Category Archives: Funny Feminism

You Could Be There: SOLOCOM 2016 Picks

2016_solocom_icon_reversedIf you don’t already know, SOLOCOM is NYC’s Only All-New Solo Comedy Festival. The fest takes place November 17-20 and since comedy often gets a reputation for being…less than feminist (ok, that’s an understatement), I felt it my duty to highlight the most subversive shows being performed at the 4th Annual SOLOCOM.

SOLOCOM was founded by the wonderful Peter Michael Marino who to this day remains the only teacher in my many years of schooling–comedy and otherwise to say that misognist, homophobic, and racist writing would not be tolerated in his classes (I remember seeing one male student leave and never come back). I have followed Marino’s work as a performer and the work he supports as a producer and festival programmer ever since.

Marino, over email said that he created SOLOCOM four years ago “to provide artists with a nourishing platform to debut brand new work solo comedy material.” Having worked in the solo show and comedy genre for so many years as a solo writer, performer, producer and director, he thought there was a gap in solo performance that needed to be filled. “Many solo shows can fall into the category of naval-gazing and sentimentality, and I wanted solo artists to have a place to create work that had a comedic bent while having universal themes and mold-breaking concepts of execution.”

Additionally when asked about why it’s important for people to start to dust themselves off from our collective post-election mourning, Marino said: “We need comedy and entertainment now…more than ever.”

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How to Not Tell a Rape Joke–Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy And Little Else!

Performance still from ASKING FOR IT

Performance still from ASKING FOR IT

Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy And Little Else! is a performance that’s very much about performance. It’s a one-woman show where the performer runs out into the audience to steal sips of audience member drinks, leaving lipstick trails on our cocktail glasses. The character that Adrienne Truscott portrays is a party girl who just wants to go out and have fun. Along the way, she encounters a bartender who wants to get her blackout drunk so that the men at his bar can have their way with her… again. When told from this character’s perspective, the idea is horrifying. Then you start to realize how nonchalantly this “joke” could be told from a comic’s mouth into a microphone. Truscott’s anonymous character is the female butt of a misogynist joke manifested in the flesh. She’s the embodiment of the woman whose body and misery is someone else’s punch line. Truscott wants the audience to remember that the woman on the receiving end of a rape joke is in fact a real human being who statistically is out in the world being assaulted somewhere right now.

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FUNNY FEMINISM #7: The Sex Drive of a Woman — An Interview with Mary Neely

A regular column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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Mary Neely is a (now) 25-year-old actress, writer, feminist, filmmaker, and web-series-creator. She can do it all. Based in Los Angeles, her debut short film, “The Dresser” played at film festivals all over the world. Her web series, Wacko Smacko launched last year, and her first feature screenplay, The Dark Room was nominated for an Academy Nicholl Fellowship. I don’t just get immense joy from watching Mary’s work, I also get inspired just thinking about Mary’s work ethic. Talking to her over the phone for this interview, I caught the sort of infectious enthusiasm she has for filmmaking that made me want to jump on a plane and go and work on one of Mary’s films for free. Mary has a vision, but also the guts to set her vision free into the world. I can’t wait to see what she does next and hope you’ll feel compelled to binge-watch her web series after reading this interview.

Mary

Cathy de la Cruz: I’m wondering if first you could begin by giving me some background on yourself since I don’t really know that much about you. I’ve seen your work, but I don’t know much about you as a person. I’m interested to hear how you describe yourself i.e., do you describe yourself as an artist or as a comedian or as a filmmaker or as a performer? You do so many things.

Mary Neely:  I’m 23, actually 24; I don’t know why I said 23. I feel old, right now. I grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of different parts of L.A. My parents moved around a lot of different neighborhoods, but I was always living in L.A. and I got really really into community theater when I was in elementary school and became obsessed with theater and Broadway and I wanted to move to New York and do acting, like Shakespeare and low-budget plays but I ended up going to UCLA for college and studied acting there.

While I was there I kinda started taking film history classes mainly in Scandinavian film. I got really into Danish films. It kinda became a crazy obsession where I would just be in UCLA’s video archives all the time.

I always primarily thought of myself as an actor and I studied acting and I thought that I would start auditioning as soon as I got out of school, but then I started doing more film stuff with the film students at UCLA and became really obsessed with film in general and I remember having moments on sets where I thought,  “Oh, I could like do that person’s job better than them.” So once I got out of school, I was really disappointed in the kinds of roles I was going out for. I just think there’s a huge problem with the kind of roles that are written for women and for me specifically as a young woman–I was just like, “This is just really depressing,” and I wasn’t really excited about anything so I just decided, “You know, I’m just gonna do it myself.”

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FUNNY FEMINISM #6: Tenured Track Comedian – An Interview with Liz Glazer

A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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Last year, when I moved to New York, a mutual friend of Liz Glazer and I told us that we had to meet. This mutual friend said that Liz was a lawyer and law professor who was about to walk away from a tenured position to focus full-time on standup comedy. The first time I met Liz several months ago, she invited me to check out a weekly night she was co-hosting with her good friend and comedic partner, Rhett Sever. Their night, Say Everything, stood out from traditional standup shows because audience members are actually encouraged to speak up and interrupt the comedian on stage with questions. These questions can throw off a comic with prepared material and these performances become intimate one-of-a-kind detours that often lead to either catharsis or collision. Whatever the outcome, it’s clear that Liz and Rhett are doing something really special and important, as some of the conversations I’ve had with strangers at Say Everything are not ones I’d likely have at any other comedy night and I thank them for that. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to talk to Liz about her own creative practice immediately after she dragged me to my first and only SoulCycle class. After class, I was drenched in sweat, while Liz, the SoulCycle regular, was glowing. That Liz got me to bust my ass to techno music on a Sunday morning is proof of the sort of energetic draw she has. It’s no wonder she gets people to spill their guts on stage every week. Below are excerpts from our drenched discussion.

Photo by: Elizabeth Rogers

Photo by: Elizabeth Rogers

Cathy de la Cruz: Can you talk about your journey into comedy? I’m curious about how you went from being a lawyer and a law professor to a comedian.

Liz Glazer: In 2009, I moved to Chicago for the semester because I needed to move away from New York. I was being very self-destructive here. I was in a relationship that wasn’t working. I was doing drugs more than I wanted to be doing drugs. I felt like I maybe could have gone on, but I remember when I got the phone call from Loyola University Chicago, I was like, ‘I’m ready. Just take me somewhere.’ I was really depressed. I went to Chicago for that semester and I started doing improv because I needed to do something unrelated to my job. I took an improv class at IO, which was formerly called Improv Olympic, and became very affected by it. I thought I was terrible at it, but I was just really afraid and I noticed that I was really afraid. Improv forced me into this zone of discomfort, of being vulnerable and being myself and not caring what people were thinking of me when they looked at me, and I had not ever really been exposed to that.

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FUNNY FEMINISM #5: Being Seen – An Interview with Heather Jewett

A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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I don’t actually remember how Heather Jewett and I met. Our introduction to each other could have been related to the riot grrrl movement, our many mutual friends or through simply living in Los Angeles at the same time. As a member of the now infamous queer electro-punk-pop band from the Bay Area, Gravy Train!!!!, Heather went by the name, ‘Chunx’ for eight years. Always a fan of Heather’s trailblazing honesty and fiercely feminist sense of humor, I clamored at the chance to interview her. Influenced by the campy and raw aesthetic of early John Waters films as much as she is by 80s and 90s blue-collar sitcom humor and by absurdist comedy, Heather Jewett is a force whose work cracks me up as much as it does inspire me to share my own voice with the world.

Photo credit: Tom Stratton

Photo credit: Tom Stratton

Equal pay shmequal shmay, I just wanna be able to eat bananas in public.

–Heather Jewett via Twitter

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FUNNY FEMINISM #4: Missed Connections – An Interview with Aparna Nancherla

A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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Last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite comics, Aparna Nancherla on what happened to be the coldest day in New York history since 1950. We were mistaken for NYU students “doing their homework on a Friday night” while carrying out the below interview at Oro Bakery. The included quotes are taken from Aparna’s Twitter account.

aparna_performing4

Photo by Doug Ault

 

“There needs to be an affirmative action program to get more white men in jail.”

ON COMEDIC BEGINNINGS

Cathy de la Cruz: I know you’ve mentioned this in your stand-up, the “I know you’re surprised I’m here, I’m surprised too.”

Aparna Nancherla: I started performing stand-up regularly 9-years ago. I got to stand-up a little bit in a more random way than a lot of other comics in that my friend was like, “Oh there’s this open mic near where we live that we should go check out,” just as like a free entertainment thing, not even to perform, but just to watch. We went one night during the summer and people were funny, but then there were people who weren’t as good, so we were like “This is something we could try” because we were both interested in humor. And I think that was my first access point to stand-up comedy. I didn’t grow up watching a lot of stand-up. I had seen it maybe once or twice on TV and I definitely didn’t think it was something that anyone could do. I came to stand-up from a direction of not knowing a lot about that world.

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FUNNY FEMINISM #3: Laughing All the Way to the Museum – An Interview with Jill Dawsey

A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with and about feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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Laugh-in: Art, Comedy, Performance explores the recent turn toward comedic performance in contemporary art. The exhibition features twenty artists who engage the strategies and themes of stand-up comedy as a means to rethink questions of artistic performativity, audience participation, and public speech.

—Jill Dawsey, Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Laugh-in’s curator, Jill Dawsey about the group exhibit and its feminist inclinations. The show opened at MCASD on January 23rd and runs through April 19th.

Cathy de la Cruz: Can you tell me about Laugh-in, and how the show relates to feminism and comedy?

Jill Dawsey: I’m pleased that you picked up on the feminist aspect of the show. The broader theme is artists who are thinking about stand-up comedy, borrowing from the strategies and aesthetics of stand-up. It has to do with a lot of things: questions of public speech and communication and finding audiences, and what can and can’t be said at this moment in time.

One of the larger threads that runs throughout the show is the way that comedy can create a space in which hierarchies can be inverted and power relations can be challenged. There are many women artists in the show and there’s a lot of explicitly feminist work.

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FUNNY FEMINISM #2: Failing, Falling and Jumping In – The Comedy of Sarah Adams

A monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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It's Easy to Be Pro-Choice

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I’m a very busy lady. This lifetime I plan to do the work of 600 lifetimes. I don’t have a linear scope. It’s all mashed up in there together. I do everything at once. This is just the business of being Sarah Adams. And that is the work of high comedy. Mostly because I’m just a dork. Just accidentally funny because I’m falling down. And even though I look like a stylish babe, I’m really just an overgrown child fumbling around. So I have to primarily focus on that. Just feeding and bathing myself. Wiping my nose and making sure I have lunch money. With what little time is left over, I give people psychic readings, I sew clothes, I write a horoscope column, I emcee events, I’m active in city government, I’m a nearly professional coffee drinker, I give people tattoos, I make movies, I’m an activist, I run a fashion label with a retail location, I’m a really bitching DJ AND I do stand-up.”– Sarah Adams

33-year old Olympia, WA comedian Sarah Adams remembers her first stand-up performance very clearly. She performed with a PowerPoint presentation, which provided visual gags such as an image of a brick wall behind her. While Adams admits she’s “seen enough stand-up to know that there’s some weird shit out there—it’s a very generous art form,” the ubiquitous brick wall background helped mark what some might see as performance art as stand-up comedy.

At her first performance, Adams remembers hearing her name announced as she walked out to the stage and purposely falling down, using the struggle to literally stand up again as the icebreaker for her first stand-up routine. This part of the performance wasn’t planned, but occurred to Adams in the moment, like so much of her material still does. Continue reading

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FUNNY FEMINISM #1: Somewhere Between Skepticism and Enchantment – The Comedy of Babe Parker

A new monthly column, Funny Feminism features conversations with feminist-identifying artists who use humor in their creative work.

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“Horror movies make me glad
I’m a non-homeowner
I got rid of my dolls
I left my Prom early.”
                                                                                    –Babe Parker via Twitter

Babe Parker

Babe Parker met me on a street corner in New York City on a fall Friday night. She met me outside because she didn’t think I would be able to find her place amongst her neighborhood’s hyphenated addresses and besides, she’s “squatting in a Verizon store anyway,” the 29-year-old Texan native joked. Babe, like myself, grew up in a conservative town in Texas before moving to Los Angeles, where she was working as an actress before relocating to the East Coast. Continue reading

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