Women have never been much good at standup comedy. To get noticed, they have to act like men and be aggressive and vulgar. Our culture won't let a funny woman be funny, as a woman. In the 1950s Lucy played a funny woman -- she bumbled around, getting into trouble and bawling her eyes out, until her husband Ricky saved her. No female comic could do today what Lucille Ball did in the 1950s. The woman's liberationists wouldn't allow it.