Thing 10: More Media with Funny Women

I saw Bridesmaids last night. It was as funny as I've heard. Since I'd never followed Saturday Night Live, I was pretty unfamiliar with Kristen Wiig. She's a talented physical and verbal comedienne, and I hope she gets as many opportunities as Tina Fey has recently. I hope this is the final nail in the coffin of the remarkable argument that women aren't funny. I hope we get more media about women where they act, recognizably, like people. Particularly where the friends act recognizably like friends--goofy, affectionate, and open.

This is a mainstream movie that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors: it's full of named female characters, who have conversations with each other, that aren't about men. There are problems with the movie, of course, from a gender-politics standpoint: it frames all of the women primarily by their relationship status, even if their relationship partners are all pretty much unshown. The main character, Annie, is also framed by the failure of her dream-business, but she's the only character with an explicit career; none of the other women mention working. It's notable that the one fat character's sexuality is shown as less vanilla and more transgressive than anybody else's. There are also problems with the movie from an entertainment standpoint--a couple of lines that feel like a poor fit for the character, the big gross-out scene that feels like it came from another movie, the completely unmotivated resolution of the romantic subplot.

But overall, IT'S FUNNY. Calling an unfriendly flight attendant "Stove" instead of "Steve" is gonna make me laugh for weeks. Its humor is a gentler variation on the squirm humor that's been so popular for a while now; instead of putting mortifyingly tone-deaf people in normal situations and watching the havoc unfold, it puts a slightly neurotic but mostly normal woman in stressful situations that aren't completely implausible, and watches her sweat. That's a lot easier to take.

It's a movie that mostly lets women be people in their own right--and funny people at that. MORE OF THAT, PLEASE.