Man. You try to make a graceful exit from the week, and then the New York Times profiles not only Amy Poehler, but Jim Gaffigan, too? An embarrassment of comic goodness!
The Poehler article is interesting for hanging a lantern on the "she's funny for a girl" trope while still kind of saying, um...she's funny for a girl.
When Ms. Poehler, a native of Burlington, Mass., and a graduate of Boston College, first arrived in Chicago in 1993, the scene was in flux. “You’d hear, ‘Oh, women aren’t funny,’ and most of the improv teams were eight guys and one woman,” said Rachel Dratch, a Chicago veteran who would later join the “SNL” cast. “But within like four years it had kind of switched up.”
As Ms. Poehler rose through the ranks at ImprovOlympic (now known as I.O.) and Second City, gender divisions within these institutions’ comedy teams began to even out, and she found herself in the company of strong female performers like Ms. Dratch and Tina Fey, the future “Saturday Night Live” head writer and “30 Rock” creator and star, who appeared with Ms. Poehler in an I.O. group called Inside Vladimir.
Soon Ms. Poehler was invited to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a sketch comedy troupe whose formidable roster included Adam McKay, another future “SNL” head writer and the director of “Talladega Nights,” and Horatio Sanz, soon to be one of the show’s stars.
“We were a group where I think our shortest guy was like 6 foot 1,” recalled Matt Besser, a founding member. “So it’s not just intimidating to perform with us because of our experience, but also because we were literally towering above most people physically. But Amy was able to get onstage with us, and that just didn’t seem to matter.”
On the other hand, the Gaffigan article goes into an aspect of his act that I was unaware of:
He also said he was gratified by his fans’ repeated support for the decision he made about five years ago to quite literally clean up his act and purge it of the “cussing,” as he calls it, that he found he was using as a crutch. (On the meet-and-greet-line in Charlotte, he tried to warn some unsuspecting audience members about to buy one of his older CDs that his language was coarser.)The article also goes into how his wife was instrumental in developing many of the hallmarks of his act -- including the "inner voice." In its own way, I think that's as much a refutation of the whole "women aint funny" trope, even if it, at the same time, resurrects the whole "behind every great man is a..." thing. Now, if he would only tour to Canada...
“The topics I’m discussing — there’s no reason to curse when you’re talking about escalators,” he said. “Among comedians, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce are, in a way, the martyrs who fought for us to have the right to curse. I feel like they also made it possible for us not to.”
Mr. Gaffigan’s big break came in 1999, when he was booked to perform a stand-up set on “Late Show With David Letterman” after five years of trying. As a fellow Indiana native (Mr. Gaffigan grew up in Chesterton, in the northwest corner of the state), he said that he had regarded merely shaking hands with Mr. Letterman as something akin to “meeting Mark Twain.” Among the jokes he told that night was this one: “I’m from Indiana. I know what you’re thinking. Indiana. Mafia.” From behind him, he could hear the host giggling. After Mr. Gaffigan was finished, Mr. Letterman rewarded him with an honor that to this day he bestows only rarely: he invited Mr. Gaffigan to sit down next to him at his desk.
“Literally, that night, my life changed,” Mr. Gaffigan said.
Anyway, go about your business.
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