13 of the Most Incendiary Jokes Told by Women
Since funny women still struggle to get the same recognition, let alone airtime, as their male counterparts, women tend to come to comedy ready to fight for their spot. From "Moms" Mabley fighting stereotypes through stand-up to Maria Bamford using comedy to help reduce the stigma of mental illness, comedy has also played an important role in helping women redefine what "being a woman" means. Comedians like Phyllis Diller, Roseanne Barr, Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Lampanelli, Bridget Everett, and Carol Burnett have all used jokes to help break down walls and the glass ceilings they support.
Out of all the great comedy that women have produced, some jokes have particularly paved the way. Here are 13 of the most important, groundbreaking, and controversial jokes made by women.
Tig Notaro
"Hello, I Have Cancer"
In August 2012, when Tig Notaro took the stage at L.A.'s Largo to rousing applause, she greeted the audience's cheers by saying, "Good evening, hello, I have cancer, how are you."
As the audience's applause turned to stunned silence, Notaro launched into a heartbreakingly honest routine that quickly set a new standard for what comedy could be. On stage, Notaro mined the darkest moments of her life: a break-up, a life-threatening C.Diff infection, the death of her mother, and a very recent breast cancer diagnosis. The show quickly became comedy legend. "Not many people have had as much bad luck as I have," said Notaro. "But not many people have had as much good luck, either." Now, the comedian has a TV show called One Mississippi in the works; a memoir, I'm Just a Person, on the way this month; and is expecting twins with her wife. Even better, she is currently cancer-free.
Wanda Sykes
"It's harder being gay than it is being black. I didn't have to come out to my parents as black."
Sykes is perhaps best known for her "Wanda" role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but her stand-up, with its heavy dose of social activism, is whip-smart and razor sharp. As an openly gay black woman, Sykes frequently critiques racism and homophobia in her sets. A perfect distillation of her gimlet-eyed humor comes in her I'ma Be Me special, when she flips the conversation about coming out as gay. The comedian role-plays "coming out to her parents as black," and hopes her parents still love her. Naturally, her mom character freaks out, muttering, "I knew I shouldn't have let you watch Soul Train!"
For more of Sykes's blistering humor, check out her 2009 Washington Correspondents Dinner appearance, where she cautions the nation's first black president that if he screws up in office, they will disown him ("What's up with the half-white guy?")
Amy Schumer
"Last F**kable Day"
In 2015, Amy Schumer was on a roll. In rapid succession, her show, Inside Amy Schumer, released a series of videos that had everyone talking about challenging but important topics like football rape culture (in a pitch-perfect Friday Night Lights parody) and the beauty industrial complex, with the Emmy-winning "Girl, You Don't Need Makeup."
Two of the sketches brutally skewered Hollywood's double standards-one featured 12 men trying to decide if Schumer was "hot enough" to appear on television, and in another, Schumer conscripted Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette into a brutally sharp sketch on beauty and ageism. In "Last F**kable Day," the three actresses welcome Schumer to the Viking funeral that they are throwing for Louis-Dreyfus's sex appeal, as they warn Schumer that some day soon her "vagina is going to turn into a hermit crab," too. It's brilliant, feminist, and perfectly, appropriately ruthless in making its point.
Cameron Esposito
"The Best Period Joke of All Time"
Considering the fact that almost half the population either has or had periods, it's pretty surprising that there aren't more jokes about them. Thank god for Cameron Esposito for finding the humor in the monthly visitor.
In the joke, which was included in her stand-up album Same Sex Symbol, Esposito reveals that while, as a lesbian (don't worry, straight friends, she's "an advocate"), she has never had a pregnancy scare, she wants to be pregnant so that for once in her life her "period would not be completely f*cking useless." After all, periods are "disgusting"-actually, "disgusting" is too nice a word for when your body is "wringing itself out like a hotel washcloth you might use again." For more hilariously truthful body talk, check out "The Female Body is Awesome!" with Esposito and her fiancée, comedian Rhea Butcher.
Moms Mabley
"Anytime you see me with my arms around an old man, I'm holding him for the police."
To call Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken, "groundbreaking" barely gives her the credit she deserves as a gay, black, female comedian who earned appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1960s America. Before being discovered by white audiences, Mabley found fame on the Chitlin' Circuit, the network of nightclubs and theaters open to African-American performers in segregated America, regularly playing the Apollo Theater, and recording an album there.
Mabley would take the stage in a frumpy housedress and hat to play the part of a "dirty old lady." On stage she would let loose with a tirade of off-color jokes full of double entendres, sexual innuendo, and digs at men of her own age ("Ain't nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one.") In 2013, Whoopi Goldberg helped shine a spotlight on Mabley's pioneering work with an HBO documentary, cementing Mabley's place in comedy history.
Cristela Alonzo
"Halloween, that's the worst time. Girls dress up in the little costumes, you know? It's like, 'Mmm, I'm a sexy French maid.' I can't do that. I just look like a maid."
If you Google Hispanic comedians, you will get a long list of very funny men-and one photo of Cristela Alonzo. While Alonzo is definitely not the only Latina in comedy (be sure to check out Gina Brillon and Anjelah Johnson), her sadly abbreviated primetime ABC TV show, Cristela, helped her become a household name. The show revolved around a multigenerational Mexican-American family (based on Alonzo's own family) and had no qualms in pointing out racism and sending up stereotypes that still exist in a supposedly post-racial society.
Whether she's joking about her border town high-school ("Our high school mascot was the Cartels. Let's just say we never lost a game!"), the importance of caller ID for broke people, or being mistaken for a drunk Dora the Explorer, Alonzo addresses her lived experience in a way that makes you laugh out loud and makes you think.
Margaret Cho
"I was like, am I gay? Am I straight? And I realized...I'm just sl*tty. Where's my parade?"
Over a decade before Kim Kardashian, Amber Rose, and The Bachelorette made sl*t-shaming a national conversation topic, Margaret Cho was on stage promoting "sl*t pride" in her one-woman show, I'm The One That I Want.
The frank joke was a breath of fresh air for women with a sexual appetite, and was standard fare for Cho who has no qualms about treating a grown woman's sexuality-in whatever form it takes-as healthy and fun. Cho seems to consider nothing out of bounds when it comes to her comedy (not even Karl Lagerfeld). She does not shy away from controversy and happily covers personal topics like her race, Asian stereotypes, her bisexuality, her relationship with her family, and substance abuse. And her story about her mother managing the gay porn section of her family's San Francisco bookstore is mandatory listening.
Jean Carroll
"In the country...everything is done in groups. Two women meet on the street, 'Oh Agnes, I'm going to have a baby!' 'Isn't that wonderful, so am I!'"
When Carroll started her career in the early 1940s, she had no white female peers, and was often stuck being billed as the "female Milton Berle" or the "female Bob Hope." She was a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show and even had her own sitcom on ABC, running from 1953 to 1954.
Her jokes were deadpan zingers seamlessly blended into stories, punctuated only by the audience's laughter, which barely disrupted her loquacious flow. She would hit the stage in heels and pearls, and skewer her own polished country-club image, issuing understated, forward-thinking diatribes on life in the suburbs, friendship, parenting, money, mothers-in-law, and the husbands that come with them. "The thing that attracted me to my husband was his pride," ran one joke. "I'll never forget the first time I saw him, standing up on a hill, his hair blowing in the breeze-and he too proud to run and get it." By appearing on the boys' club of television, Carroll showed little girls that they didn't need to spend their life in heels attending country-club soirées-unless they wanted to, of course.
Maria Bamford
"They don't talk about mental illness the way they do other illnesses. 'Wow, apparently Steve has cancer.' It's like, 'F*ck off! We all have cancer, right?"
On her 2013 album, Ask Me About My New God!, Bamford chronicled her longtime struggles with a variant of bipolar disorder, which landed her in a mental institution on suicide watch. Throughout her career, Bamford has mined her life and illness to find jokes in unlikely places, talking openly about her struggles. She also confronts the stigma that can prevent people from seeking help, skewering the idea that mental illness is nothing more than a bad attitude. "I was dating this chick all this time and she let me know she's been wearing contact lenses. I said whoa, do what you need to do, but I don't believe in all that Western medicine sh*t. If you want to see like other people, it's all about attitude. You gotta want it," Bamford says on the album.
Bamford's voice and the message she shares are important beacons for anyone else lost in the sea of mental illness, and now her signal is being boosted thanks to her new Netflix series, Lady Dynamite. (If you're eager for more on this topic, up-and-coming Brooklyn comic Aparna Nancherla is following in Bamford's footsteps, openly talking about her struggles with anxiety and depression. Also, her Twitter account is amazing).
Sommore
"Hula Hoop"
The world may not have known what it was in for when the four Queens of Comedy hit the road as a complement to the Original Kings of Comedy tour. The Queens-Adele Givens, Miss Laura Hayes, Mo'Nique, and Sommore-were raunchy, raw, and hilarious. The Queens each had a unique voice, but all managed to find a brand of humor that felt delightfully dangerous as they boldly joked about race, class, and brazen sexuality, which would make your jaw drop if you weren't already doubled over with laughter.
There was also something revolutionary, empowering, and refreshing about seeing four women talk very, very frankly about sexuality in a graphic, yet very informative, woman-powered way.
Joan Rivers
"A girl, you're 30 years old, you're not married-you're an old maid. A man, he's 90 years old, he's not married-he's a catch."
When Joan Rivers invaded the New York boys' comedy scene, she brought with her an acerbic wit, abrasive comedy style, and an unrivaled knack for one-liners. She also brought a female perspective, whether she was talking about double standards, men, money, or overly optimistic sexual expectations: "Everybody talks about multiple orgasms. Multiple orgasms! I'm lucky if both sides of my toaster pop."
Rivers, who passed away in 2014, was incredibly self-deprecating ("I was such a dog, to get me down the aisle they threw a bone") and unabashedly uninterested in what at the time was considered the domain of women ("I hate housework. You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.")
Sarah Silverman
"I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."
Sarah Silverman started her stand-up special Jesus Is Magic with a joke on a surprising subject matter-rape. Silverman has always had a flair for controversial and coarse humor and can leave her audience laughing to exhaustion at incredibly inappropriate and offensive statements. Her jokes are equal parts whimsy and darkness, and she delivers her downright dirty jokes with a girlish giggle. Silverman uses stereotypical female behavior like giggling and hair twirling to get away with caustic jokes like "I understand that the doctor had to spank me when I was born, but I really don't see any reason why he had to call me a whore."
Her show, The Sarah Silverman Program, and her stand-up routines routinely tackle topics like racism, religion, and abortion with a breezy insouciance that makes it look easy, when it's anything but a breeze.
Elayne Boosler
"We'll have sex, but I'm not sleeping with you."
Way before the days of Kickstarter and GoFundMe, Elayne Boosler funded her own comedy special, because while networks were signing up her male peers for specials, no one offered her one. Her 1985 show Party of One eventually aired on Showtime, and Boosler became the first woman to have her own comedy special on air. The show was filled with material solidifying Boosler's pro-sex, anti-cuddling stance ("This holding thing is like Marxism, it works in theory but not practice") and quickly proved that Boosler could hold her own against her more mainstream peers like Jay Leno.
At a time when female comics were few and far between, Boosler's feminism wasn't for show-it was central to who she was as a human and a comic. While Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers had serious self-deprecation streaks, Boosler didn't bother beating herself up about her looks or her weight, and she wasn't filled with shame about being a woman. Her casual take on dating and sex came from an unabashed woman's perspective, taking on double standards with humor: "[Men] want you to scream 'You're the best' while swearing you've never done this with anyone before." Her comedy helped pave the way for female comedians who could go toe to toe with anyone.
