It used to be that all comediennes looked like Totie Fields or Moms Mabley. But comedy today isn't just pretty, it's downright sexy. Although a mere ten percent of the 4000 comedians currently working are women, some of them are knockouts. One such is Rhonda Shear. "When I started in stand-up," she recalls, "everyone said, 'You'll never make people laugh. You're too pretty.' Well, I wanted to prove that a woman can be attractive and sexy and still be a comic. So I went to Playboy with the idea for this pictorial." Rhonda, who started out in 1987 opening for Wayland Flowers and Madame, is now on the bill in Vegas with the likes of Joe Pis-copo and hosts cable's Up All Night cult-movie fest on Fridays. Rosanne Katon, Playboy's Miss September 1978, does reality-based stand-up. A recent example: "Saudi Arabia is the safest place for a black guy today. Only three black guys have been killed there since the war started. Three have been killed in L.A. in the past sixty minutes." Diana Jordan used to be a lounge singer. When she found herself spending more time on her patter than on her songs, she enrolled in a comedy class (fellow students: Robin Williams and John Ritter). Now she appears on cable and headlines at clubs across the country. Nine years ago, Ria Coyne boarded a Greyhound bus from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Los Angeles with $75 in her pocket. After a succession of bizarre jobs, including wearing a six-foot chicken costume (she passed out from its weight) and selling lemonade at the Gay Pride Parade, she broke into acting (three films last year) and comedy, which she finds therapeutic. "A sense of humor can get you through anything," she says. "I like to think (text concluded on page 96) of myself as the Dr. Ruth of comedy." Ex-model Kitt Scott taxied off the fashion runway when, after a European stint, she "got tired of being a human pincushion." Whoopi Goldberg, whom she met in New York, told her she was funny; so did Arsenio Hall after he caught her five-minute ad-libbed act at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. "That locked it in for me," she says. "I've been doing comedy ever since." So here they are, five women who explode the myth that looks, humor and intelligence are mutually exclusive. After all, if Woody Allen can be a sex symbol, then, damn it, so can Carol Burnett.
