What
do you mean, women are funny?
Hooray. Last weekend Bridget Christie became only
the third female comedian in 33 years to win the Edinburgh Festival Comedy
Award. Double hooray because her act (by reports) isn’t a lightweight
crowd-pleaser but an hour of hard-hitting and funny feminism.
Why is she only the third? Is it because women are
only one eleventh as funny as men? Or is it because there are eleven times as
many males as females on the circuit? I’ve just done a rough count of the
comics listed in the Chortle website (As, Bs and Cs only. I haven’t got all
night) and there are 216 men and 57 women. More men than women, but not eleven
times as many. It seems that, simply, there’s an unwillingness to appreciate
female comics.
There’s not this problem with sketch comedy. Wood
& Walters, Smack the Pony, Katy Brand, Watson & Oliver (they’ve come in
for a bit of stick, but their last series had some wonderful moments) – no one
would dare argue that they’re not as funny as men.
But in standup women struggle to be recognised. The
circuit can be a testosterone-sweaty gladiatorial arena in which most men would
wilt. They say that it takes balls of steel to survive on it, which, if true,
cuts out half the human race. But women don’t lack courage, talent or
determination. The difficulty is that, in standup, they simply have fewer
choices.
A comedian’s stage persona isn’t created by force of
will. It’s forged over long months through a compact between the comic and
their audiences. Laughing at someone involves a degree of acceptance and trust.
And at the moment the stock of available routines audiences are willing to buy
into is far more meagre for women than it is for men.
The dysfunctional weirdo (Emo Phillips, Paul Foot).
The sexual predator (Mike Wilmot). The grossed-out drunk (Carey Marx). The
innocent from outer space (Milton Jones). If these comics were women, audiences
– male and female - would tend to feel threatened, worried or bemused. They
would have to work far harder to gain acceptance.
This is why so many female comedians fall into
either bubbly/loveable, sassy/chic, abrasive but likeable/gay categories.
There’s so much more pressure for them to be loveable, sweet and attractive.
Hang on. Not all women comics are like that. Jo
Brand was magnificently scruffy, grungy and grumpy, not giving a toss she
wasn’t going to appear on the cover of “Cosmopolitan”. But notably few have
followed in her footsteps. I can’t think of anyone at the moment with the same
air of simply not giving a toss. (I’d be happy to be corrected on this)
The solution is for more and more women to get up on
the standup stages, to renegotiate the space with audiences and get us used to
the idea that they can be whoever they damn well want to be. As Bridget Christie
is doing. Let’s hope she starts an unstoppable trend.
