COMEDY

96 THE BODYand the pair’s drunkenness. All of these are clearly forms ofincontinence, castigating women for cherishing inappropriate ideasabout themselves and inverting the generation gap. Women are notbeing universally chastised, however, but rather these individuals aresingled out for the vacuity of their values and their elevation of idealsthat ask women to conform to unattainable standards of perfection.Absolutely Fabulous’s frank discussion of sex and the body is part of abroader movement of women writers who ‘are creating characters whorealize a much fuller and more troublesome range of bodily possibilities’(Carlson, 1991:250). Certainly in the 1990s, a number of femalecomedians came to prominence whose material dealt with their identityas women, and the social, physical, and sexual expectations placed uponthem. Jo Brand, for example, has built a career on challenging maleviews of appropriate female behaviour, and media that perpetuate amale ideal of femininity:if a Martian come down to earth and just had to watch telly andread magazines to find out what women were like he’d think thatthey were all blonde and 25 with big tits…. Also he would thinkthey were never rude and always looked nice, they alwaysdeferred to men, a lot of the time. Obviously there are exceptionsto that on television, but I’m saying that’s the general essence ofit. So I like not to be like that.(Brand, in Wagg, 1998:122)A number of performers and television shows testify to the fact thatcomedy written and performed by women successfully occupiesa mainstream position in twenty-first-century popular culture. However,this cannot be simply accredited to tastes changing over time, but israther the fruit of the concerted political efforts of feminism since the1960s. Clearly, comedy is not immune to ideology but is saturated in it.As we have seen, the use of the body in comedy is derived fromnormative cultural concepts of bodily deportment and physical beauty.As such it reflects dominant ideological codes, but, as Jo Brand andothers demonstrate, it can also be the vehicle that challenges themthrough parody, satire, and ridicule. In order to better understand theideological battles that have been fought through humour, we shouldtherefore consider further the relationship of comedy to politics.