“Oh, all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series, there were people asking ‘Can women be funny?’. People still ask that. It’s like asking, ‘Can women breathe in and out?'” Julie Walters.
To all those men (and, let’s face it, it’s nearly always men), who insist on standing at the bar and declaring to no-one in particular that they ‘don’t like female comedians’, I’ve worked you out. You don’t want women to be funny. Funny women intimidate you. We threaten you, especially when, because you don’t have the balls to stand up and tell jokes, you resent the fact that we do.
Essentially, we’ve got your balls and you don’t like it!
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying every female is funny, nor am I saying every female comic is funny. But like some Staffordshire Bull Terriers are prone to biting their owners and some aren’t, like some Northern folk eat every meal with lashings of gravy and some prefer a nice raspberry jus, some people are hilarious, and some of those are men and some of those are women. If someone is funny, they’re funny, both gender and genitalia totally irrelevant.
How come when a female comic nails it, we hear ‘I don’t usually like women comedians, but she’s actually quite good’?, yet when a female comic bombs, we hear ‘See! All women comedians are rubbish’? One doesn’t represent us all! If you experience bad service in a restaurant, you just don’t eat there again, you don’t implement a self-imposed ban against all eating establishments across the country.
There’s no such thing as ‘female comedy’, there’s just comedy, and writing and performing comedy is bloody hard enough with outdated, ridiculous generalisations, whoever you are. There’s good comedy and bad comedy, like there’s good teachers and bad teachers, good doctors and bad doctors, good judges of character and bad.
A sense of humour is born, developed and honed by life experience and acute observational skills; how could gender POSSIBLY affect funny bones?
The infamous Vanity Fair article with Christopher Hitchens (here’s the link if you’re in the mood to be offended) was, and still is, a load of utter codswallop. But unfortunately, 10 years later, the same stale, clichéd phrases are still flying around pubs and comedy clubs. A particular Hitchens pearler from the article, when having to concede that there are some successful female comedians, was that ‘most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.’
The late, great, absolute Queen of British Comedy Victoria Wood earned a record-breaking nine BAFTAS and the incredible Caroline Aherne earned an impressive four and it’s a sure-fire cert they both would have earned more if they were still with us. I think I’m right in assuming that no-one would summarise either of them as simply hefty, dykey, or, as far as I know, Jewish.
The bottom line? Life’s often tough and frankly ultimately pointless, and when all said and done,if you can’t laugh, you’ve had it. Leave it to us, us women, us men, us comedy writers and performers, don’t you worry about what we look like and what gender we are, just laugh if you find us funny and move on if you don’t.
It really is as simple as that.
