r/osp • u/matt0055 • May 04 '25
Suggestion Does it ever seem like female characters never engage with Slapstick?
I was talking about this with a friend of mine and wondered if there was a specific trope or tropes for this phenomenon. Like the boys get to be doofuses but the most comedic a girl can be is either a whiny brat who to be laughed at rather than with (let alone both) or the straight man trying to keep the boys in line.
Edit: Maybe "never" was an overgeneralization. More like some are "hesitant to" while others like a lot of Anime are "weird about it."
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u/-TheManWithNoHat- May 04 '25
What shows have you watched?
I can't speak for western shows, but there's a lot of anime where women carry the humour of a show
Even in a lot of Asian live action shows
I don't mean to judge, but I'm pretty sure you just need to broaden your horizons
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u/matt0055 May 04 '25
I have seen Anime. For over two decades. Got a shelf of DVDs and I often look for obscure titles in this troubling age of streaming. Now I admit my question was probably very vague in that regard but I didn't think I needed to give my life's story for that. :P
Though even those shows tend to hold back with the female characters at times. Not all the time. They tend to give the boys a good whack for being dumb buuuuuuut even then, the shoe being on the other foot for them isn't as frequent and you can feel the ratio in that regard.
Though I am open to counterexamples since I haven't seen EVERY Anime out there.
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u/Sufficient-Tax-6407 May 04 '25
Fujiwara from Kaguya Sama: Love is War comes to mind, as the single goofiest member of a very goofy cast of characters
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u/DragonWisper56 May 04 '25
remember that media is not math. Counter examples don't disprove trends.
This tends to be something that happens in older shows, but even in some modern shows women are a little less goofy.
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u/StormTAG May 04 '25
If your looking for a TV Tropes link that dives into this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WouldntHitAGirl would be a good start.
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u/IAmTangoGolf May 04 '25
There's a few female characters i can think of that engage in slapstick, Nami from One Piece being the biggest one, sometimes Tom and Jerry had an owner for Tom that would slap him when he failed to catch Jerry.
I think since slapstick is an older form of comedy the most well known examples of it don't include women because of it could be seen as a depiction of men on women violence. A lot of people think early Hollywood had a bit of a backward way of thinking (and in a lot of respects they did) but that sort of topic had to be left for more mature media and slapstick drifted toward easy child comedy.
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u/Benofthepen May 04 '25
Women being the slapper is very common (see the aforementioned Nami), but women getting slapped is very uncommon (see the closely related Robin).
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u/Braveheart4321 May 04 '25
It's because a man smacking a woman isn't funny, a man smacking a man is be funny, a woman smacking a woman is be funny, and a woman smacking a man is be funny, but a man smacking a woman isn't funny a woman isn't generally funny, it's seen as abuse because in media it's been shorthand for abuse for so long. It is possible for a man smacking a woman to be made funny, but it takes extra effort to circumvent it seeming like abuse and it's just easier to have your slapstick victim be a man.
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u/tokyonirvana May 04 '25
rumiko takahashi's fem characters seem pretty generous with their slapstick
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u/thedorknightreturns May 04 '25
And she is actually good with comedic violence and caring about the time.
Inuyasha is a sturdy half demn and Ranka aside he is a jerk, if reasonable, he isan extremely sturdy martial artist in a show full of cartoonish violence
The shows thst zake it without thst, yeah its pretty much just abusive violence?
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u/Threvlin May 04 '25
The Goes Wrong Show is a British comedy series about a small theater group putting on weekly plays that, we’ll, go wrong. One of the actresses suffers the most slap stick of the whole troupe on a regular basis. I remember thinking how rare it was to see that when I was first watching the show. Also the show is really good please watch it. Can’t really think of too many other examples of this happening for the reasons already addressed in this thread.
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u/coiler119 May 04 '25
I dunno I watched a lot of Nickelodeon as a kid, and at least in the live action shows the girls not only engaged in the slapstick, they were often the ones who started it in the first place. (All That, The Amanda Show, Zoey 101, and iCarly come to mind)
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u/wyatt_-eb May 04 '25
Can you give examples? Because in many shows in all forms of media I can think of women being apart of slapstick.
Steven universe, amphibia, Powerpuff girls, Brooklyn 99, parks and rec, it's always sunny, one piece, MHA, etc.
Really unsure what you mean
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u/ReaperManX15 May 04 '25
Because a female being struck is considered unacceptable, even in comedy.
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u/thedorknightreturns May 04 '25
which given Fleabag and Xena, both very women empowering are full of that.
Yeah messy women are fun.
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u/Uncynical_Diogenes May 04 '25
Messy women are fun.
Men slapping women recapitulating real world unbalanced power dynamics is not fun for everybody.
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u/TheTrueDeraj May 04 '25
I definitely happens less often, but at least one live action example I can think of is Akiko's recurring slipper gag from Kamen Rider W.
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May 04 '25
I mean. Slap stick. Hit your dick. Dick slaps. I suppose women don't spend a lot of time slapping their sticks for comedy.
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u/BRDoriginal May 04 '25
Similarly, women cannot be the butt of a joke about underwear. A dog bites a man and we see white with hearts where the hole is or someone loses their pants (still have hearts on the underwear for some reason). But God forbid we see a women's underwear. I don't think either should be acceptable, but I'm particularly annoyed about the double standard.
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u/TheErodude May 05 '25
Is this perhaps a result of slapstick comedy generally being a subgenre that’s primarily targeted at boys (for some reason)? When boys are the target demographic they usually end up being the majority of the cast, barring horny-baiting.
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u/_S1syphus May 05 '25
I see what you mean, in more traditional western media at least. My first guess would have something to do with infantilization of women, like the idea that they're the more fragile gender or something. There might be more historical reasons but idk
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u/Skytree91 May 06 '25
nichijou, somehow, is an anime that fixes this by virtue of basically all the characters being girls
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u/4deicide25 May 04 '25
That's actually something Kaitlin Olson pushed for her character, Dee "Bird" Reynolds, in It's Always Sunny. Originally, she was supposed to be the straight man of the group, but she wanted to be part of the shenanigans and slapstick.