Women In Comedy

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If there is one thing in comedy that will, without fail, make me roll my eyes, it’s when a man dresses up as a woman. The entire audience could be laughing at the straight man putting on a dress and a wig while talking in a high pitched voice about makeup, but it just has never resonated with me. Since I was young, I never understood why people found it funny, but I laughed along as to not seem lame or without a sense of humor. But, as I grew older, and became more aware of the position that women hold in the world, I understood why I couldn’t laugh at this - when straight men dress up as women, it is rarely in a positive light. In most cases it’s to directly make a mockery of femininity. Men dressing as women has been happening since the time performance started, seeing as women weren’t typically …show more content…
It has always been used as a form of comedy, and therefore it is engrained in our society that it is funny. The mindset immediately took to film, with some of the first films including cross-dressing for comic relief. Charlie Chaplin was at the forefront of using this for comedy with The Masquerader (1914) where his character is fired from a studio, so he dresses as a woman to return, and A Woman (1915) with Charlie Chaplin portraying a woman so he could spend more time with his girl friend. The trend continued for countless films, but I will mention two in particular, Tootsie and Sorority Boys. Tootsie is a classic movie, and widely regarded as having feminist undertones. In Tootsie, Hoffman plays an actor, Michael Dorsey, who is having trouble getting work in Hollywood. He dresses up as a woman to get a role in a soap-opera, and after receiving said part, he must continue to live his life as a woman to the public. Dorothy is brave, independent, and

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