Happy Cancer Chick - The Women Behind the Web Series - Part 3 of 3

We activists are fond of saying, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and when it comes to the representation of Latinos in popular entertainment, the problem remains huge in 2013. 

Look no further than this past Sunday’s Oscar telecast.  In addition to overlooking prolific and gifted actress Lupe Ontiveros in the memoriam segment, Seth McFarlane’s “joke” about no one understanding nor caring what Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz or Salma Hayek says because they’re so hot had a dissertation full of fail. For example, Zoe Saldana – who co-presented earlier a technical award with former co-star Chris Pine a technical award doesn’t count as a Latina because… what exactly? She’s Black? She’s not hot? She doesn’t have an accent?  Or is she not hot because she’s Black? Because she’s doesn't have an accent? Or because she's Black and doesn't have an accent? 

See… layers upon layers of failure.  And let’s not forget the enduring and complex politics of casting most recently exemplified and further complicated by this year’s Best Picture ARGO.  These are only three examples of how little Latinos have come in fourteen years since the so-called Latin Pop Explosion. 

Lupe Ontiveros, 1942 - 2012

One way to be part of the solution is to seize control of our own images and independently produce media with whatever technology, capital, talent and other resources we have available. For two seasons, producers Jenny L. Saldaña and Linda Nieves-Powell did that with the web series Happy Cancer Chick. Read on in this third of three installments to discover how they exemplified another saying by inspirational writer Orison Swett Marden: Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great!"

SQ: Before HCC, Linda, you were well-known for theater and your novel Freestyle. What made you decide to realize this concept as a web series instead of, for example, a play such as YO SOY LATINA?

LNP:  I love writing.  Period.  I don't stay in one place for too long.  My first short story, The Fly Ass Puerto Rican Girl from the Stapleton Projects was just published in the Akashic Books anthology, Staten Island Noir.   I love to try new things and I'm not afraid of the learning curve when doing so.  I really wanted to try this out and now that I have, I think I'll produce more

SQ:  With two seasons under your belt, what advice do you have to others who may have an idea for a web series?

LNP:  Writing, whether it's on the web or TV or the stage is still key to a successful show.  Writing is the blueprint.  If it doesn't work on paper, it won't work at all. Season 2 I actually got hung up on this a lot.  I threw out a lot of ideas before finally feeling that the current format would be the best format to use.  I watch a variety of different webseries, some feature great actors, great writing, most have great intentions, but a lot are trying to mimic TV.  My favorite webseries is THE GUILD.  It's done really well and the content is perfect for the medium and demographic.  There are other series like THE MISADVENTURES OF AWKWARD BLACK GIRL, that are about funny moments and less about story arc.   I think ABG structure is a great format for the web.  This isn't always easy. I'm story driven.   So for me, I have to learn to keep it shorter and sweeter but still have a great beginning, middle, and end.   I find that the ABG series is more about that moment.  I like that.  But I can't write like that.  My brain doesn't function in moments.  I need connect ideas and themes.  Stories have to be bigger for me.  So fitting my writing sensibilities into this tiny, quick format, requires me to build new skills and create ideas that will fit this format.  My overall advice is do it.  Just do it.  You won't know until you try.   And don't be afraid of  the unions like SAG/AFTRA or WGA.  Jenny and I were able to become members of the Writer's Guild Of America because of this series and several of our actors were able to join SAG through our little project.

SQ:  So what is next for you? HHC Season 3? Something else?  

JLS:  I think we've said all we've wanted to say with HCC. For right now the HCC is going to bed. I'm working on a book of short stories, and am really enjoying that process of reliving some of my college antics.

LNP:  Yes, we decided that we said everything we wanted to say about HCC for now.  If someone came along with an idea for future episodes, I'd think about it. For now, I've been developing a few projects the last few months, one for the stage and a few screenplays.  As for the web, I have a couple of ideas I'm developing.  One is very close to being finished. Now that I know the medium a little better I want to try a few things.  I find that I can now play in two worlds instead of one.  The web (new format) and the real world (traditional format).

Here are Parts I and II of my Q & A with the fierce women behind Happy Cancer Chick. In the meantime, you can check out all five webisodes here and on Facebook. And by all means, comment and share! 

Funny Women Are Dangerous: Rape Culture and American Comedy

Sometimes I miss doing standup. Women who are funny are powerful, and therefore dangerous. But this is the first time I ever regretted not pursuing standup because I missed an opportunity to hand some predator’s ass to him.

Summary: in pursuit of shits and giggles, a man admitted before a live audience that he aggressively pursued sex with a woman who told him repeatedly that she didn’t want him in her home never mind her body. The purpose of said revelation: to inspire other men to improvise a sketch based on this event for even more shits and giggles.

Let someone suggest, however, that rape culture in the United States is alive and well, and heads rush to spew conspiracy theories about humorless feminists.

Yet this occurred in a nation where, according to our own justice department, one in four women will be the victim of a rape or an attempted rape. Where violent words like smash, pound, beat, and hit have become synonymous with have sex. Where a female pop singer can’t even imagine being raped and fantasize revenge without getting several advocacy groups on her case while no one blinks an eye as one male recording artist after the next makes the top twenty by packaging rape carols as love songs.

This happened at an improv festival in New York City. Not in Congo, Iran, Nicaragua or anyone of “those places” we like to turn up our noses and wag our finger at for the atrocious way women are treated. Nope, it happened right here in the good ol’ US of A where a sexual assault survivor has to be damned near perfect if she stands a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing her perpetrator tried by a jury of his peers. Between the acquittal of two police officers for sexual assault (one with a history of being abusive toward women while in uniform) and the dismissal of the rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (who suspiciously leaves a trail of rape allegations wherever he goes), this damned city is turning into Club Med for predators.

The thing that disturbs me the most about this incident is that the male comics on stage were astute enough to crack jokes about the ethical and legal ramifications of this knucklehead’s behavior, but not a damn one of them was brave enough to call it out explicitly and shut him down. Then again, evidence abounds that violence against women is regular fodder for our entertainment, especially comedy. From Ralph Kramden’s threats to send his wife Alice to the moon to Twitter hashtags such as #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend our society has a long history of laughing at threats and assaults against women.

If you came of age in the 80s, you probably remember Eddie Murphy's 1983 set on singers in Delirious where he imitated Teddy Pendergrast's aggressive style and joked that he "scared the bitches into liking him."

I admit that I laughed at this even though something inside me quivered. At the age of 13, I already knew that no boy or man could ever scare me into liking him. But I wasn't informed enough to know that my instincts were on point and that my age or gender was not a reason to dismiss them. And so I laughed along and repeated the joke like everyone else.

Thirteen years later, I had mixed feelings when Chris Rock insisted vehemently that he'd never hit a woman. On the one hand, I had embraced feminism and knew that his set about relationship violence resonated with audiences because of his deft interweaving of real observable relationship dynamics with frighteningly oversimplified explanations. And yet I chuckled because at the time it seemed like progress.

In between both these blockbuster concert tours, I remember watching another African American male standup comic on TV say of Keith Sweat's Make You Sweat, "You say no, I say yes, girl, I bet I can make you sweat? That sounds like rape!" The audience didn't laugh too hard at that one. Come to think of it, he himself delivered the punch line angrily. It was a joke the comic himself didn't find all that funny. I yelled, "Oh, shit, he's right!" and appreciated him for nevertheless having the guts to say that. To this day I can't recall his name.

I haven't forgotten the revelry that ensued when What's Love Got To Do With It was released in 1993 and dudes on the block fell over themselves to imitate Ike beating Tina (to this day I walk out of the room during the scene where he rapes her in the recording booth.) Nor have I forgotten how I ran scared from the movie theater during the closing credits of Baby Boy in 2001 because I had yelled, "What the fuck is so funny about that?" when the audience laughed at Tyrese's Jody hitting Taraji P. Henson's Yvette.

Spare me talk of humor is subjective and comedy is pain and all the other clichés. The ability to evoke subjectivity when one is not the target is a function of power and privilege. Think it’s so gutsy to make light of trauma? Then have the guts to poke fun of your own pain before you crack jokes at anyone else's.

As I watched the male comics on the stage react to this monologue, I eventually wondered What if a woman had been up there? Then I asked Why are there no women there? And that quickly lead me to conclude Of course, there are no women there!

Women who are funny are powerful, and therefore dangerous.

I made a New Year’s resolution in 1999 to become fearless. This didn’t entail delivering a speech or jumping out of a plane. It meant enrolling in a stand-up comedy workshop. At the time, I simply rationalized that even if I failed to make a roomful of strangers laugh at jokes that I myself had written, I still would become untouchable. “If I hear crickets for five minutes, what could you possibly do to humiliate me after that?” I’d joke. “You can’t do shit to me.”

And failure was likely for me not because I wasn’t funny, but because I came to standup, as I do most of my creative projects, with my activist lens. That means there were certain kinds of jokes I decided to never tell. The sweetest spot for every standup comic is earning that laugh while being who you authentically are and speaking the truth as you see it. For me that meant steering clear of topics that usually guarantee female performers comic gold. I wasn’t the chick who, for example, cracked about her weight, complained about being single or put her mama on blast. Although I had no problem playing up my attractiveness by wearing heels and makeup, I drew the line at discussing my sexual interests and experiences never mind mimicking any of it on stage. And while I have no problems clowning myself from time to time, deprecating myself to make an audience like me was a non-starter.

As if I - a woman, a person of color, a leftist -- already wasn’t stepping into an aggressive form of entertainment on my own terms, I dared to address the most male-dominated subjects of all: politics. That’s Lenny Bruce territory. George Carlin territory. Paul Muthafuckin’ Mooney territory. Nor was I aiming for obvious political targets like elected officials and current events. On the contrary, I wrote jokes pinpointing the politics of things that people like to believe are apolitical -- sports, music, film and other forms of entertainment. I called bullshit on the so-called Latin pop explosion and pretended to be an agent brokering trades between races before Dave Chappelle introduced us to the term “racial draft.” I was coming for the Starfucker’s Zagat Survey of Usual Suspects. Amateur or professional, that’s permissible for men who are deemed courageous for trying and incisive if they hit the mark. A woman who does it risks being dismissed as a catty hater. She must be jealous of the female celebrities or pissed at the fact that none of the male ones would screw her.

I was going to succeed at becoming fearless even if I failed, but I didn’t fail. Nothing makes you understand the power of comedy like succeeding at it. This is especially true when you belong to communities that are usually the butt of the joke. Standup is another way of reclaiming your story, taking space and seizing control over your image. When you deliberately make someone laugh as you speak your truth, you at once build a bridge to your world without handing over the keys to your kingdom. This is a lesson I learned firsthand, and one of my life's regrets is not pursuing the opportunity to go pro (another story for another time.)

No wonder there’s so much ado about whether or not women can be funny, whether or not funny women are attractive, and whether or not men are threatened by funny women, ad infinitum. You know that belief of how men and women alike appreciate a sense of humor in a romantic partner? It turns out that women generally appreciate men they find funny whereas men appreciate women who find them funny. Pursuing laughter is a form of assertion, and assertiveness is deemed a masculine trait. Therefore, a woman who goes for your funny bone is violating gender norms and stepping out patriarchal bounds. Perhaps that's why too much of male comedy is devoted to going for her jugular and putting her back in her place.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that if a woman had been on that stage, she would’ve checked Eric D. Angell. Some women who enter male-dominated arenas do yield to the sexism and misogyny. They play to the male gaze, embrace the limited roles that men deem acceptable for a women (the ride-or-die chick or always sexually available and dexterous dime piece to name two) and emulate and even outdo the men in their vices. But let’s be clear. Such women do that because they’re fully aware that their insider status doesn't make them that much safer.

And frankly the maleness of the comics on stage during Angell’s confession does not excuse them from not taking a stand.

All of this is what makes this monologue, the weak response of the male comics, and the absence of female comics on that stage so damned unsettling. To quote comedian Katie Halper, “It's like an experiment that people will point back to as an example of how socially acceptable rape is.” Funny women are powerful and therefore dangerous. Looks like the world of standup needs more “humorless feminists” to take the stage, wreck shop and put this culture of rape and other violence against women in check.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a rape to report.

For further reading: Revolutionary Laughter: The World of Women Comics by Rosalind Warren