The Online Comedy Landscape Hates Women
In the last few years, stand-up comedy is the only live art form that has had to make a significant pivot online to survive, that it’s now in turn affecting the artform. Comedians posting sketches, teaser clips and crowd work videos has become a depressing inevitability that’s at least tripling the work performers need to do to cultivate audiences, with the hope it translates to ticket sales, and get people back out to live shows.
To work as a comedian in this country it’s almost a pre-requisite to have an established online following, or be prepared to build one, leaving those who don’t have time to shoot, edit, caption videos and wrangle the algorithm, or those whose comedy doesn’t doesn’t translate to remain in obscurity.
Being an online “content creator” is a skill set, much like a street magician who picks your card out of a deck while stealing your watch is also a skill set, except I respect the latter. For reasons I will never fully understand, the main thing people seem to be churning out online is character-based sketches —ostensibly 80’s and 90’s impression comedians in a different font — about *relatable* situations people can connect with in some way or another.
A lot of them for the vast majority are centred around women. You don’t have to scroll for long until you hit a middling comedian or actor donning a bad wig, a tea towel if they can’t be bothered to buy a wig, or simply taking on a cunty stance mimicking a woman in a position of power or authority that they don’t respect.
The characters are always the same — a hardworking mother asking you to do the bare minimum or telling you something about her day, a teacher trying to wrangle a classroom or actually attempting to do her job, an exhausted retail employee with an attitude, or just female characters that dare to have a different opinion than the person portraying them — it’s punching down at its finest.
Don’t get me wrong, some of these are funny. For example, Mel Buttle’s “Lyn” is a nuanced, well-written mother character that she has said herself is done with a genuine love and care for women of that age bracket. In a few short minutes, she easily builds a world in which you are transported into a suburban home that is shrouded in genuine Australian nostalgia. She manages to hold her Lyn character in esteem, while packing the clips with good quality jokes that are a genuine joy to watch.
The same cannot be said for the vast majority of online “character comedian’s” who inexplicably have a large excess of time to shoot, edit, caption and post multiple scenes of their rotating female character-of-the-week, seemingly always shot in modern houses with stunning natural light (read: almost always white creators who come from wealth and/or live with their parents rent free as they save for a deposit on a house).
If you’ve ever dared engage me in a conversation about comedic acting, you will know that my biggest pet peeve is when people play for the laughs. It sounds like an oxymoron, sure, but the façade of a character, or the comedy of a scene is lost when an actor knows what they’re doing is meant to be funny. So often do I see people try to wring something funny out of every single moment in a scene, making choices that are far too large, hamming it up until they inevitably become a caricature of this once supposedly hilarious character.
I will scream this until I’m blue in the face, but good comedic acting comes from earnestness. Of course there is an actor behind the wheel, but the character doesn’t know what they’re doing is funny, and that’s what makes it funny.
A classic example that even the most basic of people can understand would be Michael Scott from The Office. Michael possesses an almost stubborn, complete unawareness of others, where he is steadfast in his position of “This is what makes an effective leader, manager and friend and I don’t understand why people are getting upset!” and that’s what’s funny about it. Steve Carrell makes small, clever choices, at the right time, that are rooted in sincerity which is what makes it a compelling performance.
All of this blabbering about acting of all things is to say, that this care for characters, and the execution of good comedy is nowhere to be seen in the majority of drivel that is clogging up our feeds. It would be easy for these kind of creators to claim that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” or the far less likely considering it all wreaks of going-with-the-first-idea-they-thought-of that it was a work of bouffon, except for the fact it’s sorely lacking in any kind of interest, admiration, genuine critique, or exploration of the reoccurring themes of the characters they’re portraying.
It would be far less offensive if there was some care taken to portray these female characters in a more complex way, with some form of reverence, baseline respect, or if they employed an ounce of genuine creativity instead of vomiting out the exact same content as 75 other creators. These “comedians” aren’t even cleverly punching down (since apparently they must), so their content is consistently bereft of substance, or any deeper meaning outside of “Does anybody else’s [blank] do [blank]!?!”
These female-based character sketches are boring, lazy microaggressions based on the mild annoyances of the women who bother to care for the people who create them. It continues to amplify the underappreciation of the extensive physical and emotional labour women of all ages and roles put in to satiate and soothe those around them.
As if mothers, teachers, essential workers and women in general weren’t faced with enough adversity with the general lack of care and consideration of their needs and feelings, the constant threat of violence for merely existing, the creeping descent back into conservatism, and the continued push to take away their rights. The thanks these women get is once again becoming the butt of a joke for the roles and responsibilities they cared to take on, as if they were dropped straight into a live-taping of a 90’s sitcom.
It’s not entirely the fault of online creators as there is unfortunately an audience for it — somebody is watching, engaging and sharing these videos and pushing the supposed need for this kind of content. It’s well known, researched, documented and then later ignored that the rise in short form content has greatly contributed to the shortening of attention spans, and the decline in critical thinking. A generation-wide, mass-smoothing of brains that makes people smash like and share buttons in quick succession on bright, eccentric videos that are quickly identifiable, much like a monkey banging on the window of their enclosure, demanding a child make a funny face at them again.
It would be easy to solely blame content creators for this cultural shift in consumption because of the dogshit content they put out because they’re inherently not funny — it would honestly give me no greater pleasure because it is and they aren’t, and there’s a difference in being able to pinpoint and regurgitate what’s funny and truly being funny — but I’m not so naïve to realise there are other contributing factors.
It’s obviously far cheaper to bed rot on your phone for the night than it is to buy a ticket to anything. There is an ease of access when you can watch what you want when you want, when you have a personalised algorithm hand selecting the exact thing it knows you’ll like. Pair that with the ever present feeling of malaise and fatigue from just being alive right now, why would you leave your house or go out of your way when you really don’t have to?
As a consumer and lover of art who hates putting clothes on, I of all people get it, but as a comedian and lover of performing I equally fucking hate it. It’s become so unbelievably tiring to watch people create from a place of bare minimum care and effort be rewarded on the basis that the alleged consensus is “If it’s working don’t change it” — especially when comedy has changed exponentially in the last 5 years alone. The idea we have to be bogged down in an element that is currently working is not only confusing, it also opens up the possibility of creating rigid performers who could find themselves being left behind come the next shift.
The solution is simple in theory but wildly annoying in practice — give more of a shit about what you consume. Rich coming from a woman who just watched 12 seasons on Below Deck in the span of a month, but I would like to think it was from a place of giving myself a break from constantly challenging myself to watch complex topics. Not that the trials and tribulations of hot boat freaks within the service industry in the Caribbean isn’t technically a study of the human condition in and of itself.
If you’re desperate for better TV and film, especially in this country, it’s worth asking yourself if what you’re watching is punching up, or if it’s punching down? Is it warranted, and would those depicted appreciate it? Does the person behind it seem like they give half a shit about what they’re putting out there, or is it just a means to an end? Will this TikTok cause Bridget to write another essay, or will it contribute to her finally knowing peace?