Newspaper Article

Who's Laughing Now? Women

Hopkins, Ellen, Ellen Hopkins is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine

1990

Overview

Like a mad-dog prophet heralding the apocalypse, Reno, 35, whose one-woman show is aptly titled ''Reno Enraged,'' bounds across the stage, flashing the whites of her eyes, sputtering with rage at all she has to revile. This capacious rage encompasses house-proud parents who made her childhood into a horror-film sequence (''Don't go into the living room. Don't go into the dining room''), the Just Say No campaign (''Oh, you're addicted? No, you're not!'') and those who insist homosexuality is a life style. Life style, she reminds us, implies choice: ''Ooooo, homosexuality - you mean no one's gonna talk to you anymore? Where do I sign up?'' Since the pause is so vital to comedy, much of the hilarity of what Reno has to say gets lost in her rat-a-tat-tat barrage. It's only later, reflecting on the justice of her complaint that there are no beguiling words for certain parts of a woman's anatomy, that you think, ''Now that was funny.'' If there were such a thing as comic justice, [Elayne Boosler], 38, wouldn't be in this article: she would be in the Lily/Roseanne/Whoopi/Sandra pantheon of funny women who got so famous they don't have to do stand-up anymore (though she has graduated to the concert-hall arena and now produces her own TV specials). Ms. Boosler doesn't walk onto a stage and proclaim, ''Speaking of my boyfriend.'' Instead, her warm natural manner makes it somehow inevitable that she would tell you how her boyfriend wanted to take a midnight walk by the river. And her response - ''What, are you nuts? I'm wearing jewelry, I'm carrying money, I have a vagina with me'' - clearly isn't designed to titillate. She's one of the only comics who can do a PMS routine that isn't anti-woman: in Ms. Boosler's world, a woman President with raging hormones is a masterful power broker, capable of bullying a terrorist into giving up his demands: ''Taking hostages on a day when I'm retaining water? This is going to go very badly for you.'' RENO - A work in progress, ''Out There Without a Prayer,'' runs Friday through Sept. 23 and Sept. 27-30 at Performance Space 122 in New York; she plans to continue touring with her one-woman production, ''Reno Enraged,'' and will appear in Michael J. Fox's latest film, ''The Hard Way,'' to be released next spring. [Rita Rudner]: ''Born to Be Mild,'' part of the ''HBO Comedy Hour'' series, will air in December. ''The Rita Rudner Show,'' a half-hour TV series of sketches and stand-up routines, will have its premiere Tuesday in England. [Marsha Warfield] - ''The Marsha Warfield Show,'' a half-hour syndicated talk show, airs weekday mornings on WNBC-TV. The comedienne also stars as the earthy bailiff on the NBC series ''Night Court.''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: HOPKINS, ELLEN / HUMOR AND WIT / WOMEN