As a high school student, I was very involved in the performing arts.  While creative outlets such as theatre are technically available to everyone, there are still different standards that divide genders from performing equally in comedic roles.  During my senior year, I wrote and directed a total of nine plays with a group of friends.  They were all comedies, and we collaborated as a group for all of the scripts.  The group consisted of three boys and two girls.  I wrote 3 almost completely on my own, with some help from a few of the guys in the group.  We directed and produced all of our plays, and they turned out to have very good feedback from the audience.  I was so proud of what we had accomplished as a group, but also what I had accomplished as a writer on my own.  As we began receiving compliments from our peers, I heard each of the boys begin taking credit for most of the lines that I had written.  Additionally, the programs named each of the boys as the writers for the plays that I had written; I was not even grouped in with them.  My frustration became apparent, and I knew the reasoning behind these "mistakes" was attributed to my gender.  The boys were more outspoken and brash when joking around with their peers, so naturally they all assumed the funniest parts of the plays were written by the men.  But how could I be as outspoken and inappropriate with my jokes as they had been?  I could not have gotten away with such vulgarity as they had, so I was overlooked and, for the most part, ignored.  I was overshadowed despite the successfulness of my plays because of my gender.  Because of the stigma that women cannot be as funny as men because of biological and psychological differences, women have struggled to achieve equality in the entertainment industry without much support from perspective audiences.  

My experience with inequality was in an informal environment where there was no compensation involved, but rather reputation and credit was awarded based on the successfulness of our work.  If I were in a professional environment, this would translate into lower compensation because I was regarded as less funny than the male writers and performers.  Women in comedy have been undercompensated because of their gender, enabling sexism into the twenty-first century.  This is important because the stigma that women cannot be funny proves that even women of celebrity status have a difficult time obtaining respect from their male colleagues and by extension, the consumer. 

The wage gap between female and male celebrities may seem like an isolated problem.  After all, they are fighting to raise their salaries by millions, meanwhile the majority of American citizens are attempting to earn a livable income that will support their families.   However, the wage gap in Hollywood proves that sexism is anything but an isolated problem.  Celebrities are relatively invincible; they constantly get away with doing whatever they want, with no worry about how their actions will affect them later.  They are rich enough and powerful enough that one little crime committed will not matter in the grand scheme of things.  If even women who live invincibly cannot obtain respect because of their gender, how is the rest of society supposed to overcome sexism?  Celebrities are treated like modern day royalty, and female celebrities are being discriminated against in their work.  The top ten paid actors and actresses in 2015 include eight men and two women.  Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson have made the list, but their equally talented female costars are receiving a mere fraction of what the actors on this list were receiving.  Kristen Stewart, the tenth highest paid actress in 2015, and Mark Wahlberg, the tenth highest paid actor in 2015, had a gap between their annual salaries of $20 million.  Additionally, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Downey Jr. hold the positions of highest paid actress and actor of 2015, the difference between their salaries being $28 million.  What this says about our society is that no matter how important a person is, if they are a woman they automatically have a shortcoming that they have to work even harder to overcome.  Additionally, feminism is an issue that is often popular to believe in, but not popular to act upon.  Women are praised one day for standing up for themselves, but the next are expected to go back to their lower pay and deal with the inequality, or else they can find work elsewhere.  

The roles for women have become slightly more various over the years in comedic television shows, but the reactions of the viewers have not encouraged writers and directors to stray from the regular casting of a male star.  Women are often pigeon-holed into the role of a wife and mother when cast in situational comedies.  In earlier times, as television became popular, the roles for women were limited, and the television programs reflected that.  Women were portrayed as primarily and exclusively housewives and mothers, because in real life they were expected to perform only those roles.  But now, women have gained the rights to follow their own careers, and break away from traditional gender roles.  Television has not seemed to follow suit.  Regardless of how many times women have proven their abilities, the media sets them back another seventy years by forcing most actresses into roles that are very outdated.  The reason this happens is because the majority of consumers do not seem to have a problem with watching television that encourages these gender roles.  Beth Olsen and William Douglas studied the correlation between gender roles and viewer's ratings in popular television shows over the last thirty years.  This was an observational study, making their findings very accurate and with very little bias.  They found that women are still cast mainly as secondary characters, even in modern day television shows.  There are exceptions where women play the lead roles, but they are still few and far between.

Christopher Hutchins wrote a piece in 2007 about how women cannot be as funny as men because it is not in their nature, psychologically or biologically.  To his claim, women do not have the same inclinations as men do; where men seek to entertain in order to find a woman, women do not do the same.  Women are more inclined to nurture and care for children rather than bother themselves with things such as comedy.  He also says that men would never talk about their new girlfriend and talk about how funny she is, whereas a woman would tell her friends about how funny her boyfriend is when he says, "However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own  ...  [interlude for attributes that are none of your business]  ...  and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh" (Hitchens 1).  His claims are not especially credible, because he seems to be speaking mainly of personal experiences.  His entire article is sexist just in the condescending nature in which he explains to women why they cannot be funny.  To tell a woman she is incapable of doing something is the epitome of sexism.  This opposition only proves the point even further that our society has not progressed at an acceptable rate to banish sexism.  Christopher Hutchins certainly isn't a name that anyone would know, but his article being displayed in Vanity Fair is a problem because he happens to be reaching far more people than the average person would be.  The entertainment industry is slowing the progression of women by not using their public power to help our society overcome sexism.  It seems that those that possess the power to control how others perceive issues are only encouraging further sexism by not standing up for the women who do not have the voice to stand up for themselves.

The struggle for women to become popular in comedy starts early, when it is very difficult to find a venue that will book her show.  Women have the reputation of being less funny than men, and owners of venues know that a female comedian will bring in less of a crowd than male comedians would.  It would not be a good decision in business to book people who would not bring in very much revenue, and not very many owners are willing to take a chance on a woman comic just starting off.  Especially when trying to pursue stand-up comedy, where audiences are live and expect to laugh from the first and only take of a punchline, women often struggle to gain the respect of the audience in a matter of an hour.  Perhaps some big-name actresses who have already established a reputation can make it in comedy, but some women who are trying to get started in the business have found it nearly impossible to gain the audience's trust.  Kathryn Kein, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University, has concluded that women in comedy hardly have a chance at rising to stardom unless audiences support them the way that they support funny men.  The problem stems from the stigma that women cannot be funny, thus directly affecting their ability to prove themselves.  The issue is not lack of talent, it is lack of opportunity.  Danielle Russell wrote about self-depreciating humor in female comic's routines, and she argued that "Widespread resistance to women's humour is the persistent denial that it exists or is funny: "everyone knows women can't tell jokes" and that "feminists have no sense of humour"[4]  often stymies the attempts of those women who venture into standup comedy" (Russell 3).  Women are not given the same chances that men are when it comes time for them to prove themselves.  Just being a woman is already a disadvantage, which is a form of discrimination.  It is rejecting someone because of who they are, not who they choose to be.  Women have been fighting for a new image in the eyes of society for centuries.  It is about time that we, as the supposed country that leads the free world, changed the standard of what women are 'supposed to be'.    Until the perspective of American society changes, women will continue to be unsupported and oppressed.  

Saturday Night Live has made an effort to get ahead of the curve when it comes to women in comedy.  Their proof lies in "The Tina Fey Era", which is what they call the time in Saturday Night Live where Tina Fey was the head writer, and the most popular cast members were women.  This is all true, but because of this brief change making women the most popular comedians temporarily, many viewers assume that we now live in a "post-feminist era".  This term wrongly suggests that gender equality has been achieved.  The reason this is untrue and unsettling is because of the impermanence of this era.  While women ruled the writers room for a matter of five or six years, the change in dynamic was not a transition out of old ways and into new ones, but rather a coincidence.  These women proved themselves to be exceptions of the rule that women cannot be funny.  They proved that they could do as well or better than men in comedy, but once this phase was over, so was the idea that women could be equal to men in comedy.  Caryn Murphy wrote in her chapter of the e-book "Saturday Night Live and American TV" about Tina Fey speaking on gender equality in her workplace, "Fey explained that the presence of a female director and stage manager contributed more support for women's talent during these years; this information notwithstanding, overarching claims about the extent of the gender shift in the Tina Fey era are contradicted by the persistence of male-dominated casts and writer's rooms" (Murphy 184).  

 Amy Schumer performed sketch comedy that portrays the sort of criticism she is up against as a woman in comedy.  The men in this skit are ignorant to the content and only pay attention to how she looks and how hot her body is.  This is an exaggerated example of how women in Hollywood are perceived, despite their ability to perform with the same professionalism as men.  This is a very biased video, and it may seem offensive to men because it is portraying them all as sex-crazy and insensitive.  However, Amy is using satire to get her point across in a way that will capture the audience's attention.  She has resulted in doing all that she can in order to gain the trust of her audience, despite her gender, which includes making crude and stereotypical jokes, like the male comics often do.  She turned the tables back around and exposed the difficulties that women face in order to be heard, not just in Hollywood but everywhere.

In the 1950's and 1960's, most writers for film and television shows were men, and they often wrote women in traditional and gender exclusive roles.  They gave them either a mother and wife role, or if they were younger they would give them a virginal and innocent role.  As stated in Bingham's journal article title, a woman like Doris Day in comedy was considered a, "Sexless Sex Object:, Non-comic Comedy Star" (Bingham 3).  This is important because of how contradictory it was to name a woman as a sexless sex object.  The expectations for women to seem simultaneously sexy, but assuredly virginal was just another unreasonable request made of women in the 1950's and 1960's.  Additionally, it was said that "The cultural concern with female sexual standards went far beyond notions of moral propriety. Fears of sexual chaos that preoccupied the US imagination during the cold war years have been documented by May (1988:93-94), who suggests that "it was not just nuclear energy that had to be contained, but the social and sexual fallout of the atomic age ... the nation had to be on moral alert"" (Ruiz 304).  This particular ideal woman is no longer present in the 21st century, but these unreasonable expectations are still very much alive.  Women in the present day are constantly told to be something else.  Women in comedy are even more criticized than everyday women because they are in the spotlight, attempting to succeed in a field that is nearly impossible for a woman to get into.  They are expected to be just as funny as men when they make it in the industry.  Simultaneously, they are being told that they can't be as funny as men because they aren't men, making this an impossible stigma to overcome unless the stigma itself is demolished.

 Rebecca Krefting, a woman who has experience in the entertainment industry, expresses the reason that audiences tend to find women less funny, which has to do with the different relationship that women have with their audiences.  Many male comics use women as a topic of their jokes, so when a woman is the one telling the jokes, the audience supposedly misses out because the woman is not willing to glorify stereotypes associated with women the way that many male comics are.  When female stereotypes are received by an audience who is fond of the speaker, the audience slowly begins to believe in what the comic is saying.  It is easy to say that comedy is just all in good fun, but there are real consequences to this form of entertainment.  Comedy should be just that, entertainment.  It should not be a route to indirect sexism, or promotion of oppressing women.  Comedy has to be unexpected and sometimes inappropriate for it to be funny.  However, if we as an audience are allowing these comics to say whatever they want in their routines, then we should allow equal opportunity for whomever wants to pursue this career.  If women can make fun of men the way that men make fun of women, the stereotypes do not disappear, but at least audiences are not receiving a one-sided opinion.  Rebecca Krefting performs stand-up comedy, and she experiences the way women comics are treated first hand.  She has to consider many more elements when writing her sets because she is a woman, and she has to work around her gender in many ways to make sure the audience responds positively.  She demonstrates the problem with women in comedy by her explanation of what she has to do in order to be noticed.  Men don't have the same obstacles and stigmas to overcome.  They don't have to worry about being overlooked because of their appearance, or if they will seem to crude or too prudish, they just have to be funny.

My research can be questioned by the argument that plenty of women have made it in comedy, and plenty have risen even above some of their male predecessors.  Some of the most popular actors in Hollywood right now are women.  But are they being compensated in a way that is comparable to men, and how much longer did it take them to rise to stardom?  I understand the points of the opposition, but where they are calling these successful women progressive, I am calling them exceptions.  Our varying opinions are the effect of our varying definitions of the word "progress".  I believe that most of the controversy on the topic of women in entertainment comes from the miscommunication that a few women rising above the opposition and oppression they received is the definition of "progress".  They cannot be proof that women are now equal to men because they do not represent the majority of women who work in the entertainment industry, and therefore they cannot represent the general population of women.

