Female comics get due with ‘In On the Joke’
It wasn’t that long ago that successful female comedians were forced to stifle themselves to be funny. But it was the obstacle that all of the first women in comedy had in common on their journey to fame. For Joan Rivers, Moms Mabley, Minnie Pearl, Phyllis Diller and many others, masking their femininity, sexuality and intellect added extra layers to showbiz’s glass ceiling. It was only through their determination and undeniable talent that they managed to redefine the boundaries of their craft. In the pages of the justreleased “In On the Joke,” bestselling author Shawn Levy (“The Castle on Sunset”) unearths a lost history in stand-up.
Q: How did the research for this book on pioneering comedians compare with previous books you’ve done on male figures in classic Hollywood?
A: I had to start from almost zero. I’m 60 years old, so I have memories of seeing many of these women perform. And of course, Joan Rivers was with us until about a decade ago — still vital and active. I knew Phyllis Diller’s work, I remember Totie Fields and Moms Mabley performing before their deaths. But I only knew them as someone who consumed the entertainment. I really didn’t have the ability to write about them or tell their stories . ... A whole chunk of this history was new to me, so I learned along with the reader.
Q: This particular period between World War II and 1970 is such a fertile time for the evolution of modern standup comedy. How did women have to adapt to get visibility on stage?
A: The earliest female comedians had to create a persona around themselves and play against their femininity. Moms was playing a granny when she was in her 30s and 40s. Minnie Pearl (aka Sarah Colley) was college-educated, and to do comedy, she pretended to be an uneducated rube. Phyllis Diller often played the housewife who got shocked with electricity through her hair. Even Joan Rivers in her early career was the girl who couldn’t get a date — although she had been married and her marriage had been annulled.
The one exception was a woman I literally knew nothing about, Jean Carroll, who was performing stand-up dressed like a man in a tux, telling jokes about her family, no-good kid or lazy husband in the 1940s. They all had to do something to disfigure or deform themselves, or put a bracket around themselves and say, “I’m not really a woman. I don’t have the problems of women.”
Q: The book opens with Phyllis Diller dressing up as a man in order to get into the Friars Club Roast in 1983 — even though at that point she was probably bigger than any male comedian who was allowed to be there.
A: When Phyllis Diller performed on television in the ‘60s, she was a movie star, she was playing soldout theaters all over the country, and she’d go on TV and get one-tenth of what Jack Benny or Milton Berle was being paid. She had several TV shows and if they didn’t immediately prove themselves, they got the rug pulled out.
Meanwhile, Bob Hope was under contract to NBC and Milton Berle had a contract that paid him for 25 years after he went off the air.
Q: How is this book able to add to the discussion about the roles and opportunities open to female comics today?
A: When this book is in the hands of active comedians, both women and men can see how much of what happened is still going on and how many genderbased obstacles still pervade. I think that conversation is still worth having.