Collaborating with Men

What’s your personal history with feminism?

I’ve been a feminist for as long as I can remember, even before I knew what the word meant. My personal brand of feminism has developed and changed over time, and it hasn’t been easy to go on this journey, especially when the world bombards us with negative stereotypes about feminists and feminism – the most pervasive stereotypes being that a) feminists aren’t funny, and b) feminists hate men.

I feel like the “fact” that feminists aren’t funny and hate men would be news to the men I’ve worked with.

Over the last couple of years, I have collaborated creatively with several different people to write short plays/pageants and short films for a volunteer organization I am affiliated with. These plays and pageants are comedic in nature, and often silly.

Extremely silly. As in, a parody of The Avengers where the villain is Snooki instead of Loki. As in, a story that is both a parody of Argo and Les Miserables (with a little bit of Twilight thrown in). As in, a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where Jesus wonders if the world would have been better off if he’d never been born. Just to name a few.

None of these are available to the public because putting them on YouTube would violate privacy issues, but you get the idea. Silliness and parody abound in these short projects.

In almost all of these collaborations, my creative partner was a man.

Now I’m writing for a comedy web series that will premiere in a month, and I’m working with – you guessed it – a group of dudes.

Working on these projects requires a big chunk of time, commitment, and energy. Writing scripts means sacrificing chunks of time to brainstorm and work on dialogue. Editing the footage of these short films means sitting in front of a computer with a creative partner until 5 AM.

Filming episodes means setting aside almost half of a weekend to make sure lighting and shots are perfect, to re-do shots when they’re not perfect, and sometimes filming a mere two minutes of material can take an hour and a half.

Spending that much time with people to make the comedy work means we have to get along, but it’s about more than just being polite to each other. We have to enjoy each other’s company so that when we look at five different takes of the same scene, or film the scene ten or twenty different times, we keep the creative juices flowing.

That’s why these partnerships work. Sometimes the creative juices flow when we’re at our most energetic, and sometimes we get those bursts of creative, insane genius that only come when we’re completely exhausted and running on empty.

And almost all of these partnerships have been with men. I have yet to collaborate with another woman on a comedic short film or web series.

I know plenty of funny women. I know female comedians, actors, and playwrights/performers who have made my sides ache with laughter. But even though I find these women very funny, I haven’t found one whose comic tastes coincide with mine. I’ve admired these women from afar, had conversations with them about comedy, made them laugh as they’ve made me laugh, but I haven’t had that magic conversation that happens when I realize I’ve met a comic kindred spirit where we can bounce ideas off of each other for hours.

I have had those magic conversations with several different men.

But as we know, feminists don’t like men.

So, how do I break it to the guys that I’m not actually funny and P.S., I secretly hate them?

I’ll have to figure out the best way to tell them. But in the meantime, I’ll put in a plug for The Dan and Matt Show, an upcoming sketch comedy web series starring my friend from work and his best friend. Here is the first teaser trailer:

I’m a writer for this show and it premieres on October 6th. Expect more silly things like staring contests with Grover.