THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407070447
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
WOMEN, CHAUVINIST MEN have been insisting from time immemorial, have no sense of humor.
Women, feminists respond with alacrity, must have a sense of humor to put up with men.
Truce.
Books have been written recently that argue women get a bum rap because men traditionally have set them up as the butt of the joke. In America, some academics are saying, women in comedy are cast exclusively as shrews or bimbos. No wonder they don't laugh.
``Comedy positions the woman not simply as the object of the male gaze but of the male laugh - not just to-be-looked-at but to-be-laughed-at - doubly removed from creativity,'' complains Frances Gray, drama lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England. ``Hence the relentless stereotyping of women into roles which permit them to be looked at, judged, and laughed at as sexual objects: the dumb blonde, the wisecracking tart, the naive virgin, the dragon who doesn't realize she is sexually past it.''
Or, as relentlessly stereotyped actress Debbie Reynolds once put it, ``Cute, cute, cute - the ruination of careers.''
Gray brings her scholarly guns to bear in Women and Laughter (Univ. Press of Va., 202 pp., $35 cloth, $12.95 paper). Think about it. How many women have been accorded top comic status in the American mass media of this century?
The guys have Chaplin, Keaton, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, and, arguably, Dan Quayle.
Now name the gals.
Mae West, who kidded her own sexuality. Gracie Allen, so dumb nobody could communicate with her. Lucille Ball, who was always trying to get a job to become more than ``just a wife'' to Ricky.
``The essence of Chaplin is that he is his own man,'' says Gray. ``Lucy isn't her own woman; her triumphs are always partial, her power fragmented, her defeats always sanctioned by the narrative.''
She was programmed to lose.
Gray points to '50s sitcoms in which even the titles made it clear who was in charge: ``I Married Joan,'' ``My Little Margie,'' ``Father Knows Best.''
That may not be entirely fair when one considers the capable domestic center of most video households past was usually Mom. Ozzie Nelson was always one sandwich short at the societal picnic, as was Chester A. Riley, Ralph Kramden and - still and forever - Fred Flintstone. But Gray maintains that wives with real power constituted a threat.
``Tony Nelson, male lead in I Dream of Jeannie, was an astronaut, and Darrin, Bewitched by Samantha, was an advertising executive. Both men in other words had rather trendy professions that were both glamorous and well paid. But Tony, when he finally agrees to marry Jeannie, feels compromised by any attempt she makes to provide for them both . . . while Darrin was given to sniffing suspiciously at anything particularly well cooked and inquiring whether it had really been prepared in the proper (non-magic, time-consuming, tedious) way.''
Then came the '70s and Mary Tyler Moore, single, career-focused and, by implication at least, feminist. But she was white and middle-class, grumps Gray. And, worse, she was pretty - which made her more object than subject.
Julie D'Acci, an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that women in serious shows are pervasively portrayed as victims. In police shows particularly, when they are not secretaries or girlfriends of the male protagonists, women have been ``showcased as sex objects or used within the narrative as bait for criminals.'' There was, however, one dramatic series that aired from 1981 to 1988 pioneering the idea of women in partnership and in charge.
D'Acci's Defining Women: Television and the Case of ``Cagney and Lacy'' (Univ. of N.C. Press, 344 pp., $45 cloth, $16.95 paper) suggests that the show ``helped women fans not only reconceive themselves as women but also cope with and change aspects of their daily lives.'' That was at least in part because women were involved in the production as well as the cast, says D'Acci. Seventy-five of the 125 scripts were written or co-written by women, one of whom won an Emmy.
No joke.
As pop sexist Bob Dylan noted early on, the times, they are a'changin'.
Nobody's been laughing lately at Penny Marshall, and Roseanne Arnold cannot easily be labeled a sex object. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
As Lucy Ricardo, comedienne Lucille Ball ``isn't her own woman,''
argues Frances Gray.
by CNB