Shortly after Tina Fey became the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live,<\/i> she gave an interview with The New Yorker<\/i> in which she shed some light on the darkness of the comedic mind: \u201cIf you want to make an audience laugh,\u201d she explained, \u201cyou dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have regurgitated this quote countless times since I read it. It encapsulates the mentality of the comedian, whose job it is to foster a sense of camaraderie with an audience despite possessing a somewhat antisocial demeanor and twisted imagination. But lately, as someone who can probably be categorized as a humorist and definitely be categorized as a woman, I wonder if keeping my more mordant material to myself is wise\u2014especially when it revolves around topics that hit close to home. It feels disingenuous that at a time when women are being encouraged to speak up, to tell their truth, comedy about what really hurts us is the final taboo.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
VIDEO: Ava DuVerney, Natalie Portman Call\u00a0Out the Golden Globes for Selecting All-Male Best Director Nominees<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n RELATED: Ava DuVernay on How to “Pivot Towards Positivity” in Trying Times<\/strong><\/p>\n I get why. Things are serious. We are in the midst of an empowering, unifying, exhausting feminist tsunami, and trying to make sure the boat doesn\u2019t capsize is a full-time job. Right now sensitivity reigns supreme as we endeavor to correct a system that has allowed sexism and sexual predation to operate unchecked across all industries for longer than we\u2019ve been alive. Just this January hundreds of prominent Hollywood women formed Time\u2019s Up, a well-funded initiative to fight systemic sexual harassment nationwide. We need this. Lest we forget, last year\u2019s litany of public apology letters included inadvertent admissions that no, actually, their authors had not realized women were people too. Charlie Rose came to \u201ca profound new respect for women and their lives.\u201d Harvey Weinstein came of age \u201cwhen all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.\u201d Fellas, wait till you hear about the man we put on the moon! (They sent a man because everyone knows boobies fly all over the place in space. Makes sense.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Saddened by the rudimentary nature of our cause, we women tend to err on the side of justifiable anger and basic empathy, even among ourselves. As if, upon glimpsing a shot at real change, we don\u2019t want to complicate things with competing reactions. Not when some men are still fuzzy on the definition of \u201cequality.\u201d Besides, is it worth looking like a heartless traitor to one\u2019s own gender by making a crude joke about bathrobes?<\/p>\n I posit yes, actually, it is. It\u2019s been six months since the spate of sexual harassment scandals that rocked the world. We\u2019re overdue for an advanced course in Woman as Person. So I say we start by laughing at what genuinely makes us laugh. Even if the joke comes at our own expense. Especially when it comes at our own expense. It\u2019s so important to stay funny in these unfunny times, not only as an escape valve from headline horror but because making a joke about a serious issue is not making light of it; it\u2019s controlling the spotlight on it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n VIDEO: 11 Famous Women on Female Empowerment<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n RELATED: Senator Claire McCaskill on Her 36-Year Political Career and What’s Next<\/strong><\/p>\n Case in point: A few weeks ago a friend shared an article with a group of us. It was about a pair of 6,000-year-old skeletons\u2014a man and a woman\u2014who were discovered curled up together. It was meant to be sweet and reassuring. I wrote back: \u201cYeah, but 50\/50 that was rape.\u201d The year 4,000 b.c. does not strike me as a fairground for romance. Another friend attached an image she found of a skull and typed \u201c#metoo.\u201d Does this make us jerks? Do we think nonconsensual sex is a laugh riot? I hope not. We are a group of progressive women, some of whom have been victims of sexual assault, all of whom are reasonable, educated people. The more we share jokes like these with one another\u2014the darker, the better\u2014the more we test the limits of our own opinions, the more we can find out what we\u2019re really thinking, and the more humor becomes a weapon. It\u2019s our way of saying we have other gears and we will allow ourselves to use them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n I\u2019m not suggesting we suddenly adopt an anti-PC stance, as if it\u2019s remotely OK to raise a country full of eighth-grade bullies who ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter? Can\u2019t take a joke?\u201d Anything said with the objective to offend, shock, or disempower is rarely funny. Which, for a humorist, is a crime in and of itself. I am simply suggesting that the more personal ownership we feel over an issue, the more we should indulge in our natural array of reactions to it.<\/p>\n Besides, what\u2019s the worst that can happen? No one is amused by your comment on Facebook or across the lunch table. OK. It\u2019ll suffocate quickly. But what if it doesn\u2019t? What if it speaks to other women who\u2019ve been thinking the exact same thing but haven\u2019t articulated it yet? Humor may die without oxygen, but free speech dies without humor.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n So to my fellow women I say, \u201cNothing is off-limits.\u201d Make the joke, post the tweet, write the blog, say what you feel, write what you think. Don\u2019t water it down. Don\u2019t just text it to your one friend who will laugh, because I promise you she\u2019s not the only one who will appreciate it. When it comes to the issues we care deeply about, there is no such thing as too soon, only too late. Now is not the time to put our most twisted thoughts in a modest dress. Now is the time to find the closest staircase and push.<\/p>\n Crosley\u2019s latest book of essays, <\/i>Look Alive Out There, is available April 3.<\/i><\/p>\n For more stories like this, pick up the March issue of <\/i>InStyle, available on newsstands and for <\/i>digital download<\/i> Feb. 9.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shortly after Tina Fey became the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live, she gave an interview with The New Yorker in which she shed some light on the darkness of the comedic mind: \u201cIf you want to make an audience laugh,\u201d she explained, \u201cyou dress a man up like an old lady and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}