Redefining Body Genres in the Face of Female-Driven Comedy

I remember the feeling I had when I first saw Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig, upon its release in 2011. I had never seen anything like it – the film stood apart from the slew of early 2000s sophomoric comedies for its honesty, almost unbelievable hilarity, and its slate of leading funny women. It was so hilarious, in fact, that I told my then-boyfriend that he had to see it with me. Comedy aside, he was reluctant to pay to see a film detailing the ridiculous infighting among bridesmaids, especially because I had already seen it. I confidently promised him that it was actually funny and that the bridesmaids storyline took a backseat to the humor. He acquiesced and we both laughed uproariously throughout the film. Whether it was because of the lack of oxygen from laughing too hard or the awe-inducing performances by the female leads, we walked out of the theater on a cloud of after-movie stardust, savoring the gratified high that comes from a brush of filmic perfection.

The film was universally lauded for its brutal honesty, gross-out tactics, and vulgar comedic approach, and audiences responded by flocking to see it. As the New York Times wrote in its 2011 review, ‘“Funny,’ apart from being a subjective judgment, is also a commercial imperative, and it is one that ‘Bridesmaids’ has fulfilled.”¹ According to The Guardian, the film “showed that women on screen could be just as gross, outrageous and R-rated as anything in the 2009 bachelor party hit The Hangover.”² The film undercut the traditional idea of a conventionally alluring female lead – and the common themes of beauty, poise, and sensuality audiences are accustomed to seeing: in Bridesmaids, the allure was seeing these same women vomit and have explosive diarrhea on screen.  The seemingly aggressive, risk-taking approach worked, and my boyfriend’s and my two tickets (in addition to my previous ticket) comprised mere drops in the bucket of the film’s success. With a production budget of $32.5 million, the film has made $169,106,725 domestically in the seven years since its release. It was and still is the highest grossing R-rated female comedy of all time at the domestic box office.

Producer Michael Shamberg illustrates the traditional thinking about comedies in Hollywood, “If you make a guys’ comedy, you can get girls. But if you make a girls’ comedy the guys will go, ‘That’s just chick stuff.’”³ Yet, Bridesmaids easily defeated this stereotype, although it took an army of older, female moviegoers – and presumably the guys they had convinced to come along.⁴ I, myself, behaved exactly the way the studio intended: I watched the film with a group of girls and then went back again with a twenty-something male (the most extolled spectator in Hollywood’s idealized viewer spectrum).

Critics hailed the film as “groundbreaking,” “your first black president of female-driven comedies,” and “a vindication of the rights and abilities of all women — not just those six — to make jokes.”^{5 6} Bridesmaids approached its humor with almost wicked precision. Its writers, Kristen Wiig (who also stars in the film) and Annie Mumolo, dive deep into the taboo arena of body fluids and functioning (or lack thereof), and director Paul Feig creates a near-perfect translation of their vision into a traditional “frat-pack” comedy.⁷ But unlike the puerile, narrativized comedy of other Frat Pack films, the affective images in Bridesmaids seem more sensational, more extreme, and in that way more alluring and fascinating to audiences because of their “groundbreaking” nature than those in films headlined by their male contemporaries. By contrasting the visual and sonic chaos that ensues when his actresses lose control of certain bodily functions with the calm, control we expect them to exude, Feig employs the cinema of affect in order to elicit laughter from his audience, thus positioning the film – and its female leads – as the newest members of the grotesque, previously masculine bastion, of this type of laugh-out-loud comedy.

The women all become victims of an inability to control their own bodies – whether it be experiencing diarrhea, vomiting, the high from mixing prescription drugs and alcohol, or the consequences of alcohol consumption itself. Yet, it is the images of women vomiting on each other and having diarrhea in a sink and in the street (all while wearing pastel, frilly bridesmaids’ dresses) that stand out as rarely seen in mainstream comedy films. By undermining the audience’s expectations of a women-led film in this way, Bridesmaids demands not only a reconsideration of the comedy genre, but also additional analysis of Linda William’s “body genres,” perhaps commanding an addendum.

Williams notably omits comedy from the body genres: pornography, horror, and melodrama.⁸ Unlike the classic form of narrative cinema, with its realist approach and repetitive formulas, the body genres feature sensational and gratuitous violence and terror, sex, and emotion. Williams further categorizes this “cinema of sensation” by the three pertinent features that they share: 1) “The spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion”; 2) “[A] form of ecstasy,” that is “the body beside itself with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness” evident by an “uncontrollable convulsion or spasm” in the viewer; and 3) Women on the screen functioning as the “primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain.”⁹ Filmmakers employ these tactics to manipulate the viewer¹⁰, to the point of achieving a quasi-similitude between what is happening on screen and what the viewer is experiencing in her body. For Williams, “whether this mimicry is exact” is less a determinant of success in these genres than the “self-evident matter of measuring bodily response.”¹¹ Thus, according to Williams, in the spectrum of film genre, comedy actually falls above the “low” body genres, in part, due to the lack of involuntary mimicry of the body on screen and along with a heretofore absence of the affected female body in comedy.

In Extreme Cinema, Aaron Kerner contends that laughter is the most malleable affective response: it is “capable of responding to humor, to what disgusts, to what is sexually arousing, to the exhibition of pain and horror.”¹² In this way, even though the viewer’s laughter may not be an exact echo of what she is watching on screen, it is indubitably the body responding to what is being shown on screen with an uncontrollable spasm. Kerner explains that “in its ‘expulsive’ capacity laughter potentially negotiates, or even neutralizes, that which might otherwise cause us to recoil in disgust.”¹³  This is particularly true when looking at the affective response in viewers to on-screen vomit: a form of grotesque body humor independent of narrative context. As a response to on-screen vomit, the ejection of laughter from the viewer actually resembles the act of vomiting – an involuntary transgression of the internal/external boundaries.¹⁴

This transgression is acute in the vomit or “food poisoning” scene in Bridesmaids. Images of perfectly coiffed, polished and most importantly female bodies of the women vomiting all over each other and defecating in both a sink and also in the center of a busy New York City street prove that anyone can be debased by the realities of the “lower stratum,” and that even a mainstream comedic work, through its compelling affective moments, merits consideration as a work in the body genres.

The vomit scene begins with the bride, Lillian (played by Maya Rudolph), and her gaggle of bridesmaids walking into a starch-white couture dress shop. “Oh, man,” Megan, played by Melissa McCarthy, starts to say, looking around the sprawling, pristine store, “This is some classy shit her—” a loud belch interrupts her before she can finish. Another bridesmaid hurriedly reprimands her, and Megan responds resolutely, “I want to apologize. I’m not even sure which end that came out of.” Megan, notably, is the only woman in the group who is not rail-thin but instead is obese. While the other women are decked out in muted, off-white, form-fitting, traditionally feminine dresses, Megan wears loose black-pants and a mannish button-down shirt. Rather than styling her hair in a blown-out fluff like the rest of the women, Megan sports a low, slicked-back ponytail.

 

Annie (Kristen Wiig), Becca (Ellie Kemper), Megan (Melissa McCarthy), Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Helen (Rose Byrne) try to hide their nausea during a dress fitting in Bridesmaids (2011). Frame capture.

The contextual clues all point toward this initial belch as a “mere” fat joke, one of many made at the expense of Megan’s size throughout the film.¹⁵ In fact, the burp foreshadows the six women’s rapidly approaching fate. Though they all appear in various expensive bridesmaids’ dresses, they are sweating profusely; turning myriad shades of pallid green or deep red; and emitting low, grumbling sounds from their stomachs. Lillian emerges from the dressing room in a billowy white wedding dress, and the five women are only able to feign excitement for 15 seconds before they sputter, covering their mouths, heaving, and choking back vomit. They begin audibly passing gas, and Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey) rushes at the front of the group toward a single restroom.

Rita is unable to control herself, vomiting en route to the toilet. Frame capture.

A handheld camera pans with Rita as she throws herself down onto the toilet; she hurls globs of brown vomit across the bathroom. The next shot is a low-angle close up: she pukes into the toilet. The handheld medium shot trails Megan running into the bathroom, screaming “I need the toilet! I need the toilet!” and a wide shot reveals her spinning around the bathroom looking for a place to have diarrhea. Within a second, she notices the sink. She throws the towels, lotions and other luxury accoutrements off the countertop. She then hoists up layers of chiffon and heaves herself up to sit on the sink. Rita looks up from vomiting – her countenance is plastered with brown slime – and chides her fellow bridesmaid, “No. No, Megan. No! NO!” The irony is written all of her face. Soon, Becca (Ellie Kemper) bursts into the bathroom and vomits onto the back of Rita’s head, who is face-down to the toilet.

Rita and Megan vomiting and defecating in a dress shop bathroom toilet and sink. Frame capture

Meanwhile, Helen (Rose Byrne), vying for the position of Lillian’s best friend, accuses Annie (Kristen Wiig), Lillian’s previously established best friend, of not looking well. Beads of sweat cover Annie’s face. Her eye makeup is already beginning to smear, and her hair sticks to her cheek. However, to prove to Helen that she’s not sick (for if she were it would implicate her in the food poisoning incident, as she chose the restaurant for lunch, a point that was underscored ten minutes earlier in the film), Annie claims to be hungry and asks for a snack. Helen appears with a silver dish full of saccharine Jordan almonds.¹⁶ Annie gingerly places an Easter-egg green almond into her mouth. She winces as she bites down. The crunch is sharp and clear, easily audible over the quiet piano, the background music in the dress shop. Streams of sweat run down and off her face as she nods, lying to Helen, “I was just hungry.”

Annie feigns hunger, sweating profusely and gagging while eating a Jordan almond to prove to Helen that she doesn’t have food poisoning. Frame capture.

While Annie is mid-bite, a flustered Lillian runs up. She is still wearing the wedding dress. Her stomach grumbles audibly, and she flees the shop, presumably trying to make it to a bathroom across the street. Carrying white billows of the couture wedding dress, Lillian runs across a busy New York street. Cars honk and skid out of the way. As if she’s walking in quick sand, Lillian begins to slowly melt like a withering scoop of vanilla ice cream. “It’s happening,” she mutters. Two other characters clarify that Lillian is indeed pooping in the street, as the piles of snowy silk prevent the viewer from “seeing” anything – in contrast to the scene we just witnessed inside.

In the next scene, Annie is driving Lillian home when she pulls over and exits hurriedly out of the car to finally vomit herself, though the camera stays in close up on Lillian’s face, still slick with sweat. Smeared eye makeup rings her tired eyes. Annie pants as she gets back into the driver’s seat, and the food poisoning saga is over at last.

I can attest from having seen this film in theaters twice, and also several times since then, that the food poisoning sequence precipitates waves of uncontrollable laughter in audiences. People laugh so hard they cry; they gasp for breath and double over, clutching their stomachs in a spasm not unlike the gastric distress they are witnessing on screen. Everyone – regardless of gender – identifies with the women, and the very human experience of being temporarily unable to control their bowels. Instead of empathizing with the women on screen, audience members take a perverse pleasure in laughing while they uncontrollably defecate and vomit. We understand on a very basic level what they are experiencing – for who among us has not succumbed the ravages of food poisoning? In this way, our laughter “defuses what otherwise might be overwhelmingly disgusting,” even as we are not experiencing the symptoms of food poisoning personally.¹⁷ Only when Annie eats the almond do we cringe in empathy – waves of nausea surface in our own bodies as we imagine ourselves trying to eat something in the middle of an intense attack of nausea. The laughter in the audience is transformed from uproarious to a cringy understanding.

Whether it’s mimicking the act of vomit with the ejective “ha” of a laugh or feeling your own stomach gurgle at the image of a disheveled woman chewing on an almond in the throes of gastric distress, Bridesmaids succeeds in Williams’s mandate that body genres create sensations in the bodies of the viewer. She writes,

[W]hat may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female” (emphasis mine).¹⁸

For Williams, feminine victimization and “the female body in the grips of out of control ecstasy” ¹⁹are paramount to an understanding of the cinema of excess.²⁰ As noted previously, the bodies of the women on screen “have functioned as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain.”²¹ In this way, the allure of the female body has the capacity to be both moved and moving. Given the viewer’s affective response to the images in Bridesmaids, and the fact that the bodies in question on screen are female, it is not logical to add nausea to this list? We may understand women’s affective potential in the film as representing two bodies in one, marking the nexus between the contextualizing question of “what are we seeing that is affective?” and the more technical question of “how is it affective?” Kerner points to Mikhail Bakhtin to explain what makes something grotesque: “One of the fundamental tendencies of the grotesque image of the body is to show two bodies in one: the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born.”²² The women in Bridesmaids are in dresses that represent their purity, virginity, readiness for marriage and motherhood while they unrepentantly vomit on each other and defecate in inappropriate places. The scene proves that even the perfectly polished bodies of the female characters can be rendered infantile by bodily malfunction in the same way countless comedies have done to male characters. The protagonists do not wallow in “female” humor but instead establish themselves as masters of human humor, skillfully navigating the niches of the lower stratum: vomit and feces.

Of course, in real life, we all know that women suffer as often as men do and in these same ways – gastric distress as evidenced by vomiting and diarrhea. Thus, the images should serve not as debasing, but rather as equalizing. This was the goal of Bridesmaids: to position the film as just as funny as any other ensemble comedy of its time, which notably up until that point had featured only men in leading roles. This required diving headfirst into the sloppy, disgusting, nauseating complications of being human, regardless of gender. In this way, through its affective use of vomit and diarrhea, the food poisoning scene allowed women – its female-led cast and two female writers – to claim a space in the industry previously reserved for men. The film’s success hinged on its ability to make money, and though its many critics called the raunchy approach risky, its brutal comedy is what made it so successful. As film critic Peter Bradshaw postulates in his review of the film, “A good deal has now been written about Bridesmaids being at the vanguard of a new feminist revolution in Hollywood comedy – a sorpack to go with the fratpack – and how, before this, women were marginalised or treated as second-class turns in Hollywood.”²³ At the end of the review, he admits, “Obviously, ‘Bridesmaids’ does resemble the Hangover template a little… It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but what’s striking is how fresh and unusual the comedy looks.”²⁴

What is perhaps most interesting (though maybe not surprising) is that the food poisoning scene was not in the original script. Moreover, the two female writers (Wiig and Mumolo) resisted its addition. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Wiig reveals, “The scene was not our idea and it was not in the original script and we didn’t love it… It was strongly suggested for us to put that in there.”²⁵ She adds, “I didn’t want to see people shitting and puking.” Though Wiig didn’t divulge exactly who pushed the idea for the scene, in the same interview, she also talked about the influence of Judd Apatow (a producer of the film) and how he inspired her to try new ideas.

Producer Judd Apatow, Writer/Actor Kristen Wiig, and Director Paul Fieg. The Playlist

As film critic Ricky Miller details, Apatow became a mega-producer because of his successes with a very particular type of comedy film:

…[T]hey weren’t really social commentaries or true parodies, and they weren’t dark comedies or witty wordplay comedies. For the most part, Apatow supported films that were one of two forms: one is being over-the-top, but heartfelt raunchy comedies; and the other is the subdued comedy of awkwardly watching someone grow up.²⁶

Before Bridesmaids, Apatow’s major filmic works include The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. The comedy of these films, and Apatow’s work generally, up until Bridesmaids, revolved around men’s obsession with their own penises. This took the form of men talking to each other about their desires for heterosexual sex (as in Superbad, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) or dealing with the results of irresponsibly executed heterosexual sex (as in Knocked Up). While this comedy certainly dwelt in the lower stratum, it was skewed entirely masculine and was seemingly intentionally dismissive of the interests of female viewers. Proving the power of the mid to late aughts young male viewer, these films collectively grossed $379 million domestically at the box office. Within 10 years, Apatow had become the golden boy of comedy in Hollywood. By 2010, these three films alone netted an average of over $100 million apiece. Though the laughs come at the expense of Apatow’s male characters behaving basically like adult children, per Michael Shamberg’s previous assessment, women still bought tickets (even as they cringed through the immature, male-centric sex humor).

With the backing of Apatow as a producer, the female writers of Bridesmaids were thus allowed a foot in the door and a chance to finally break through the entire history of male-dominated comedy. Their collaboration, however, came at a price: Apatow had made a lot of money for studios using a certain comedic formula, and his approach with Bridesmaids, in that regard, barely diverged from his previous box office successes. The primary difference in Bridesmaids was that it starred women. Apatow (and Hollywood, generally) perceive the female analog of male penile narcissism to be a relentless fascination with marriage and childbearing. Wiig and Mumolo’s response to this was to have the protagonist (played by Wiig) emit a condescension toward this attitude. The problem, then, was how to extract comedy from marriage, babies, and female friendship in a way that the proven target audience for this genre of film (young, white men) would respond to.

Wiig underscores the position she found herself in: “When people say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna give more female-centered movies a chance,’ you’re not reading the fine print, which is, ‘Oh, but, they have to be like this.’ They want to see women acting like guys.”²⁷ The women were given the budget, director, and producer to make a mainstream Hollywood comedy. They were not given the creative freedom to make the movie they had originally intended. Despite featuring female leads and being written by two women, men ultimately controlled the story of Bridesmaids.

Strangely, this anti-feminist viewing of the food poisoning scene ticks yet another box in Williams’s body genres: “Are the orgasmic woman of pornography and the tortured woman of horror merely in the service of the sadistic male gaze? And is the weeping woman of melodrama appealing to the abnormal perversions of masochism in male viewers?”²⁸ For our purposes here, the question might be: are the spewing women of gross-out comedy forced to vomit so that male viewers will relate to the film? In the case of Bridesmaids, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ Men watching female-driven gross-out comedy is sadistic in the same way that men watching pornography is sadistic: men reap enjoyment from female suffering. Similarly, as a female viewing of a melodrama is masochistic, so too is a female viewing of a gross-out comedy. In this way, the feminine victimization of the women in Bridesmaids, and our affective response to it, reside squarely within Williams’s body genres.

However, the lack of an embodied villain – as is the case with so many forms of gross-out comedy, the women’s bodies are in fact both victims and perpetrators – almost neutralizes the female victims. Despite the extreme display of “feminine masochistic suffering,” without a “leering villain,” there is no melodramatic power in their suffering.²⁹ In this way, this suffering is both primordially human and supremely gendered. Yet, a gendered viewing is what creates its affective potential. This gendered viewing also undermines the allegedly revolutionary approach of the film. As Kerner explains, “Bakhtin celebrates the spirit of the carnival as a form of radical freedom; however, most transgressions that invite laughter are sanctioned, and in the end reaffirm ‘proper’ order.”³⁰ The images of the women vomiting and defecating in unsanctioned places is funny precisely because they are women. Our laughter reaffirms our socialized belief that women should not degrade themselves in such a way, even though symptoms of food poisoning are obviously universal and transcend gender. Truly, “There is nothing revolutionary about the carnival,” and the grotesque images of the women’s bodies, wrenching from projectile vomit and violent diarrhea while they are still swathed in the pink pastels of couture bridemaids’ dresses, feels very much like a side show in Judd Apatow’s carnival.³¹ At a time when the target audience of a film was men under the age of 30³² (and, indeed, when the mainstream of American culture is still dictated by men at all levels of society), Apatow produced a film that settled well within his thematic wheelhouse.

For Apatow and Universal Pictures (the studio that produced the film), their great “risk” of making a movie featuring six funny women paid off. To date, Bridesmaids is Apatow’s most financially successful and critically acclaimed film. It was his first to receive an Academy Award nomination. Though they did not win, Melissa McCarthy was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, and Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo were nominated for Best Writing in the Original Screenplay category. The film opened to nearly universal acclaim; and it boasts a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score even today.

Academy Award nominated writers Kristen Wiig (as Annie) and Annie Mumolo (in a cameo as Nervous Woman on Plane) in Bridesmaids. Frame capture.

Bridesmaids – with its pivotal food poisoning scene – presents solid evidence in the case to include comedy in the body genres. Kerner promotes the idea that the “ha” action in uproarious laughter is capable of being a physical reaction so violent as to be tantamount to vomiting. As the first of its kind and in showing us (in close up, no less) grotesque images of women vomiting all over a room and each other, the film pushes for the inclusion of female-driven comedy in Williams’s body genres while reinforcing a gendered spectatorship. The sad truth for society is that this proves that the film Bridesmaids was not, in the end, actually groundbreaking. Founded in a male-centric formula that used female victimization as the engine of comedic effect, the film reinforced the gendered stereotypes of the topics about and mechanisms by which producers presume viewers will find women funny.

Nevertheless, although the film wasn’t revolutionary in its approach, it did break the comedy glass ceiling, opening the door for future female-led, big-budget comedies. Yes, they were operating in a man’s world and using men’s tools, but they successfully wielded these tropes and formulae to resounding financial success. As a result, the male producers of Hollywood now trust funny women slightly more to make them money. They understand that the allure of the female body is wider than perhaps traditionally believed. 

In the long march toward gender parity in Hollywood, Bridesmaids thus played a crucial role: it’s not perfect, but the first of something never is. Since its debut, we have had such box office hits at The Heat (2013), Spy (2015), and Girls Trip (2017), each of which demonstrated that for a relatively low financial input by Hollywood standards, female-driven comedies that endeavor to escape the cage of propriety around their genre can garner significant yields for studios. One day, perhaps, a truly female-driven comedy featuring a production team of majority female writers, actors, directors, producers, etc., could actually break ground for female comedians, introducing new thematic trails that depart from the tired paths of male-based comedy and allow women the creative freedom to unearth new ways of affecting their audiences. Until then, we have Bridesmaids and its progeny.
 
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