Producer-director Judd Apatow (The
40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked
Up, Superbad) may
seem an unlikely feminist hero, but his latest hit movie,
Bridesmaids, was widely
treated as a breakthrough for progressive and egalitarian ideas.
Though directed by a man (Paul Feig)—and one, at that, who gave his
autobiography the (intentionally) ironic title Superstud—the movie was written by two
women (Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) who were treated on a par
with the breakers of glass ceilings. For in almost every one of the
dozen or so reviews that I perused, the reviewer mentioned the
authors’ sex in connection with the notorious article by
Christopher Hitchens which appeared in Vanity Fair in 2007 and which claimed to
answer the question of “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” These critics
seemed to like Bridesmaids
less for any intrinsically cinematic merit it had than because they
regarded it as the definitive refutation of Mr. Hitchens’s
shockingly sexist opinion.
It would doubtless be ungallant of me to point out that it only
took four years for the apologists for women’s comedic talents to
find their counter-example. But what an example it was! Let me
describe to you as carefully as I can what is perhaps the most
memorable scene in Bridesmaids. Miss Wiig, who also stars
as Annie, the maid of honor, has taken the bride (Maya Rudolph) and
the other bridesmaids out to lunch at a decidedly seedy-looking
Brazilian restaurant before they all go to a bridal boutique to
pick out their dresses. Each is swathed in yards of gossamer and
lace when it becomes apparent that something in the lunch did not
agree with them—and in a way so disagreeable as to make Mr.
Hitchens’s noxious views look like a meeting of the minds. There is
a mad dash to the shop’s only ladies’ room which, rather
improbably, contains only one toilet and one sink.
Mr. Feig’s camera, while discreet enough about one kind of
bodily effluvium, lingers just a bit on another kind as two of the
bridesmaids fight for access to the toilet and a third finds it
more convenient to sit in the sink. The bride, who naturally has
put on the pouffiest and whitest of the dresses, is thus hobbled in
the race to the loo and instead attempts to leg it to one at
another establishment across the way. She doesn’t make it, but
instead sinks to her knees in the middle of the street with head
bowed and her ample skirts ballooning about her lower extremities
like a wilted but still white flower. Hilarious, I think you will
agree. As Manohla Dargis of the New
York Times put it in her glowing if not uncritical
review, the movie “goes where no typical chick flick does: the
gutter”—literally, in this case—thus answering doubters with a
demonstration that “women can go aggressive laugh to
aggressive-and-absurd laugh with men.”
Funnily enough, it turns out that Mr. Hitchens never said women
couldn’t be funny or even that there were not many women who are as
funny as the funniest men. He had written that they weren’t
naturally so, for reasons that had to do with evolutionary biology
(men need humor to attract women; women do not need humor to
attract men) and that when women were funny they tended to assume more
masculine characteristics. As Fran Lebowitz put it to him: “The
cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the
equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is
largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than
that?” Thus the gross-out humor of Bridesmaids, to say nothing of the
furious feminist response to his article—“That’s not funny!” being
the answer to the old riddle about how many feminists it takes to
screw in a light bulb —rather tended to confirm than to disprove
Mr. Hitchens’s point, I would have thought.
Miss Dargis was only one of those queuing up to write about the
movie at the New York
Times—which was to name its first female executive
editor three weeks later. In addition to her review, the paper
devoted not one but two Sunday feature articles, including a
3,000-word magazine profile of Miss Wiig, and at least three posts
on its Artsbeat blog. The explanation for this love-bombing by the
one-time newspaper of record and pillar of the establishment must
lie in an obscure sense that the Misses Wiig and Mumolo’s efforts
amounted to a vindication of the rights of women. As Miss Dargis
put it, “in most wedding movies an actress may have the starring
part (though not always), but it’s only because her character’s
function is to land a man rather than to be funny. Too many studio
bosses seem to think that a woman’s place is in a Vera Wang.” The
bastards! But if women can do gross-out comedy as well as and,
well, as grossly as men, that’s a victory for equality!
In the same way, the foreign press in May was much agitated by a
craze in Europe and Canada (which oddly didn’t make much of a media
impact here) for something called SlutWalking. This was born after
some hapless Toronto police constable had told a women’s group that
if they wished to minimize the dangers of sexual assault, they
shouldn’t dress like sluts. You or I might think such
unexceptionable advice only a prudent act of deference to reality,
but the entire feminist movement seems to have arisen as a single
feminist to pronounce anathemata on the head of the poor copper,
who of course was forced to issue a groveling apology for his
insensitivity. Numbers of them proceeded to parade about their
various village commons dressed as sluts—though in some cases they
had to carry signs or write the word on their outfits so that
people would know what they were supposed to be—in order to tell
reality where it could get off.
THE WEEK AFTER Bridesmaids opened to a strong
second-place box-office showing behind the teenage superhero movie
Thor, the New York Times Magazine ran a curious piece by British
blue-stocking Jenny Diski titled “An Unspeakable Word Is the Word
That Has to Be Spoken.” It was a paradoxical title, as the
unspeakable word that had to be spoken—a well-known vulgarism for
the female pudenda—remained unspoken and even unwritten in the
article itself, although it echoed throughout. Among other
fascinating tidbits, for instance, Ms. Diski revealed that the BBC
had lately been the scene of a violation of the taboo on two
separate occasions as news readers had attempted and unaccountably
failed to pronounce the surname of the British culture minister,
Jeremy Hunt.
The Times, perhaps with
a vague sense of being mocked for its prudery by one of its own
contributors, appended to Ms. Diski’s article an excerpt from the
New York Times
Style Manual’s entry for
“Obscenity, Vulgarity, Profanity” by way of explanation. After
citing the principle of “civility” as the nearest it could come to
a reason for the paper’s reticence, it included the following
warning injunction, that “an article should not seem to be saying,
‘Look, I want to use this word, but they won’t let me.’ ” More than
one reader seems to have complained about Ms. Diski’s apparent
breach of the paper’s own standards, as the matter was subsequently
taken up by the paper’s “Public Editor,” Arthur Brisbane, who
sought an explanation from the magazine’s editor, Hugo Lindgren. He
was told that the latter, together with a staffer whose official
title appears to be “associate managing editor for standards”—and
you wonder why the Times
is going broke!—had “discussed the question and decided carefully
on how to handle it.” So that’s all right then. As Mr. Brisbane put
it, “I suppose we can feel assured that this loitering at the edge
of propriety is not done heedlessly.”
Actually, I would have guessed that it was not. The paper’s
edging up to that “edge of propriety” could not have been done
without being mindful that such forbidden territory is the natural
home of culture in an age whose critical vocabulary recognizes no
higher term of praise than “transgressive.” Like other journalistic
organs, the Times can
hardly ignore this if it wants to be taken seriously. The only odd
thing is that it remains so hesitant, not to mention shame-faced
and apologetic, about its own departure from what are so clearly
(as Ms. Diski points out) outmoded standards of propriety. Maybe
this is because even the most culturally edgy, among whom the
Times would clearly wish
to be counted, feel a residual sense of decorum not only about the
pudenda—which in Latin means “that which it is fitting to be
ashamed of”—but about other physical realities that are no less
real for being kept tastefully out of sight. Come to think of it,
isn’t that also what women used to do with their capacity for
cracking tasteless jokes?
