I have started doing stand up comedy and was recently told by one of the males of the group how great it is to have women doing stand up and especially because they are actually funny and not just all vagina jokes. I politely informed him that women are very funny and I find a lot of male comedians just talk about the raping and pedophilia for shock factors.
I am almost 13 years old and from India. Out here we have a very famous comedian with his own show and everything, and people from all over the country watch him including my mother. From the very start, I have never seemed to get the humor in his jokes. They have always been very sexist and misogynistic. Putting up standards of beauty for women. How they should look and what they should do. Even one of the characters that appear on his show is a desperate to get married girl, who he keeps turning down by making fun of her looks. And there is one very ‘pretty’ girl who he tries to flirt and set himself up with. It really sickens me that people laugh at his very rude and offensive jokes. I am so done with this thing. I don’t get how he can get away with making fun of women that way.
At a stand-up comedy gig in Shepherd’s Bush. I was the only woman in the room and was relentlessly picked on by the comedians, who would not stop telling me how “gorgeous” I was. One asked whether I was dating the male friend I had come to support, when told no my friend was advised to simply “keep trying”. Another said to the whole room that I was “a woman worth dying over, or at least spraining a wrist over” and received thunderous laughter from the audience. I left feeling utterly humiliated. Was I supposed to find that funny?
I got home from a comedy gig, and my male housemate asked me: Housemate: how was the comedy gig? Me: good thanks Housemate: do you know why that was? Me: no why? Housemate: because they were all men. women just aren’t funny. Face it that women aren’t funny.
This is a small thing but I’m sharing it because it pissed me off. My boyfriend and I went to see the comedian Stewart Lee last night with a big group of friends. Sorting out seating beforehand, one of my boyfriend’s friends said, “Don’t sit with your boy or girlfriend, it won’t be as funny with your boy or girlfriend.” Oh of course, because comedy is best enjoyed in single-sex groups of mates, there’s no way that my boyfriend and I might have a similar response to it or experience it in a similar way. I find his comment too baffling really to pinpoint exactly what drove it, but it pissed me off because 1) I WRITE AND PERFORM COMEDY. I’d organised and performed in a comedy show just two days earlier. I have an enormous, thorough and quite geeky interest in the whole art form, and Stewart Lee is my favourite. 2) The person I share a sense of humour with most is my boyfriend, who is a) a boy and b) my boyfriend. Watching Stewart Lee would not be funniest with a group of girls I have little in common with (I do have female friends but I didn’t have much of a comedic history with the other girls at the gig). Watching Stewart Lee would be funniest with him, for both of us. I’d like to say that his weird ideas about heterosexual relationship dynamics didn’t affect my enjoyment of the show, but you know what, they did. I did sit next to my bf but on his other side were these lads who managed to create a little laddish bubble that assumed that I was excluded from their appreciation of the show and as a result, did exclude me. It’s just an extension of the ‘wives go and sit in another courtyard while we men talk about important and clever things’ expectation that’s prevalent in the traditional Rajasthani society that I grew up in. Absolute bull***t. /End
I am a female comedian in London. Last night I performed at an open mic gig that has typically been one of the more liberal on the circuit. I was one of three females on the list of twelve, which is above average in this environment. Nearly every single act attacked women. Whole sets about various “insane” ex-girlfriends who do tai chi visualising snapping their ex’s penises off (huh? Also topical reference mate), multiple comics making multiple jokes about fucking their mothers, pompous rants about Trump being unfairly treated because Hilary is way worse (spoiler alert – she’s not), women placed as subservients in a variety of set ups, and an almost endless stream of men being alone but it all being women’s fault. And worst of all, the closing act is someone I remember being creative, surreal, and enigmatic. His mum fucking jokes were the worst. This environment breeds it. And it’s fucking shit. I’m not doing the circuit anymore. Instead I’m putting on my own gigs with people I love. Because fuck any more of my time being spent listening to these arseholes. After this week especially, it’s the misogynist straw that’s broken this camel’s back.