BEYOND THE PUNCHLINE

What happens when love ends between two women? When there is no man to blame?

Except all of them.

That’s how the current draft of my novel-in-progress Conversations We Should’ve Had begins. I’d assumed it to be a rather sad and profound reflection on the challenges of how inescapable the patriarchy really is. Even when you’re a gay woman in a relationship with a woman, a man is somehow just always hanging around in a strangely objectifying way, an ever-hopeful uninvited guest in an unwanted throuple, a sort of anti-‘unicorn’. However, when I tried posting the line on social media last week, I was surprised how many people responded with a laughing emoji.

And I realised that the structures and formats of joke-telling are so hardwired into my DNA that I had made even this thought *sound* like a joke. Which perhaps makes it my perfect opening line after all.

Because the novel is all about a particularly painful realisation: whilst comedy has been a hugely rewarding part of my career for the last twenty years (since I made the Funny Women Awards finals as a very raw new act in 2006!), the pressure to turn absolutely everything into a punchline has come at a cost. Sometimes I have undermined my own truth. Sometimes I have hidden my trauma.

A silly old favourite joke of mine is one about nervously coming out to my mum as a teenager – and my mum embracing my sexuality to ridiculously mortifying levels of enthusiasm, including telling me all about her own ‘friendship’ with a woman called ‘Joan’. It’s a sweet story, one that fellow 2006 Funny Women Awards finalist Suzy Bennett often recites back to me.

But what this story masks is how, back in the homophobic 1980s, my progressive mother was a solitary island of safety and acceptance in a turbulent sea of hate. Going to school each day felt like running the most terrifying of gauntlets. Bullies lurked in every corner, seeking out the existentially lonely kid (me) who knew deep down they were different to other girls. In RE lessons, my classmates would freely state that gay people should all be murdered – and this went unremarked upon by teachers. And how the hell do you turn all of *that* into a joke?

So perhaps that’s why I similarly stayed silent about the night I was followed and assaulted by a male audience member after a gig. I had been speaking confidently and proudly about being a gay woman. And he seemed to be under the impression he might be able to ‘help’ me turn straight. Somehow this targeting due to my sexual orientation, my vulnerable spot, made the experience feel especially invasive and personal. Shame attached itself to me like a heavy blanket. I did not know how to speak about what had happened. And yet we female comics are now speaking up about misogyny. At last. For me, writing fiction has felt like the safest way to wrangle with the topic. But the emotional truth underpinning my story is very real indeed.

For more information about Rosie Wilby’s work, her debut novel Conversations We Should’ve Had, and the companion live show which tours in 2027, head to her website.

Photo credit: Miranda Parry