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Playing for laughs: the cast of bridesmaids .

FOR a Hollywood movie the message is more defensive than effusive. Five little-known actresses in hot- pink dresses crowd a bride trussed up like a white carnation. The title: Bridesmaids. The featured quote: ''Chick flicks don't have to suck!''

As a comedy without stars or a well-known director, Bridesmaids is a hit in the US and its departure from convention has goaded critics into focusing on the cast's gender, reigniting debate about whether women can be funny.

Kristen Wiig, a long-time comic on Saturday Night Live, plays Annie, a hapless thirtysomething whose bakery has gone bust and whose boyfriend has departed. When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged, she is pitched into a rivalry with fellow bridesmaid Helen (Rose Byrne) and bawdy antics ensue.

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Comedian Julia Morris.

Produced by Judd Apatow, best known for comedies such as Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin about slacker boys who never grow up, Bridesmaids features women who drink, vomit, fart and drop the C-bomb. One character is a mother who despises her three sons. Most of the cast is over 30 and dare to look variously haggard, dishevelled and wrinkled. The movie is not quite so bold that they don't all redeem themselves by looking good when it counts but plenty of taboos are trashed.

Box-office analysts predict Bridesmaids will make a handsome $US125 million in North America, which means that after drawing an audience that was 67 per cent women on its opening weekend, a lot of men are wandering into female territory.

''Everything about the marketing campaign for and the critical reaction to Bridesmaids is driving me f---ing crazy,'' film blogger Lindy West writes. ''Can you imagine a poster proclaiming, 'Movies with men in them don't have to suck!' or a critic writing the phrase, 'These are smart casual bridal gowns , funny men!'?''

Comedy is the last gender battle in the arts. In no other creative endeavour does the equality of men and women remain as unsettled. Christopher Hitchens famously argued in a 2007 Vanity Fair article that women were not funny.

Another Saturday Night Live star, Jane Curtin, revealed on The Oprah Winfrey Show recently that John Belushi deliberately sabotaged skits on the show that he knew were written by female writers because he felt that women were ''fundamentally not funny''.

Women working in stand-up comedy are particularly familiar with that old line.

Comedian Julia Morris once fielded a telephone call from a man who asked for a discount for a stand-up comedy night after hearing that she - a woman - was the headline act. Wendy Harmer remembers being told by one baffled male fan: ''You're really funny. It really proves that women are human beings, too.''

Such is the antagonism from female stand-ups to any publicity about whether men are funnier that many declined to be interviewed for this story.

But there is a culture of women-only comedy nights and mentoring events for female comics. So is the industry any more difficult for women than men?

''I will never know and I may as well wonder how my comedy career would have gone if I was a sheep,'' award-winning comic Celia Pacquola says.

But opinions of those who have been around longer tend to differ. ''Look, it is harder for women,'' one woman says on condition of anonymity. ''With stand-up, it's the last male bastion.''

It was rougher in the 1980s, wedding dress discount wedding dress discount when comedians such as Judith Lucy, Harmer, Jackie Loeb and Morris were breaking into the scene and heckling was de rigueur. One challenge for funny women has been that much of the comedy in film and television has historically been written by men, casting themselves as goofs and leaving the women to roll their eyes and issue limp-wristed ''Oh stop that'' slaps. But the increasing prominence of women in comedy is turning this around.

In her memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey says when she started on the writing team for Saturday Night Live in 1997, a male actor was chosen to impersonate the wife of Rocky Balboa over a woman who wanted the part. ''By the time I left nine years later, that would never have happened,'' she writes. ''Nobody would have thought a dude in drag would be funnier than [anyone among the female cast].''

Morris, who moved to Los Angeles 18 months ago to forge a career as a comic actress, says she has noticed many more parts for funny women have opened up, even in the past year.

''Shows like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives have reminded people that you can be over 35 and still alive,'' she says.

In Australia, television comedies starring women, such as Kath & Kim and more recently Laid, appeal to both sexes. Judith Lucy has a new show screening on the ABC later this year. The offbeat drama Offspring centres on a quirky female played by Asher Keddie.

But the co-writer and star of The Librarians, Robyn Butler, says there are still nowhere near as many roles for funny women in Australia as there are for men.

''The reason being that more men are in comedy and men write for men and women write for women,'' she says.

Bridesmaids director Paul Feig admitted in a radio interview that Wiig's character might have been written as more of a slacker if it were male. ''None of this is fair … bridal dress bridal dress but I think there's a feeling for women to be a little more together, cheap designer wedding dresses sale,our store provide vera wang,vintage wedding dresses,best wedding dresses 2011 online store'' Feig said. ''There's less tolerance for women who are a disaster.''

In that way, Bridesmaids is a conventional film, with characters that represent a classic smorgasbord of the parts available to female comic actors.

''This is about trying to make a movie where women are talking honestly and having real-woman interpersonal relations,''Feig says.

Some of that necessarily involves jokes that make a male audience uncomfortable. Wiig impersonates a penis in one scene - actually more sophisticated than it sounds - and there are gags delivered by men referencing tampons and menstrual cramps.

Female comedians despise talking about their gender but admit that their routines do involve some jokes that appeal more to women, because comedy is built on recognition.

Fey recalls when Saturday Night Live co-writer Amy Poehler turned on a male colleague who complained he didn't like her unladylike jokes. ''I don't f---ing care if you like it,'' Poehler said.

Fey says: ''I think of this every time someone says to me, red summer dress red summer dress 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' or 'Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny … Do you have anything to say to that?' Yes. We don't f---ing care if you like it.

''I don't say that out loud of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist wedding dress , Hitchens is sick and the third guy I made up.''

■Bridesmaids previews from today and opens on June 16.