On stage at a comedy festival in 2016, taping a live podcast in front of almost 2,000 people, I got a familiar feeling. It’s a funny feeling—unfortunately not comedy funny, more like “uh-oh” funny.
The feeling, boiled down, is this: “I wish they would just forget I am a woman.” The host and the all-male panel, four men in all, were completely unable to do so. Innuendo and a jovial sort of sexism flowed into the conversation like poison, and I felt myself shutting down, unable to do my job, which was, of course, to be funny.
Young women, trans women, queer women, women of color, all stake their own claims to stand-up comedy.
I had, at that point, been doing comedy for ten years and, afterward, I kicked myself: Why couldn’t I rescue the situation? The audience picked up on it, too. On social media after the taping, some pointed out the sexism, others questioned my right to be there at all.
The experience was not new to me, as a woman in comedy, but the scale of this particular humiliation knocked me a bit. Ultimately, I learned from it; today, I’m more vigilant about which panel shows I appear on. I’m quicker on the defense, and careful to nip any grotesquerie in the bud as soon as I sense it.
Being a woman in an industry dominated by men has real and tangible drawbacks. As a newer comic, I was told by a male comic that he’d like to book me as his support act, but he was concerned that people might think there was something going on between us. I made a critically acclaimed TV show in Ireland in 2010 that was not renewed after one season; the broadcaster deemed it “too niche.”
Looking back, I see how I figured out workarounds, small ways to carve out air pockets so I didn’t drown. In 2006, I did the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a month-long, notoriously tough rite of passage for stand-ups, and I went hyper-feminine. I dressed in 1950s-style party dresses and my sister sat beside me onstage and made cupcakes for the audience. The show was a hit: My nonthreatening persona and quirky, self-deprecating material was no challenge to the status quo.
As the years passed and I got bigger gigs and prestigious touring jobs, I settled in to wearing shapeless, dark clothes onstage, hoping to vanish my womanness and become just a person, telling jokes.
I don’t do much stand-up these days, but I co-host a show in Brooklyn called “Butterboy” with two other comics, Jo Firestone and Aparna Nancherla. In their “Best Comedy of 2018” roundup, The New York Times named me “a natural master of ceremonies,” adding, “if a comic indulges in hack stereotypes, there’s a chance she might call it out.” Later, I wondered why it was remarkable that I sometimes point out when a comic has punched down, or resorted to cruelty and clichés. Every MC should do this if it’s called for.
For a long time in comedy, the norm has been an able-bodied white man—you know, like Louis C.K., an admitted predator. I’m able-bodied and white and these qualities give me proximity to that norm. This is a privilege, one that others do not share. Black, brown, and disabled women are further from that norm than I am, but the coolest thing about stand-up comedy today is that they are doing it, and doing it triumphantly.
In the five years I’ve been part of New York City’s thriving and ambitious stand-up scene, I’ve witnessed this shift toward a new reality. It thrills me. Young women, trans women, queer women, women of color, all stake their own claims to stand-up comedy. They are uninterested in trying to fit in to the old ways, they seem epically bored by the norm, and have long slipped out of those ill-fitting yokes. They simply forge ahead doing their own hilarious and brilliant things.
Watching them, I feel bolstered and inspired. I love that they would not dream of putting up with the nonsense I bore years ago, when I toured across Australia opening for a man who closed the show every night with a routine about his wife’s vagina during childbirth, and how it was akin to watching his favorite bar burn down.
This new generation of comics would not laugh at that joke, but they would laugh at the comic. Perhaps they would even pity him for being just one more middle-aged white man standing on a stage proclaiming his irrelevance for all to see, without even realizing that’s what he was doing.