There are members of Fiona O’Loughlin’s family who won’t talk about what she does for a living, it’s that shocking. She’s a drug dealer, right No. A prostitute No. A street sweeper No. She’s a stand-up comedian. And not just a comedian, but a female comedian to boot.
“I find it really insulting and infuriating. It’s my job, I’ve spent 13 years working on it and for it not to be given the same respect as another job … It takes a long time, especially if you’re guilt-ridden and a wife and a mother, to see the honour in it and the real value in it as a career, and there really is value and honour in it.”
In the programme for this year’s New Zealand International Comedy Festival, which lists acts alphabetically, you have to get to page nine before you see a female stand-up comedian, and that’s Hayley Sproull, one half of a duo with Chris Parker. It’s page 13 before we meet O’Loughlin, the third female listed at the festival, who’s been dubbed the “Queen of Australian comedy”. Over the rest of the programme there are only eight female stand-up comedians in shows on their own, compared to pages and pages of their male counterparts. Female -up comics might not be a rarity, but they certainly are a minority.
There’s an unwritten rule, says comedian Michele A’Court, that there’s only one woman at a time on the TV3 show 7 Days, maybe sometimes two. “They’ll say it’s because there’s a smaller pool to choose from.” And they’re possibly right, but there are barriers to women being included in comedy shows.
“I do think that producers and people who book shows and provide the work are less inclined to put more than one woman on a bill, for example. They like variety and women are seen as a minority like a juggler or a magician, and you wouldn’t put more than one magician on the bill.
“I know that at the Classic [comedy venue in Auckland], if there are two women on the bill we’re really excited. We go, ‘Look at us, we’re allowed to be on the bill together’.”
It’s not just in New Zealand; on Rolling Stones’ 50 Funniest People Now list only 11 women make the grade, including Flight of the Conchords’ Kristen Schaal and veteran comedian Joan Rivers. O’Loughlin estimates that there’s a one to 10 ratio of female to male comedians in Australia.
So why are women so under-represented in comedy
A’Court, who has been performing stand-up comedy for 20 years, says there are a number of reasons. And not because women aren’t good at it, although a 2007 essay by Christopher Hitchens, published in Vanity Fair, argued that women weren’t funny. The essay caused a furore, and United States comedian Adam Carolla stoked it last year by telling The New York Post that “the reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks”.
A’Court thinks that the real point of the Hitchens article is that women don’t have to be funny the way men do.
“This is how men are attractive,” she says. “It’s by amusing women. Women don’t have to be funny because they’re pretty and they make babies and you can listen to that and go ‘Oh piss off’, or say ‘That’s a really good point’. We don’t need it in our armoury of stuff. But if you’ve got it, if that’s the way you want to be or who you are, you should do that.”
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You can debate that until the cows come home, but O’Loughlin agrees that women have been socialised out of being funny. “It’s so ingrained in society, and it’s as old as god’s dog, women are expected to be quieter. Our job is to be pretty and nice and quiet, and female stand-up is not those things. It’s still quite confronting to society. But if you keep going with it, it’s so worth it.”
A’Court has some more practical reasons why women don’t have the numbers in comedy like men do.
“It’s a really stupid job,” she laughs. “It’s not family-friendly, there’s a lot of travel, it’s at night … my years of doing a gig at night then getting up at 6.30am to get my daughter ready for school, they were hard years. It’s hard because you’re generally not earning enough to have both a child and a nanny, I certainly never was. Then you’ve got childcare costs and all that stuff.
“I was on my own for a few of those years, as well, so I was very lucky to have help from my parents who were amazing about looking after Holly while I was doing Edinburgh Festival and things like that.”
She says stand-up comedy is the perfect career for young single men. “You drink at work, and there’s all that freedom.”
O’Loughlin agrees. She started stand-up when she had young children at home. Living in Alice Springs, where there was no stand-up scene, she used to save up her child endowment – similar to the old family
