When 112 fellow comedians voted Frankie Boyle ‘Most Offensive Stand-Up” for a survey commissioned by comedy channel Dave back in 2011, nobody was surprised. With a slew of media backlash for his controversial material, it’s hard to imagine who else would have taken the crown. It’s not just Boyle, of course; comedy that divides audiences, willfully being as offensive as possible, is becoming part of the mainstream. Boyle and other comedians like him on the list – Jerry Sadowitz and Roy Chubby Brown came second and third – don’t just cross the line, they march right across it doing the can-can, and the public seem to love (or at least admire) them for it.
I’m not a huge fan of Frankie Boyle – I sat through Tramadol Nights once, behind a cushion, and felt vaguely queasy. What bothers me the most about him and his contemporaries, however, is not the content of their material but the fact this seems to be solely a male domain. In short, I’m bothered by the fact that there just aren’t any female Frankie Boyles.
Actually, that’s not strictly true; there’s a plethora of talented female comedians right now, some well-known and some starting out. The laws of probability would suggest that there’s as much taboo-breaking material being written by women as there is by men. It’s perhaps more accurate to suggest that when it comes to the big comedians – the ones who get programmes commissioned, sell out tours, and have W. H. Smiths stocking their DVDs – there’s a woman-shaped gap in the market. Humour with the capability to shock is left to Boyle and his (male) chums. The most-well known women in British comedy today are taking a different path.
Take Miranda Hart, for example, or Sarah Millican. It’s not that they aren’t capable of being edgy, but their overall appeal seems to be their softness; they’re often haphazard, frequently the underdog. They joke about liking cake and have amusing accents. Even when they do slip the odd zinger in (Sarah Millican’s material can be as spiky as it is soft) you’d still give them a hug. There’s no way I’d dare give Frankie Boyle a hug.
Boyle’s main point of female comparison tends to be American comedian Sarah Silverman. Having found acclaim as a comic performer and writer through Saturday Night Live and The Larry Sanders Show, her own sitcom The Sarah Silverman Program drew Comedy Central’s biggest audience in three years with its pilot. Just like Boyle’s Tramadol Nights, its trademark tended not to be the writing, performance or characters; it was its cultural reception that really defined it. Critics either loved it or hated it, but everyone knew about it. It was rude. It did things it shouldn’t. Like Boyle, Silverman herself is no stranger to controversy; her take on the world’s most offensive joke in 2005’s documentary The Aristocrats nearly led to a libel lawsuit, just as Tramadol Nights came under fire for racist language and jokes about Katie Price’s disabled son.
What’s our equivalent this side of the pond? Do we have an up-and-coming Sarah Silverman? There has, of course, been female-driven material that’s garnered critical attention for being edgy or inappropriate; it’s just that we tend to associate it far less with comedians themselves. Andrea Mann, comedy editor of the Huffington Post, argued recently at one of Funny Women’s events that women frequently perform comedy through a character – a fact which historically often seems to be the case.
Caroline Aherne’s Mrs. Merton and Malcom was deemed as ‘possibly the most disturbing show on television’ by TimeOut when it aired in 1999. It’s easy to see why; there’s something undeniably unsettling about Mrs Merton, who spends the show raising a strange 37 year old man-child in the form of Malcolm, and a silent, almost invisible Mr. Merton. Nighty Night, which featured Julia Davis as a narcissistic beauty-parlour owner with a dying husband, gained critical and audience attention for its twisted humour, whilst managing to be successful enough to be picked up for a US version by Sex and the City producer Darren Star.
There’s one key point to this – it’s not the women creating the comedy themselves that we’re shocked by; it’s the personas they adopt. This, it can be argued, creates a safety net – we can fear or dislike a fictional being, rather than a real person. After two programmes and nearly a decade as Mrs. Merton, Aherne eventually abandoned the character to go off and co-write and star in The Royle Family; a show that’s much loved but arguably far less creepy.
Getting up in front of an audience and delivering material which is going to offend people is hard. For women, there’s an added pressure when it comes to performing stand-up. Firstly, they’re outnumbered. There are still far more men in the industry making it onto billings and getting commissioned. Secondly, comedy is still one of the few areas where sexist material is still part of the mainstream – and where it’s still socially acceptable, as an audience member, to engage with it and find it funny.
If you’re dealing with an audience who are culturally more inclined to be skeptical or even prejudiced towards you, regardless of how talented you are, creating a persona to hide behind can be a protective mechanism. If we love to hate Frankie Boyle, it’s not because of his gender – it’s simply based on his material. Arguably, it hasn’t always been as easy for his female counterparts, which might be why there are fewer of them.
But, right now, it’s 2013. Being a funny woman isn’t as gimmicky as it was. Popular culture seems to be having a flirtation with female comic talent; the last couple of years have seen Bridesmaids, HBO’s Girls and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosting the Golden Globes as but just a few cultural landmarks. We’re gradually moving on from the voice of Hitchens past – it’s becoming widely accepted that women can be hilarious, end of.
With all of this going on, it becomes very easy to ignore the fact that there still seems to be a divide here – that men can be dark and edgy, but we still expect women to be palatable. You can veer a little close to the line, but it’s helpful if you dress like a granny, fall over a lot for comic effect, or stick to either being chubby and frumpy or hot and sexy.
Take Sarah Silverman as a case in point. She featured on Maxim’s Hot 100 List two years running, suggesting that if women don’t hide behind a character or a warm, cuddly persona, they’re ‘dark and sexy’ – their choice of material makes them alluring instead. In her 2007 spread, Silverman poses in skimpy clothing and a gorilla costume; it’s her role as a comedian, as much as her body, that’s been sexualized.
It is of course undeniable that the Frankie Boyles of the world are defined in the media as their own characters – rule-breakers, badass, a little bit dangerous. Anyone who’s achieved a level of notoriety for the things they do or say is going to be stereotyped or caricatured in some way. But Boyle’s edginess, if you will, seems to get him places. Alongside the DVDs and arena tours he’s a panel show regular and featured on Mock the Week for seven consecutive seasons. My Dad loves Mock the Week. If anything’s an indicator of breaking into the mainstream, it’s appearing on something that even our parents enjoy.
People want to see Frankie Boyle because he’s Frankie Boyle. Undiluted, uncompromising, rough and ready. They don’t filter him through a persona or try and contextualise his material against a backdrop to make themselves feel less uneasy. There must be female comics out there doing the same thing. Why can’t we view them in the same way? We don’t have to admire their style, or even feel comfortable with it, but if taboo-breaking comedy is now culturally relevant – and commissioned – shouldn’t we be promoting women who are generating that kind of material as much as their male counterparts?
I don’t know yet if the world’s ready for another Tramadol Nights. I certainly don’t know if I’d watch it if one appeared, although I’d be secretly pleased if the next Frankie Boyle ended up being a woman. For every joke about boyfriends, bakewell tarts or living alone with a bunch of cats, there should be material that makes your eyes water and your stomach turn. That’s the thing about female comedy; being a woman shouldn’t simply define you as a brand. There are as many different ways to be funny as there are comedians. Gender should have nothing to do with it.
Isabel Dixon
@isabel_dixon
Pictured from top: Frankie Boyle, Sarah Silverman
