THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF BEING A FUNNY WOMAN

Dr. Lou Montgomery

“The whole art of life is knowing how to transform anxiety into laughter.” Alan Watts

“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it.” Charlie Chaplin

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” Victor Borge

      Comedy is the lubricant of the soul. Comedy is about surviving. It’s healing and restorative. It’s the cheapest and the safest medicine we can get over or under the counter. It helps us wipe the slate clean. We can laugh today because we already did our crying yesterday. When we take ourselves too seriously we inflate our problems like zeppelins; laughter blows them away. It promotes lateral thinking and fresh perceptions, revealing hidden possibilities. As an artist I use comedy to massage open the psyche so that the most searing truths can penetrate through ego defensives.

     Laughter has been proven to have all sorts of curative medicinal effects inclusive of alleviating depression, promoting relaxation, increasing oxygen levels in the blood, reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, increasing tolerance for pain through its analgesic effect, and increasing endorphin levels which affects of whole sense of well being. It keeps us more socially attractive and binds us to those we laugh with.  It is perhaps the most loving medicine. If we feel good laughing we should laugh to feel good. Throughout the ages physicians and sages have advocated a “merry heart” as the perfect remedy for whatever ails us. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote: “ Joy, temperance and repose, Slam the door on doctor’s nose.” When laughter erupts and bodies convulse, all sorts of chemicals cascade through the body. Over 600 different muscles are engaged in a good belly laugh providing the best internal aerobics gym. After a great laughter session, there is a lingering after-glow in which we reduce stress in the nerves, breath fully, expand our circulation, and let go of muscle tension. It  is ecologically sustainable; the more of it that is spent the more remains.

      Laughter seems to be hard wired into our evolution, originating in the tickling and play-fighting behaviors of primates. When young chimpanzees and other simians play-fight, they let out a rhythmic panting, which is their version of ticklish laughter.  When we are tickled, say under our ribs, our most sensitive and vulnerable areas are being touched.  Whether processed through sensitive nerve endings, triggered by our eyes reading a comic strip, or auditorily as we hear a joke, our brain is stimulated to produce  dopamime,  the “feel good” messenger carrier.  It ‘s addictive, like chocolate or sex.

     Laughter medicine seems to be tickling the whole medical profession. Robert Holden in 1991 opened Britain’s first Laughter Clinic , which he calls  “support group for joy.”

Within six years over 10,000 health professionals had attended his trainings. Dr. Madan Kataria , an Indian psysician, is so dedicated to the mental and physical health benefits of laughter that he created a yoga-based laughing technique called Hasya yoga. At his “laugh clubs” conventional Hatha yoga breathing exercises are combined with both intentional and unprovoked laughter. Hasya yoga has now become an acknowledged supporting cancer treatment.  Prof Dr. Ilona Papousek at the Insitute of Psychology at the University of Graz, who has studied the effects of laughter on stroke victims, found Hasya yoga to be more effective than exercise in bringing down blood pressure.

     Within the field of psycho-neuro-immunology, which studies how the mind effects the brain and immune system, exciting research has shown how humor and light-heartedness boost the immune system.  More white T cells, which prevent infection, are created; thus they are called “happy cells.”  Laughter acts as a safety valve to discharge build-ups of nervous energy and in doing so reduces serum levels of cortisol, dopac, adrenaline and growth hormone, reversing the classic “fight or flight” response during stress.

     Given that comedy is so healing and restorative in general, I would like to briefly pose some thoughts about creating comedy as a socially conscious woman. Much of the comedy I have written and enacted is written from, but not limited to, a feminist perspective. It incorporates a Dionysian propensity for exuberance, intensity, and “excess” in the sense of a “carnivalesque” approach to comic writing. It is crafted to be intentionally subversive, marginal, anarchic, paradoxical, unconventional, and risky.  It’s goal, as feminist literary critic Judith Little says, is to say “truly dangerous things obliquely.”  Women  have historically used their banter and wit to reshape and rescript lives that have felt oppressive or out of control.  An important aspect of the role of wit has been to gaze at the world through a slanted lens, gain distance and perspective, shape one’s own version of the world, and laugh at failure.

      Although my female voice issues from all my plays, the most overtly feminist of my works is Kali’s Follies .  I set out to de-colonize the female psyche invaded by introjected patriarchal values, as well as to unmask misogyny.  It meant, however, showing both the Emperor and Empress without their clothes. Female liberation entails more than disarming the patriarchy. It requires women being accountable for both conscious and unconscious collusion with oppressive forces.  Our lives inside female bodies have been largely immobile, fragile, objectified, commoditized, and docile. Women have had to imagine “how they appear to men in order to construct themselves for the desired effect of pleasing men.”  So insidious and pervasive are these internalized dictums that the female Trickster must be constellated who can jump out of and pull back the curtain on the system that holds both genders hostage. 

     All of my formal acting out deliberately aims to de-center, de-stabilize, and dis-locate cultural and ideological frames.  It sets the Trickster in me not only free but “at large.”

In the tradition of such feminist writers as Helene Cixous and Irene Irigaray, I have tried to write comedy where laughter erupts and splashes over the cultural demarcation line. I often cross a dangerous line beyond which I might find myself exiled and excluded. As I publicly disclaim in Escaping the Matrix “ I have always been on fire for the truth and often chocked on my own smoke! “

     One feature of women’s comedy that is different from male oriented comic fiction, in which the transgressive hero is usually reintegrated back into society, is that it is not so invested in an integrative function. Women’s comic writing often does not have a happy ending; often it serves to destroy the social order even if it cannot necessarily replace it. Women’s comedy is not designed to be a social safety valve, a gender bonding device, and assault, a teasing attack, or device designed to insure dominance through ridicule, the way much male humor has functioned. Male comedy has tended to be more aggressive and target  those seen as weak, infirm, or inferior. Women’s humor, instead, tends to mock norms, affectations, hypocrisies, and the mindless following of social expectations—not target individuals per se.  It tends to be more inclusive, relational, and less prone to make fun of what people cannot change, such as social handicaps or physical appearance.  Unfortunately, until recently, female comics such as Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, or Irma Bombeck have used self-deprecation—turning on themselves or other women—to get laughs. In the process, they have unwittingly only further colonized women’s sense of self esteem.

     Great female comic writers such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, and Zora Neale Hurston, however, have written works that are sardonic and satiric but in voices that are uniquely liminal, circuitous, inflammatory, subversive, and double.  They write in a language not of the Father, not phallocentric.  Works by these brilliant wits and social critics defy categorization.  They ridicule absurd mind-sets and rules and thus “clear space” within oppressive unhappy situations.  Women’s humor serves as an index to their values and roles, overturns the culture’s sacred cows, and confronts structures that keep women powerless and their lives narrow and shallow.  It acts as social commentator. It stands apart and reflects the energies and mechanisms of society.  As Dorothy Parker wrote, “ There must be courage, there must be awe…a disciplined eye and a wild mind…a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.”

     Until recently, women’s humor has not been something  we have known exactly how to use. Historically, humor has been treated as an all-male pastime; women have been shut out of its gender specific domain.  Women traditionally were not permitted to initiate laughter or, worse, laugh at sanctified male traditions. Even though women have always laughed heartily amongst themselves, historically, their humor was mostly confined to segregated domestic interiors.  Even then, however, no comedy has been as pervasive, hysterical, and obsessional as comedy by women for other women.  But women’s humor has been largely lost on men who have assumed they simply were incapable of “getting the joke.”  Schopenhauer, for example, believed that “women see what is immediately before them better than men, because they never look at anything else.”

      Women’s humor has developed from a different premise than that of men in that their tactics have needed to be those of survivors and not saviors.  The world they have been forced to inhabit has so often not been of their liking nor of their making.  The patriarchy has reinforced the message that there is really no place for a smart, witty. woman.  Indeed, the license to be outrageous on stage often does not extend to a cocktail party, where my robust wit is more likely to received as a threat to the male status quo. It seems we are still supposed to smile and curtsy our way to liberation. Seen as powerless, and thus humorless, women have traditionally been objects of comedy, the butts of the joke. Freud said women were “unlaughing.”  I love this quote by Mary Kay Bleakley who enumerates crazy-making double-binding societal messages:

You could get your point across much better if you would only…Speak up, Slow down. Move over. Come around. It’s no wonder that our self-confidence has a quicksand quality to it. We seem to be miles away from having the right personality as humorists and satirists because we are miles away from having the right personalities as women. We are too emotional, too hysterical, too moody, too illogical, too (fill in the blank). We always seem to be carrying the wrong baggage with us. We bring our feelings into the conference room and our logic into emergency rooms. The messages are confusing. We are cute when we are angry. And angry when we’re funny; we’re threatening when we’re glib, and amusing when we’re upset. It has taken us decades to discover, singularly, and collectively, who we are.

     In Demeter’s myth, her move from depression to rage is instigated by the bawdy jokes

of the crone Balbo.  The myth suggests that rage, coupled with humor, the ability to laugh at oneself, are sure signs that one is moving out of inferior feeling and getting past narcissistic egocentricism.  Balbo could be seen as the prototype of the Unruly Woman.  The unruly woman, embodied in such comics as Mae West and Rosanne Arnold, use laughter as a weapon for feminist appropriation.  In that they make “spectacles” of themselves, they are seen as threatening and slightly demonic.  Since there is not acceptable social outlets for women to express anger, when anger surfaces as humor, it is seem as perverse, grotesque, or insane. Still, female bodies and female desires, through inversion and “offensive” behavior, have made more room for the female psyche to be seen and heard. Misogyny has demarked the unruly woman as transgressive because she dares to claim her own desire.  Unruly comic women serve as models for returning the male gaze, reclaiming pleasure for ourselves, and negating women’s invisibility. Unruly women possess what might be called an “inexhaustible compulsion to excess” or a need to “up the ante.”

      I have discovered, however, in my own unruliness as a comic actress that I can trot all kinds of taboos and things female out of the closet. It has been a fantastic relief to lay down all that cultural baggage. By means of a certain kind of comic confession, a giving free rein to my “excessive” imagination ( my analyst used to say I imagined in 20 point font), and the vulnerability inherent in my own folly, the laughter generated has been powerfully self-defining and enlarging. Rather than divide, it seeks to build solidarity at no one’s “expense.”  I have used models female theatrical writers like Jane Wagner who wrote Lily Tomlin’s hit The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe and Eve Ensler, who wrote Vagina Monologues. Both of these works are creating a new genre of feminist comedy that perceives society from the underside, focuses on our anxieties and obsessions, and unmasks hegemonic patriarchal structure but without indulging in self-righteousness or heaving blame.  Most importantly, they are works that celebrate feminine comic sensibilities, a sense of community, and a female’s immense capacity for hilarity and sexual pleasure wherein everyone wins!  As Frances Miriam Berry said in the 1840’s “ It is a very serious thing to be a funny woman.”