"How?"
"Why?"
“Mommy, where do Comedivas come from?”
The “how” could fill countless articles, the “where” you’ll have to talk to your mommies about, but the “why” is what I want to share with you today. There are a million reasons why I founded Comediva. The official, mission statement version is: To increase the presence of women in comedy, and provide a one-stop-shop for a girl to get her giggle on.
But when I’m really pressed about the “why,” it’s hard for me to answer without sharing a story.
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A few years ago, I was a bright-eyed, fresh-out-of-film-school screenwriter with my newly-minted and potentially worthless MFA under my belt. I set out to become a comedy writer – as many, many others have done before me. I was fortunate enough to have written a comedy script that a pair of amazing producers liked, and they took me out into The Big, Real World to pitch this idea as a pilot. At that point, I was incredibly grateful for the opportunity to pitch with these superheroes, and I tried not to be attached to the outcome. But I trained for those pitches like a marathon: writing, practicing, re-reading, pitching to myself in the shower. I was an effing pitch machine! I was READY!
Two of the networks I pitched gave it a pass. (For the non-filmies, that means they said no). And the only feedback I heard was that the idea “wasn’t male enough.”
Not male enough.
That single phrase will stick in my brain for the rest of my life.
It’s fine, I thought. I didn’t need a chip on my shoulder. I didn’t need another excuse to blame for how hard it is to make it in Hollywood. I understood that if their demographic was male, that’s the audience they had to cater to. I got it.
But then, where was our network? Where was the channel that exclusively catered to a woman’s sense of humor? Is it because girls don’t care about comedy? Is it that girls are just not as funny as guys? No, it couldn’t be. As I read and researched and thought more about it, I found out something completely mind-blowing and earth-shattering:
Girls just have a different sense of humor than guys.
Wait, really? That’s it? WTF?!
What makes up a girl’s sense of humor is complex and varies from lady to lady. However, at the risk of making sweeping generalizations, I did learn a few reasons why girls are just different from boys when it comes to funny:
- Boys tend to use humor to one-up each other. Girls tend to use humor to bond with each other.
- Despite our abuse of the phrase LOL, it’s harder to make girls laugh out loud than boys.
- Girls enjoy irony, wordplay, and subtlety, and favor storytelling over joke-telling.
So girls are just different.
DUH! WINNING!
At long last, Comediva is here, to cater to your sense of humor, ladies. The boys are welcome too, of course. But a lot of people have told me, “Girls watch guy stuff, but guys won’t watch girl stuff,” as an explanation for why there is no home for female comedy. Let’s see what happens? If the boys wanna play too, we’re cool with sharesies.
But this one’s for the ladies. And once we started to look, we found an abundance of underutilized female comedy talent that now has a platform to create and express their hilarity.
We built this site and everything in it with you girls in mind, always seeking to make ourselves laugh as hard as we want you to. We’ve juiced our creative mind-grapes and that sweet juice has fermented into a fine wine that is truly one-of-a-kind.
It means more than words can say for me to be able to type this:
It’s here.
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