I’d be curious to hear a comic of David Letterman’s stature weigh in on the question of whether or not women can be funny. But when it comes to who gets to appear on his show, it turns out that it might not matter that much what Letterman himself thinks. The show fired Letterman’s comedy booker, Eddie Brill, after he told the New York Times that “There are a lot less female comics who are authentic. I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.” In the process, he reignited the debate most recently fueled by Christopher Hitchens about whether or not women can be funny, or whether they’re funny in the same ways as men, or whether men and women find other things funny.

But I actually think the more important point here is less in positing an answer to those ultimately unempirical questions and more in pointing out the critical importance of gatekeepers in diversifying entertainment. Letterman is, of course, the CEO of his show, so his opinions matter. But just as important as his feelings about about female comics is whether he cares enough to make sure everyone on his team is on the same page about booking. It’s the same across the entertainment world. It’s a good thing for Bob Greenblatt at NBC to want to find stories with more diverse casts and a great show about a black or Asian family, but he’s also got to make sure that the folks who are reading pilot scripts know that he’s got his eye out for something like that. We need good executives at entertainment companies, but we also need good gatekeepers, because those roles aren’t always the same. It may take time to get there, but hopefully Letterman will replace Brill with someone who knows how to find the best female comedians. And it’s good to see the Daily Show finally hiring a black woman to deliver reports:

On July 9, Daily Show creator, former Air America host, and comedian Lizz Winstead hit the road for a stand-up tour benefitting Planned Parenthood. She took a break from the show and finishing work on her forthcoming memoir to talk to me about what she’s learned about support for reproductive rights from her audiences; why conservative comedians aren’t very funny; how we can back up Planned Parenthood workers; and her dream television show in the post-Bridesmaids boom for women in comedy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How’s the tour gone so far? Are there things you’ve learned from your audiences along the way?

Really great! We did this sort of first leg, and I’m taking almost all of August off except for the 19th of August because I have to finish my book. It’s no longer a joke and nobody thinks it’s cute it’s not finished…[I've learned that] it’s still taboo to tell your story. I don’t know if taboo is the right word. There’s still fear…People have come up to me, at least 20 after every show, and said ‘I feel like I can tell my story.’ It’s sort of the Harvey Milk story…Once someone puts a face on a subject it makes it that much harder to demonize it. It changes the conversation a lot. I’m glad that it gives people some pause to think about what they’re doing with their own story and their relationship to Planned Parenthood.

The other thing that’s equally awesome and equally heartbreaking is how generally overwhelmed with thanks that the staff is. Because it makes me feel like more people need to be stepping up and helping them fight the fight. Those people are in their doing their basic job every day. That should be their job, not to be tortured every single day by these terrible people who protest in front of their clinics and terrify them.

In terms of telling more stories about abortion, what do you think accounts for our pop culture squeamishness about abortion and reproductive health more generally?

I think it comes down to advertising dollars. It’s still such a taboo subject. The extremists will boycott and they’ll rally and they’ll do that kind of stuff. When you go to a local market, [it's a struggle] for the local press to write about the show. We’ve had to rely heavily on people like you, people like the progressive blogosphere. You have a wider reach, and you don’t care if they attack you. It’s really interesting how people shy away from it. You’re marked. You have to make a decision. I turned 50 on Friday, and I’ve had a really nice, fun half of my career, and what am I going to do? If I can’t use the voice I have to get people to pay attention to the news, than what am I doing? That’s kind of given me a clear path to other things that I want to do in the second half of my career.

It seemed to me as someone who had been watching the progression of anti-women and anti-women’s health care legislation, watching the complete escalation of it with this new Congress made me feel like I can’t sit there and let this happen. I have a voice, and I have a show that people like, they pay money to come see it. To be able to share this personal story, that it encourages other people to say so. It seems that humor, here’s a a completely obvious statement, has become a real driving force for conversations about the issues in the world.
Read more

As Robert Bork joins Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as an adviser on judicial issues, it’s worth a reminder where he stands on the First Amendment and art. Namely, that he doesn’t think the former protects the latter: “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote in the Indiana Law Journal in 1971. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

This is silly, of course, and invites all kinds of brightline questions: art is a means of speech, but the fact that speech is screened in a movie theater, or on a television, or written in a book sold in the fiction or literature section, or webcast, doesn’t mean that it inherently cannot be political. Under Bork’s definition, would there be a certain threshold art would have to meet to be considered political? Would you have to devote a certain percentage of song lyrics to political expression, or minutes of a television show to gain protection for it? Does art have to be electoral, or in support of a particular piece of legislation or regulation, to count as political and protected?

The news this week that The Daily Show was censored Britain because it’s in contravention of U.K. law to air parliamentary footage if your intention is to use it for the purposes of “light entertainment (including satire) or drama programmes” is a useful illustration of that kind of brightline challenge (and a worthwhile reminder that for all that the phone hacking scandal is terrible, British expression laws are really restrictive). Would general mockery of Parliament be protected? Or of Congress? Our political debates, which in addition to featuring funny-looking procedure, are eminently mockable for the ridiculous things our lawmakers say, are badly in need of satire and critique.