On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Well, for what it's worth, my former trainer the aspiring standup
> basically endorsed this point of view. Male comics aren't comfortable with
> funny women the same way most men aren't comfortable with aggressive
> women. And I don't think she'd ever read Freud.
I don't think there is any dispute that the comic milieu is overwhelming male in composition. And, leaving aside whatever caused that initial imbalance, once you've got it, you seem always to get a very macho atmosphere in which men give their aggression more free expression than they would normally. And it becomes a pleasure and they become something of a mob. A woman walks into that and she gets it.
There are other realms where this is also true, ones you probably wouldn't normally associate with extreme machismo, even if you noticed that they were overwhelming male in membership. Chess and jazz come to mind. From far away, they seem almost unmasculine, the first in its nerdiness, the second in its sensitivity. But up close, most of the top practitioners are unbelievably neanderthal in their attitudes toward woman. And when you take a second look, you see both arts have extreme one-on-one competition with their peers watching at their heart: high noon dueling.
Fwiw, now that I think of it, Alex Cockburn, years ago, wrote a very enjoyable book attempting to apply explain chess in terms of reductionist Freudianism. It's called _Idle Passion_.
Michael