I was in the women's gym at the YMCA over the summer running on the elliptical machine before a dentist appointment. It was part of my daily routine to go to the Y, and it wasn't unusual for the TV's to turned on to the standard news networks and HGTV. As I looked up from changing the song on my phone, five words on Fox News caught my eye:

"Funny Women Usually Aren't Pretty"

I took a picture of it to post on Instagram and I instantly tuned into the channel and became livid. Reporters said something to the tune of "girls who are pretty and funny are hard to find" and I could not believe what I was hearing. It was demeaning, it was infuriating, and it upset me to the point where I was nearly creating a scene from my elliptical.

Reporter Steve Doocy was hosting a panel of "comedians" on the program Fox and Friends, running his mouth about how funny women weren't attractive; this was after former Disney CEO Michael Eisner had made a back-handed compliment to Goldie Hawn including how women who were both funny and attractive like her, were hard to find in Hollywood. The whole situation made me literally want to barf up my meager breakfast of a Clif Bar.

For my entire life, I have looked up to funny women like Melissa McCarthy, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Gilda Radner, Carol Burnett, Betty White, Kate McKinnon, and Ellen DeGeneres. I saw them as intelligent and unique. All of them broke barriers and made a name for themselves in the male-dominated world of comedy. Each one of them was beautiful in their own way, and their sense of humor added to their beauty. They were famous, not because they were beautiful, but because they were also talented. They didn't have to look like a Victoria's Secret Model to grasp the attention of an audience because they could get it by using their brains and making witty statements about the world they lived, worked, and raised their families in.

By the time I was a junior or senior in high school I was regarded as the "Tina Fey of my class." My comedy was pretty low key and reserved - usually only the people right next to me in class could hear it - and I didn't try to make myself noticed because of it. I read and basically memorized her book Bossypants and I could easily pull off her Sarah Palin impression - I even created my own small improv sketches for choral department variety shows. Tina Fey was my role model - she didn't let anyone tell her she wasn't attractive or talented enough, and she didn't let men determine her worth. She wore glasses and looked fairly plain and low key like I did. She wasn't super flashy, and she didn't try too hard to get attention but she was appreciated for her worth and her intelligence. I wanted to be just like her and the fact that people thought I looked like her and reminded them of her was the highest compliment.

And that was why those five words infuriated me.

I began to doubt myself. Of course I made a joke of it saying, "I must be compensating for my below average looks with comedy," which got a laugh. But the fact that this was deemed a newsworthy story on a well known, national network made me sick to my stomach. I do not really consider myself a full fledged feminist. I do advocate for women's rights and human rights, but I'm not one of those women who thinks they should go out in public without wearing a bra. Demeaning intelligent women on television because they don't look like stick thin, perfectly contoured, picture perfect models in everyday life is ridiculous. I have never been stick thin - I've referred to my body type as a "husky German build" for years. But I can be pretty and funny despite the fact that I like to eat doughnuts, drink Diet Coke, and I wear a size 12 instead of a size 00.

This story from Fox News is not the first time women in comedy have been degraded by the media. Melissa McCarthy was fat shamed by the entertainment media despite the fact that she is one of the funniest women currently in the industry. Amy Schumer was told to lose weight for a movie she WROTE AND STARRED IN because the industry told her she was too fat to be a believable love interest on the big screen. Women in comedy don't have to be stereotypically "sexy" to be beautiful. They don't need to be beautiful to be funny, but there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER that they should be generalized into a category that definitively ranks them as either being unattractive simply because they are funny or funny because they are unattractive.

Funny women are pretty, and we are empowered enough that we do not need a national news network and some bogus, opinionated study to tell us otherwise.