silly comedians doing whole shows about space-dogs and it is delightful and hilarious. But if you are talking about real life, you have to be on the same page as the audience. You are talking to a group of strangers, so you can only base your jokes on the ‘general truth’ of most people’s lives. Which is why a lot of comedy plays on stereotypes: men should be manly men who never cry and are always the big spoon, lesbians are butch and hate men and always ask me on datesfn5 and fat people are unintelligent and lazy. Stereotypes mean that you can make a joke about a group of people without having to explain it. ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics … Unless there was a pie-eating contest. Because fat people eat a lot, that’s why they’re so fat’ – this would not work as a joke. But it works when the punchline is implicit. For fat jokes to work, we all have to buy into the validity of the stereotypes.
I once saw a comedian get a huge laugh because he said that his son wanted to dress up as a princess. He just stated that fact – and the audience started laughing. The subtext was that men are not allowed to dress up as princesses.
But we are beginning to collectively understand now that some men do want to dress up as princesses and they should be allowed to. That lesbians are not necessarily butch and that they almost never ask me on dates and that men should probably be allowed to start feeling their feelings.
And people don’t necessarily laugh because they agree. Sometimes it’s an initial reaction because the rhythm automatically lends itself to a laugh. Or perhaps you laugh because you don’t want to be the dry and boring mood-killer of your friend group or maybe you laugh out of pure self-defence.
When I dated a guy in the military, he once came home laughing hysterically because of a story he had heard one of his soldier friends tell. They had all been sharing stories about how they ended up in the military and this one guy had been quiet. When he finally cracked, he told them all why.
He had wanted, his entire life, to become a gynaecologist. He went to school for years, studied hard, got good grades, got the education. On his first day as a gynaecologist, his first ever patient was a fat woman. My boyfriend at the time wiped tears of laughter from his eyes when he said, ‘And she had been sweating, of course,’ because of course we sweat. The guy had finished the check-up and walked straight out of the clinic and into the military, never looking back. The joke was that he had wanted to fondle pretty women’s privates and he ended up having to give a fat woman a medical check-up.
I remember laughing. I think I even found it funny. In doing so, I hoped to erase the fact that I was also fat. That my sweaty vagina is so gross that it sends grown menfn6 directly into a war zone in the hope of a quick and painful death. Ha ha. My boyfriend told me how everyone had laughed so hard and for so long. I remember not turning up at my next gynaecologist appointment. Maybe I will just wait till we’re in a new war against a country and they need the manpower.
A few years ago, I was sitting backstage in a comedy club watching a comedian perform. I was enthusiastically laughing at all of the new jokes he was telling that I had never heard before. He is a good comedian. Let me just speak from a comedy point of view, for a second:
Comedy is a lot of things. It takes years, sometimes decades, to learn how to do it well. Shorter words are funnier than longer words, words that begin with a hard-sounding letter are funnier than words that begin with a soft-sounding letter, the word that reveals the surprise-twist in the joke has to go at the very end of the joke, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. A stand-up performance, if you only listened to the beats, should sound like jazz. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-da-da-bam.fn7 You learn about timing, intonation, pitch, where you look at which points of the show, how to hold a microphone, how not to hold a microphone, how to cut as many words as possible from a joke, to make the shortest trip from the beginning of a set-up to the delivery of a punchline. Every single comedian who has a notable career has worked very hard for it, has died on stage in a nightclub in Plymouth for no money only to go back to a Travelodge and cry their eyes out – and yet they have driven for six hours to Leeds the next day to do the same again. Even the comedians whose jokes are hurtful.
And a comedian can be a good comedian and still be an absolute piece of trash. Jokes can be both horrendously offensive, damaging and dangerous and at the same time, be well-constructed and technically funny. Comedy is all about technique. This is not a book about how to do comedy, but I feel like this is an important point to make when I am about to criticise stand-up. And it is important for you to know when you do decide to criticise stand-up.
The comedian I was watching from the dressing room on this particular night was a good comedian. He knew how to write jokes. He knew his craft. And then he closed on his final joke:
‘This girl was unattractive. I’m not going to say in what way, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think brunettes are unattractive, imagine she was brunette. If you hate big noses, imagine she had a big nose. And if you’re me, imagine she’s fat.’
He left the stage and came down backstage to the sound of the audience applauding. I couldn’t congratulate him on a good set. I couldn’t make myself do it. The joke had worked, the crowd had laughed, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Fortunately for me, another comedian spoke:
‘You’ve been in the sun all day?’ she asked him, as his face was bright red.
‘It’s because I’m a redhead and I forgot to put on sunscreen today,’ he explained with a sadness in his voice. ‘I don’t think you guys understand how hard it is. How many comments I have to listen to every summer. From friends and strangers. You guys don’t understand,’ he said.
And looked me in the eyes. I blinked a few times, not really understanding how he couldn’t see what had just happened. How he didn’t feel like an absolute fraud, doing jokes about fat people being unattractive but somehow wanting sympathy for being teased himself – from a fat person. How he could be so ignorant as to what he had just done.
When pointing out that some jokes are hurtful and damaging, we always hear the same comments: ‘But what about freedom of speech? Can we not say anything anymore? It’s a dictatorship now. A joke is just a joke. You need to be able to laugh at yourself. Chill out.’
Freedom of speech is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. Although sometimes I daydream that we do live in a dictatorship and it is run by a strong, powerful non-man – a radical, communist, intersectional feminist, powerhouse of a non-man. We would have one day a week – say, Monday? – where men were not allowed to speak at all. That would be the day we would get things done. Then we would emerge on a six-day weekend because we would not need to work anymore. Without a man mansplaining our thoughts back to us, a man interrupting our every sentence to repeat literally what we just said, without a man needing to assert an ego or flexing his muscles, we would get shit done.
Then there would of course be all-men-are-jailed-Tuesdays. Men are allowed to talk but they can only talk to each other, because they are all in the same jail. Meanwhile, we would have a day where we did not consider the length of our skirts and where we did not need to place keys between our fingers on our way home at night. If a white van drove past us, we would just shout ‘Hi Betsy’ because it would probably just be Betsy in her white van again.fn8
But, comedy was, for me, always something free-flowing. Something that was meant to have flaws. This act of escapism where I could just make fart sounds with my mouth for ten minutes and there would be no consequences. It was something I could do without anyone telling me what I can or cannot do. There were meant to be no rules because no one could stop me.
But I now need to be more aware of every word I say. It’s not a terrible tragedy that I actually have to think before I do my job. It’s just a matter
