Five years of LMAOnaise: Why comedy reviewing deserves better

I never wanted to review comedy. I just wanted to love it. I wanted to sit in a dark room (preferably middle-to-back) and laugh and then encourage other people to see the thing that made me laugh so we could all talk about how funny it was together.

I set up LMAOnaise Comedy as a way to shout about all this fantastic comedy I was ingesting, and to build a community of people who wanted to do the same. Success! I did it! It’s now been five years of yelling about why I love comedy to other people who are also yelling, and we’re having a great time together. (It’s why we’re celebrating with a big Soho Theatre show!)

But at some point on my journey of enjoying comedy, I noticed that some of the reviews I was reading weren’t matching up with my experience of what I had watched. Not on the basis of a difference of opinion, but a seeming lack of understanding. As a queer woman, the comedy world I entered was one filled with drag and cabaret, messy and loud and weird. I couldn’t help but feel like some of these reviews just weren’t getting it. I did some deep digging, as is my nature as a journalist, and discovered that these were coming from straight men. 

So, when presented with the opportunity to review comedy for Funny Women at the Edinburgh Fringe, I took it. And I’m glad I did because it is wonderful. But to be honest, part of me still kinda hates it… and I think that’s a healthy reaction to what I’m being asked to do. 

Reviewing comedy is difficult and it never gets any easier and it shouldn’t. It should take effort to boil down an hour-long show that has taken a year or more to create into a 400 word summary. 

Being granted access to officially comment on other people’s art is an honour and a huge responsibility. It’s one that I don’t take lightly at all. In fact, I agonise over it every single time. It doesn’t matter that I have committed to never publishing negative reviews or takedowns of comedy shows on LMAOnaise. Only publishing positive reviews isn’t about mindlessly praising things, it’s about taking pains to demonstrate understanding and show that the hard work someone has put into their show has been appreciated.

You have to juggle a lot of things as a reviewer, and it’s a difficult line to tread, but I will always prioritise care over speed. I have seen reviews with offensive mistakes, or off-hand and unnecessarily personal jabs somehow slip through the net. And I have heard reviewers justify these mistakes by saying it was late at night and they had a lot of reviews to write, an excuse I refute with everything I’ve got. (If you’re so tired that you’re writing sexist remarks, go to bed until you’re not a misogynist anymore.)

Look, men are allowed to do things. I’m not saying they aren’t! But the majority of mainstream comedy commentary is coming to audiences funnelled through a male lens and I don’t think it’s serving us. In some ways, it’s actively causing issues if that lens is leading to misunderstandings.

Comedy is an act of community. It doesn’t work alone. All of us are part of it in some way, whether as performer or audience or reviewer. Aside from enjoying ourselves, we’re all responsible for how we engage with the rest of the ecosystem – that’s just being a human person in a society. 

I get the impression that reviewers sometimes feel they sit apart from this, an objective observer on the edge of things. And to a certain extent we do have to be separate, but that doesn’t negate the responsibility we have been granted. It certainly doesn’t give us carte blanche to say what we want without consequences simply because it’s an opinion. We have to acknowledge that the consequence can sometimes be causing damage to a person.

Reviewers are not special; we don’t have any special insight, or special opinions that are better or more valuable than any other audience member. What we do have is a platform of whatever size to legitimise our opinions. And sure, we’ve seen a hell of a lot of comedy.

Comedy is amazing and HARD and I could and would never do it. If I’ve learned anything in the last five and a bit years of doing LMAOnaise and in my decade of writing about comedy, it’s that our first obligation is respecting people. We show respect for the artist by treating them as people, endeavouring to understand their work and not just consuming their performance. We show respect for the audience by recognising that our assessment is only valuable in conjunction with theirs.

There are some very brilliant comedy reviewers whose work I admire greatly and, guess what, they’re women. It’s not that I don’t trust that straight white men can write favourably about women or queer people or global majority artists, but that they simply don’t have the tools to properly communicate those experiences. Why would they? It ends up presenting the male view on what’s good as default. It drives this continuing narrative that male comedy is “normal” and everything else is a risk. You’re reading this on Funny Women, so you’ll know that’s obviously nonsense and doesn’t reflect how we see comedy at all. 

The LMAOnaise show we’re putting on at Soho Theatre is a reflection of the comedy world as so many of us know it. It’s an exciting mix of genres and styles (and funnily enough not as difficult as it would appear to have a line-up that isn’t only straight white male stand-ups…). We’ve got Alex Franklin, Kate Cheka, Em Humble, Rosalie Minnitt, Jodie Mitchell, Ciara O’Connor, Temi Wilkey and Maia Tassalini. Unreal!

It’s also supporting a mission to make reviews less of a traumatic minefield. The show is a fundraiser to help get LMAOnaise to the Edinburgh Fringe to review again and continue with our goal of JUST MAKING THINGS A LITTLE BIT NICER FOR PEOPLE – who would have thought that would be so difficult and expensive…

It is possible to take a different approach, to uplift instead of tear down and to recognise comedy as the community act it is, rather than something transactional.

So come along on Friday 17th April, and watch THE best, funniest and coolest upcoming comedians on the scene right now!

Finally, I get to put down my pen and just enjoy it.

LMAOnaise Comedy’s Big Birthday Fundraiser is at Soho Theatre (downstairs), on April 17th, 9:15pm. Get your tickets here.