Stand up comedy’s problem with women: ‘Strip clubs are more welcoming’

“Where’s all your f—ing women?” That was the question Taskmaster star Lucy Beaumont posed last week to Hot Water, one of UK’s most popular comedy clubs, in a now-deleted post on X/Twitter. Not the most tactful way of phrasing it, but still a question worth asking: why do men outnumber women so dramatically on club line-ups?

“Basically you can search every city for comedy this month I reckon about 90 percent have either no women or woman on the bill,” Beaumont wrote. “Some have one woman a month!!” Certain venues, she said, were essentially just “male clubs that tolerate women”.

After her post went viral, comedy industry site Chortle ran the numbers on a dozen clubs around the country, to produce a table naming and shaming those with the largest apparent gender gap. Their report suggested some clubs booked around six times as many men as women for weekend shows – which generally involve larger crowds, and larger paychecks for the performers.

There is an obvious gulf between men and women at the very top of the industry, even if precise figures can be hard to gauge. Billboard magazine’s ranking of 2023’s most profitable comedy tours worldwide featured just one woman, Taylor Tomlinson, in the top 10. (But the curious absence of Ricky Gervais’s Armageddon – which reportedly made over £26 million, which should have easily put it in the top 10, doubt on Billboard’s methodology.)

But what Chortle’s data shows is that the gender-gap is almost as stark at the grassroots level. London’s Comedy Carnival had the largest reported gap (with 87 per cent of their acts being men), but told The Telegraph that Chortle’s numbers were “based on a limited snapshot” that “may not fully represent our overall booking practices”; their own estimate for the past 12 months of shows put the figure at a still-significant 79 per cent.

Hot Water came second on Chortle’s table, but pointed out that “roughly 85-90 per cent of comedians applying for spots are male, compared to 10-15 per cent female”. The Liverpool club said: “The current ratio of male to female comedians on the circuit means that evenly mixed lineups each week can be difficult to achieve without compromising the overall quality of the show.”

It was a response that didn’t go down well with Maddy Bye, producer at Impatient, the comedy production company behind touring shows from the likes of Mark Watson and Britain’s Got Talent winner Viggo Venn. “It doesn’t make sense to me to say there aren’t enough good women in comedy,” she tells me. “To me, it is the booker’s or the producer’s job to put more research in and find talent.”

As a producer, event booker and host, and one half of the sketch duo Siblings, Bye has often come across sexism in the comedy world: “I’ve had loads of people say directly to my face ‘I’m not a huge fan of female comedians’. If someone says ‘I’m not a huge fan of Michael McIntyre’ they wouldn’t say ‘I’m not a huge fan of men.’”.

“Are women funny?” is a question that ought to have been left behind in the last century, at around the same time as “Can women drive?” and “Do women deserve the vote?”. There’s no point shouting that the answer is obviously yes, or naming examples with such wildly different styles of humour as Dorothy Parker, Linda Smith, Victoria Wood, Joan Rivers: a few dinosaurs simply won’t be swayed.

The problem, says Bye, is that when women are in the minority on bills, “female comedians are seen as a genre”, lumped together rather than treated as individuals. She believes promoters should make a concerted effort to book a larger proportion of female acts. But fellow comic Siân Docksey, co-host of one of the UK’s top alternative comedy club nights, ACMS, thinks telling promoters who they must book is counter-productive. “There has to be an allowance for taste,” says Docksey. Enforced quotas are not the way forward: “Booking and hosting a show can’t be on rigid terms – promoters should be able to choose, and not have to over-explain themselves… What they should do is best serve their audience by booking acts that they love – and you’d hope some of those acts would be women.”

Docksey and Bye both agree that the clubs highlighted in Chortle’s report aren’t an accurate snapshot of the UK scene overall. “I don’t think it’s representative of the entire comedy industry – otherwise I wouldn’t be in it,” says Bye. Are other clubs faring better?

I happen to live within walking distance of a comedy venue – South-East London’s Poodle Club, “Britain’s only dog-friendly comedy club” (as they say in showbiz, you gotta get a gimmick). It features mixed-bill nights with a range of new and established acts. For the next six weekends, the club currently lists 47 performances, with more acts yet to be announced – and a quick tally shows women outnumbering men by two to one on their line-up. It’s an exception to the rule, but a salutary reminder that some small clubs buck the trend.

Nonetheless, there are more men than women in the UK comedy scene, and if that gender gap seems especially pronounced in the club circuit, there are complex reasons for that. Docksey has some sympathy for the argument that club bookers are struggling to find acts. “Being a club comic is a highly specialised skill within comedy,” says Docksey, pointing out that there are many successful comedians who don’t thrive in the context of 10-minute spots in mainstream clubs – such as comedians who prefer to write hour-long narrative shows (Liz Kingsman, for instance, whose One Woman Show became a West End hit).

“There is a shrinking pool of jobbing club comics who are working those weekends,” says Docksey. This is due to economic factors that go far beyond the stand-up world. “How many of the greater structural inequalities in the world can we change by asking ‘Who can we book for a middle 10 in Luton’?” she says, with a dark laugh. “We’re in a cost of living crisis, and women are more likely to be subject to gender paygaps and childcare costs. Comedians’ fees have not really risen in the last 10-15 years. People are being priced out of it, and a lot of those people are women.”

One comedian who has spoken candidly about being priced out is Alice Fraser, ranked as one of The Telegraph’s 50 Funniest Comedians of the 21st Century. “I just can’t make the numbers work out now… I have to pay for babysitting now, apart from other things,” she says in her latest stand-up special, Twist. Reflecting on how having a baby has affected her career, she said: “I stopped taking the gigs that are not worth my time… and what that means is that I have accidentally quit.”

The club circuit simply isn’t set up for parents – particularly single parents – and when the cost of childcare (in terms of both money and time) still falls largely on women, it will force brilliant female performers off the circuit.

Even for those without children, when comedy club gigs involve long journeys, late at night, just to perform for 10 minutes for a paltry fee, questions of economics soon become questions of safety for female comedians.

It’s an issue Fraser makes painfully clear in Twist, finding dark humour in awful experiences from her time as a touring comic. “I’ve done the gig where you drive for eight hours and it’s ‘free accommodation’ that turns out to be bunk-beds with the other three acts, all of whom are men in their fifties, one of whom has a felony conviction,” she says onstage. “I’ve done the gig where it’s three hours train-ride and you get there, it’s £150, but the last train leaves because the gig runs long and you have to decide whether to spend your money on a taxi or accommodation – or you keep your money and take your chances [on staying over] with a producer who calls himself ‘sleazy Dave.’”

And there are clearly plenty of “sleazy Daves” out there, with some female comedians using a WhatsApp “blacklist” to warn each other about dangerous men. Lucy Beaumont, whose comments started the past week’s controversy, has said that “predatory male behaviour” has held back her career. “If you’re in any other workforce you would go to HR, but [in comedy] there isn’t one. I think it’s just everywhere and it’s not talked about enough,” she told the Comedian’s Comedian podcast last year. “It upsets me when I hear about young female comics having the same experiences. I thought for a while it was the same five or six people – and now it’s not – I could name you 10 or 15 because of course people talk.” I’ve also heard one comedian with experience of both fields say that “a strip club is sometimes a less toxic workplace environment for women than a comedy club”.

There have been some efforts to make the industry safer for women. After the comedian Eurydice Dixon was murdered walking home from a gig at night, in 2018 Angela Barnes founded the Home Safe Collective – an initiative raising money for her fellow comics’ taxi fares. But overall, it’s hard to argue with Fraser’s conclusion that “This is an industry that is built for the man who is willing to sleep in the bus stop till the nightbus comes.”

Sian Docksey has done her time on the club circuit, but prefers performing solo hours, which give scope for more experimentation, and ambitious ideas: she spends most of her latest show pole-dancing in outlandish costumes.

“I felt a bit weary because when there’s doom and gloom about being a working female comedian, that eclipses how much fun it is,” she says. She’s optimistic: in more than a decade on the comedy scene, she’s seen more and more female comedians rising to the top. “In the time I’ve been going, things have improved so much.”

Still, if some clubs are lagging behind, Docksey would like to remind them that “booking women is a good business decision”: ignoring half the population doesn’t just limit the pool of acts, it also limits your audience. There’s a stereotype that female comedians only talk about “women’s issues” – which is only true to the same extent that male comedians only talk about “men’s issues”. But it’s undeniable that audiences are drawn to work they see as relatable –  and if you relate strongly to even just one performer on a bill, that can be enough to draw you back. Female punters who sit through an all-male line-up at a club might not return there – and the opposite is also true, as Docksey points out.

“After a show, girls will come up and talk to me because I’m talking about stuff that is in our lives – and they then bring their friends back to the club.” As an example, Docksey mentions that after her sister saw a funny routine about contraception by Irish stand-up Alison Spittle, “she literally brought all her friends to Alison’s next show. Alison Spittle is now my little sister’s favourite comedian – which is a little heartbreaking, because I’m a comedian.”