So in As You Like It<\/i> there’s a bit where Rosalind is pestering Celia for information about Orlando and then not letter her get a word in edgewise when she attempts to actually talk. Celia complains about her interruption. Rosalind (dressed as Ganymede, remember) says Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.<\/i>\n
Through the first weekend, this line does not get a laugh. The director has given her a note, which she has tried, and nothing. So she comes backstage and asks us: why am I not getting a laugh with this line? I told her the problem is that she is not saying the line in 1974, which was the last time it might have been funny. Our Fool, more helpfully, tells her to draw out the pause between the phrases. She does this, and she gets a laugh at each of the remaining performances, often a huge laugh.\n
And I am bothering telling you so because this sort of women never shut up amirite<\/i> joke is something that I just find Not Funny. Not Funny at all. There are a lot of jokes in AYLI<\/cite> about gender roles, and how people respond to crossed-up gender expectations, and a lot of those jokes are really funny—but not that one. Not to me, at any rate. And one of the things I have found that sort of lurks around the edges of the various misogynist nastinesses that have been turning up in fandom recently is the women never shut up amirite<\/i> joke (and to a lesser extent the men! amirite?<\/i> joke), and it is still not funny.\n I lucked in to some tickets for the local professional production of Twelfth Night<\/i>, to which I took my daughter this weekend, and it occurred to me that the production took very few opportunities to make gender expectation jokes. Yes, there were bits about the very masculine Orsino among his buddies, particularly getting a rub-down from the supposedly-male Viola\/Cesario, but those were jokes about Orsino, not Viola. One production I saw (in Golden Gate Park in 1993) had Viola\/Cesario chucking herself under her chin whenever she wanted to assert her male-ness; an odd gesture, and one I didn’t previously associate with the performance of machismo, but after a few repetitions we all got it, and it got funnier through the rest of the show. In this one, Viola pasted on a moustache and wore trousers, but didn’t spit or scratch or grunt or otherwise indicate guy-ness and masculinity at all.\n