Linny tells Nancy about her first speaking role in a film. The film is a horror short named TAPES. Our book this month is called THE MIDNIGHT SHOW and it was written by two authors: Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne. This is a first for us to review a novel with co-authors! The format is also a different format than novels we’ve read. The text isn’t typical novel description and dialogue and introspection. Rather, the entire book is of the memos, interviews, old news articles, emails, voice mails, and transcripts our lead character, Madeline Cohen accumulates. Madeline is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. She pitches a story that will look back to 1980 to the season premiere of The Midnight Show (sort of like a Saturday Night Live sketch show) and explore how funny women, then and now, are commodified or dismissed. She also wants to evaluate how the comedy world contributed to the unsolved death of one of the show’s breakout stars, Lillian Martin. Linny really liked the format of the book, as did Nancy. Nancy assumes the authors had a great time placing the contradictory narratives sequentially, highlighting the complexity of the characters’ perspectives. At first Nancy was afraid she was going to have a hard time keeping the characters straight since we only know them as interview subjects, but they all had such strong personalities she was able to keep them straight. She really liked how the author slowly reveals the characters, too, from their “public” personas that they’ve been assigned or have cultivated, to who they really are or become. It was fun getting behind the curtain on that, too. Linny believes she started watching Saturday Night Live during its second season. Nancy believes she started watching during the first season. Although this novel isn’t about SNL, Nancy liked how it does give an idea of what it may have been like, behind the scenes just before and during the show’s runaway success. Linda doesn’t remember the time that women weren’t considered funny. Nancy, on the other time, definitely does and believes this continues today. Nancy reads the novel’s epigraph quote from Christopher Hitchens, who was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, who said: “Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about. All right – try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?” Linda recalls some of the great female comedians she loved, such as Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. Linny said she bought into sexism and the way women’s ideas were dismissed, but that was sexism, not because they weren’t funny. Linny loved the female characters. Nancy thought the female characters were much more aware of what was happening and were more complex, too. Nancy said each woman dealt with the sexism in different ways. Linny felt like she figured out how the novel would end, but that a lot of the fun was figuring that out. Nancy put together a fun quiz for Linny about first cast of SNL. Linny then turned the tables with her own questions.