Quarantine Night School
Austin, TX | July 27, 2020
I’ve been attending night classes in female comedy this summer.
No, not from a university or an institution. From funny women themselves. Thanks to a gift card from my mom and to my local feminist bookstore, I have been spending my sleepless summer quarantine nights delving into the minds of comedians like Tiffany Haddish, Ali Wong, Amy Sedaris and their cohorts of radical laughter.
My husband, God bless him, is a morning person. He voluntarily wakes up early and joyfully retires to bed before midnight. I don’t get it. He’s truly fascinating to me, seeing as I was born at 10:00pm in the heat of the Texas summer to a night nurse and a firefighter. I think I have more memories set at night than I do during the day. Naturally, I come to bed a few hours after my husband. The past few weeks I have filled the wee-hours of the morning reading The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women by Sheila Moesche and illustrated by Anne Bentley. I’ve been studying the stand-up, sketch shows, satires, books and feature films made by the women detailed in her book.
A few lessons I have learned during my night classes:
There is power in talking about and laughing with taboo topics.
It’s not that bad! You’re just saying what everyone else is thinking.
The vagina is a treasure trove of comedy, any way you approach it.
Take the patriarchal societal expectations directed toward you and turn them into your comedic gold.
If you get people laughing, you can get people thinking critically.
I can’t seem to get enough of the life-giving, experience-affirming, body-celebrating jokes of the funny women who paved the way for me. I feel so validated and empowered listening to Tiffany Haddish joke about trauma, Ali Wong discuss motherhood, and Amy Sedaris harpoon the myth of perfect housewives.
Page after page, their stories and careers seem to reiterate a singular truth; no one else is going to make the comedy you want to see in the world, you have to make it yourself.
Is anyone going to tell my story of womanhood for me? No! Especially not my experience with endometriosis. My dad, my biggest fan and greatest cheerleader, once told me that he was uncomfortable when I spoke about my uterus. “Too bad! Get used to it!” I said. “Yeah! Get used to it!” my mom quickly snapped back at him. My uterus isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither am I.
It’s up to me to tell the stories I have yet to hear in the spheres of media, comedy, and entertainment. Women of all ages are ready to laugh at and with my experiences, because they used comedy to cope with their womanhood first. Thanks to the extraordinary femme comedians that have carved their way through bullshit to tell their stories with confidence and wit, I am able to do the same.