Salon.com > Olivia Munn

Olivia Munn: “I’m easy to hate. I get it”

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:30:00 +0000

It's a rather stressful time to be Olivia Munn. In June, the 30-year-old landed one of the most coveted spots in late-night, as a female correspondent on "The Daily Show," an accomplishment that unleashed a surprising geyser of commentary and criticism about women and comedy, starting with a post on Jezebel that sniffed at her credentials and accused the liberal sacred cow "The Daily Show" of sexism. (The post elicited a saucy rebuttal from the show's female staffers on Wednesday.)

"Looking back, it was ridiculous of me to even prepare!" one "Daily Show" hopeful complained to Jezebel. "Should I have gone to the gym more? Done Playboy? It's such a joke."

“The Daily Show’s” women: No sexism here!

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

The ladies of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" have spoken: Their boss isn't "a sexist prick."

This is apropos of Jezebel's recent allegation that the show has a "woman problem," based on its dearth of female correspondents and interviews with former female employees. A group of 32 current lady staffers have penned an irreverent public missive that begins, ehem, "Dear People Who Don't Work Here." Contrary to what you may have heard, especially amid the Olivia Munn fracas, they want you to know that Stewart is "the opposite of sexist," and their workplace isn't one "where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens." In fact, women make up 40 percent of the staff:

Olivia Munn “coerced” in Playboy?

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:32:00 +0000

Just last week she was slammed for being too sexy for "The Daily Show," but now Olivia Munn is generating sympathy from some feminists. That's because, as Amanda Hess reports today on The Sexist, her memoir reveals that she felt pressured into posing topless for Playboy. Based on Munn's account in "Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek," Hess writes that "Playboy's photographer, stylist, and team of handlers staged a day-long attempt to coerce Munn into taking it all off." It happened, as Hess sees it, in eight stages: Control, denial, social pressure, appeal to her sense of trust, "accidental" exposure, downplaying her concerns, silencing, anger, condescension and abandonment.

The short of it is that Munn rejected Playboy's first request to have her pose naked on the cover of the magazine, but accepted when a chance to pose clothed was offered. She signed, as Hess puts it, "a comprehensive contract specifying which specific areas of Munn were on-limits and off for the photographer -- side boob and underboob, yes; nipple, butt crack and vagina no." But when she arrived for the photo shoot, everything seemed suddenly up for negotiation.

Is Olivia Munn too sexy for “The Daily Show”?

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:26:00 +0000

Want to be a woman in comedy? Be funny but not too funny. Be beautiful. Or don't be beautiful, you sellout, you. Are you writing this down?

That nagging discomfort we lefty, abortion-loving angry feminists feel toward a show we otherwise adore only intensified this month when "The Daily Show" brought in its first new female correspondent in seven years -- and the plum, only occasional anyway position went to smoking hot Olivia Munn. In addition to recently co-hosting G4's "Attack of the Show!," the 29-year-old also happens to have been a Playboy cover girl and fills out a pink bikini for a Maxim pictorial better than Lewis Black ever could. Dander inevitably went up, notably in a thoughtful, widely circulated post in Jezebel about "The Daily Show's" well-documented "woman problem" and TrueSlant's list of five competent, non-bikini-wearing female comics who'd fit in fine on "TDS."