Comedienne queens Tina Fety, Jenna Fisher, and Sarah Silverman have teamed up to poke fun at Hollywood’s “It Girls” in a photospread for the April 2008 edition of Vanity Fair Magazine. Sarah mimics Amy Winehouse, and Jenna becomes Lindsay Lohan for a day. Even Wanda Sykes makes an appearance as Naomi Campbell.

It’s hard to remember or fathom, but there was a time when Phyllis Diller had to dress in drag to attend a Friars Club roast. There has been a epochal change even from 20 years ago, when female stand-up comics mostly complained about the female condition—cellulite and cellophane—and Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr perfectly represented the two poles of acceptable female humor: feline self-derision or macho-feminist ferocity. (The fact that both those pioneers are now almost as well known for drastic cosmetic surgery as for comedy is either a cautionary tale or a very sad punch line.)

Comedy has changed on sitcoms, in clubs, and on Saturday Night Live. The repertoire of women isn’t limited to self-loathing or man-hating anymore; the humor is more eclectic, serene, and organic. “The consciousness changed” is how Lorne Michaels explains the difference. Michaels should know. He began his career as a writer for Diller, among others, and got his break as a producer thanks to Lily Tomlin, jobs which eventually led him to Saturday Night Live. There, starting in 1975, he presided over decades of male-dominated sketch comedy (brightened by the likes of Gilda Radner) until he named Fey the head writer in 1999 and in 2000 made her “Weekend Update” co-anchor opposite Jimmy Fallon. (In 2004 two women anchored the mock news desk when Amy Poehler replaced Fallon.) Suddenly, S.N.L. sketches were written by women, for women; the biggest stars were Poehler and Maya Rudolph; and the oh-God-I-hate-myself-so-much routines seemed passé. The satire shifted outward, with parodies of everything from “Mom Jeans” to Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. When Rachel Dratch, another strong cast member, introduced her whining Debbie Downer character, in 2004, Michaels says, “It was almost old-school.”

As comedy has opened up, women who once might not have dared write comedy, or writers who hadn’t considered performing, have been emboldened to become writers and get onstage, “sort of the way singer-songwriter happened in the 1960s,” Michaels says. Now the patriarch of S.N.L. is holding auditions for the next generation of female stars. “Two or three are really funny. And they are totally confident and don’t feel any need to do ugly-girl comedy. They do skits like ‘Angelina Jolie on an airplane.’?”