Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama. (Courtesy photo)

There’s a movie coming out in a week that I’m really rooting for. It’s called Baby Mama, starring Saturday Night Live alums Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. I like both actresses and hope the movie is better than the discouraging trailers imply. Why? Because the movie stars two women as comic leads, and I fear this is a shockingly rare occurrence. To confirm that suspicion, I began to compile in my head a list of movies based on two simple criteria: the woman had to be the star, and she had to be the comic focal point. It started off well—9 to 5, Bringing Up Baby—then it quickly petered out. So I embarked on a highly scientific investigation. First I listed all those I could think of, then searched the Internet for others. Finally I pored through the American Film Institute list of the top 500 comedies of all time. I came up with 40 movies.

Every year a few dozen comedies are released in the U.S. Probably a few of those each year would fit our criteria, right? Five or 10 percent? That would mean through the last century of film we’d have a few hundred movies starring funny women, as compared to a few thousand starring funny men. Yet I counted 40. How is it that 51 percent of our population gets to be the funny star about 1 percent of the time? All of the women I know like comedy. And all of the women I like are funny. We all know there are age-old social conventions that tell women not to be funny. Many of those conventions are promulgated by Hollywood, where women primarily play the roles of humorless support, mildly humorous romantic ideal, or potential victim of estranged lovers and axe murderers.

The list of actresses who have been able to maintain a career as a leading lady and still perform high comedy is absurdly short: Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Judy Holliday, Barbara Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Whoopi Goldberg, Jamie Lee Curtis, Diane Keaton. That’s not a complete list, but it’s frighteningly close. There are scores of other great comic actresses, some of whom occasionally get to be the star. Most often they either play the smaller role or share the spotlight with a comic male. Many accept their place as a supporting actress (Madeline Kahn, Terri Garr, Toni Collette). Others get to be funny in support, but not when they win the rare lead (Lily Tomlin, Janeanne Garafalo). Things weren’t so bad during the heyday of screwball comedy in the ’30s and ’40s. But apparently women all but stopped being funny from 1950 through 1979. And with few exceptions, each of the women listed above stopped doing comedy as she got older. Streisand, Hawn, and Goldberg have essentially retired, and Curtis is a part-timer. Only Diane Keaton continues to take on comic leads and thrive.

It isn’t all bad. The more open-minded medium of television is packed with sensational funny women. But film is a different matter. Most of the great TV stars—Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres—never found success in big-screen comedies. Hopefully Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can prove themselves to be the female counterpoints to Will Ferrel and Ben Stiller. Hopefully, talented, funny young actresses like Amanda Bynes can overcome the even more stifling rules that come with being under age 30. The final rule, of course, is that they must be beautiful. We are in the great age of the scruffy comic male superstar. But no woman can make a film career out of just being funny. We’re missing out on a lot of good comedy because of this. Here are six female-driven comedies worth checking out:

Stage Door (1937) Ginger Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Eve Arden in one movie, and a script that’s worthy of them.

The Lady Eve (1941) Barbara Stanwyck pursues straight man Henry Fonda from an ocean cruise to his Connecticut home.

Freaky Friday (1976, 2003) Jamie Lee Curtis has a rowdy good time in the enjoyable re-make, but Barbara Harris is one-of-a-kind channeling Jody Foster in the original.

Outrageous Fortune (1987) Bette Midler and Shelley Long battle and make friends while hunting down their mutual boyfriend.

Superstar (1999) Molly Shannon reprises her SNL character Mary Catherine Gallagher in a rare female comic vehicle. It’s thin, broad, and good-hearted.

Dick (1999) Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst mess with Richard Nixon. It doesn’t all work, but at least two young women get to be funny. Williams is especially good.

Alex Manugian lives in Sherman Oaks, California. He grew up in Groton and has reviewed movies for Harvard residents for many years.