Paola Molina, a writer and comedian trained in Buenos Aires, is the mind and heart behind the popular book “Confessions of a Bachelorette”. Work that began as a fanpage of personal anecdotes on Facebook, and which was added every day by hundreds of thousands of followers who empathized, laughed and even projected their own experiences with the stories of “la Solte”.
And it is that one of the most powerful tools of Paola’s comedy is its ability to transform the taboo, the shameful and the tragedies of adulthood into an infallible humor. But the road to success was not easy. Even more so if it is a woman who fights from the stage the machismo present in comedy, and that is encouraged by colleagues, producers and the same audience.
“In my beginnings there was always the public’s prejudice that because I was a woman, I was going to be a fome,” Paola Molina told El Mostrador.
“I remember a couple of shows with men with their arms crossed in the front row, eyebrows raised with a look like I’m approving the show instead of enjoying it,” the Solte recalls.
“There are also the colleagues who present women as ‘beautiful’, for example, ‘now comes the pretty Paola’. With that, they take us away from the comic spectrum and relegate us to the usual: our physical appearance as the most important thing,” he adds.
Analyzing the evolution of women in comedy, for Paola “until very recently the woman was only the sexy mine that accompanied the ramshackle comedian who could make a fool of herself and who was the one who really made her laugh,” she says.
“And if it wasn’t that woman, it had to be the ugly old woman whose punchline of jokes was her ugliness. There was no complexity, no layers and our physical appearance remained the first line,” he adds.
However, “now you go to a bar and there are young women talking about being remorseful about being mothers and that’s wonderful, because she comes out of the traditional role of the woman who is delayed in the family. Women talking about issues that have nothing to do with gender roles,” she says.
How can comedy with a feminist perspective be a tool to claim women’s rights?
– Comedy helps lower our guard so we can laugh at what we don’t necessarily agree on, but that we are able to understand and immerse ourselves in the world of the comedian.
With feminism in comedy, we’re laughing at the lie that made us believe in novels, tv series and commercials of what it was like to be a woman. In the feminist joke the pathetic subject of laughter is no longer the victim woman, but the abusive man or the oppressive system.
How do you visualize the women’s stand up comedy today?
– I see that there are many more women in comedy, where not all of them are feminists and that’s fine. Women have always had to be outstanding in any field to have the quota and participate with male colleagues. For me that is the most important thing, more than the comedian’s speech, I think it is important that society finally sees us as normal people. May we be allowed the same freedom and the same mistakes that men have had room to get around.
