The grand tradition of funny, badass women has few pillars stronger than Ms. Katharine Houghton Hepburn. Why? Well first of all, the lady was FUNNY. She’s more hilarious than one who knows her only by her iconic reputation might believe. Check out Bringing Up Baby if you want to find yourself laughing so hard you can’t breathe. When her character, Susan Vance, sets out to convince his Dr. David Huxley to help her drive her pet leopard to Connecticut before her wealthy aunt finds it in the apartment, no force on Earth, including David’s sound logic, stands a chance of stopping her from getting her way.
Hepburn’s comic superpower is her unique ability to whip up absolute mayhem with an entirely innocent expression on her face. Whether she’s dismissing the perfectly log
ical assumption that one would not actually keep a leopard in a New York City Apartment with statements like, “Oh David, don’t be irrelevant. The point is I’ve got a leopard, the question is what am I going to do with it.” Or angelically professing her love while swinging around a museum atrium on the back of a ruined brontosaurus skeleton, she never once loses her totally commitment to one of the zaniest characters ever to grace celluloid.
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Second of all, she was a badass. Katharine never let the fact that she was a woman get in the way of something she wanted to do. The daughter of suffragette Katharine Martha Houghton, the co-founder of Planned Parenthood, she couldn’t help but grow up a feminist. Despite having made some decidedly un-feminist movies in which her heroines were “put in their place” by the man, Hepburn was extremely vocal about her progressive political beliefs in real life; so much so that she spoke up for friends Black Listed in the communist scares of the fifties, regardless of the potential consequences to herself. But what really makes her an icon of comediva history is the fact that she approached feminism with the same fabulous aplomb that made her such a spectacular comedienne.
Don’t believe me? Fine. I shall demonstrate. You wearing a pair of pants right now? Thank Katy H. She wore men’s suits frequently, bluntly informing curious interviewers that she wore them because they were comfortable. That simple act of fashion defiance started a trend of women wearing trousers. Raise your hand if you’re a fan of that one. Yes, you in the skinny jeans, we’re lookin’ at you.
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They might seem like little things, but Hepburn’s ability to defy convention with that well practiced, “Well of COURSE there’s a leopard in the bathroom, I told you there was,” look on her face paved the way for the comedivas of today. Which leads us to … our Comediva Comedy Style Lesson of the Week.
If there’s one thing we can learn from Katy, it’s that, “No, no, no, YOU’RE the one who’s crazy,” stare. Useful both for those moments when you have a leopard locked in your bathroom and for those moments when you’ve just pitched that so-amazingly-out-of-the-box-it-will-reshape-the-planet-Earth idea and the douchebag from the next cubical down is trying to convince the boss it will never work. Let’s practice. Ready? Okay. One…. Two… Three…. Kathryn Hepburn stares GO. See? Works like a charm.
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So, to sum up, Katharine, this paragon of comediva history, was a hilarious, outspoken, successfully bad ass woman who lived, loved and laughed like she already knew she was a legend. She was silly, serious, outspoken, aggressive, abrasive (they wrote Philadelphia Story just for her), loving, compassionate, loyal and, to quote John Hudson, “utterly fearless.” Sounds like the kind of Comediva we want to be when we grow up, right? Luckily, we’ve already practiced the Hepburn stare, and Katharine left plenty of advice about how to go out there and use it. Including: “If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.” And: “Never Complain. Never Explain.” Or, Comediva’s favorite: “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”
So go, break some rules. Make our Comediva of the Week proud.
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