When I told my husband that there was a whole thing about how men think women aren’t funny he said, “What are you talking about? It’s really sexist for you to accuse men of thinking that.” He never felt that way. My reaction to his article wasn’t anger, but confusion. YAEL KOHEN: I was unaware as well until Christopher Hitchens wrote that piece in Vanity Fair. When I started, I wasn’t aware that there was a stigma that women weren’t as funny as men. LIANNE STOKES: I did stand-up for five years. We chatted with Kohen about the bawdy broads, intellects, and sex bombs who lit up the zeitgeist. Kohen’s painstaking research included interviews with a diverse mix of comics and writers, among them Roseanne Barr, Robin Williams, David Cross, and Aubrey Plaza. It is not a book that feeds into gossip, misogyny, or man-bashing it’s a clever, honest revelation of the comedy industry, spanning six decades. Rather, Kohen penned the book to celebrate women in comedy and to uncover how different time periods and cultural climates affected what ladies talked about onstage. Yael Kohen didn’t write We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to add her voice to the tiresome debate about whether or not women are funny.
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