Stand-up comedy, women and coping

No the truth is sometimes I feel so overwhelmed and suffocated by the weight of all the stuff I have to do that I just need a good laugh. I finished watching The Office, and I’m still too emotionally raw from that finale to start another nine season comedy yet. So that’s how I started swimming through the depths of all these comedy specials.

It started innocently with John Mulaney — everyone’s favorite. Then I watched all three of Aziz Ansari’s specials and then Nick Offerman’s. Then bam! Just like that I ran out of comedians I could name. Oh Chelsea Handler? Oh yeah I’ve heard of her so I’ll watch that one. Wow it’s really refreshing to watch a woman. I want to watch more funny women.

So I found Jen Kirkman, Iliza Shlesinger and Chelsea Peretti. I also found my inner scary feminist uber bitch who wants to bash heads because I’ve essentially run out of funny women to watch. No I know there are more. But compared to the number of male comedians there are like six women. Yes that is an exact number (not really).

Where did the idea that women aren’t funny come from? Why do women need to prove themselves again and again with films like Bridesmaids, The Heat and Trainwreck? Tina Fey and Amy Poehler essentially conquered the Golden Globes as well as NBC.

Even at Hopkins where we boast a probably very admirable statistic about our men to women ratio, the Intersession stand-up class of 20 only had seven girls. That was an improvement from previous years when the highest number of girls was four, but still. Why aren’t girls told they’re funny?

I for one am hilarious. This is definitely a direct result of my having little to no other redeeming qualities. I have the unique ability to make any situation approximately 800 times more awkward than it was before I showed up so I have learned to cope through humor. But some people hear that I’m funny — I don’t know how that gets out, it’s not like I readily advertise that through a column in a newspaper — and then people ask me to tell a joke.

Comedy isn’t that easy folks. I can’t just *tell* you a joke. It’s gotta be the right time. So much has to fall in place for me to be funny, but, lucky for me, that happens all the time.

That’s why I have so much respect for stand-up comics. They don’t get any circumstance or situational comedy to rely on. They write all of that beforehand and hope it’s funny and hope that audiences will respond to that. And that is at once the bravest and the dumbest thing anyone could do ever.

See, like, it’s brave because you’re not only sharing something you’ve written — which is something I do biweekly — but you’re getting a live reaction. Which is also why it’s so dumb. If you’re not actually funny and you just think you are because you have two friends who tell you how funny you are (this is not about me), you are going to find out immediately. Because no one is going to laugh.

Maybe that’s why Chelsea Peretti planted dogs in her audience. And Chelsea Handler brought her dogs onstage. But they’re actually funny and don’t need dogs as a backup plan.

Sometimes Hopkins feels like a four-year-long stand-up show. I’m up in front of a huge audience of professors and grad schools and my parents, and I’m just waiting for them to laugh but no one is laughing because grades aren’t actually as funny as I wish they were.