We awoke this morning to find that a Facebook friend (Carl Brandt) posted on The Male Half’s wall that SHECKYmagazine had been “name-checked” on the Nick and Artie Show, the nationally-syndicated radio show hosted by Artie Lange and Nick DiPaolo. (The show debuted October 3 and is described as focusing on sports and entertainment.)
We hopped onto the N&A website and listened to hour one of the Thursday broadcast in which a caller, Karen from Boston, chatted with the hosts about the Steve Sweeney assault story (Scroll down to see our post on that). Sure enough, at the end of her call (at the 12:15 mark of the broadcast), she quoted the last line of the aforementioned SHECKYmagazine post– “It’s even more astonishing that anyone would tangle with a Boston comic! If she had done that in the 80s, she’d be in a full body cast right now.”
Tellingly, “Karen” referred to the author of the line (and to the author of the blog) as “he.” This is something we’ve noticed now for a long time. While it is true that the blog is named after a man. And while it might be argued that the tone of the magazine could be interpreted as masculine, we’ve gone to great lengths to convey that it’s a joint effort between two people– a man and a woman. We even have our photographs prominently displayed top left! We’ve adopted certain crazy conventions (like referring to The Female Half and The Male Half, and wiping out any use of “I” when writing posts) to make it clear that the posts are authored jointly. We’re not sure how anyone– let alone “Karen,” who is obviously a woman– could automatically use the masculine pronoun when referring to our blog. But it happens with alarming frequency.
We briefly addressed this very subject during a recent interview with Las Vegas Review-Journal (LVR-J) columnist Mike Weatherford. Weatherford’s Sunday column was based on that interview and contains the following pertinent passage, on the subject of married couples in comedy:
But they still don’t have a lot of company among married comedians. “There’s a few out there,” he says, “but they seem curiously reluctant to … ”
“Say they’re married,” she adds, finishing a sentence in the way long-married couples do. “(Promoters) tend to devalue the female half of the couple.”
Emphasis ours.
Promoters, readers, audiences– all tend to devalue the female half of the couple.
And we’re not whining. It is what it is. And it certainly has shaped how we’ve dealt with business and work. And we certainly understand how other couples seek to build a wall between their respective careers (usually at the insistence of the female half of the partnership).
But we’ve embraced it. For a time– back in 1988 or 1989, we strove to make it clear that we were separate entities, that we didn’t have to be booked together, etc. But, no matter how hard we tried, the message didn’t get through. We eventually rolled over. Now, we’ve totally given up and given in. And now, it’s on a billboard!
We especially like the billboard below, in the distance, that says, “Divorce Custody!” (It’s readable on larger versions of the pic, trust us!)