Amy Schumer, who has placed highly in multiple comedy competitions, performed Thursday for the Spring Comedy Show along with comic Mark Normand. It’s been years since a female comedian headlined a comedy show sponsored by SEE.
Amy Schumer’s Spring Comedy Show on Thursday in Ritchie Coliseum made her the first female comedian in years to headline a Student Entertainment Events comedy show.
The comedy world has always been overwhelmingly full of testosterone. The cast of Saturday Night Live, for instance, includes only seven females out of 17 total players.
That it took so long for SEE to bring Schumer to the campus not only points to the professional stand-up world’s status as a primarily male-dominated industry but also shows society’s unwillingness to accept women into the field. To put female comedians on a level playing field with men, women must form their own brand of humor to showcase themselves as independent and funny in their own right.
Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 Vanity Fair column on the issue said men have only humor to try to attract women to them because they can’t attract them in any other way. “An average man has just one, outside chance: He had better be able to make the lady laugh,” Hitchens wrote.
Hitchens also wrote that because much of comedy is crude, it tends to market itself away from women.
The two current obstacles to the widened popularity of female comedians in the stand-up world are society’s perception and the high prominence of male comedians. For example, Schumer’s entrance to the campus was marketed on posters showing her behind a row of shot glasses in a provocative stance. The Facebook event featured her with a finger on her lips.
The landscape of female comedians is split into three groups: noncontroversial talk show hosts (Ellen DeGeneres) or the population of Comedy Central raunchy comedians such as Sarah Silverman and Schumer. They’re groups that are boring and predictable.
The third group is the one that has defined women in comedy the best — the group of empowering, classy and funny women such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. These females don’t rely on overtly sexual topics but fall back on the elements of good comedy: timing and impressive jokes.
For women to succeed in the comedy world, they must take more risks and turn away from the norm to develop their own brand. Women are funny in a different way than men are, and now is the time for them to find their important place in the comedy world.