The History of Comedy

I just watched “The Funnier Sex,” an episode from CNN’s The History of Comedy. The segment features numerous current comediennes celebrating their groundbreaking predecessors. They highlight the sexism that marred their predecessor’s progress—especially that ridiculous view that women can’t be funny—and expressed how much harder it was for an attractive woman to also be considered funny. Lucille Ball—as usual—was singled out as the pretty woman who changed that for everyone.

Sigh.

Look, I love Lucy—we all do—and I get that most people’s sense of history is as developed as an ant’s. But are we going to ignore the vaudevillians entirely? Those women who used their sexiness to get away with cultural commentary? Who—like the standup artists who followed them—used live audience’s reactions to fine-tune their jokes, over and over again? You know, like STAND-UP COMICS??

In other words, WHERE IS MAE WEST?

West was not, of course, the first female comedienne in America. But as someone who starred in vaudeville, broke out in film, made appearances on TV, and then produced a live Vegas show with Chippendale-like men, she was hardly an invisible influence on the comediennes who followed her. And her humor was MUCH more like that of the stand-up stars celebrated in the series than Lucy’s ever was—and far more risqué.

And Mae wrote her own material, managed to be a rom-com star into her 40s, and even saved a studio. Mae peddled and exploited her own attractiveness in her jokes. She was known as a bombshell, even if some of her snarky male contemporaries—and ours—use their own sexist views of curvy women’s bodies to question it.

Let’s review just one incident—on the smash second day of her play Sex in 1926, which she records in her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It: Only 85 people appeared for the first performance, disappointing the star and the manager, who blamed the scandalous title for ticket sales. But at the next day’s matinee, Mae observed lines of men from the naval base “two and three deep.” The house manager was scrambling for extra seats for his theater. “And you said it was a bad title,” noted Mae. And he replied, “I forgot about the sailors.”

Sound like a woman who wasn’t using her sex appeal for humor?

I understand that standup is not the same as vaudeville, but the latter was clearly a forerunner, certainly more than scripted TV.

Look, I enjoyed the episode from The History of Comedy. It featured some of my own heroes, including Joan Rivers and Rachel Bloom. But why, after all these years, are TV historians still ignoring the extraordinary impact of Mae West?

What other comedian wrote lines we still repeat 100 years later, such as one of the all-timers?:

“It’s not the men in my life that count, it’s the life in my men.”

I suspect I know the reason she’s bypassed—the same reason early groundbreakers are so often forgotten: Because the wave of female comediennes would take years to follow in her wake. Because she was so ahead of her time that she wasn’t even part of the same generation who would supposedly “change everything.”

But all the more reason to own her. All the more reason to celebrate her. All the more reason, CNN, to give the sexy, groundbreaking, hilarious woman her due.