A few weeks ago I did my first open mic. It was quite the gamut of first time experiences. The first time I was so nauseous I thought my intestines would strangle me; the first time I've honestly considered moving to Brussels; the first time I've gone through the entirety of my contacts list before an event and texted them all with variations on a theme of 'bollocks'. (And for those of you who had nothing to say to that: you're on my Cull List, my friend).
It was also the first time I'd been to this sort of quick fire night – 20 comics, five minutes each. It's a good way to canvass the terrain. Five minutes gives most comics enough time to stick to one topic – without the legroom that a longer set would bring, you get a pretty direct sense of where each person's sense of humour is at.
The first thing I noticed – having stepped elegantly over the small puddle of sick that I had deposited in the doorway – was that I was far from being the only lady in the room. The force was strong with my sisters that night: for every man and his microphone there was at least one lady and her – the same – microphone. The odds were stacked – evenly. It was 50 to the 50. One to one. Mano el woMano. I rejoiced, and did a quick recce to compare breasts (this is what women do; I assume it is the same with trouser bulges).
I voted myself winner of that game, and my set didn't go so badly – by which I mean I didn't physically die – so I was free to spend the rest of the evening winsomely critiquing everyone else. Now without wanting to be too flippant about it, I suspect that doing your first open mic is a bit like giving birth. Once you've done it, your eyes are opened to a whole new world of pain and risk that might be harmful to what you imagine your little bundle of comedic joy to be. It also turns you into one sanctimonious so and so. You don't just watch comedy. You watch comedy.
In an epiphany that has probably been completely undermined by that birth analogy I just used, I realised, watching that amount of potted comedy back to back, that a recurring trope among the female comics was their own bodies. Whether visceral stories from the bedroom or self-deprecating accounts of their own physique, a disproportionate amount of the women made themselves the butt of their own joke.
What a shame, I thought. And then, very soon after – what now? Where the hell do I get off? What business of mine is it if a comic – male or female – wants to focus on their own physical form for a laugh? Why did I find this such an issue? Plenty of male comedians talk about their hairy backs and their hilarious lack of sexual prowess all the time – far too many for my liking.
I'm bored to tears with tales of male ineptitude masquerading as castigation when you suspect they're actually rather proud of themselves for being so brutally honest. 'Oh god, it was awful, I'm such a bad sexer' – while in the background screams the baseline 'I just had sex! Sex, people! Actual with-a-lady-sex! But oh it was bad.' (High Five!)
Plenty of blokes on that night told us things that would have been better left in a secret place and maybe buried in an airtight capsule – so why was it the female focus that drew my attention? I realised – with, I hasten to add, due sense of horror at my own high-mindedness – that I was disappointed. Disappointed. Who the bastard hell am I, everyone's mother?
For starters, it might not be a disproportionate amount. The body is prime fodder for comedy precisely because it is a body, with all its inconvenient realities. Flesh is funny. Maybe female five minutes are no more crammed full of body humour than the guys', only I notice it more. This prompts the unhappy thought that maybe we're conditioned, even as women – perhaps especially as women – to accept the lady body beneficently only when it is presented in an attractive light. Any deviation from absolute beauty makes us baulk. Who is this lady with her confessions of droopy breasts? Bring us the man who talks about his flaccid cock! We demand flaccid cocks. Flaccid cocks!
But disproportion or no, the really arresting thing is the knee-jerk reaction I had. Disappointment? Why on earth do I feel let down if a woman wants to make her post-natal body the subject of some start-up banter, or another gets a punchline from the mismatch of his enormous wang and her tiny box?
However, this is where I will stick my neck out. There's nothing to say that the female body can't be funny. There's nothing to say it shouldn't be discussed onstage, not least by the person who owns it. Nevertheless, seeing so many so-so variations on a theme back to back, I do wonder if it's doing us any favours. The body's fine: but we need to branch out. While it's great to see so many women active in comedy now, there's no getting around the fact that we've come late to the game: in terms of sheer stage time, we've got a lot of ground to make up.
It's not that waxing lyrical about sexploits and body-shame is wrong – it's just not all that new. It seems to be covering ground already stomped down to a fair old pulp by all the guys that have gone before. And that's not to say it can't be tackled (haw haw) – just when the time is right, and in the right way, and when there's other stuff on the menu too.
Brilliant comics like Sara Pascoe, Isy Suttie and Bridget Christie deal in a very personal kind of confessional comedy that is body conscious when it needs to be – but their scope is much broader than that. And while it's absolutely right that, after years of being passively evoked as a plot point to help Mr Microphone pull off his punchline, we should get our own back, if that's all we're doing, it feels a bit like just taking our lead from the lads.
Of course these were just five minute slots, and very few were seasoned comics (sick puddle by the door – yours truly, thank you very much) – but these are presumably the seeds of bigger ideas. I just hope that these little fivelings grow up into fine strong twenty-somethings that can stick it to the man without necessarily having to relate exactly how he stuck it to them first.
Mind you, what do I know? I was blathering on about beard envy.
Sarah Sharp is a freelance writer: she is a regular contributor to London Is Funny, The Skinny, What The Frock!, Screenjabber and FilmJive. She is slowly working her way towards that stage. Follow her on Twitter @SharpScribbler.
Pictured: Sarah Sharp