Not Ladylike to Laugh? Oh, Please.
For men to be funny, women don’t have to be unfunny. Both may chuckle.
In mid-September, the Hot Water Comedy Club, a well-known and much-beloved stand-up comedy venue in the English city of Liverpool tweeted that it was committed to diversity—but added a caveat: “The reality is that certain professions, including stand-up comedy, naturally have gender imbalances.”
It went on:
“Based on our own applicants, roughly 85-90% of comedians applying for spots are male, compared to 10-15% female. While we fully support the push for greater diversity in comedy, the current ratio of male to female comedians on the circuit means that evenly mixed lineups each week can be difficult to achieve without compromising the overall quality of the show.”
And then:
“Maintaining high standards is something we'll never compromise on.”
For a statement coming from a comedy club, it was staggeringly unfunny.
I’m a woman. And I am funny. In fact, I’m so funny. I’ve taken two solo comedy shows to Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performance arts festival, for successful runs, I host monthly news-themed comedy night in London, and I write for the BBC’s long-running satirical show Have I Got News For You (now remade for America!).
The Hot Water Comedy Club posted its statement after the British comedian Lucy Beaumont had called out (in a now-deleted tweet), a number of comedy clubs for running all-male line-ups. She didn’t beat around the bush: “Where’s all your fucking women?” she asked.
All-male line-ups, she added, mean “the banter changes, the atmosphere becomes competitive and women don’t grow or shine or get equal employment.” To drive her point home, she added an advertisement for a comedy club in her hometown of Hull, in the north-east of England. Here it is. See if you can spot what’s missing:
Let’s just call ‘most’ of them what they really are - male panel shows that book a woman and male comedy clubs that tolerate women, the banter changes, the atmosphere becomes competitive and women don’t grow or shine or get equal employment. pic.twitter.com/Pu8pw3uDJS
— Lucy Beaumont (@LucyABeaumont) September 10, 2024
Beaumont’s frustration is very on point.
According to an analysis from the comedy website Chortle, almost one in five weekend lineups at the U.K.’s biggest venues are still all-male. And overall, almost three-quarters (72%) of comedians across all these high-profile shows are men. And yes, of course there are notable women comedians—Beaumont herself, Katherine Ryan, Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Maya Rudolph, Akwafina, need I go on?—but they’re too often the outliers, not the norm. A more jaded individual than I might conclude it is simply not ladylike to laugh. This, of course, is rubbish. So wherever did the insidious idea that women just aren’t that funny come from?
Funny, But With Conditions
If we take a look at the Western canon, we find that women were allowed to be funny—but that funny came with conditions.
A super example can be found in (of all places!) The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is bawdy, lowbrow, and hilarious. She is quick-witted and clever and the product of five marriages. She also—let’s be clear here—defies normal gender roles: Is that why she is permitted humor?
Shakespeare’s plays included funny women, but funny ones were not the upper-class. They were the maids and the housekeepers—the nursemaid in Romeo and Juliet, for example, who served more as a prop than a fully-fleshed character in her own right. (And these characters were, of course, always played by men.)
Joy Wiltenburg, a professor emerita of history at Rowan University in New Jersey, noted in a 2022 article that when the 17th century English baronet Sir Nicholas Le Strange was keeping a journal of funny sayings he heard, “the richest source of quips was his mother.” She adds: “Instead of thinking women weren’t funny enough, men seem to have been more worried that women would make fun of them.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Then in 2007, the journalist Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to mansplain to us—in Vanity Fair, no less!—“Why Women Aren’t Funny.” His argument was that humor exists mainly to get the ladies into bed, “to make them writhe and scream (uproariously).” Gross. Hitchens’ view was that humor is a zero-sum game. But it’s not. For men to be funny, women don’t have to be unfunny. Both may chuckle.
And that brings us to 2024, when I recently read a woman (!) regurgitating Hitchens’s ideas in The Telegraph, a U.K. broadsheet: “Women remain indifferent orators, and oratory is the essence of stand-up comedy,” wrote the author, Petronella Wyatt.
Think we can combine these two: To suggest that women aren’t funny, period, is to suggest that women are lacking something fundamental to being human. Because laughter isn’t just a simple reaction: it’s a response to pain—to processed trauma; to the systematic oppression of a world that isn’t built for you; to the horror of small talk; to grief; to love; to war; to the fact that NASA engineers asked Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut in space, if, for her week aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1984, she would require 100 tampons…
Humor is nuanced, diverse and at its best when it arises from lived experience; preferably an experience from the outside looking in. However, unless she’s a queen or a victim, most women’s lived experience isn’t deemed proper material for art, literature or comedy in western history, and we’re still dealing with that lack of representation today.
Power Dynamic
The comedian and author Catie Wilkins started out on the U.K.’s stand-up comedy circuit a few years before Hitchens’ article was published. She told me that, in the mid-2000s, “there was a stereotype that women comics only talked about periods”—which, in fact, had the effect of making it “actually taboo for any women [comics] to talk about periods.”
Wilkins concedes that today, the amateur open mic circuit, where comedians cut their teeth, “is a lot more 50/50,”—but her experience of the professional circuit (read: where comedians get paid) is that there are still fewer women than men.
The problem for women, she says, is that the pro circuit has gatekeepers: people who watch you perform early in your career and can support your move to paid work by recommending you—or not. Explains Wilkins: “it’s still definitely easier if you look like the people doing the hiring, partly because they will relate to you more.”
For me, comedy is about power. And that’s a power dynamic, right there. It’s public speaking with laughs—the best way to win hearts and minds. That’s why it matters who’s onstage, holding the microphone and commanding the room. As for getting paid enough to stand-up a sustainable career—that, also, is a powerful thing.
Getting bookings is just the first hurdle. Comedians rise through the ranks by getting good reviews. “The range of critical perspectives is extremely narrow,” says the journalist Zoe Paskett, who founded the award-winning comedy newsletter and newspaper LMAOnaise.
Critics usually come from the point of view of a middle-aged white man. In the U.K., the majority of newspaper critics fit that demographic: Their words can have a disproportionate effect on a comic’s career; a good review will change your fortunes, and can be the final step in getting an agent or a TV gig.
“That ends up setting their perspective as the standard,” adds Paskett, “and everything else as a deviation from that.” The result is that “women, people of color, queer people are all seen as more of a ‘risk,’ which is obviously ridiculous,” she says.
The comedian Steph Darcey (also a friend of mine), who plays a robot politician in her one-woman show, Prototype, had a frustrating experience. In her show, she parodies multiple politicians—some of the caricatures are women and some are men. But the reviews she received only mentioned her parodying the women politicians. “I wondered if some audience members couldn’t see past the fact I am a woman? Do I have to explicitly ‘dress as a man’ to parody one?”
When critics are called out, it doesn’t go well for comedians. “Critics can be reluctant to take criticism in return,” says the journalist, Paskett. “They often see it as bitterness on the part of a scorned artist who got a negative review, rather than a legitimate request to write and behave better.”
Perhaps you are wondering, Carrie Bradshaw-style: Why do women stay in comedy, if it’s that bad? I do it because I believe that comedy should be diverse and meritocratic—yes, you could say I’m doing my part. And because groups that are under-represented generally have to be extra-innovative.
And extra-innovative, they are: There are industry-wide initiatives, such as the Women in Comedy Festival, the Funny Women Awards, the women-led podcast Drunk Women Solving Crime, FOC IT UP!, an “unapologetic celebration of comedians of color” and Material Girls, the female and non-binary show.
But why should women have to innovate? They have proven over and again that there’s a market for their jokes: just ask Ellen DeGeneres, the world’s second-richest comedian (despite being cancelled for creating a toxic work environment) or Greta Gerwig, who wrote the (very funny) screenplay for Barbie, the highest-grossing movie of 2023. But still women comedians are forced to first circumnavigate the patriarchy—then write jokes about it.
There’s a saying here in the U.K., which feels appropriate for this: “If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry.”
Josie Cox
Deborah Copaken
Emma Haslett
