Women in Comedy

I'm reading New Yorkers in batches, but since we were speaking of women in comedy ... the April 11th New Yorker has a must-read article on Anna Faris, of The House Bunny fame.  The article is entitled "Funny Like A Guy."  You can kinda access it here, but Faris is appearing in a movie entitled, "What's Your Number," which is apparently about a woman who learns (in Marie Claire) that if she sleeps with more than 20 guys, she'll never get married, so she goes back to each of the guys she has slept with to see if they're The One.  We could parse *that* premise, but first, interesting quotes:

The makers of "What's Your Number" were anxious about the number itself.  "We thought, Would twenty guys be too many for the audience to relate to her?"

Faris on rejecting certain female rom-com movie roles:

When Pratt [Faris' husband], tidies the house, he often finds discarded scripts with cover notes offering his wife a million dollars--which to Pratt, a regular on the NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation," seems like a lot of money.  Faris calls such parts "the girl," or "counce-card roles," after the reflective sheet that softens the light around an actor, because the whole job is to giggle, simper, and coo.  She told me, "I feel like I did that in 'My Super Ex-Girlfriend' " -- a 2006 film in which her role consisted of allowing Luke Wilson to admire her ass and then turning with melting eyes as he ran off to have sex with Uma Thurman.  "I hated being on that movie so much I was glad when it bombed," she said.  "These roles are destroying a generation of boys, who think we'll forgive any kind of assholey behavior."

On audience expecations of female characters:

Nicolas Stoller, the director of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," ... says, "There's a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likeability for women stars.  You need to make the actress completely adorable, or else she'll be thought of as the straight man or the bummer ..."  To make a woman adorable, one successful female screenwriter says, "you have to defeat her at the beginning.  It's a conscious thing I do--abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun.  It's as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie."