I’ve researched women’s experience of the UK comedy circuit for ten years – this is what I’ve learned.
Over the last ten years I have been researching the barriers to women’s participation in the UK comedy circuit. During that time, it became clear to me that the live comedy industry has a particular susceptibility to fostering spaces of abuse.
Comedy as an industry, both in its live and media forms, continues to be male dominated and so these power imbalances are gendered. Women and non-binary comedians encounter sexually abusive behaviour and misogyny on the circuit with startling regularity. Working in isolation makes women more vulnerable to exploitation and prevents them from sharing experiences. This makes it harder to identify and address problems. The lower status of women entering the industry , the fact they would almost always be the only woman amid a male lineup, and the late-night context of their work, builds in opportunities for mistreatment and abuse.
This was evident in Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcast, where former colleagues of Brand described how he regularly took meetings in his underwear – or naked – and this was just chalked up to “Russell being Russell”, aka his cheeky comic self.
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