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.  My senior year, I wrote and directed a total of 9 plays with a group of my 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, but 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 the compliments from our peers began pouring in, 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" were indirectly but certainly because of 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 them.  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. 

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.  Beth Olsen and William Douglas studied the correlation between gender roles and viewer's ratings in popular television shows over the last 30 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.  While the number of women who star in television shows has technically improved, it is still far less frequent than a male taking the spotlight, and even then it is far more difficult to become popular with an audience.  

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 woman comedian will bring in less of a crowd than a man 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.  Kathryn Kein, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University, researches gender, feminism, and pop culture to study the effects of this type of sexism.  She 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.  Until the perspective of American society in general changes, women will continue to be unsupported.  

Saturday Night Live has made an effort to be 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.  As Caryn Murphy wrote in her chapter of the ebook "Saturday Night Live and American TV", some progress has been made, but women are far from being equal to men in the entertainment industry, especially in comedy.  Furthermore, "The Tina Fey Era" has ended, and Saturday Night Live is back to a male-dominant cast.

The 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?  My sources are both argued and supported, which has made me consider the perspective of my opposition.  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 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.  I may revise my research question by asking if most women are being compensated and represented appropriately.  Adding the "most" will help the opposition recognize that the exceptions do not really apply to my research, and cannot be used as valid opposition to my argument.
