Funny Girl
With a string of high-profile comedic roles, the once broadway-bound kristen bell has emerged as one of hollywood’s wittiest leading ladies.
© STEVE ERLE
Kristen Bell has lost her phone. Well, not lost—not exactly. “I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet,” she laughs. “It honestly happens to me three times a year. I guess I just get excited to pee, and I pull my pants down so quickly that it flies into the toilet.”
This is exactly the sort of broad, deliciously slapstick moment— a splash, a gasp, a murmured expletive, a series of subsequent scheduling snafus—that Bell, one of Hollywood’s most promising young comediennes, has mastered onscreen. In an era where women-led comedies are tragically scarce, Bell—who entered the spotlight as a wisecracking, outcast teen detective on the lamentably short-lived CW series Veronica Mars, and joined Judd Apatow’s cabal of everydude comics with the title role in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall—has been busy making a fine case for funny, female-driven films that don’t involve pink cocktails or wedding dress tugs-of-war. Although she’s still best known for her television work (her disembodied narration on Gossip Girl nails the perfect balance of mean and clever), the charming and humble Bell is bright enough to light up a far bigger screen.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit (she remains a fervent Red Wings hockey fan, describing their playoff elimina- tion as “a thousand stabs to the heart”), Bell moved to New York City after high school to pursue a degree in musical theater at NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. She began performing on Broadway and relocated to Los Angeles in 2002, where her first few roles were mostly dramatic.
“I grew up worshipping Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner, Jennifer Coolidge and all these wonderful females. But I never had the instinct or the guts to write standup, so I never thought that I would do comedy,” she says. “The first couple of jobs I got as an actor were intense and dramatic and I was fine with that. When I booked Veronica Mars, it was a drama, but there was a lot of comedy, there were a lot of one-liners. People started to notice how funny the show was. Not because of me,” she quickly adds, “but because of the writers, who were very, very funny. I just took whatever was on the page and delivered it to the best of my ability.”
Still a Midwestern girl at heart, Bell has quietly eschewed the kind of Hollywood debauchery that can destroy an emerging starlet. She opts, instead, for cozy nights at home with her rescue dogs, cracking jokes with her pals (including her fiancé, Parent- hood star Dax Shepard) and cooking elaborate meals. “It took me a long time to get comfortable here; I didn’t realize that LA is what you make of it,” she says.
THIS MONTH, BELL STARS IN YOU AGAIN, A GOOFBALL comedy about a successful executive whose brother is about to marry the mean girl who tormented her in high school. The film, which has a powerhouse cast (Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cloris Leachman, Kristin Chenoweth and Betty White) addresses how certain insecurities—especially the ones we accrue between the ages of 14 and 18—never entirely leave us, and how women can and should choose to support rather than destroy each other. “I had wanted to do a female-driven comedy, and there aren’t that many out there,” Bell says. “This movie was so full of estrogen it was busting at the seams. That was really attractive to me.”
Indeed, You Again gave Bell an opportunity to perform alongside some of Hollywood’s most auspicious leading women, and she cites Hollywood stalwart (and, at 88, unexpected It girl) White as a comedic inspiration. “Betty was just beginning to become America’s sweetheart when we started filming last year,” Bell says. “She was fresh off The Proposal, and everyone was start- ing to open their eyes and go ‘Oh wow, Betty White, oh yeah, she is our favorite. We somehow forgot.’ The great thing with Betty is that it’s completely deserved. She is the funniest person in the room. Because of her age and because she’s diminutive, you don’t expect it, and that’s part of the brilliance of her comedy. She’s also the sweetest—her demeanor is just lovely. She waits patiently to make the right joke, and she makes it when she’s got everybody’s ear, and you laugh about it for days.”
White’s resurgence as a comedic icon (her Saturday Night Live appearance last May earned the show its highest numbers in 18 months) capped what’s been a promising decade for women in comedy, with writers and comediennes like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kristin Wiig, Kathy Griffin and Chelsea Handler finally earning accolades—and audiences—for their smart, acerbic routines. In November, Fey will receive the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, becoming the third woman (along with Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg) to snag that honor. And in a New York Times profile of Handler last spring, Jay Leno all but declared the gender gap in comedy closed, claiming, “What I love about Chelsea is that she shows we’ve reached a point where comedy is comedy—it’s not male comedy or female comedy.” So is humor now less the terrain of men spewing bathroom jokes, and more of an equal-opportunity game?
Not everyone thinks so. A few years ago, journalist and pro- vocateur Christopher Hitchens penned a (willfully) controversial article for Vanity Fair titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” in which he posited that women—who, according to Hitchens, have no real biological imperative to be funny—are more likely to be sub-par comedians. “I’d love for you to call Christopher and send him to my house for an evening,” Bell says, “because I think he would find out that he’s sorely mistaken. Here’s the thing: Some people just can’t make jokes. There are people out there who give me extreme secondhand embarrassment because they’re trying to be funny and they’re just not. And that’s OK! Not all of my jokes land—not nearly all of them. But I don’t think it’s fair at all to categorize women as being that way. The most handsome men are complacent with not being funny because they’re satisfied with the amount of [women] that they get.” She pauses. “I would love to send Betty White and Christopher Hitchens on a blind date, because his mind would be blown.”
While Bell is fiercely optimistic about the future of women in comedy, she acknowledges that female joke-crackers do face a unique set of challenges in Hollywood. “It’s still a struggle. To be a pretty girl—not that I’m saying I am—but to be an attractive woman trying to do comedy? That’s the hardest thing,” she says. “Everyone looks at you and is like, ‘Wow, you’re gorgeous. Wait, you’re trying to tell me jokes?’ They want to categorize you, put you in a box and not let you break out very easily. To be a female comic and not rely on putting yourself down, to not be self- deprecating—that’s difficult.”
Still, regardless of any glass ceilings or gender barriers, Bell has plenty of reasons to be hopeful about what’s next. “Recently, there have been so many female comedians that have shown they have the skills to pay the bills,” she says. “It’s been a lot easier for women like me, who kind of just want to follow in their footsteps.”
Bell might be quick to give credit to her trailblazing peers, but chances are pretty good she’ll be on the receiving end soon.
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