JoLaw
Monday 3rd January 2011 10:29pm
Sunderland
132 posts
Quote: Alfred J Kipper @ January 3 2011, 9:24 AM GMT
Jo, you make some very interesting points there, several I agree with, but are men really to blame for not liking or not getting female based comedy as much male comedy? I wouldn't say they are, nature has made us different, and we tend to have an instinctive inkling for comedy of our own gender culture, I'd say.
If men write off an entire routine or comedian (worse, gender) on the basis of a statistically tiny proprotion of material that THEY feel doesn't relate to them directly...then yeah.
My close male friends would never write off a female comedian as unfunny based on gender rather than material, if they were those kind of people (I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on here, but 'people' is self censoring) then they wouldn't be my friends. They come to my gigs and enjoy them, they have female comedians that they like.
Quote: Alfred J Kipper @ January 3 2011, 9:24 AM GMT
You said yourself you behave differently when with your girl mates than you do with blokes, confirming this natural difference. Why then blame men for not wanting to see women acts as much as men acts?
Aspects of it are different, but if we didn't enjoy each other's company, then we wouldn't be friends. I reckon it's a spectrum. You've got hateful, hurtful insults at one end, somewhere in the middle there's friendly but harmless banter, and then at the other end, talking about how great they are. Most people are capable of moving up and down that spectrum rather than staying at a fixed point. When I'm with my male friends, there's statistically more of the banter side of things (never really cruel) but that's not to say we don't sometimes have more serious, emotional conversations at times. They all laugh at my jokes. I'm nacissistic enough that if they didn't, I wouldn't be friends with them
Quote: Alfred J Kipper @ January 3 2011, 9:24 AM GMT
Surely the thing to do is to shape your comedy for a female centred audience, as all the best known female comedians have done? I thought all women naturally did this anyway, so maybe what's bothering you is that there aren't enough female fans out there going to see stand up? I'm no expert on stand up btw, it's just not my cuppa, maybe there are a lot of women going to stand up. If so, surely you should target them?
I'm not going to shape my comedy in order to target anybody. Men laugh, women might identify with some of it more, but generally, my aim is to be funny rather than to think of it as female/male comedy. I am a female, and naturally that will affect the way I experience the world, which will affect my comedy. It doesn't make it worse, or mean that only women will like it.
I think some of the best comedy comes from personal experiences, you don't have to have shared those experiences to laugh. I'm not a transvestite, but when Eddie Izzard talks about the reactions he gets, I can still laugh. I've seen comedians cover a lot of topics personal to them, but not experienced by me. Alcoholism, sex addiction, bad jobs, girlfriends, different backgrounds etc, but if it's funny it doesn't matter.
My problem is men who immediately react badly when a joke from a woman comes from a woman's perspective.
As for what's bothering me? Pretty much nothing except misogynistic attitudes! I'm very, very new to stand up. I'm experimenting with different material, styles and the different sides to me, but I spend no time thinking about how gender specific my jokes are. I'm more concerned with how funny they are.
I haven't had bad reactions. I've had a few jokes that haven't worked as well as I'd hoped (along with some that worked much better than I predicted, it's all a learning curve) but my biggest downfall is nothing to do with gender. It's waffling for too long between funny bits, which I imagine is hard to believe from my incredibly succint posts.