Where are the women in film comedy?

Women? Making people laugh? Don‘t be ridiculous, says Cath Clarke. Isn‘t screen comedy a man‘s game?

What a shame that Vanity Fair cancelled its post-Oscars party this year. Frocks and fabulousness aside, the bash might have thrown up an interesting encounter between the magazine’s contributing editor Christopher Hitchens and scriptwriter Diablo Cody. Last year he wrote an article – merrily mangling scientific research as he went – with the headline ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’. Now Diablo Cody is a very funny woman and, as we go to press, has just picked up an Oscar for her script for ‘Juno’. During a recent visit to London she was in stitches about Hitchens’ article. ‘Apparently mothering is such a serious business biologically that women can’t be funny or they’ll fail as mothers,’ she explained with mock seriousness. ‘I think that was the thesis.’

The 29-year-old Cody, who wrote ‘Juno’ when she was 26, isn’t the only female comedy writer in the running for best script; there’s also a nomination for Tamara Jenkins (‘The Savages’). Two fingers to frumpy old Hitchens then. And yet, does the success of both films show how few funny women make it on to our screens and on to writing credits? Rachel Millward, the director of the Birds Eye View women’s film festival thinks so. ‘The reason something like “Juno” is so exciting is because, if you look now, we’re really struggling to see women playing key roles in comedies.’

Little wonder the film’s young star Ellen Page is being hailed as the coolest thing since Winona Ryder took out the evil Heathers. Millward’s own festival is a case in point. Its line-up last year was its best yet, with screenings of ‘Away from Her’, ‘Stephanie Daley’ and ‘Sherrybaby’. All great films, but their explorations of Alzheimer’s, infanticide and drug addiction didn’t make for a cheery festival. ‘Lots of weeping went on’, she admits, and with that in mind will be showing some classic gal comedy – from the pioneering silent-screen comediennes to the screwballs of the ’30s and ’40s – alongside BEV’s regular programme next month. The screwballs, with their titanic clashes between the sexes have lost none of their defiant anarchy.

Written and directed by men, they nevertheless featured some seriously funny ladies – Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert and Rosalind Russell among them – at a time when women were still respected as an audience demographic. Ahead of their time, they are fiercer than much of the romantic comedy we are sentenced to watch today. Howard Hawks’ ‘Bringing Up Baby’ flopped on release: Katharine Hepburn’s madcap heiress was too open-minded, too pushy, too out there for 1938. Best of all is George Cukor’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1950): Judy Holliday plays Billie, a buxom, brassy, hollering and hip-swinging gangster’s moll. Tilda Swinton has described Holliday’s Billie as her favourite performance by an actress: ‘She has the magical quality of an actress reaching all the notes at her disposal… as far as I’m concerned she could just retire right then and there.’

Could we honestly say the same of an actress in a recent comedy? Take last month’s weepy-com ‘PS I Love You’, and its rather queer casting. Hilary Swank is many things (a two-time Oscar-winner for starters), but she is no comedian, gushing and ‘oh gosh’-ing her way through the film in obvious discomfort.

Perhaps Hollywood is looking in the wrong places for its comediennes. Think of an actor who makes you laugh – Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler or Dane Cook maybe? – and chances are he came up through the comedy circuit. Invariably, a romantic comedy finds him paired with ‘a girlfriend’, a straight actress whose female duties are to look pretty and make him look funny.

Hilary Duff and Jessica Simpson are both popular girlfriends but a cursory glance across last year’s films throws up a gaggle of others, including Thandie Newton, playing love interest to Eddie Murphy in ‘Norbit’. The writers of ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’ (shame on you, Alexander Payne) went further, dispensing with the girlfriend altogether, pairing Adam Sandler and Kevin James as faux beaus. If only the same crossover applied to comediennes, we’d be lucky enough to see Sarah Silverman more often on the big screen.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule that demotes actresses to mere girlfriends. Christopher Guest’s regular players include Jennifer Coolidge and Catherine O’Hara. ‘Knocked Up’ gave Katherine Heigl and the excellent Leslie Mann some of the film’s biggest laughs. Amy Heckerling writes brilliant comedies, and let’s not forget Nora Ephron. Millward also throws Julie Delpy’s recent acidy romantic comedy ‘2 Days in Paris’ into the mix.

Oscar or not, Diablo Cody is already on to her next script, this one about a possessed cheerleader, for ‘Girlfight’ director Karyn Kusama. Interestingly, she says she would never have thought about writing a script had she not been approached by a producer who read the blog in which she chronicled her time as a stripper. He talked her into writing and ‘Juno’ was to be her trial run. ‘I loved to write so much, the best for me was to sit down and write flowery prose. The idea of dialogue on a page didn’t appeal to me. It does now.’ She is laughing again, with a distinct lack of womanly seriousness. Goodness knows what Hitchens would say.

Perhaps babies are funny after all, funnier certainly than clapped out baby-boomers. Just listen to Juno (Ellen Page), who does nothing but joke about her condition: this to her best friend, ‘I am a sacred vessel; all you got in your stomach is Taco Bell.’

Birds Eye View is at the ICA, BFI Southbank and various venues across London from March 6 to 14.