took a simple story that a lot of women have experienced — over the course of planning and executing a friend’s wedding, two women grapple with their different priorities and stages in life — and told it well and with a great deal of warmth, pain, and humor. And it told that story to completion. We don’t need a sequel to it because the story is over. Which is why it’s heartening first to hear that Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are smart enough to have decided that they don’t want to do a sequel, and depressing to hear that Universal might bull ahead without them anyway.

The Hollywood Reporter story that breaks that news contains two interesting, and I think indicative, tidbits. First, that the cast’s bonuses, which while more than I make in a year, were relatively stingy compared to the overall financial success of the movie. And second, that Wiig has a bunch of small, smart projects lined up. Both of those things seem to me to say something about the limited things Bridesmaids will be able to change in Hollywood. One of the reasons Bridesmaids impressed me so much was how deep the cast was: even the characters who got the least screen time had funny, sharp moments and the actresses nailed them. I’d be curious to know what the actors on The Hangover movies got as bonuses, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re more than $100,000, and this is an example of how the Hollywood pay gap is alive and well. If women making successful movies doesn’t get them paid like men, it’s not clear what will.

Second, I think there’s something feminist in Wiig’s decision to walk away from a potential franchise for which she was likely offered way more than her bonus. Bridesmaids would lose, just as Sex and the City and Nancy Meyers’ movies are to a certain extent a loss, if the lesson that studio executives take away from it is that this is the girl movie, or the kind of girl movie, they’ll make. We don’t need 47 Sex and the City movies. We don’t need 50 movies where the jokes is that Melissa McCarthy is fat and crude and sexually aggressive in exactly the same way. What we need is for Kristen Wiig to go off and become the kind of star who can turn a bunch of different movies into hits. And we need the same thing for Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph and Alison Brie and a bunch of other insanely talented, gorgeous women. Franchises are a good thing, they provide reliable paychecks to working actors, but they’re also a way of sticking people in silos.

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?

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.