Can We Talk?
In her tribute to the late comedian Joan Rivers, Katha Pollitt wrote that “comedy had a big No Girls Allowed sign on the door for most of her career” [“Rivers Gets the Last Laugh,” Sept. 29]. But I remember, as a boy growing up during the late 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, enjoying the excellent humor of funny ladies of radio, television, movies and live theater: Billie Burke, Eve Arden, Judy Canova, Ethel Waters, Shirley Booth, Kathleen Lockhart, Connie Brooks, Jane Ace of Easy Aces, Ann Sothern in Maisie, Myrtle Vail and Donna Damerel in Myrt & Marge, Cathy Lewis and Marie Wilson on the My Friend Irma show, Gale Storm in My Little Margie and Audrey Totter in Meet Millie.
There were many hilarious co-equal stars…