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.