It’s far from the worst ever piece she’s done. It just hits hardest on those of us with a special interest in and love of live comedy.

Still a misguided piece of hers though.

I just think that whole article is a real pity – there is some good analysis to be done, as Kate has shown, but Greer’s article isn’t it.

That comment does not surprise me at all, tigtog – in a way, standup has been perfect, because I’ve got a partner with a traditional job so I haven’t had to worry about childcare – but most of my audience isn’t out at 9 pm on a weeknight.

And that ties into Beppie’s point about relatability which is spot-on – the thing I love is that even when I’ve had a terrible gig, there’s always one woman who comes up to me afterwards and says, I just loved that. Someone was once explaining the psychology of an audience to me and telling me that women who are in the audience with a man are less likely to ‘let themselves’ laugh if the man isn’t laughing – no idea about the veracity of that, but it does seem to be true that if there’s a deep man’s laugh in the audience then you’re unlikely to die on stage.

So much to say…but I’m exhausted…we opened our (all-woman) show at the fringe last night and I couldn’t sleep afterwards. Plus, reading that original article just wore me out.

and then that our supposed failure will be taken as a representative of all women in comedy

Oh yes: the “one woman didn’t strike me as impressive, therefore no woman can ever be impressive” dismissive generalisation that happens to POC depressingly often as well.

I’ve told this story before, but the scales really fell from my eyes with a male friend of mine who specialised in droll misanthropy that I used to find amusing – I lent him a book and when he returned it he didn’t say “not my sort of book thanks”, what he said was “women can’t write science fiction”. After that his deeply seated sexism in nearly everything he said just stood out in sharp relief and I found I hardly liked him any more.

The book was by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Michelle’s last blog post..Oh why me.. why do you make me read these things?

Conversely, lots of my uni friends were happy to get up on stage to perform skits in groups. Then it only takes one woman to be fearless, the others will go along with it given the opportunity. Of course, in most of those groups there have historically been one or two women and five blokes.

There isn’t really a forum where you can try out a couple of group skits. That stuff used to come out of universities, but university theatres have lost a lot of funding. Obviously returning funding to university activities would be excellent, but it wouldn’t make things any easier for the women who don’t enrol, or who are only at uni for the essential activities before heading home to care for their children.