The 2016 Funny Women Awards are open. Sign up and get funny! If a 59-year-old vicar can get to the finals, surely you have a chance?
Why bother? Because we female comedians are still an endangered species; that’s why.
Last week I did a bit of leafleting for Funny Women before performing at their showcase at the Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall, London. With each leaflet, I said, “we’re encouraging more women to come into comedy. At the moment, only one in 20 of British comedians are women.”
Every single woman I spoke to said, ‘Gosh, that’s got to change.’
It has – for the sake of all women, because when you make people laugh, they are open to new ideas and to the prospect of change. If we women are to become truly equal, we need everyone to be willing to step up to the plate.
So is the 20-80 statistic true? No one has done the maths. but if you go to Wikipedia you’ll find that there are 168 women on the British Women Comedians page. If you look for the same category for men, you’ll find that it doesn’t exist. There are links to the pages for more than 1000 male comedians but no need for any page outlining that male comedians actually exist. That probably tells you all you need to know on the statistic.
I also looked up British female comedians over 50 and found a handful – but every one of those (apart from Lynn Ruth Miller and myself) started out when they were way younger than 50. I was chuffed to bits to discover 82-year-old Ruth at Old Folks Telling Jokes at the Leicester Comedy Festival where the third woman appearing was Marguerite Grant who’d just won the Silver Comedy Award for over 50s with her very first comedy gig.
But… and it’s a big but… both Ruth and Marguerite are Americans. Not British at all…
So is it just me? Am I the only British woman comedian who actually started gigging in her mid-50s? Because if it is, it certainly shouldn’t be.
Lynne Parker founded Funny Women because people told her that women aren’t funny and she wanted to prove them wrong. Women are funny; we’re funny about exactly the same things as men are (though I have to say that I, personally, find bush jokes as unimaginative as knob jokes) and, more importantly, we can make people wake up and think while we’re being funny.
I tell jokes about religion and as I’m a vicar and a Bible historian they are jokes based on knowledge that make people think and go ‘oh…I didn’t know that!’ as well as (hopefully) laugh. Women making us laugh about the situations of both women and men in the world, about our hopes and fears, our children, our partners, our world is a powerful vehicle to change.
Older women making us laugh through life-experience – which the young ones simply don’t have yet – is going to be a very, very profound force for change.
Is it tough out there in the mostly male world of comedy? Only if you think it is. Yes, there are misogynists just as there are in any workplace — see ‘the Jenny Collier incident’ where a female comedian was told she wasn’t wanted on a gig because the venue didn’t want too many women.
Certainly I rarely gig with more than one other woman on the bill but that’s what Funny Women is here to change. And why having Sandi Toksvig as the new host of QI is so important too. We need more women in comedy so that more women can appear on TV comedy shows and quizzes. So that Wikipedia will simply stop having a category of ‘British Women Comedians.’
It’s not about moaning about the lack of women or about all the problems and the hindrances that there may be for women in comedy. It’s about getting off our backsides and getting out there to inspire other women to stand up for themselves as well.
And if we can make you laugh while we’re doing it, then that’s nine tenths of the battle.
Game on!
