Women Aren't Funny: Lena Dunham Talks About Hookers and That "Special Time"

Lena Dunham is a comic filmmaker who produces much of her work on web television, but also makes independent shorts in her free time that's split between New York City (where she was born and raised) and in midwestern Ohio on the Oberlin campus. Not even a college graduate (she'll graduate this May), she already has a hearty filmography to explore, which can be found at her production company website, Pistols Kill Ponies, on YouTube, and on the Nerve Video website, which hosts her web TV series Tight Shots. We spoke one afternoon without much formality. She jumped right into conversation.

[Lena Dunham]: Most of my film friends are guys, that’s just how it ends up. I don’t have an overwhelming amount of girlfriends who want to make films. So I was talking to some of my film-guy-friends, and one of them made a comment and said, “You know girls can be funny, it’s just a lot harder.” And it was amazing to me. I couldn’t believe this was actually coming out of his mouth. I didn’t even fight back, because I didn’t even know how to address a statement like that.

[Pamela Kerpius]: Like it was such a shocking moment to have that come into your consciousness that you didn’t even know how to respond?

Exactly. Because that to me is such a ridiculously untrue statement that I’ve never even taken the time to figure out why it’s not true.

With filmmaking in general, I feel like it’s harder to know if all of your work is automatically going to be effected by being a woman, if your stories are all going to reflect coming from that standpoint. It’s like the oldest feminist discourse question. After I did this web series (Tight Shots) and a short film (Dealing), I had meetings with different network guys from ABC and NBC who were trying to extend into TV and find people to write short form stuff; and one guy said to me, “We’re really looking for people who have a beat on that special time in a woman’s life.” And it was not clear at all what “special time” he was talking about.

Maybe he wanted to snatch you up before you got pregnant and started a family. Something like that? Like maybe he thought your comic genes would shut down after you have a child.

Yeah, yeah, I didn’t know what he was talking about! I didn’t even ask what the “special time” was, because I don’t think I wanted to know the answer…

[laughter]

"Special time,” yeah, I could not believe it! It blew my mind, it totally blew my mind.

I think it’s going to stay funnier not knowing the definition.

It’s true! I’ve had people respond differently every time I tell that story. My mom was like, “puberty?” And my dad thought, “menopause?” My sister was like, “college applications? What ‘special time?’”

After you reach the spring equinox of your twenty-fourth year…

Pamela, you could devote a whole theme week to just guessing the “special time.”

So how did you get into comedy?

Before I was ever interested in filmmaking. When I was little I was a total dork and wanted to do musical theater. I had the dream that many 5th grade girls have, which is I wanted to be the star of Annie or Les Miserables or something. Or I would have killed to be what Miley Cyrus is now.

So anyway, I did a lot of acting, but I randomly decided when I was fifteen that it would be really awesome to be a stand-up comedian. So I went to stand-up comedy school at a place called The Comedy Institute of America in New York. It’s really two rooms in a sketchy building in Times Square. It’s definitely not an institute of anything.

But I went anyway, and I was the youngest person in the class so the teacher was automatically sweet to me and wanted to protect me. I feel like he shielded me from some of the harsher criticisms you generally get in stand-up comedy class. We did a few shows, and after I did the class I kept doing a few more around New York. But I think I had an instinct that I was in a little over my head.

There were shows where you had to bring your own audience, and of course they all had to be over 21. So I could bring my mom and my grandma and my babysitter...

So this sketchy Times Square theater, was this an inspiration for Hooker on Campus?

[laughter]

Seriously! It sounds like it!

Hooker on Campus came from me imagining what it would be like if a hooker was walking around my campus. I thought, “That would be amazing if in this beautiful midwestern town, a hooker just walks through!”

It’s interesting to me that you wrote that role for yourself, it’s not terribly common that a woman would write herself as a prostitute…

She’s a little bit of an offbeat prostitute, she’s not very sexy. She’s pretty insecure! I think I was probably a little inspired by Amy Sedaris, she’s the type of woman I can imagine writing a role for herself as a prostitute. After I did stand-up comedy school, I went to college and started making movies and I realized that my favorite thing to do was to star in them myself doing completely absurd things.

Do you have a following at Oberlin?

I can’t say I have a following there. But I do have screenings sometimes at the Oberlin campus, and my movies are all on YouTube, so people can always see them. Sometimes teachers will randomly tell me, “Saw Hooker on Campus!” Just the people you don’t want to have seen it. But I guess that’s the risk you run.

I have to say, I’m curious about that short in particular; the role is very conscious of gender and sexual stereotypes, especially on a college campus where women wear three-inch heels to house parties. Sometimes it's as if women are emulating that hooker "look."

For me, that character was a strange literalization of what it feels like to be a girl in college attempting to find somebody to date. Especially at Oberlin where women are the majority, it’s about 65-70% women. And if you take away the guys who like to play Dungeons and Dragons and the guys who are gay, you’ve got like eleven straight guys who are smelling meat like crazy lions.

[laughter]

You go to these parties and it’s like a desperate search for somebody to pay attention to you. Sometimes you do feel like a soliciting hooker walking around campus. So that’s the root of the idea, this hooker trying to make friends and form a social life. The part of myself that thinks I’m not that good at college came out in that character.

Did you meet anyone upset by the movie?

You know, no one was upset by it, but there were definitely people I approached on campus who didn’t think it was funny, and who didn’t want to be involved. I think people have a tendency to see you doing something like that and think, “Why do you want to make a spectacle of yourself?” And they misunderstand where it’s coming from, because it definitely wasn’t like I just wanted to wear a short skirt and walk around campus. But I think it’s easy for people to wonder why I’d be showing my body that way, or why am I acting so provocatively.

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You can see most of Lena's shorts at her website, Pistols Kill Ponies. Here is a peek at one of my favorites, Open The Door.