Laughs. Whew. Carmen is loving it. We all flip the page.
People assume that all girls who are exotic dancers have daddy issues. I do not have issues with my dad. We have a great relationship: We talk a lot, I see him all the time, and the sex is great.
I was on Baywatch. All the women on that show were hot. They say women’s bodies are like a wonderland. Mine is more like a football field. Because I have a tight end and a lot of black dudes have been on it.
Gasp. The room went quiet. Everyone looked to Carmen to see how they should react. She forced a smile like a pro, which I’m sure she had a lot of practice doing from having to tolerate Hugh Hefner for most of the nineties. I recognized her awkward smile because I myself have forced it many times, but with way less perfect teeth. For example, I had forced this same smile when I got cheated on and found out the other woman was programmed in my boyfriend’s phone as “Sandylicious.” Realizing that this person was in pain and pretending she was fine, I thought to reach out my hand and take the stack of jokes from her. The only problem was that my body did not obey. I was too frozen in shock to do anything. Carmen held her head up high, took a deep breath, and turned the page. Fuck.
It’s sort of hard to date when guys can find naked photos of you all over the Internet. Seriously, if you Google me, your computer will get a virus.
Oof. Even as a desensitized comedian, I knew that one was rough. It managed to penetrate through whatever armor she had left and her eyes welled up, and the amount of eye makeup she had on indicated that she had not planned on crying that day.
This moment gave me compassion for guys when girls get mad at them and they’re confused about why. I truly had no idea what I did wrong or how to fix it. I could also tell that, like all women when we cry, some of the tears were new, but some were very, very old. “They’re just jokes,” I kept saying as I tried to manage the warm pang in my chest that felt like my heart was defecating into my stomach.
This was the first time I realized that not everyone had the same acumen for self-annihilation I had. All my life I used myself as a punching bag. Didn’t everyone? Wasn’t everyone willing to put their self-esteem on the line for a laugh? Once I stepped outside the confines of my family system and the dingy hallways of comedy clubs, apparently the answer was no. Plot twist—turned out Carmen Electra had way more self-respect than I did.
This incident taught me that the coping skills I had learned in order to navigate my family didn’t work in the outside world. I was wielding weapons I used to fight a battle that had been over for fifteen years. I was out of the boxing ring, sitting on the bench, but still had my boxing gloves on, jabbing at anyone who came near me like a half-blind kangaroo on Adderall.
Needless to say, Carmen quit the show. Before storming out, she barked rhetorical questions at me such as “Is this really what people think of me?” which led me to believe that she had some sort of awakening that day, too. Regardless, I’ll always be grateful to her for making me realize that we can use jokes to get closer to people or to push them away. Turns out jokes are like knives. You can use them to cook a beautiful meal or to straight-up stab people. Life works in mysterious ways: Some people learn from Gandhi, some from Osho, others from the Dalai Lama. My spiritual teacher just happened to have been a Playboy Playmate who married Dennis Rodman. How, well, funny.
I hope that, like me, Carmen is doing just fine.
THE SEXISM CHAPTER
For the first couple of years that I was doing stand-up in L.A., I was doing shows wherever I could get up, hustling for spots via Myspace messages. Since I had no clout—or act, for that matter—the stages I graced ended up being bowling alleys, coffeehouses, dive bars, and youth hostels whose audiences, very appropriately, consisted of hostile youths. I even did a set in the parking lot of a fried chicken place, and if I must say so myself, I managed to get some laughs over the sounds of traffic and helicopters. I never knew, on any given night, what kind of audience I’d be up against, whether they’d respond to my jokes or even speak English for that matter.
Despite the wide array of venues I performed at, one constant up until a couple of years ago was that at every show there was always a guy or group of guys who were not thrilled with a female coming to the stage. As I grabbed the mic, I’d hear everything from a mutter of “Here we go” to a yell of “Take off your shirt!” to the sight of people checking their phones or straight up getting up and leaving. To be fair, I didn’t have a great act back then, but they couldn’t have known that yet.
Nevertheless, whenever people say, “Comedy is such a misogynistic field, right?” even I’m surprised that I’m not quite sure how to answer this question. Believe me, I’ve tried really hard to figure out a way to respond with a definite yes to this question, because clearly someone is saying yes to it and I wanna be liked by whoever that someone is. But no, I don’t think the field is sexist. It feels ignorant to me to anthropomorphize a field, as if an abstract noun like archery has the capacity to be judgmental. I don’t think fields are sexist, I think people are sexist, and in the comedy field it’s just easier to see who they are because they’re drunk and yelling at you. And I must say, that’s actually something I appreciate about being a stand-up. I actually prefer in-your-face sexism to the more insidious institutionalized kind because dealing with the passive-aggressive, subtle sexism and gaslighting that women have to contend with in other professions sounds exhausting. There aren’t that many jobs where you hear sexist insults in the workplace issued so bluntly. I’d much rather someone yell their insults to my face than have my boss DM me corny pickup lines or send dick pics on the sly after work.
? ? ?
From what I’m aware of, I don’t think sexism has held me back in comedy per se. It may have fueled way more hateful comments on Reddit, but I have to own the fact that when I haven’t been given an opportunity or job I wanted in comedy, it hasn’t been because of sexism. The truth is, annoying as it is to say, I probably just didn’t deserve it yet.