Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
don’t have kids because it’s too
hard with the lifestyle.
I didn’t realize until I read your book that
Chelsea Handler was such an advocate for
women in comedy. You get the sense
that she’s kind of a bitch, and she’s
not. And she doesn’t seem to have
that competitive thing at all. It’s
not just that she hires writers to
help her look good. She brings
them on the show. The other thing
that’s interesting is the way she
grew a female audience for standup. You get the sense that people
who work in comedy think that
women go to a comedy club, and
they’re laughing because their boyfriend is laughing. But you now
have this huge audience of women
laughing because they like Chelsea.
You interviewed Phyllis Diller, who died
earlier this year. What was she like?
When I went to her house, the experience was pretty formal. Her
assistant was like, “She likes to be
called Madame Diller. Don’t hug
her. You can shake her hand. Don’t
kiss her.” We ended up speaking for
two hours. She was lucid. She [was]
very warm, and she really did laugh
that way. But she was 92 at the
time, and she was so frail I thought
she was going to keel over when she
was laughing. It made you nervous
because her whole body shook.
What are the challenges women in comedy
face today? Look, the Internet obviously provides an opportunity to
more directly build an audience.
But at sites like Funny or Die or
CollegeHumor, you still don’t have
a lot of female writers. You have
female producers. So that’s going to continue to be a challenge.
Women who are most
successful [on Saturday Night
Live] went in when they were
like 28 versus the ones who
go in at 22 and just sink.”
[And] because people are hungry
for young female comics, they’ll try
to get someone before they’ve had
enough stage time to get good. Even
when you look at Saturday Night
Live, women who are most successful went in when they were like 28
versus the ones who go in at 22 and
just sink. There’s a confidence that
comes at 28 — you’ve developed
your point of view. It takes time to
build that, and men have that time.
They hire a lot of 40-yearold men for comedy.