How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb must really want to change. Whether you find this, or any other, lightbulb joke funny depends little on the talent of the teller. As with a knock-knock or a man-walks-into-a-bar gag, your reaction depends mostly upon your mood. But real, live, stand-up comedy? It’s a far more mysterious and, until recently, manly phenomenon.
The Australian comic Sarah Kendall has just been shortlisted for the Perrier Comedy Awards in Edinburgh. She is the first woman on the list since Jenny Eclair, who won the prize in 1995. Since then, women have made great strides in the stand-up world — quite possibly because the sort of comedy they excel at, the observational type, has superceded the traditional music-hall style of straightforward one-liners. Nevertheless, there are those audiences that still seem surprised to be amused, intentionally, by a girl.
Comedy remains a slippery art. Aristotle and Aristophanes struggled to understand its effects by examining its relationship to tragedy. More recently, doctors studied 35 male and female comedians and found that their intense focus on absurdity as adults was a response to having been treated absurdly as children. By that measure, we should all be Maureen Lipmans. Wisecracks, a 1992 documentary, goes further to explain the peculiarities of comedy, and female comedians. After profiling 24 of them over a two-year period, in comedy clubs in Canada, Los Angeles and London, the film-maker said: “They tend to be an extraordinary, optimistic lot. They keep getting up on stage, waiting for a laugh . . . There’s a sort of maverick quality to being a stand-up comic.” Being a maverick has not, traditionally, been associated with being a woman.
Girls learn to listen and laugh at jokes; boys learn to tell them. And besides, being funny was never considered feminine: good comedy is often cruel, and women have traditionally been taught to be soft, nurturing creatures, not waspish wits. But such perceptions no longer hold true. The presumption that a woman could not entertain — could not control — a crowd has been replaced by another. The rare woman will try.
Twenty-nine percent of men still think men are funnier than women (only 7 percent of women say women are). Like a new haircut, “hard comedy” is all about confidence. The stand-up stage is forbidding, tough to tread lightly. Performers are expected to strut and prowl, demanding attention and approval again and again. Stand-up comedy has always been the bare-knuckle fighting of art forms. But then, women have been concealing iron fists beneath their delicate velvet gloves for centuries.