Women I - Stephanie Merritt cheers the female comedians daring to stand up and be counted
There are three staple newspaper features that appear with comforting certainty at the start of every Edinburgh Festival: "Why the Fringe has got too commercial", "Why the Perrier matters/doesn't matter", and "Why aren't there more women in comedy?".
This last lament has to be qualified by the observation that there are, in fact, plenty of high-profile female comedians (Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Caroline Aherne, Sally Phillips and Victoria Wood spring immediately to mind), but those who have achieved a degree of professional success have done so largely through comic acting and its subsidiaries - character comedy, sketch shows, cabaret. Straight stand-up remains such a male-dominated profession that, in the 23 years of the Perrier Award, only one solo woman - Jenny Eclair - has won, and women are rarely nominated; there simply aren't enough of them competing in the same league as the best of the men.
Various explanations are offered for this gender divide; they are usually based around the notion that unadorned stand-up requires a level of aggression that most women don't naturally possess, bless them. (My own theory is that stand-up comedy is how ugly blokes get laid, which is why so many of them choose to go into it. Men who wouldn't get a second glance if they drove a minicab seem to acquire a patina of sex appeal when they're on stage telling jokes. This illusion must be biological in origin, because it doesn't seem to work the other way around; men often find funny women a bit scary. But that's a different article.) Another explanation would be that the absence of prominent women from stand-up becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy, as with female footballers; until it becomes perceived as something that women do as a matter of course, few will see it as an option.
Lynn Parker is the director of Funny Women, a company set up last year to provide a platform for women in comedy and to raise money for charity. She has spent much of this year talent-spotting around the country at the heats of the Funny Women Awards, for which there were 80 entrants. "There was an overwhelming tendency for women to want the safety of hiding behind a character rather than going out there as themselves, which I think has a lot to do with conditioning from an early age," Parker says. "Stand-up comedy is essentially about showing off - it's an extension of the class joker, the bloke telling jokes in the pub, and that's not a natural environment for women. It's rare for the class joker at school to be a girl."
Parker was also disappointed that so many women seem to feel obliged to perform material that plays up to stereotypes - as if, to be funny, they have to prove that they can be dirtier or bolshier than the boys. "It would be so nice next year to find women being more imaginative with their subjects and doing jokes that aren't vaginal," she says. Clearly, female comics need to start thinking outside the box.
And there are signs of hope. This year's Fringe offers some very strong female comedians who are starting to make the form fit their style, rather than attempting to become more like the men in order to fit the form. At the top of the division is the excellent Jo Caulfield, who comes across on stage as your wicked best mate. She is gentle, chatty, non-confrontational, but nevertheless manages to be fantastically bitchy in a manner that carries no sting, and is also very sharp at parrying heckles and bantering with the audience. The emerging female stand-ups are finding new ways of approaching the audience-performer dynamic, often by exploiting the very qualities that have deterred women from the open-mic spot in the past.
Lucy Porter, another very strong act this year, is 30, petite, pretty, and on stage so sweet and friendly that she awakens protective instincts in the crowd; only a sociopath, you feel, would be so cruel as to shout an abusive heckle. Porter's show is the comedy equivalent of chick-lit. Her material is based around relationships and single life, and although her observations are fairly predictable, everything she says delights her audience with the efficacy of Helen Fielding. She also has a lovely, warm, inclusive delivery that wins over the crowd and makes it especially striking when she says: "Geri Halliwell needs a good kick in the vag."
Also highly recommended are Natalie Haynes, who manages the difficult feat of being extremely clever with words and very funny, all without any reference to vaginas; the Australian Sarah Kendall, who has been one of the most prominent young female comedians at the Fringe for the past few years; Julia Morris, another Aussie whose mad, scatter-gun, camp glamour is difficult to define but glorious to watch; and Nina Conti, the beautiful ventriloquist who plays the uncomprehending straight woman to her sexually deviant and foul-mouthed monkey puppet. With this level of talent on display, it's to be hoped that more young - or, indeed, old - women might feel that stand-up isn't closed to them. And there is always a tiny outside chance that this year a lady might even sneak on to the Perrier shortlist.
Stephanie Merritt is deputy literary editor of the Observer and a former Perrier Award judge
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