"Who hates the term 'female comedians'?"

I do! My hand is up!

"Do you get the, 'I usually don't think women are funny'?"

"'I don't usually like black comics, but you alright.'"

"I get that all the time."


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This should not have been a debate.

My right to safety is not a discussion.

To put this into perspective, could you imagine if Kamau held a "debate" about New York's Stop-and-Frisk policy between asked a white male officer from the NYPD and a black male victim of police molestation? "We need the ability to continue verbally harassing people after we have physically violated their civil liberties. It's comedy!"

And Kamau was right about that moderator. What was up with that guy?

For all of the people who have ever asked, "Is it really worse for women on the internet than it is for men?", or, "Is it really worse for women in comedy than it is for men?", the unequivocal answer remains, "YES, OF COURSE IT IS!" Whenever a woman stands up and speaks, especially for the rights of women, she is immediately a target for attack, even when people agree with what she is saying.

For a big drop in the even bigger bucket of proof, here's a link to what happened to Lindy West after the "debate":

If Comedy Has No Lady Problem, Why Am I Getting So Many Rape Threats?, Jezebel.


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Funny ladies who inspire me

Janeane Garofalo and Maria Bamford recently visited Jackie Kashian in The Dork Forest podcast, and their conversation made my day. It's nice to hear people talking about issues like the challenges of women working in the entertainment industry and financial management (and beads!).

Thank you, Janeane, Maria, and Jackie, for continuing to provide me with positive, quirky, distinctive images of funny ladies in media, images that I hope will increase in number and influence in the future.


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I want to see his scatting and jazz hands.

Skip to 6:10 for the NSFW reference.

From Rob O'Reilly's "About Me":

I love puns, board games, pandas, netflix, sushi, Wilco, Lupe Fiasco, We Are Scientists, New Pornographers, 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Extras and the Office. I also like girls who like those things.

I like nine of those things! Also, he totally does look like "Harry Potter and John Lennon had a baby."

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When I have presentations to do,

I like to think of myself as a young comedian working on my stand-up act, like Patton Oswalt below, but without the expletives:

The A.V. Club: What if things don’t go well? Are you able to get perspective on that pretty easily, or is it bruising if something doesn’t really work?

Patton Oswalt: It’s not that it’s personally bruising. I’m in New York right now, and I had to run two sets for a TV show, so I went to two clubs. I went to Comix and I did my set and it went fine, and then I went to Gotham, and I ate it so fucking hard. [Laughs.] You get to a point when [the audience] knows who you are, so they’re happy to see you, but every now and then, you just get that, “This shit is not flying.” And then it’s even worse, because they’re like, “This asshole’s on TV, and he’s not fucking funny.” Like they almost expect you to know what the fuck you’re doing after you’ve been on TV for a while. So when you eat it like that… I actually ended up being pretty excited as I was re-writing it in the cab home [from Gotham], because I was like, “Oh, I have a lot more to work on.” I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.”

AVC: Is it better now than it was? At the beginning of your career, when you weren’t as known, it seems like it would have been an uphill battle every time, getting an audience on your side.

PO: Definitely. But you know what’s really weird? I’m grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over. Because I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn’t like that battle, or they just couldn’t do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience. And I think that’s really, really important. That’s why they’re okay stand-ups, but they’re never going to be great, because they don’t have that presence. They never built those muscles up.

I have a lot more to work on, too! And I would never have a home birth.

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