Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO sitcom Girls, has become the voice of twentysomethings everywhere who are struggling to figure out the transition from youth to adulthood. The writer/director spoke during a panel at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend where she talked about Woody Allen, the escalating campus rape problem and how "puritanical" America is nowadays. Actresses Mindy Kaling and Kristen Wiig were also at the event.
Dunham thinks society needs to lighten up when it comes to humor, Deadline notes.
"The fact is people are forgetting that humor is a tool for debate," she said. "That boycott, censorship, shut 'em down approach to humor shows a very basic lack of understanding of what humor can do for us culturally and what it has always done."
She also made a point of letting people know that her personality is different from that of her Girls character Hannah Horvath. Dunham used Larry David and Woody Allen as examples of actors who probably do not have to put up with people thinking they know them on some level because of their on-camera personas. And then she threw a zinger at the iconic director.
"Woody Allen is proof that people don't think everything he says in his films is stuff that he does because all he was doing was making out with 17-year-olds for years and we didn't say anything about it," she said in reference to the allegations that Allen abused his adopted daughter.
Dunham has been critical of the director ever since his former girlfriend Mia Farrow and her son tweeted about the Golden Globes tribute to Allen in 2014.
The actress ended the talk with her thoughts on the increasingly prevalent issue of sexual assaults taking place in colleges across the country.
"One of the reasons it is important to talk about campus assaults is that these women in positions of incredible privilege are still being forced every day to fight for their truth and that is indicative of the fact that sexual assault is an epidemic and so many people are voiceless," Dunham, who wrote about her own experience with sexual assault in her new memoir Not That Kind of Girl, said.
