Tom Sales recently wrote an article for the Washington Post about the female cast members of Saturday Night Live. He says things like:
– “. . . cute Casey Wilson and glamorous Michaela Watkins have concurrently left. Watkins may have been just too classically pretty to be hilarious. Anyway, the absences of Fey and Poehler will be felt. ” (And yet Sales quotes Lorne Michaels as saying “‘When Amy did the show hosted by Josh Brolin, she was nine months pregnant. . . . There’s nothing that woman can’t do.'”)
– “The audience was rewarded for watching not only with Fey’s Palin and, on occasion, Poehler’s Hillary Clinton, but by the real people making by-now-obligatory SNL cameos: Palin dropped by to visit her doppelganger; Obama went on after having the gall to cancel two planned appearances (he tends to be funnier on his own than as a member of a large cast, ahem); and the stunningly dependable McCain made appearances that were uniformly terrific.”
First of all, I don’t get the joke about Obama. Second of all, what?: “the stunningly dependable McCain . . . uniformly terrific”; I would have just said: “and McCain . . . old.”
In her article “Tom Shales Is So Right, Beautiful Women Are Terrible At Comedy,” Alex Leo funnily fights the good fight: “As I was home alone, skimming blogs, being fat and ugly, I came across Julie Klausner’s post on Tom Shales’s recent take on SNL‘s hirings and firings. It was hard to read, not because of the content, but because the boil on my left cheek has started to obscure my vision. As a woman in comedy, I understood his point: Being ‘classically pretty’ works against you. I mulled this idea as I wiped ice cream from my mole hair, ‘This must be why Marilyn Monroe was so terrible in Some Like It Hot,’ I thought, rubbing my hump, ‘and why Tina Fey never made anything of herself after SNL‘ . . . . It’s not as if beauty works to a comedienne’s advantage. Sarah Silverman, Aisha Tyler, Chelsea Handler, Amy Sedaris, and Kristen Wiig are all gorgeous and massive disappointments.”
Being hot and being funny don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Conversely, being ugly and being boring don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but 9 times out of 10, they are. These are just facts based on assumptions based on Ayn Rand.
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Read more from Julie Klausner on her Web site.
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If you are funny/attractive, funny/lady with good personality, or funny/vegetarian, please submit to [email protected].
