Only Men Are Funny? You’ve Got to be Joking

A Fordham female comedian gives a rousing performance in the Blackbox. (Tessa Bloechl/The Ram)

A Fordham female comedian gives a rousing performance in the Blackbox. (Tessa Bloechl/The Ram)

By Katherine Meyer

As a female standup comedian, Amanda Pell, FCRH ’15, has grown used to being in the minority. After joining Fordham’s standup troupe as a sophomore, she spent two years as the group’s solitary girl. Even now that other girls have been added to the lineup, female standup comedians remain hard to find at Fordham.

Pell thinks this is more than just a fluke.

Now a senior, she has been involved in standup comedy for almost four years, both on Fordham’s campus and elsewhere, and during that time she has noticed some inequalities between female and male comedians.

“Nobody really understands that it’s kind of a culture that keeps girls down,” Pell said.  She has come to view the problem not as a mere lack of females who want to do standup comedy, but a deeper, more systematic bias against them.

“It’s very subliminal, definitely, because the funny thing is, everyone is trying to be encouraging,” Pell said. “But…so often when I come off stage I get ‘Wow, I usually don’t like female comedians but you were actually pretty good.’ And it’s a slap in the face.”

Abby Gibson, FCRH ’16, also said she has noticed some differences between how men and women are perceived onstage. Gibson has done a variety of comedy work, both on-campus and off, but most of her experience comes from being a member of Fordham’s improv comedy group Stranded in Pittsburgh.

“For the most part, I feel that I have been treated equally to my male counterparts, but I do think that I am perceived differently from many of them,” Gibson said. “In a show, a male improvisor acting as a woman always gets a laugh, but a woman acting as a man does not always get the same reaction. I believe part of the reason is that it is easier for men to portray women as over the top, eccentric or flamboyant and still have the character be believable to the audience.”

Fordham professor Kirsten Swinth, who has studied gender culture of modern women, agrees that a bias is present. She thinks it is part of a larger, older trend.

“Part of what comedians do is be subversive — humor helps us see the world in a different way. But it’s more risky for women, it makes people uncomfortable…because women are supposed to be proper and appropriate,” Swinth said.

Now she says that she has seen less of an overt bias against female comics, and more of what she calls a “deep-seated historical bias.”

“The low numbers of women in comedy are really no different than low numbers of women in the public eye anywhere. It’s part of a broader challenge we face today, which is to get more women into the public eye…[and] women can and should be in the public eye. We know from a lot of research that more voices mean richer conversation.”

But is there any truth at all in the perception that female comedians are somehow less entertaining?

Grant Bolles, FCRH ’16, considers himself typical of male standup fans — he enjoys watching it but does not have any comedy background himself. He said that in general, he does find female comedians less funny than their male counterparts.

“The ones I know typically seem to rely on cliche bits. It’s often the same thing over and over–they talk about stereotypically ‘women things’ that really only pertain to other women: dating, sex lives, their periods, clothing,” Bolles said. “Whereas male comedians, I think, tend to branch out more. When it’s a woman, it’s usually obvious that it’s a woman’s bit, but not so much with men. It’s like women are pigeonholing themselves.”

He is quick to add though, that this does not mean he thinks women cannot be funny.

“Of course, there are women who don’t do this, and I’m obviously not going to say that women can’t do good comedy,” he said. “But in the case of most of the female comedians I have seen, the material is kind of redundant. It’s just not that interesting, and not that funny.”

Pell agrees with this, if only to a certain extent. She often finds herself trying hard not to sound like “the next girl who’s up there.”  She attributes this pressure to stand out from female peers to many of the same trends Bolles noticed.

“[With female amateur comedians] there is a lot of self-deprecating, a lot of self-sexualizing, a lot of self-objectifying humor that is not my sense of humor, and that I don’t find funny. So I’m sitting here going like, ‘Ok either I’m crazy and this is really funny, or there’s a reason why these women are tending towards this topic and I don’t understand what it is,’ ” Pell said.

She is now doing her senior thesis on just that: finding out how gender bias influences female comedians, and whether female comedians and male comedians are somehow fundamentally different in the way that they write.

Whether or not they are different, it is very clear to Pell that women can –and should– do comedy. Now, she just wants to make sure the rest of the world knows that.

“The ‘are women funny?’ conversation just needs to end,” she said. “Because we’re there. We’ve figured it out. There are enough funny women to prove [it]— well really we shouldn’t have to prove it, but we did. We’re good.”

__________

Katherine Meyer is the News Editor for The Fordham Ram. 

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