funny women

Let’s make this Decree short and sweet. Adam Carolla, a washed-up douche with some seriously skewed views of gender and sexuality, decided to squawk about unfunny women in a New York Post interview this weekend. Yes, that tired argument. Again. Seriously though, who cares what Adam Carolla thinks? He didn’t even make me chuckle during his brief time as a Celebrity Apprentice, and that’s rookie stuff.

Many of us have, at some point, asserted that we “don’t feel like leaving the house.” It may take a few days, several long naps, and many hours of Criminal Minds reruns, but eventually most of us manage to get out the front door and back to our regularly-scheduled lives. Sara Benincasa, not so much. You may know Benincasa from the spot-on Sarah Palin impression  she perfected back in 2008, or perhaps from her take on a vlogging Peggy Olson.  Perhaps you’re heard the sex-and-relationship show she formerly hosted for Cosmo Radio on Sirius XMchannel, or tuned in to the more mental-health-focused “Sex and Other Human Activities,” podcast she currently hosts with fellow funny person Marcus Parks. Or maybe you’ve seen her sharing a bathtub with luminaries like Margaret Cho and Donald Glover on her web chat show, Gettin’ Wet with Sara Benincasa. 

But, as revealed in Benincasa’s new memoir, getting out in the world has been both more difficult and more mordantly funny than you might imagine. Based on her one-woman show of the same name, Agorafabulous! Dispatches from My Bedroom is the story of how one girl’s anxious, clenched-sphincter childhood blossomed into adolescent panic attacks and then, as a college student, into full-blown agoraphobia. Along the way, there’s public embarrassment (Benincasa’s panic attacks curtail a school trip to the beach, to the chagrin of a tanning-obsessed gaggle of New Jersey mean girls), family confusion (at the hight of a panic attack, she subjects her mother to four and a half hours of the same Dave Matthews Band song) and cereal bowls full of urine (at a particularly challenging juncture during college, she developed a fear of toilets.)

There’s also a revelation: This is not a recovery narrative, and Benincasa isn’t cured by a new medication, a folksy Robin Williams-esque medical figure, or the love of her life. She’s here, she’s got irrational fear, she’s used to it.

The television newswire was abuzz last week with the hiring of two new SNL funnywomen, Jenny Slate and Nasim  Pedrad, but as it turns out, they’re not there to up the vagina quotient on a show that has always been Mostly About The Men.  No, Slate and Pedrad are replacements for last year’s new ovary-hires, Michaela Watkins and Casey Wilson.  And I suppose I should be saying something now about how insulting it is that women aren’t considered funny (thanks a bunch Chris Hitchens) and that there appear to be designated lady-spots on the cast of SNL – the 2009-2010 cast will contain just four inner-gonads havers.

But as I was trying to build up the requisite head of steam to write such a piece, I found I couldn’t, for once, muster the outrage.  See, I wish I had something super-intelligent to say about either Watkins or Wilson, but let’s face it: at the best of times, I’m a casual SNL watcher.  And just for fun, ask yourself this question: do you know ANYONE who watches Saturday Night Live faithfully anymore?  I mean, absent complete boredom of a Saturday evening I can’t imagine forcing myself through an entire live broadcast.  Hortense at Jezebel used to have people sit up and join in a thread, but once Tina Fey gave up Sarah Palin’s ghost last fall there was little appeal in it anymore.  So I can’t help but feel, somehow, that it’s a compliment that few women are “funny enough” (scare quotes intentional) to be regular SNL cast members these days.  It’s sort of like that time in my eight-grade gym class when the girls were made to watch the boys play basketball so that we’d “learn something.”  Oh, we did, and that lesson was: bumping the ball with your knees does not count as dribbling.