Adult Swim Creative Director on ‘Limiting Female Projects’: ‘Women Don’t Tend to Like Conflict’
Mike Lazzo, who serves as vice president and creative director of Adult Swim, received criticism this week for reportedly not hiring women in creative positions because, as one anonymous former employee recalls him saying, “when you put women in the writers room, you get conflict, not comedy.”
Lazzo clarified his comments on reddit: “What I actually said was-women don’t tend to like conflict, comedy often comes from conflict, so that’s probably why we (or others) have so few female projects,” he wrote. “Nonetheless this was a dumb answer to a good question as Lucille Ball and Gilda Rather to Amy Poelher and Amy Schumer prove my statement a load of generalized nonsense.” A recent Buzzfeed report states that only one out of every 34 credits go to women on Adult Swim, the lowest of any network; the average is one in five.
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Adult Swim revealed its slate of upcoming shows earlier this year, and none of the 47 creators listed on the announcement were women.
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