Jane Austen, Judd Apatow, and Melissa McCarthy (all in one post!)
Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy’s buddy flick, The Heat, is currently trouncing a number of more expensive movies with major male stars (e.g. Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger), which may recall a similar situation two years ago, when Bridesmaids was a huge—and completely unexpected—commercial success. In recalling the earlier movie I’m less interested in their obvious connections (such as the fact that Bridesmaids was McCarthy’s big screen breakthrough, resulting in an Oscar nomination, and both it and The Heat were helmed by Paul Feig, comedy writer associated with critically acclaimed TV shows like The Office and Arrested Development). Rather, I’m interested in the issue of female comedy, which got a lot of press back in 2011 when Bridesmaids became one of the top twenty highest grossing films of the year.
(This image would be even funnier if that were Judd Apatow in the middle.)
The gender politics underlying the Bridesmaids headlines are complicated, and not just in the controversial assumption that comedy is not usually the domain of the fairer sex. More subtly, almost any filmgoer could have recognized that Bridesmaids isn’t that different from a Judd Apatow “bro-mance” or the outré but sentimental comedy once identified by the Farrelly brothers (Bridesmaids has all the elements, complete with gross-out sequence). Feig’s current film is the same, and just as funny—and as in Bridesmaids this attribute complicates the current film’s supposed progressiveness. Is it really revolutionary when it’s just aping such male-identified formulas?
Overlooked in this more subtle context to the films, however, is an even more obscure but still important history of male coopting of female comedy, now largely unknown but to the most devoted of English majors. In the eighteenth century women were prominent inspirations for laughter and good humor within British letters, as playwrights and novelists like Fanny Burney and Charlotte Lennox poked fun at social customs and contemporary culture. Jane Austen is the most prominent heir to this literary tradition, but the female genealogy of comedy is not widely known because in 1771 Henry Mackenzie published The Man of Feeling, a gently humorous portrait of a softhearted fellow whose sentimentality and effusive responses make him an easy target of social ridicule. An instant success, The Man of Feeling established a new literary fashion for light-hearted humor based on male sentimentality, and effectively cannibalized the once formidable reign of female talent in contemporary comedy.
For its success in appropriating and reinventing what used to be disparaged as aspects of feminine weakness we might call Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling the first bro-mance. The subsequent prestige enjoyed by that work—which is still anthologized and was widely known while the work by women was not—illustrates the struggle among genders for legitimacy in comedy. The problem is not just that women have to prove that they have the chops to helm comedy. The further irony is that in doing so, they are only taking back something that was theirs to begin with.
***Thanks to Kristan Ballard, whose excellent 2012 dissertation, “Feminist Comedy in the Eighteenth Century,” inspired this post.