A few weeks ago a video was posted on TikTok by creator Jahelis claiming that Saturday Night Live hires no “hot women”. Now deleted, the video was quickly shared to X where millions watched her point out everything wrong with how we perceive women in comedy but arrive at the wrong conclusion. She just can’t quite “put her finger on” why she doesn't find these women hot.
Though the theory she explains in her video completely goes over her head, she brings up an interesting point: can funny women be hot? We are all familiar, as a society, that we’ve been conditioned to see funny women as less attractive. There is that famous saying: men want someone who will laugh at their jokes and women want someone who will make them laugh. An experience Jahelis may be familiar with as she shares a picture of a young Jimmy Fallon who she claims is a “conventionally super hot guy.”
This gap in Humour Hotness has created the concept of the most powerful woman: someone who’s hot and funny. Some people couldn’t fathom meeting a woman who makes them laugh and horny at the same time. Could a woman hold that much power? Sorry, let me rephrase that. Could a woman hold that much power without being criticized for it?
Female comedians have always had to navigate their profession under the guise of men. They are criticized for making jokes about the female experience while men fill arenas making jokes about their wives. Simone de Beauvoir endlessly analyses this in her book The Second Sex: “To say that woman is mystery is to say, not that she is silent, but that her language is not understood.” The woman is always chastised as the Other.
This video surfaced around the release of Rebel Wilson’s memoir Rebel Rising. In it, she recounts issues her agency had with her wanting to lose weight: “The agency liked me fat because they got hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for each film where I played the fat funny girl.” If she became conventionally attractive, how else could we justify Wilson’s success?
Zoe Marner, co-host of The Too Much Podcast, has recently been trying to gain an audience on TikTok through her comedy. The platform, which has helped dozens of new comedians launch their careers, is home to a lot of “veiled misogyny” she explains. The comments about her looks are commonly about her nose ring. “The shocking misogyny is when they say ‘women shouldn’t speak’,” she says of her most jarring comments.
As someone who uses the platform to make people laugh, Marner says her looks quickly become irrelevant on a platform where girls go viral for lip-syncing while looking pretty. “I try to look nice on TikTok but I really don’t try to look my hottest,” she explains doing so helps people stay focused on the contents of her video. If not, they end up asking for the type of hair dye she uses. “Maybe I’m mid enough to be funny,” she laughs. (She is definitely a 10/10, by the way.)
Perhaps female comedians being mogged on TikTok can also be said for female comedians on television. Unfortunately, watching Chloe Fineman dressed up as Timothée Chalamet on SNL might not give you the same visual experience as Sydney Sweeney in Euphoria.
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There are power dynamics in stand-up comedians and “gender essentialism is hard to avoid,” says Marner. Funny, pretty, smart, and nice, are all qualities which give you capital. Once a woman has all those traits, our brains seem to glitch. “It challenges how we understand humour is formed. We think adversity equals a sense of humour,” she continues. This is true, considering many comedians turn to self-deprecating jokes as a comedy style.
So, the question lies, how much power can we let funny women have? We tend to give more room for male comedians to be hot since no one is complaining that the men of SNL need to be more attractive for us to be entertained. Maybe if we were less angry at the capital that funny attractive women have we could let ourselves laugh a little more at their jokes.
To Jahelis, the female comedians on SNL should be more hot than they are funny. Like comedian Stef Dag who went viral in the TikTok series “Subway Takes” for saying men want to date the Candid Girlfriend™ because they can turn her into their muse. We simply want women to shut the fuck up so bad.