Page 13 - Katherine Ryan press pack 2015-20

I can’t book you that night,” the stand-up comic Hattie
lady ha ha lady ha ha

Hayridge was told by a promoter 25 years ago. “I already
have a juggler.” To the promoter, a female comic was a
variety act, something strange and possibly exotic, but a
real comic? No. That would be a fat man from the North.
British stand-up was always sexist: rape jokes, domestic
violence jokes, heckling and abuse of female comics; the
confusion of female comics with jugglers, circus animals
and other curiosities. Now, women are part of a stand-up
boom, filling theatres with one-woman shows, creating
and starring in sitcoms, performing on panel shows and
playing the club and festival circuits: Bridget Christie,
Sarah Millican, Katherine Ryan, Sara Pascoe, Luisa Omielan,
Miranda Hart. For the first time in British comedy history
they are as marketable as men. The reason is simple:
enough women got good at comedy.
In her memoir, Look Back in Hunger, Jo Brand
describes her debut gig in 1986. It was a set about Sigmund
Freud in a Soho club, which she delivered drunk on
seven pints. An audience member — a male comic, she
later discovered — said “F-off you fat cow” until she left
the stage; at a later gig she was called a “fat slag” by a
group of dentists.
Helen Lederer, meanwhile, was asked to expose her
genitals by a heckler. The experience of stand-up was so
frock stars agonising, she fled into radio and TV. Curled up in a cafe in
Previous pages: Hampstead, she told me it is almost too painful for her to
Luisa Omielan’s talk about. Female comics were asked for sex in exchange
show transferred for gigs; mistaken by doormen for cleaners or the girlfriends
directly from the of comics; their commitment and talent were questioned.
Edinburgh Fringe If there was a Damascene moment, it was when
to the West End
Bridget Christie performed A Bic for Her at the Edinburgh
Right: the Fringe in August 2013. It was a furious and sensational
Canadian show about misogyny, inspired by the awful Bic for Her,
comic Katherine a pen “for women looking for an everyday writing solution
Ryan with her that is designed to fit their needs”. Christie hated the
dog, Dolly pen — why should women be reminded of their gender
when buying stationery? Did the Brontë sisters, she asked,
walk around shouting “This pen is so heavy!” and yearning
for a Bic for Her?
Christie won the Foster’s award for best show at the
Edinburgh Festival that year, the most coveted prize in
stand-up. I do not know if Christie changed comedy or if
she expressed something that had already happened, but
since that day, explicit misogyny is unfashionable in
mainstream stand-up — although it loiters at the edges.
Daniel O’Reilly, for instance, whose character Dapper
Laughs, a moronic shag monster whose catchphrase was
“She knows!”, once said a female audience member was
“gagging for a rape”. His tour and TV show were pulled
after an outcry; his single, Proper Moist, sank. I wasn’t sure
about Dapper Laughs — I thought it was a spoof — but
I doubt this would have happened before A Bic for Her.
Christie looks continually aghast. She has a
Gloucestershire burr; it veers up and down. She performed
feminist material before A Bic for Her, she says, but dressed
as an ant. “Doing it dressed as a woman would be too
alienating for the audience,” she says. Then she began to
wonder if she was the token ant on the bill, and asked why
everyone wanted her to do ant jokes “when I can do all

“When Kate middleton announced
her pregnancy, i was like — ah!
i wonder if she’ll keep it?”

Katherine Ryan

The sunday Times magazine • 15
14 • Th e su nd ay Ti me s ma ga zi ne Th e su nd ay Ti me s ma ga zi ne • 15
14 •The sunday Times magazine

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