of the audience’ since we now know that there are not just two genders. It’s a simple action and after a few times of saying it, it just becomes your automatic go-to phrase. It is not hard work to make sure the words you say do not contribute to an already toxic culture.
I’m in the privileged position to be able to get up on a stage and keep an audience’s attention for a certain amount of time. And it is certainly a privilege to be able to get up in front of an almost exclusively white audience and feel safe in the fact that my whiteness is relatable. But being known as a woman in comedy did not make things easier – the majority of the people in the audience inherently believed that I was therefore unfunny – an attitude that is slowly beginning to change. So I am not saying that getting on stage was easy. But I felt like it was easy because I felt like I could say whatever I wanted to and not get hurt. I had never considered the fact that what I said could hurt others.
Even though it is legal for you to stand on a stage and speak from the heart, it does not mean you are not hurting people. As a comedian, I have made truly awful jokes on stage. My very first television spot was three minutes long, during which I made a joke about sexual assault, ending with the words, ‘Because women aren’t funny.’
I did not know about rape culture or internalised misogyny because I had never heard those terms before, and nor did I particularly understand why it was all so wrong.
Now, gradually, it is different. Comedy seems to be moving into an era where we are becoming more and more aware of the potential damage our words can cause. And now I stand on a stage on a daily basis in front of a lot more people and I have a lot more time in which to speak. Because of the way my career has progressed, I am now listened to more than I was when I was a 21-year-old with mediocre comedians’ spunk in my hair. I am now a professional comedian, meaning I only allow very famous comedians to spunk in my hair.fn9 So I have had to realise that I need to be careful with what I say on stage.
An audience member told me once, after a show, that she had gone to see a show in which the male straight comedian did a homophobic joke. She said, ‘I was the only one in the audience who looked queer. Everyone stared at me.’ When she left the show, two men in the queue to leave addressed her with a homophobic slur – with the confidence of a straight male comedian doing a homophobic joke supposedly ironically, but without the humour and the irony.
So I love comedy. I breathe, sleep, fuck and eat comedy, but my words have been harmful in the past and they will be in the future, because that is the very nature of existing. I still love comedy but I see how comedy is not a safe haven anymore where anything goes – comedy can be a weapon and you need to be careful that it is not pointed towards the wrong people.
I love comedy and I truly wish that I didn’t often hear fat people tell me that they feel unsafe in comedy clubs. That they always watch comedy with the expectation to be the punchline.
The comedian who did the pie-eating-contest joke recently messaged me to ask me if I would tweet about his upcoming show in London. (It’s a delicate situation, professionally. It is delicate for him to ask, and in doing so revealing to me that he was not selling a lot of tickets. And it is delicate for me to answer, because I should not create any kind of professional tension. But I decided to answer him anyway.) ‘I don’t think you want my followers to come. I can’t really tweet about someone who does negative jokes about fat people. My audience is full of fat people who are not – and should not – be ashamed of that. I hope you understand that. I’m sure you’ll sell out the show without my help.’ (He didn’t.)
He wrote back, ‘I understand,’ and I am not sure he did that either.
But I was grateful that his answer was polite. Usually, when I have called out someone for being problematic, it has not gone so well.
We need a fat Disney princess
Calling out a guy in a private message is vastly different from calling out an entire industry and therefore an entire system, especially when you do so more or less accidentally.
A few years ago, I sat down to watch a Disney film with my younger cousin. It is completely irrelevant which Disney film because what happened could have happened with any of them, literally any of them. The female lead was thin. No shocked gasps there. Classic Disney princess – eyes bigger than her mouth and nose combined (I have a fat head and it’s really difficult finding glasses – I can imagine it’s impossible for Disney princesses), and the circumference of her waist smaller than the one of her throat. I felt a twinge of self-hatred creeping up through my fat body. Immediately, I became annoyed that I felt that way. If an adult who prides herself on being body-confident can suddenly feel bad about herself because she is looking at a thin Disney princess, how does a little fat eight-year-old feel?
I took to Twitter. I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess’fn10 and I put the phone away to watch the rest of the movie.
A lot of people tend to see social media as nothing but a platform for teenage girls to post selfies. But even if that’s the case, to me that is still inherently positive. A platform just for young women to decide exactly how the world gets to see them, instead of only seeing themselves portrayed on television mostly through the male gaze,fn11 often as nothing but a virtually mute sex symbol. We are so used to seeing women as objects through a man’s lens. When the woman holds the lens herself and directs it at her, that is powerful, regardless of filters and amounts of make-up. They use Photoshop to make us look the way they want us to look, so there is no reason why we cannot do the same.
The internet is powerful. Important movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectTransKids, #EverydaySexism and #MeToo started on Twitter. If you grew up as a nerdy teenager in the early 2000s and probably later, the internet was where you found your peers. I had pen pals from all over the world who understood me better than anyone at my school. If you refuse to or are unable to conform, being a child can be lonely. The internet can be a better playground than the one down the park.
Saying that the internet is a trivial thing is a very privileged statement. And let us be honest – it is boring. Whenever someone takes a photo of a bunch of people on the bus all having their heads bowed down, looking at their phones with a caption mourning the loss of ‘real-life’ contact, or asking ‘why are they not just talking to each other?’ it makes me want to scream into a pillow. We live in a world where the person sitting next to us on the bus could be any kind of threat to our personal identity or our safety. In an ideal world, I would react with a smile when a man talked to me on a bus, but due to a significant amount of very uncomfortable interactions with men on buses, I no longer have any interest in engaging with any of them.fn12 I am just saying, there is a reason why people might be on their phones when they are on public transportation. There are no men trying to grope my thigh inside of my phone. Instead, I have a community full of fat, queer, social-justice activists who preach messages of self-care and a need for a revolution.
So it deserves mentioning. After having watched the Disney film, I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess,’ and put my phone away, like a good millennial.
The backlash lasted days. I got thousands of comments. Each time I checked my social media, the negative comments were everywhere. I say ‘negative comments’ but that is misleading. It sounds like these are cool-headed people decently suggesting that I am wrong. That is the furthest from the case. These people were enraged. It was hard not to imagine
