If Julia Louis-Dreyfus chugging a pint of melted ice cream, then letting rip a sizeable, rasping fart doesn’t fill you with the kind of warmth usually stimulated by, say, a basket of puppies, I don’t think we can be friends.
And this is just a snippet of a sketch from this week’s season premiere of Inside Amy Schumer, which beautifully, caustically and, in a way quite seriously, rips it out of Hollywood’s treatment of older women. And by “older”, I mean forty to fifty-somethings, which, in an age where people regularly make it past 100, hardly seems old. We see Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette (both “older women” by Hollywood standards) join Louis-Dreyfus in celebrating her last day of “being fuckable”.
Louis-Dreyfus explains that this is the point at which the media decides that, as an actress, you’ve surpassed the age of believable fuckability. So, where you were once cast as a sexpot, you’re now cast as a long sweater-wearing frump. It’s when you start getting offered sexless and dowdy roles like Mrs Claus. An apt example of this being Sally Field’s stealthy transformation from Tom Hanks’ love interest in Punchline to his mother in Forrest Gump. And no, the same rules do not apply to men.
Aged 65, Harrison Ford was still Indiana Jones. Aged 58, Bruce Willis was still vesting it up and refusing to die hard as John McClane. Meanwhile, Michelle Pfeiffer, in her fifties, is hardly still playing Catwoman. Can you imagine? Well actually I totally can imagine, but I’m not Christopher Nolan, so tough tits.
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But Louis-Dreyfus, the extremely fuckable Seinfeld and Veep star, is sanguine about her transition to unfuckableness, hence the ice cream-chugging and farting. She can let it all hang out now. “I can grow my pubes out,” she says, shortly before being cast off in a ceremonial “no longer fuckable” rowing boat in the style of a funeral barge, with “Sally Field wuz here” carved into it.
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Not only does this sketch throw ample shade at that toxic combination of sexism and ageism, ever present in show business, it’s also a giant “fuck you” to everyone still banging on about women not being funny. What’s more, it’s a true sign of women in comedy having reached a critical mass, where they can safely criticise the double standards that plague their own professional lives. They can also fart, talk about pubes and generally be extremely toiletty. And by “toiletty”, I mean (in short) unashamed of their bodily functions.
The more that gender politics are prodded and poked at in mainstream comedy, the closer we get to anything resembling equality on our screens. And if that prodding and poking also happens to involve farts, all the better. Because, I’m sorry, farts are funny. And toiletty, irreverent and pubic women are the future.
I’ve always been suspicious of comedy with a message. Generally speaking, moralising of any kind is about as funny as a replacement bus service. But this absolutely perfect Amy Schumer sketch manages to make a very serious point, without compromising a single LOL. This is what so many funny women do best.