After 'Wedding Crashers' I was just surprised as to the lack of comedic female material there is. So I had to start working and getting stuff out there for myself.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love doing comedy. Absolutely love it. After 'Wedding Crashers,' people suddenly realized that it was something I could do.
The American audience has really opened up to women being A.) funny and B.) kinda crude. 'Bridesmaids' is R-rated, and I think it was a major coup for women to have an R-rated comedy that did really well. Same as 'Bad Teacher.'
Up until 'Bridesmaids', the general consensus was that women preferred comedy a bit softer.
I'm a 'Bridesmaids' type of girl. I love silliness. That's who I am at heart, and I know I can do it. If my career path takes me elsewhere, that's great. But comedy is my forte.
When I auditioned for 'Wedding Crashers,' the producers had never seen any of my other work except for Bond. I got 'Wedding Crashers' partly because I was a Bond girl.
I've been pitching a show of five female stand-up comedians through the generations, from Phyllis Diller to Amy Schumer, so when I got an e-mail asking me if I would participate in the Women in Comedy Festival, I was thrilled.
Comedy is really my passion. I started out way before television doing sketch comedy with other women. Very much along the lines of, at the time it was 'Sensible Footwear', but now it's 'Smack The Pony', 'French And Saunders', that kind of thing. That's how I started out.
I think 'Saturday Night Live', starting in the 1970s, really gave women an outlet to be funny. A lot of those women went on to have film careers, from Kristen Wiig now to Tina Fey and Gilda Radner.
I grew up in a time when women didn't really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny - because it's powerful; it's a threat.
I'm lucky. I've worked with extremely talented women who won't sacrifice comedy to make themselves look better.