I’ve been running around a lot for the past few days, and I’m still not done. But, I’ve been thinking about female comics, particularly standup comics, for the past few days…mostly because I watched Date Night and Tina Fey was AWESOME. She’s the only female comic I can remember since I started to have some memory of these things, who manages to be a comic and a female without that ending up in some bizarre overly-sexualized carcicature. Most female standup comics seem to be fighting that one way or the other: either they embrace it and play a sexpot with a sense of humour or they reject it or they go out of their way to tell dumb sex-related jokes to show they can be just as raunchy as the men. This is the conundrum of feminism in America these days generally, I think.
Anyway, a long way of saying, I ran across a commencement speech that Gilda Radner gave in 1980 at yes, the Columbia Journalism School, one of the places I’ve passed through. So here it is. Enjoy!