Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Lately, the comedy scene has been dominated by women who can’t seem to get their lives together. From Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana, who seem to simultaneously strut and fall through adulthood, to the quintessential female Trainwreck of 2015, Amy Schumer, there has been a trend of women in pop culture being just as helpless and confused about life as their male counterparts. Though actively flailing through life with the assistance of alcohol is rarely a thing to be praised, in this case it is.
There was a trend in the not-so-distant past where almost all of our televised adult-children were men. Meanwhile, the women stood on the sidelines, nagging and finger wagging. Take basically any long-running husband and wife sitcom — The King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, Modern Family. The wife is always the highly-competent, no-nonsense superhero, and the husband is the bumbling idiot. During its prime, Modern Family actually tackled this disparity directly. In Season Two, Claire and Phil decide to switch roles, with Claire taking over the fun parenting responsibilities and Phil laying down the law. It true sitcom fashion, it ends horribly. The type-A Claire pushes her son to have too much fun, and Phil turns into a familial dictator. As the episode was mocking the gendered trope in Modern Family‘s playfully biting tone, it was pointing to the problem: in comedy, women are shrews and men are dopes.
These stereotypes are detrimental to both genders. While hilarious, constantly portraying men as these pseudo-children who can barely handle holding down a steady job (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Workaholics, Joey from Friends) goes from being a comedy device to an underlying assumption that men are incompetent. Meanwhile, constantly casting women as the comedic “straight man” limits their performances and confirms the societal expectation for women to be borderline perfect. Also, these characters often come across as more shrewish than merely uptight. That’s why having the current influx of ladies who can’t handle life is so very awesome.
Allowing our pop culture women to adopt the adult-child persona men have been sporting for years has expanded the type of female characters we’ve seen. There’s the over-confident, hapless, and hilariously unfunny Dee (Kaitlin Olson) from It’s Always Sunny who will never succeed in her dreams to be an actress, the previously mentioned Abbi and Ilana (Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer) who take turns falling and dancing through life’s disasters, and we even now have a suburban-hating housewife role model in the form of You’re the Worst’s Lindsay (Kether Donohue). All of these ladies and countless others are not the prim and proper shrews of comedies past. They drink, they do drugs, they curse, they complain, they’re outright mean to people, but more than anything else they’re unapologetic.
The rise in female pop culture train wrecks has given us a host of original women characters to idolize while revitalizing the always funny but often male-dominated sphere of adult children comedies (see: Ferrell, Will). But more importantly, this rise has allowed female characters to tell their own stories. Often if you’re the crazy member of a comedic duo, you drive the action. Comedy narratives have become less about these women reacting to the men in their lives’ experiences and more about these ladies telling their own stories. This change has given female characters more agency while flooding us with a more diverse array of women characters. Man Seeking Woman’s career-driven Liz (Britt Lower) is worlds different from Master of None’s unsure-in-life female lead, Rachel (Noël Wells), who are both galaxies away from the grossly incompetent party center of Idiotsitter, Gene (Jillian Bell).
So I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you again, Amy Schumer. Once again, you and your movie Trainwreck have perfectly chronicled and contributed to a much-needed change in comedy, wine glass in hand. Now chug.
