F
Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
ROM JOHNNY CARSON to Christopher Hitchens to
Adam Carolla, there have always been people who say
women aren’t funny – or at least not as funny as men.
Author Yael Kohen doesn’t expect her new book, We
Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, to
change any minds, and that wasn’t her intent anyway.
Kohen begins with the premise that women are funny and
focuses her oral history on the experience of female comedians from the 50s to the present. Phyllis Diller, Ellen
DeGeneres and Chelsea Handler are among the many f
unny women who help her tell the story. – Lori Fradkin
How willing were women to talk about this
topic? Certain people were very open
to it. Others were not. Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler didn’t speak to me,
but they’re still in the book. I did
get the sense they felt like they’d
said all they had to say. And to an
extent it’s true. How much can you
continue to ask, “are women funny?” Let’s move on and talk about
how they’re funny, how they broke
through, what the barriers were —
as women but also just as comics.
Loni Love discussed the issue of “having it
all” and says you can’t as a stand-up. She
decided not to get married or have kids. I
heard that from a lot of women. As
a man, you can go on the road, have
a wife stay home with the kid and
come in and out. For some reason,
that’s acceptable, but it’s not as do-
able for a woman. Chelsea Handler
doesn’t have kids. Sarah Silverman
doesn’t have kids. Ellen doesn’t
have kids. Then you have people
like Joy Behar and Roseanne who
already had kids when they went
into stand-up. It’s like they either
had kids when they were young and
struggling to make ends meet or
they become stand-ups and then
Kohen is also
a contributing
editor at
Marie Claire.