Published on The Weekly Review online, April 8, 2016
Female comedians are, and have always been, funny. This is a thing. Sometime, way back when, some dude decided to start spreading rumours that they weren’t, and that got everyone confused, so female comedians have forever been plagued with questions like “are women as funny as men?” and “what’s it like to be a woman in comedy?”.
And they’re over it.
“It’s just such an odd thing, it’s almost existential, like you don’t have any experience of a gender other than your own,” Sara Pascoe says.
“When I walk on stage I feel like a person, I don’t feel like a sub-culture.”
Sara is just one of the top female comics getting together for the annual Upfront show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
The show is in its 21st year and will feature local and international comedians including Felicity Ward and Mae Martin – both of whom are very much in agreement with the sentiment above.
“It’s just so mad that people still ask the question ‘are women as funny as men?’,” Mae says.
She muses about how funny it would be if female doctors were called into question due to their gender, something Felicity echoes.
“No one’s asking dentists what it’s like to be a female dentist – you’re just a dentist!” Felicity says.
So we asked them what they would prefer to be asked – kind of an “ask her more” for comedians.
Mae:
“Anything really, except ‘are women funny?’ Cause really the only difference is answering those questions!”
Felicity:
“What dudes get asked! Whatever male comedians get asked, that’s what we want to be asked, cause we’re just comedians. Anatomy is literally the only thing that is different between us.”
Sara:
“The kind of question that would be interesting to talk about might be the current state of comedy.”
Sara’s point is a good one – comedy across the world is thriving. Stand-ups including Louis CK, Amy Schumer and Aziz Ansari have taken their stand-up to small (and big) screens. Aziz has recently released a book about the way dating has changed with technology.
“It’s a very, very thriving industry in the arts, because it doesn’t need subsidy because there’s enough of an audience for people to earn a living and that’s really exciting and really rare,” Sara says.
She’s recently written her own book, Animal: How a Woman is Made, which looks at the evolution of the female body, and how it’s treated in culture.
“There needs to be more discussion, especially with young women and women who are [in their formative years] and making choices, and making sure they’ve got space and they’re not being told the wrong things about themselves,” Sara says.
In this way, perhaps the ideas that female comedians have are different, but, as Sara explains, just because you don’t have the same experience as someone, it doesn’t mean you can’t relate to it or find it funny.
“It’s a tough one because it’s not irrelevant yet, it’s still a thing, so you do have to address it. But I think the only way to make it irrelevant is to stop addressing it eventually,” Mae says.
She says she still comes up against promoters who don’t want more than one woman on the bill, or who have rewarded the men on a show and not the women.
“I did a gig once where I was at a members club and all the other acts got paid with membership to the club and I didn’t get one – like all the men got them.”
Her comedy career started when she was 13 years old, after she started doing improvisation classes at the well-known Second City comedy group in Toronto.
“I just got addicted to it. I don’t know why I thought it was a viable career option, but for some reason I did,” Mae says.
She now talks a lot about sexuality and diversity, but also about her family and some of the weird and embarrassing things that have happened to them and her, and, as she’s found out, to most people.
“The more personal you get and the more you reveal – like the weirder stuff you reveal, the truer stuff – you find that people really relate to it,” she says.
Felicity’s comedy festival show deals with the real as well.
“The show is about anxiety and depression and irritable bowel syndrome and it turns out that they are linked, and I found that in the process of getting diagnosed – but it’s funny,” she says.
She found that people with mental illness often don’t get a chance to laugh at themselves, something that can be rather cathartic. Make no mistake though, she’s an advocate for not just talking about, but doing something for people with mental illness.
“I’m like ‘yeah talking about it is important’, and it definitely, definitely is, but now I’m like ‘I think there’s enough awareness guys’, like awareness is great, but what does that actually achieve?” she says. “You’ve gotta put your money where your mouth is.”
Felicity is also over talking about the gender thing, though she says events like Upfront are great just to get some of the best comic talent together. She says she MC’d a charity event last year that had an all female line-up, including some of the women in this year’s Upfront.
“Everyone destroyed. And at the beginning I came out and I said ‘you’re about to see one of the best line-ups of comedy in Australia’, not one of the best female line-ups,” she says.
“People were hysterical with laughter. They were beside themselves, didn’t know what to do with their bodies, with laughter.”
And isn’t that what comedy is all about?
Jemimah Clegg 