NEW YORK — The unwritten rule of Hollywood comedies is like that classic admonition given boxers the night before a fight: Women weaken legs.
Here the legs are a movie's potential at the box office. Which is why it seems unusual -- if not illegal -- for two females, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, to have the leads in a buddy comedy, "Baby Mama," opening Friday.
In the film, Fey -- the first female head writer on "Saturday Night Live" and now creator and star of NBC's "30 Rock" -- is Kate, aching to have a baby in her yawning 30s but saddled with what her gynecologist laments is a "T-shaped uterus." Enter Angie (Poehler, "SNL's" current sketch star, face-locked in a tight perma-smile to convey Hillary Rodham Clinton's dismay at the media's love affair with Barack Obama).
Poehler's Angie is a gum-chomping, working-class girl whom Kate enlists as the surrogate "baby mama" to carry her child to term. It's an "Odd Couple" set-up -- a slob forced into cohabitation with a yuppie striver who swears by the ethos of organic foods and worries that Angie's fast-food consumption will hurt her fetus' chances of getting into an Ivy League school.
Sounds hilarious, right? "Saturday Night Live" impresario Lorne Michaels, an executive producer of the film, sums up why marketing this comedy is different from most: "Normally it's about a guy who gets dumped by a pretty girl and ends up with a prettier girl. This is not that."
It can be difficult to determine where we are currently in the whole can-women-be-funny? debate other than to say there have been a spate of essays on the topic. The Times' movie critic Carina Chocano recently noted how "the girl" and "the hot girl" have merged into one abject role for women in studio comedies. Last year, Vanity Fair published agent provocateur Christopher Hitchens' essay "Why Women Aren't Funny," though the April magazine featured an essay by New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley going the other way, highlighting the bumper crop of women writing as well as performing their comedy, mostly on TV.
There, on the Vanity Fair cover, were Fey, Poehler and the scary-sexy-funny Sarah Silverman, whose recent music video parody about her "affair" with Matt Damon made instant noise in the way comedy is increasingly disseminated -- as viral video.
