I wrote something somewhere else you might like!
Because here’s the thing that we all know: just because you employ a ton of women (40%, they say!) on your staff doesn’t negate the possibility that the content of your show, and its public image—as in, who actually writes and says the words, who, in a word, are presented as the show’s “authors”—is male-skewed. No matter how porous the boundaries between the creative and production staffs, no matter how integral they are to the-day-to-day work of putting on the show, that’s got to be obvious to you. If your male writers are, as The Daily Show’s are, dominating your women writers at a rough 15:1 ratio, if it is men that you take onstage with you at the Emmys, then let’s be honest about what that means.
Enjoy. My A/C is broken and I’m about ready to murder someone.
Congratulations Michelle! You should feel proud and awesome for writing a great analysis of a potentially difficult topic that has been so well-received. It was so cool to see your byline on the Awl and then name-checked on Jezebel.
I must say that this whole kerfluffle seems completely trivial to me. It’s his show and we can watch it or not. Women in this country have so many more serious problems than the gender ratio of on-air faces on a tv show.
Well, it’s a well-known fact that feminists can only care about one thing at a time, so perhaps that’s a valid concern…
MM, the first part of your comment is exactly what I read from pretty much every anti-feminist who’s commented on this issue. Seriously.
The second part of your comment assumes, as Michelle said, that women can’t or shouldn’t fighting inequality or misogyny on more than one front at a time, which is an equally common way of belittling women’s concerns about sexism.
Is the way TDS hires women or portrays women/women’s issues a hill we’re all willing to die on? No, but nor is anyone saying it should be. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss the issue or the people to whom it is important and who do want to speak out.
Michelle, many congratulations on your piece on the Awl! It’s the best analysis I’ve read to date. It’s so disappointing, yet not terribly surprising, to see so much defensiveness on behalf of Stewart and The Daily Show and so much kneejerk anti-feminism in this debate. I simply don’t understand why it’s so difficult for many people to grasp that one can both enjoy a program, and its host, and still feel that both can do a bit better.
I might be blinded by my great love of the Daily Show, but I really don’t think the original Jezebel criticisms were fair.
The main reason is that Carmon didn’t make it clear that she was referring to writing/on-air staff and not all workers at the Daily Show. That was just shoddy. But anyway, I’m sure any company has angry ex-workers who are willing to talk bad about it.
And do you really think they use frat humor? It’s never really striked me that way on the whole.
@Endora: I love TDS but I think sometimes the humor can be pretty fratty. Less so than other shows, maybe, but that’s not much of a distinction when it comes to comedy.
Oh wait! Here’s a good post on the topic!
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/in-which-i-gingerly-criticize-jon-stewart
After reading that and thinking about it a bit, I see your point about fratty humor. But still, given how much they produce, I really think they get it right much, much more often than they get it wrong…
@Endora
No one is saying they don’t get it right more than they get it wrong, they’re saying that TDS can still do better. It isn’t enough in this world to say things aren’t as bad as they could be, you still have to point out the difference between the status quo and the potential inherent in the show.
@Michelle and BeckyS: I knew I was going to catch some smack for my comments. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply that we can only concentrate on one problem at a time-come on now. I do think that given all the other stuff that’s out there, the heat this is attracting seems out of proportion.
Having said that, I know perfectly well that if the show had no on-air people of color, I’d be suspicious and displeased. I agree wholeheartedly with the posters who said they love the show but hope and expect that Jon & co. will do better vis-a-vis women. I’m not a big tv person, so maybe if I watched it night after night I’d be more upset about the disparity.
My 22 year old daughter and I had a thought-provoking chat about this yesterday. I told her that, in my experience, women are just not as funny as men, especially in stand-up. She suggested that this was at least partly due to my expectations, that is, she believes that we’re socialized to find men funnier than women. So if a man and a woman presented the same material, many people would laugh for the guy but not for the woman. Now I’m pondering this.
Thoughts, anyone?
@MM: Having said that, I know perfectly well that if the show had no on-air people of color, I’d be suspicious and displeased.
And yet when women complain that TDS has almost no on-air women, very few female guests and a 15-1 ratio of male-to-female writers, you’re neither suspicious nor displeased?
You’re daughter’s right about women in comedy. Provocative or edgy humor, when coming from women, tends to be labeled with the usual dismal stereotypes of “bitchy”, “shrill” or “well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her.”
I stopped watching TDS after the election because I was burned out by the sexist Palin and Clinton jokes. I do watch it now from time to time, but once you see the Dude Humor edge, it’s hard to un-see it. As a viewer, I receive too many reminders that the jokes are not meant for me.
@mm: TDS is particularly worthy of criticism because it has such a liberal/progressive reputation.
@mischiefmanager: I don’t buy that Christopher Hitchens stuff for a second. Sure, maybe women are conditioned to opt for other fields than comedy, because comedy requires practitioners to be brash, bold, self-confident, critical, and opinionated while ladies are encouraged to be demure, soft-spoken, agreeable, passive, and pretty. Same reason, probably, that there are fewer female Op-Ed writers than male ones.
The women who do step up — Kathy Griffin, Margaret Cho, Joan Collins, Sarah Silverman, Kirsten Schaal, Ellen, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and so on — are not just very funny, they’re pretty brave.
Your piece was great, Michelle, because it undercut Emily Gould’s arguments with finality but without viciousness. And because it brought the focus of the discussion back to where it should be: not whether women are funny, but that The Daily Show remains primarily a boy’s club, and members of the TDS fan club are allowed to ding Jon Stewart for it. We criticize because we care.
oh, i’m a bit disappointed that we’re having this conversation here too.
These aren’t Daily Show problems, these are entertainment industry problems. Why are we crucifying TDS? What do we hope to gain from it? TDS is so far from the greatest offender. The show before TDS, on Comedy Central, (Tosh.0) is sexist, ignorant jokes from top to bottom.
Does TDS have room for improvement? Sure! But it also has a lot of smart and interesting and important things to say. I have not found this TDS vs feminists of the internet to be helpful or constructive at all.
@martha: TDS’s response was not helpful. It was defensive and evasive (or maybe they just missed the point?). Why give them a pass just because other shows are worse? Yeah, it sucks when something you love is also kind of sexist, but that doesn’t mean you should just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
Good article. I said it somewhere else, but I think this is going to go nowhere until someone takes the lead and makes specific demands to the producers in a pointed fashion. If that happens, I expect the exchange to go something like this:
Hire More Progressive Female Writers and Correspondents Movement: “Haw haw, funny letter. However, bullshit, production staff is not creative staff. Hire more progressive female writers or else you guys are hypocrites.”
The Daily Show: “Creating jokes is a delicate but arduous task. If we mess with the process as it stands we will mess up the business model that has been working for us, and viewership will drop. If we do that we will be doing a disservice to our shareholders.”
HMPFWCM: “Do it or you’ll regret it.”
TDS: “Make us.”
HMPFWCM: [months of public shaming campaign, boycott, media harassment]
TDS: “Okay, fine, Jesus, we’ll shake it up. Just stop making us lose money.”
Or maybe it would all go nowhere, who knows.
I always find it particularly upsetting when intelligent, generally progressive men have such a blindspot for their own sexism. Idiots are easy to dismiss; thoughtlessness from those who are otherwise thoughtful? That stings.
I stopped watching TDS after some infuriatingly dude-oriented joke about how A-Rod is so awesome, Jon would let him sleep with his wife. Not: so awesome that Jon would give his wife a high-five for sleeping with A-Rod. Not: so awesome that *Jon* would sleep with him. But: so awesome that Jon would pass the piece of property that is his wife to another dude for that other dude’s sexual gratification. That, to me, is clearly not a show that respects its female viewers.