One night last fall in Los Angeles, two rising comedians met each other for drinks. The situation could’ve been awkward, since Courtney Pauroso, a sketch comic at the Groundlings theater, and Beth Stelling, a stand-up comedian who has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Conan, didn’t actually know each other. But Pauroso had reached out to Stelling after she heard they had both dated another comedian on the scene. Their ex had been emotionally abusive and had even raped her, Pauroso said. Had he hurt Stelling as well? Yes, Stelling told her. He had.
The two women spent the next month trying to figure out what to do next. They didn’t want to press charges — police are notorious for failing to take rape and domestic violence seriously — but considered reporting him to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where he performed, although Pauroso wasn’t a regular there.
“I was so scared people would think I was crazy,” Pauroso said. “I didn’t want to be the ‘rape comic.’”
Instead, Stelling — with Pauroso’s blessing — decided to post photos of her bruised arms and thighs on Instagram as part of a “year in review” post on Dec. 28. Stelling’s ex, whom she didn’t name, had done this to her, she wrote. He had also verbally abused her and raped her. She wrote that she had stayed quiet for fear she would look “weak or unprofessional,” but after hearing about other people he had hurt, she realized she had to come forward.
“Unfortunately I’m in a line of smart, funny women who experienced this from the same man in our L.A. comedy community,” Stelling wrote. Three days later, Pauroso told her podcast listeners that she was one of them.
“I don’t want him here, I don’t want him around me, I don’t want him to have the chance to work in the community,” Pauroso said of her ex, whom she also didn’t name. “I think it is an appropriate punishment for him to be ostracized.”
Stelling and Pauroso weren’t trying to become national news — in fact, they were alarmed by how quickly that happened. (“It’s terrifying that this is all over the internet,” Pauroso said, “because we can’t control it.”) The point wasn’t to attack their ex, which is why neither woman mentioned his name, although the man — Cale Hartmann — was outed so quickly that he felt compelled to post a public response stating that the “severity” of Stelling’s accusations was “false and extremely harmful.” (Hartmann directed BuzzFeed News to a publicist who did not comment further.) Their only clear goal was to help other women, Pauroso said, adding that she never would have spoken up without Stelling’s validation and support.
“I was like, ‘If you think I’m lying, go to Beth,'” she said. “If I was someone who was just getting started in comedy, I cannot imagine ever having the strength to do this, much less alone.”
Stelling and Pauroso are not alone. Stelling's Instagram post had barely been up before the members of a private Facebook group for women in the L.A. comedy community identified Hartmann by name and began discussing next steps. For nearly two years, Facebook groups like this one have been a place for the city’s female improvisers, sketch performers, and stand-up comedians to vent about how sexism is intertwined with professional opportunity. Last year, they decided to do more than talk — they started naming names, and they got results.
At least three men whom they accused of sexual harassment and assault are no longer allowed at some of Los Angeles’s most prominent theaters. One comic is facing a police investigation. Another man's reputation was so thoroughly destroyed that he had to move back to his Midwestern hometown.
When women share unfiltered information, it’s often called gossip, or, even worse, a witch hunt. But there’s been a cultural shift in recent years, from college campuses to the military, where women have taken advantage of new platforms to speak freely and publicly instead of depending on the so-called proper procedures that have let them down — and institutions have been forced to listen. Some call it groundbreaking feminist organizing. Others call it mob justice. Either way, that sea change has reached the comedy community, and it has raised tough questions about who is responsible for addressing sexual misconduct in a business where sexism has long been a barrier to women’s success.
Some of the city’s biggest theaters say they take these issues seriously. But as the improv and sketch comedy scene has exploded, theater companies have struggled to be more inclusive while still allowing for the political incorrectness and spontaneity they’ve always championed.
Last year, UCB and iO West, arguably Los Angeles’s most established theaters and training centers, drew up new misconduct policies and hired new staffers to handle allegations. iO West said its initiatives were a direct result of allegations that had been raised on Facebook. UCB, which has yet to post its new student-specific policy online, insisted its guidelines had been in the works for a while.
But the theaters can only do — and are only willing to do — so much, which is why female comedians are sharing their stories with each other instead. Yet some comedians are uncomfortable with how quickly the community has turned on the accused men, none of whom have ever been formally charged with a crime.
“By the end, it wasn’t even about me,” said one man — we’ll call him The Actor — who left L.A. after women in the Facebook group accused him of being a relentless sexual harasser. “I felt like I wasn’t even a person anymore, like I didn’t have a voice, or that my thoughts and opinions didn’t matter. I was just a symbol of this larger issue.”
Gina Ippolito, a comedian who has helped broadcast the members’ allegations outside of the group, said the women had to act without waiting around for the cops, theaters, or other men in the community to believe them. “It was the best system we had,” she said. “No one suggested an alternative.”
Erika didn’t know anyone when she moved to Los Angeles in 2010, two weeks after graduating from Indiana University. After a lonely first year, she discovered the L.A. branch of the Upright Citizens Brigade, and the beloved bicoastal comedy institution soon felt like home. Erika spent all her extra money on classes, interned at the theater, and hung out with her new friends after shows.
“I was at the theater more days than I wasn’t,” said Erika, who asked that her last name be withheld. “I wanted to meet everybody.”
One of the first rules of improv Erika learned was “Yes, And,” which means that performers should build on each other’s ideas instead of rejecting them: If one person says, “It’s raining outside!” the other better open up an imaginary umbrella.
Improvisers discuss the creative benefits of “Yes, And” in near-mythical terms. But some of Erika’s male classmates were less interested in being intuitive teammates than launching into their own raunchy material, which often devolved into gratuitously sexist jokes and inappropriate touching. Women felt they were expected to “Yes, And” and play along, not only onstage but off, where the unwanted come-ons sometimes continued.
Erika never considered complaining. Even if she had, who would have listened? Some of the teachers, coaches, and headliners around town — most of whom are men — made a point of calling out bad behavior, but others didn’t seem to care. Some even had their own skeevy reputations. The L.A. comedy community was supportive, but it was also fiercely competitive. In some cities, comedy is more of a hobby, but in L.A., actors pay for classes and compete for unpaid stage time in hopes they’ll get discovered. Women who spoke out were often branded crybabies, bitches, or — worst of all — unfunny.
“There was this pressure to be down for everything,” said Erika, now 26. “I wanted to be unflappable, the type of performer who didn’t get freaked out when you had to pretend to give a blow job on stage.”
There was one place where Erika could vent: the “Women of UCB” Facebook group.
Lindsey Barrow, then a house manager at UCB, founded the group in February 2014 after attending an inspiring workshop on “women and directing” at the theater. It was meant to be a safe space for women to brainstorm and collaborate, but it “turned into more of a forum for women to talk,” Barrow said. Over 1,000 women joined to post about everything from their upcoming shows to dermatologist referrals. As the group grew, the conversations got more personal.
During the summer of 2014, the national media started covering the rising number of women accusing comedian Bill Cosby of rape. The social media campaign #YesAllWomen trended worldwide after the UC Santa Barbara shooter was discovered to be a misogynist, and student activists around the country pushed the White House into launching a task force on campus sexual assault. The group members were inspired by these collective storytelling crusades to write about their own experiences with sexism — stories that women in Hollywood have historically been afraid to tell.
“When I was younger, there were so few women in comedy that we weren’t encouraged to have any sense of sisterhood,” said 47-year-old comedian Margaret Cho. “We were just so isolated.”
Even today, superstar actresses are still paid less than men, have fewer opportunities to audition for leading roles, and routinely fail to make it onto “Best Of” power lists. Many comedians interviewed for this story would only speak anonymously because they were worried about jeopardizing their fledgling careers — and newcomers make up a large portion of the thousands of people paying for classes at theaters that run training centers like UCB and iO West, which started as alternative “DIY” comedy troupes but have grown into booming bicoastal businesses.
The Upright Citizens Brigade Sunset Boulevard location in Los Angeles.
Upright Citizens Brigade
UCB, which runs three theaters in Los Angeles that put on 300 shows last year, operates the only nationally accredited improv and sketch training school in the country. Hundreds of people regularly try out for a dozen or two spots on UCB’s prestigious Harold (improv) and Maude (sketch) house teams, and all of them have to have completed the theater’s four-level training program, at around $400 per level. Nearly 12,000 students took classes at UCB New York or L.A. in 2014, about 6,400 of whom enrolled in the theater’s entry-level improv class, according to Vulture. Around 5,000 students took classes that year in L.A. alone, perhaps in hopes of meeting creative partners, getting spotted for a commercial or TV show, or even becoming the next Amy Poehler (one of UCB’s four founders), Aziz Ansari, or Nick Kroll, who are just a few notable UCB alumni.
But UCB offers more than wildly popular classes and shows (its website warns that “classes sell out very quickly, sometimes less than a minute”): It’s a hub for passionate devotees who want to work and play together. Determined performers can go from audience member to regular performer, to coach, to paid instructor or even theater administrator relatively quickly.
It’s good for business to blur the lines between theatergoers and actors — and actors and instructors — so that newcomers feel like part of a big, funny family. But there are drawbacks to the informality, one being that there haven’t always been clear guidelines for resolving serious problems. As UCB has grown in size and influence, it has received criticism for not paying its performers and discriminating against minorities — and for not taking widespread sexism seriously enough.
Both UCB's and iO West’s training centers say they are committed to diversity (UCB even offers scholarships), but, as of now, critics say the numbers still speak for themselves. In Los Angeles, for example, UCB lists 34 men and 15 women in its faculty department, and iOWest lists 18 men and 6 women. The majority are white.
There’s a general feeling that “there’s no such thing as sexual harassment in comedy,” an improv teacher wryly explained in a recent episode of the FXX sitcom You’re the Worst, on which sexual harassment in improv was an ongoing plotline. Stephen Falk, the show’s creator, said in an email that this was inspired by the writers’ own experiences. “There is a sort of dangerous inherent conflict” in comedy in that it “needs to be a ‘safe’ place where anything goes comedy-wise — where the dirty, honest truth must be free to be expressed, which can lead to some bad behavior,” he wrote.
Members of the “Women of UCB” Facebook group told BuzzFeed News they felt pressure to ignore annoying or even abusive behavior if they wanted to succeed — for example, if a guy in class “completely ignores your entire premise and turns you into a prostitute,” Carrie Keranen said. Lauri Roggenkamp recalled one improv scene during a class at UCB where a man simulated sex with her so aggressively that he forced her leg up and ripped her jeans. “If you complain about it, you’re not viewed as a team player,” she said.
The only other option, women said, was to quit. “It's easier just to stop showing up,” Jennie Newman, an alum of both UCB and iO West, wrote in one of the groups. She said she had left a theater after repeated harassment.
“I didn’t want to step on on any toes, or prevent opportunities for myself,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I know that’s sad, but I didn’t know who I could trust.”
No comments:
Post a Comment