Male and female comedians: clowns vs. straight men

(Data vampires got me! I'll finish this post in a bit.)

As we were discussing in the Progressive thread, in comedy, men are usually the clowns and women are usually the straight men. Why? What are the implications? (And feel free to post examples!)

Men can be straight men in comedy too. Chandler and Joey, for example. It's that men can be clown or straight man, women can only be straight man. In general

Well, it's certainly more common to see two man routines than it is two woman routines. Personally, it always seemed more like, if women were the straight man, the joke was suddenly on the straight man. So while whatever Ray Romano is talking about *is* crazy, he'd end up being right, or frequently was (It seemed to me; I quickly tired of that show). So however sane she was, the wife would be wrong.

But I also don't watch overly many sitcoms. They bore and annoy me.

Margaret Dumont was the straight woman in the Marx Brothers movies; the joke was always on her.

Women who were the clowns: Lucille Ball, of course. French and Saunders (and on ab fab most of the women including Patsy and Bubbles; the daughter was the "straight woman"). Some of the old screwball comedy stars like Carole Lombard. Marilyn Monroe did some great comedy in How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like it Hot. Carol Burnett.

Elaine on Seinfeld started out sort of a characterless straight woman but eventually ended up being as crazy and self-absorbed and goofy as Kramer or George, though not as physically clownish as either one (though she did do that infamous dance). Jerry was the straight man (though he clowned it up from time to time too).

There's also Jackie from Roseanne. I think she dressed up as Gilligan at some point.

Miranda Hart in her UK sitcom Miranda is also a good impression of a female clown (mostly playing against a straight woman best fried, but also against straight men).

This is definitely a pervasive trope though.

In comedies, especially slapstick ones, we are generally supposed to like or empathize with the clown. There are exceptions to this, but, usually, when it comes to the exceptions, the clown is presented as very extreme in order to make the audience empathize with the "normal" straight man (an example of a case where you are supposed to empathize mostly with the straight man would be Arrested Development). In those latter cases, the straight man is almost always a man. These are men's stories-stories that are centrally about the men. Women rarely ever get the good straight man roles either, they are not the "everyman" dealing with the exhausperating clowns, rather they are the straight man who is cast as the fun ruiner of the amusing/likeable clowns.

There is another role women sometimes take in comedies, that of fairly one dimensional love interest/love prize. This character is not necessarily the straight man, but neither is she the clown either. She can be used in the plot as the motivation for change, or as the source of conflict between the protagonist and antagonist, but is largely interchangeable in most cases. An example of this would be...the female lead in almost every movie Adam Sandler has been in.