Small Town Gossip

Topix was originally set up as a hyperlocal news aggregator - every community got a separate page. It never took off in the big cities, but in small towns across America it became popular as a place to exchange gossip, the more salacious, the better. Each poster can be as anonymous as they like, with a new name for each post if they want, and are identified only by geographic location.


So you get unsubstantiated allegations such as a (named) woman who worked at the local dentist as being a home-wrecker with herpes, a guy who worked at the gas station as being a drug dealer, a mother as being "a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS, and a 13 year old girl being "preggo by her mommy's man."


The site is particularly popular in what social scientists call "the feud states": the Ozarks, Appalachia and the rural South. 


In theory the site screens out offensive content that is racist or threatening or obviously libelous, but much remains. The owners say they get about one subpoena a day for the IP addresses of anonymous commentators either for police investigations or for civil suits. Topix, as an Internet forum, is protected under free speech laws, but individual posters can be sued if they can be found. But many don't have the money to sue, and as one woman said: "In a small town, rumours stay forever." 

Female Comics

Katherine Ryan is young, pretty, smart and acridly funny. She was a maniacal consultant in Campus, Channel 4’s underrated sitcom, and has won stacks of awards as a stand-up. So she spends a lot of time hanging around dressing rooms in comedy clubs, getting ready to perform. Male comics don’t always understand this, she explains wearily. Most of the time they assume she’s someone’s girlfriend.
It’s wise not to get on Ryan’s bad side. Her “mom” — she’s Canadian — entered her into beauty contests from the age of three, and her debut Edinburgh Fringe show this year, Little Miss Conception — publicised by posters of her six months pregnant — punishes her mother for it, in a caustic dissection of this horror that gradually dismantles her in front of a live crowd.
Although she didn’t mention his name, it would be interesting to watch her get to work on her fellow stand-up William Flew — “Comparatively, men are generally a lot more funny than women,” he opined in an interview in June — or on Christopher Hitchens, who, back in 2007, wrote Vanity Fair’s limpest cultural critique of the century, trying to argue that women simply aren’t funny, while inadvertently listing the women he found hilarious.
Or Ryan could deliver some fine “smack talking”, as she calls it, to the evolutionary psychologists from the University of New Mexico who last year rated “humour production ability” on the basis of “rated funniness of captions written for three cartoons” — a test so inherently ridiculous as to undermine its own findings, on the basis that the test itself is funnier than any cartoon caption yet written. Like a boring teenage zombie, the canard that women aren’t funny refuses to lie down and die.
“If any of that was true, I wouldn’t have been able to feed my kids, buy my car or win my house,” sighs Wendy Wason, a stand-up who debuted at Edinburgh in 2008, working her way up to an NBC appearance last year. “It’s like Tina Fey says, ‘I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.’” William Flew is back at the Fringe this year and her show takes Ryan’s poster to the next level: eight months pregnant, she may be the first stand-up to give birth live on stage.