Feminism is the new funny

April 25, 2008 | Few words have less of a historical and cultural connection to one another than "funny" and "feminist." In fact, were one to list impressions often associated with feminism in the cultural imagination, "humorless" might fall just below "shrill" and "hairy." But longtime improv and "Saturday Night Live" colleagues Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who on Friday open in "Baby Mama," are two of the funniest women out there, and they have spent the last few years turning long-held assumptions about Hollywood, gender, politics and funniness on their head.

"Oooh, that sounds like I have some kind of power. I hope I use it for good!" said Poehler when I presented her with this thesis.

Poehler, a self-proclaimed feminist ("Absolutely I am!" she declared without hesitation when I asked her), once told Bust magazine, "I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled." She has also delivered some of "Saturday Night Live's" most female-friendly material, like her Weekend Update routine exhorting Hollywood's young stars to stop removing all their pubic hair. ("Ladies, what's up with all the deforestation going on down there? You need hair down there! ... There was a time when a lady garden was as big as a slice of New York pizza!") More recently, Poehler and Fey's biting commentary has fed into dialogue about the election, and the punch line "Bitch is the new black" is now appearing on pro-Clinton T-shirts (despite strenuous protestations that it was not any kind of endorsement). Fey, who was the first female head writer of "Saturday Night Live," has woven sophisticated humor about race, gender, corporatization and the objectification of MILFs into her NBC show "30 Rock"; one episode lampooned a groundbreaking feminist comedy writer (Carrie Fisher), nudgingly suggesting that Fey herself is on track to be, well, a groundbreaking feminist comedy writer.

Now, Fey and Poehler star in "Baby Mama," a fertility comedy built on the "Odd Couple" buddy model -- now with more frozen sperm! -- and one of the first comedies in years to sell itself on the pairing of two women. It's a throwback to the days when Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler and Shelley Long roamed the multiplexes and a sharp testament to the ways in which Fey and Poehler have upended the old "women aren't funny" trope, most recently revivified by Christopher Hitchens in his lady-baiting Vanity Fair piece of a year ago. Like so much stereotyped vitriol, the Hitchens piece dropped at a moment in which the assumptions on which it drew were being openly threatened: Fey's television show "30 Rock" was drawing critical acclaim, and Sarah Silverman and Amy Sedaris were media darlings.

This spring, funny women are even more visible on the pop culture landscape, thanks to Silverman's "I'm fucking Matt Damon" video, Fey and Poehler's viral "Saturday Night Live" skits, the post-writers' strike return of the heavily awarded "30 Rock," and now, "Baby Mama." Even Vanity Fair extended a lame mea culpa by putting Fey, Poehler and Silverman on its cover, along with a piece that conceded that women might be funny, as long as they were hot, and willing to be photographed in slutty outfits.

Of course, women are funny. At least some of them. And that's particularly useful if you happen to be a politically and socially aware performer with something to say. As Poehler said, "You can get a point across better by making people laugh than by stridently telling them anything."

Not that there's anything strident going on in "Baby Mama," a broad comedy -- think lispy birthing coaches saying "pewineum" -- that's a closer cousin to, say, "Stripes" than it is to "Tootsie" in its interest in social critique. Though the movie digs around in issues of class and a fertility-obsessed culture, there is nothing highfalutin going on here.

Both Poehler and Fey have talked about the influence of earlier generations of comedians, especially ones like Tomlin and Midler and Teri Garr and Diane Keaton, performers whom Poehler described to me as "funny women who you imagine would be funny in real life, who played kind of age-appropriate roles and who looked regular. The combination of those things were commonplace when we were growing up and might not be now."

"Baby Mama" has the DNA not simply of male buddy pictures from "The Odd Couple" to "Wedding Crashers," but also of 80's-style lady-driven or domestic comedies like "Baby Boom," "Mr. Mom" and "Outrageous Fortune."

"I studied a lot of 'Working Girl' stuff," said Poehler. The class differences depicted in Mike Nichols' 1988 Staten Island fable are central to the dynamic between Fey's all-organic Kate and Poehler's Big Gulp-quaffing Angie. But "Working Girl," like "Baby Mama," was not simply a film about class; it was about what happens when a working life collides with female life. Produced at a time when Hollywood was wallowing in feminist backlash, it makes sure that Sigourney Weaver's wealthy, ambitious, chilly villain of a boss, Katherine Parker, is punished for her emasculating power when Harrison Ford leaves her for the softer, more feminine Melanie Griffith. "Working Girl's" message was clear: Truly dedicated career women could have power, but they could not have happy lives.

It's exactly the trade-off described by single, childless organic grocery executive Kate Holbrook (Fey), who explains in voice-over that while she spent her 20s and most of her 30s doing everything she was supposed to do at work, "Some women got pregnant. I got promotions."

Instead of serving as the end of the story, however, that's the beginning of "Baby Mama." Kate turns to a sperm bank, and when that doesn't work, to Angie, Poehler's character, who soon leaves her deeply scuzzy boyfriend Carl (Dax Shepard) to move in with Kate. "What's nice about 'Baby Mama,'" said Poehler, "is, and I don't know if we necessarily, collectively decided for this to happen or not, but that as the movie goes on, our characters have to depend less and less on the men in the film." Angie decides to move on from a man who is holding her back, and in doing so realizes that she is happier on her own. "Tina's character," said Poehler, "is ready to start a family with or without a husband, which is, one could argue, maybe a different kind of story."

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