Modified On January 11, 2008
An article on CanadianPress.com (with no byline?!?), loosely pegged on the WGA strike, kicks around the matter of gender in the writers’ room. There are plenty of quotes from female picketers, including this, from Sarah McLaughlin, who wrote for That 70s Show:
Sitcoms typically draw their writing talent from standup clubs, where women are scarce, but that doesn’t mean that witty women aren’t plentiful, she said.
To which we say, “Balderdash!” (Or Balderdash X 2!)
1. Women aren’t “scarce” in standup clubs.
and
2. Sitcoms typically don’t draw their writing talent from standup clubs.
We’ve commented in the past on this annoying trend among producers on more than one occasion. The trend has been to draw talent from “alternative” sources– The Ivy League or The Onion or workshops or anywhere but comedy clubs.
We suspect that somewhere along the line (probably when the fifteenth or sixteenth article about how Letterman’s staff was made up entirely of Harvard grads or the twentieth piece on The Simpsons that mentioned the Ivy League pedigree of the writers and show runners) the buzz in H-wood was that, in order to field a “fresh” and “new” creative team, they had to have marinated in the irony that is unique to Cambridge.
And, in true Hollywood fashion, a trend starts to resemble a rule after a while (think Groundlings or Second City).
We also suspect that in addition to the pull, there was a push– If you want to field a fresh and funny creative team, the last place you want to look would be among all those “jokey” and “set-up/punchline-y” wretches that ply their vile trade in the comedy clubs.
We say, if you’re going to hire a female writer, you can’t get a tougher one– who is more suited to a writers’ room– than a standup comic. A real one, not a comic who goes up onstage in L.A. because her manager told her it was a good idea. A comic who has a tough hide from a few gigs in flyover country where the audience provided a little… resistance.
And, when, as McLaughlin states, “a male writer says flat out, that women aren’t funny,” you can bet a female comic will have a rejoinder. It’s a nifty trick she picked up by doing all those hell gigs. Would a female comic run from the room? We think not. Regardless of whether that room is “more like (a) locker room, where writers cultivate a competitive atmosphere to squeeze the best jokes out of the staff.”
How’s this for a solution: Hire nothing but female writers. Problem solved. No competitive atmosphere, no locker room, no meltdowns. Throw in a token guy writer or two, just to make it look good.