TALKING DIRTY

Chelsea Handler sexes up late night.

- NANCY FRANKLIN

The power of the people made itself felt in a rewarding way in the past few months, after a Facebook petition was created calling for Betty White to host “Saturday Night Live.” Eventually, more than half a million people signed, and, in a move of great good sense and great good humor, Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer, duly invited White (or, rather, re- invited her—she had been asked several times before). The result was a lot of fun: an eighty-eight-year-old woman, with a sixty-year television career, kicking some energy and professionalism into a show that, while technically not dead, stubbornly refuses to really live. White obeys all the rules of good behavior except when it comes to what she says; you just don’t expect someone with her grandmotherly sparkle to be quite so wicked and dirty.

Attractive women and comedy aren’t thought to go together, because— supposedly—attractive women don’t need to be funny. This was one of the notions that Christopher Hitchens put forward in an eye-roller of a piece titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” in Vanity Fair three years ago; for starters, the theory doesn’t take into account the fact that men and women are human beings first, with individual backgrounds and existential agendas that are not aimed exclusively at attracting sexual partners. Yet attractiveness is something that women performers are forced to deal with in a way that men aren’t. There are nowhere near as many women as men in the field of comedy, and the female comedians who do make it tend to be examined closely for what their appearance and their performances “say” about women. That may, or may not, be changing. In a piece in the