Jena Friedman Punches Up

—and chats about the Unwanted Babies of Comedy

Tim Riley

Apr 21, 2023

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Not Funny: Essays on Life, Comedy, Culture, Et Cetera (Atria/One Signal)

I first caught Friedman on Stephen Colbert talking about her deathless live 2016 Election Night barb (“I just wish I could be funny… Better get your abortions while you can…” she says). She seemed tentative with Colbert, but grateful. No surprise, he’s a gentleman. Somebody urged her to pitch a book and now nobody’s safe…

TR: I want to start with a quote from your book that I really, really liked: “Love her or hate her, here was a woman who worked her entire life to conform to society's expectations of how likable she needed to be in order to be accepted, only to lose to a clown in the end.” And you're talking about Hillary. I just think that's one of the sweetest, wisest things anyone's ever said about Hillary. Yeah, no, seriously. And then you say this: “But in the aftermath of that traumatizing election, something cool happened. Women everywhere stopped giving a shit about being likable.” I'd like you to expand on that for me a little bit.

JF: I do think that the tenor of that election and the outcome just kind of opened the floodgates to women perhaps feeling more emboldened to put it all out there. You know, the Me Too movement coming off the back of that time, it feels somewhat connected. And I think that when you're backed up against a wall, you're a little more fearless than normal. And I do think that in the 2017 climate—it doesn't feel like it was long ago, but it was six years ago—I think it emboldened women.

TR: Yeah. It's crazy to think it was that long ago. It feels like yesterday, but it also feels like a really long time ago in a certain way. Feels like we've aged a lot as a culture since then.

JF: We have. We've had a pandemic, and we've had an attempted coup, we’ve aged a lot…

TR: I love your bit about how the abortion jokes are like the unwanted babies of comedy. You're pretty candid and you really dig in there deeply. Like, you're just not going to avoid this. Have you found yourself having trouble with that material in different places? Or do you find that the confidence really helps that material just surge right on through?

JF: The miscarriage jokes, that's in the special. Those didn't really work in the way that they worked when I wasn't pregnant. I think my being pregnant scared people, but that's like my favorite place to play in, that kind of discomfort where you know that what you're saying is correct. You know that you are not being offensive because this is a topic that we need to talk about that we're not talking about, but that is simultaneously being legislated. I’d done the bit so many times as a non-pregnant person, and it had made people laugh, the only difference was that now I was pregnant. And so it was fun to kind of tease the audience for not laughing. Yeah, that was that's what makes standup feel fresh and fun to me; when you're kind of playing with the audience’s discomfort.