Whose Line is it Anyway I'm reminded of the challenge of women in comedy -- not just the challenge of for woman in comedy, but the challenge faced by their male counterparts.
Like it or not, women are treated differently. I'm not completely sure why, but I can speculate. One reason is that we, the audience, expect women to be treated differently. Though collectively women and men are treated more similarly than in the past, there remains a clear difference in expectations by the audience.
Jokes at women's expense are not considered funny, and are often considered rude. (Wife jokes remain an exception.) When's the last time you've seen a commercial that made fun of the stupidity of a woman, versus a man? I'm not complaining about it -- just observing that, by and large, we feel far more comfortable in making (white) men the buffons now than in ridiculing a woman in an advertisement.
Of course, the expectations for what a woman can do comedically are different from what most think men can do. For whatever reasons, when Louis CK talks about how shitty his daughter is, it works. But if a female comic did the same, it seems... different. Is this my (and our collective) gender double-standard? Do I somehow need or require women to be more nurturing, loving, and less funny? I don't know. But I don't think that's the dominant factor here -- it has to do more with how the cast feels they can treat her, and not about our audience expectations.
I could be wrong -- I haven't checked out her comedy, and maybe she's really vulgar. Joe Rogan is hilariously filthy as a stand-up, but usually plays it straight as a TV host. Perhaps Tyler is getting pretty strict guidance from the producers about what is and is not acceptable.
Carol Burnett somehow managed to be really funny. I remember, as a kid, quite dimly, the Carol Burnett show. But she was perhaps helped by the fact that she was the star. Lucille Ball also was funny, though she did keep within the expectations of her time.
In any event, I'm inclined to think that a lot of the chemistry lacking between Aisha Tyler and the rest of the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast has to do with uncertainty or discomfort about how much the cast can pick on her. They can't call her fat. They can't pan her for a terrible movie she starred in. She is attractive and bright. These old guys probably, if anything, instictively want to protect her, not put her up for ridicule. And even if they did poke fun at her, would it seem fair? Even if, intellectually, we believed she could take it, would we really, on an emotional level, find humor in older men making a joke at her expense?
I haven't even touched on race yet. Could Colin Mochrie or Ryan Stiles really make a joke about her and feel comfortable about it on a racial level? I've seen enough of the old (American) Whose Line Is It, Anyway? to remember a few moments when Drew made some slightly off-color racial jokes with Wayne Brady. To Brady's credit, he managed to play them off as if they weren't a big deal -- and, I'm assuming, they weren't.
We've seen this evolution in TV commercials. At the moment, it's pretty much a given that, if the commercial involves a couple, it's only safe to make fun of the husband. Better yet, it's only safe to make fun of white guys as a bit buffonish. Maybe it's the legacy of Homer Simpson and Al Bundy, which underlined (but did not incite, for that ship had already sailed) the rise of the father as an object of ridicule and humor.
A decade ago, Drew Carey was the perfect whipping boy of sorts. He was a white male, fat, wealthy, had geeky glasses, a great fake-pissed off look, and an attitude that made it clear he was willing to be ridiculous. He even had the middle name Allison! He didn't take himself too seriously. And although not a gifted improviser, he made his relatively amateurish participation doubly hilarious by being adorably self-conscious about his lack of proficiency. It's fun to laugh at him in the same way that it's fun to laugh at Louis CK -- these are guys that look like the guys we could (and did) make fun of growing up. And yet it's fun to laugh with them because they have an underdog aura that makes us cheer when the boy does good.
I don't know what this means for Aisha Tyler and the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast. She enjoys the skits and the off-color jokes. But she does seem more like an audience member than a quasi-participant. There's no banter. What could they joke about? Youth? That's perhaps a safer bet than anything remotely touching gender or race, but even that could come across as looking chauvinistic -- the old men telling the young woman how the world really is.
Maybe they just don't know each other well enough. They are different generations. Aisha spent some time hosting, which, while not unrelated to sitcom/improv, is a different world. For similar reasons, maybe this is why Joe Rogan wouldn't be a great host for a comedy show, despite his career as a stand-up -- too much time doing other things in television, and hanging out with a social group far different from the improv/stand-up circuit.
It's also worth noting that the first American Whose Line show did start with a British host, later to be replaced by Drew Carey. Maybe every show needs a season or so to test things out and decide what works, and what doesn't.
Anyway, I will try to catch some more of the newer episodes. If I feel like it, maybe I'll tackle more of the differences between the previous and current incarnation, and speculate as to its success.
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