Women In Comedy

Olivia Lakes
Prof. Santos
EN 199-003
15 April 2015

This week we discussed women in comedy and how useful female comedians can be for talking about important issues. We also brought it back to the idea of being a "real" woman, or just an average, everyday woman in real life, outside of the media. I thought it was very interesting and reassuring, as well as hilarious, to read about these women and the challenges they faced and about how they used comedy to get throught or get a better understanding of things. 

I have always thought it to be hard to make jokes about serious topics without being misunderstood or disrespectful, and so to see women go head on to something serious, and be funny, and actually say things of substance is amazing. Because it's so taboo for women to be really outspoken and aggressive about things were passionate about, I see comedy as a great way of diffusing the situation by making things funny while still shedding light on things that mean something to them and therefore not being seen as super threatening because of the nature of the discussion. Peoples opinions seem to be more valued when other can relate to them and comedy is a great way to connect and relate people. 

Along with that, the fact that comedians aren't really obsessed over in pop culture was interesting to me because it definitely made them more relatable. In contrast, when we were talking about women in reality TV, none of us could relate to the lives of those women, but with these comedians, because they can talk about every day issues, they are a lot easier to understand. In the articles, they seemed a lot more down to earth which I feel relates to their job because they don't always have eyes on the critiquing everything, so they can be themselves more or less.