Last night Funny Women was mixing it up with the comedy cognocenti at the launch of Ticketmaster’s latest study, ‘State of Play: Comedy UK’. The wide ranging consumer research explored various aspects of British audiences and how they consume, discover and enjoy comedy in 2014.
Ticketmaster's vice president of music and comedy, Andrew Parsons, and vice president of insight, Sophie Crosby, took us through the data with a powerpoint presentation and… before you drop off, it was actually very interesting to see the statistics of your comedy consumers.
The results demonstrated what currently influences audiences live comedy choices. An equal number of men and women attend comedy shows and ticket sales have trebled for women comedians. Hence the newspaper headlines featuring 'best sellers' Sarah Millican and Miranda Hart – not that we needed any research to tell us that this was the case.
The statistics note the rise of the 'celebrity comedian'. Over half (51%) of comedy attendees would not pay to see someone live if they had not already seen them on TV.
We were also joined by Shappi Khorsandi who stressed the importance of seeing live comedy, saying "We all come from the spit and sawdust comedy world". With regard to the BBC's recent attempt to increase equality on TV panel shows by insisting on at least one woman on every programme, Shappi pointed out that they did not specify woman 'comedian' and the pool for panellists was spread pretty wide.
Shappi also commented that: "It’s great to see the surge in female comedians, stamping out the prejudice. We have still further to go, though. I’d like to see more female comics enjoying the dominance that men do on the bigger stages. Perhaps we are not capturing the public’s imagination in the same way, but it is all changing for the better and we are well on the way to enjoying equal success with our comedy brothers."
We look forward to seeing even more women in comedy in the future!
Pictured: Shappi Khorsandi
