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Judd Apatow was on Chelsea Lately last night promoting his new movie Bridesmaids, the producer’s positively-reviewed first foray into the genre of lady comedy. In his discussion of the flick, Judd told Chelsea Handler he now thinks women are funnier than men, but also lamented the lack of porn and dick jokes on the set — the norm when he’s shooting with an all-dude cast. Chelsea handled (pun unavoidable) the remark deftly, explaining that women can be filthy too, although they might have the good sense to hide that fact from the man who hired them and stands to give them more work in the future.
All this talk about dude Apatow movies and chick Apatow movies raises the question, “What about just, like, people Apatow movies?” Bridesmaids is currently at the center of the “are women funny?” debate — which isn’t going to be resolved by continuously dichotomizing female and male humor as intrinsically separate things. Judd saying that this film has taught him that women are funnier than man feels almost patronizing, especially when he goes on to lament the lack of male humor on his set. It’s appropriate that this discussion came up on Chelsea Lately — we’ve praised Chelsea on this blog before as being a bridge between traditionally female and traditionally male conceptions of comedy, someone who isn’t defined by either and is therefore freed-up, comedically.
So what about an Apatow movie that treats people as people and humor as humor — something that lets us into the point-of-view of both Kristen Wiig and Jason Segel‘s characters, without defining them as archetypes of an entire gender. The problem of women in comedy isn’t going to be solved by insisting that chick humor is funnier than dude humor, and getting outside of those kinds of limiting boxes is liable to make stuff funnier in general — and isn’t that, ultimately, the only point?
judd was only saying women are funnier so that people go and see his movie. Clearly we can see he was lying, it was written all over his face.
There are a small number of good comedic actresses like kristen bell but there aren’t many. Whereas with men there’s quite alot of good male comedic actors.
The whole men vs women thing is very childish, so many women on twitter saying go see bridesmaids and something borrowed to support women in comedy. I say go and see good comedies to support good comedies regardless of the gender of the cast.
Normally I’d agree with you, Sarah, but the buzz around Hollywood is that Bridesmaids is the make-or-break for female writers and female comedies as a whole, with executives effectively saying “let’s see how Bridesmaids does, and if it’s a hit, maybe we’ll take a look at your script” to every female writer over the last few months, from what I’ve heard. So people are talking up Bridesmaids because the careers of several people, even those not involved in the movie, depend on it being a hit.
Kristen Bell is funny? That’s news to me.