124 Women in Comedy
Anna Greenwood
On the 22nd of February of this past semester I attended a show at Plymouth State featuring the comedic stylings of one Kelli Dunham; a genderqueer comic who spent the majority of her set relaying her zany experiences of traveling around America’s south performing shows and attempting to interact with the locals. As a bit of a side-note: Kelli never disclosed the pronouns she preferred during her performance but after a bit of investigating I found out that she uses she/her/hers pronouns on her website so we’re going to go with that.
The show-stopping punchline of the night came when Kelli weaved a narrative around how she swindled her way into a major conservative convention (the specific platform of said convention escapes my mind) where she saw Sarah Palin speak live for the first time. As she began describing what it was like to see Sarah Palin in the flesh, the audience got the idea that she was about to deliver some carefully calculated insults. I remember her saying, “You know I never really realized it, but Sarah Palin is just so…” and then she paused and looked directly at her audience and yelled “HOT! WHY IS SHE SO HOT?!”
I was in stitches. The audience was cackling save for a few older couples whose horror-struck faces suggested that they had likely ventured into the show not understanding what was on the comedic menu for the night. The entire show was hilarious.
In a later portion of her set, Kelli chose to share with us a story that was more sad than funny that had to do with performing comedy at college campuses. A few years back, she went to perform a show at URI when a gaggle of around fifty blonde-haired girls in matching pink shirts shuffled into the auditorium and sat down to watch her show. Kelli said that she realized about fifteen minutes into her set that these were sorority pledges who were being forced to attend her comedy show as a portion of their hazing. She said one of the girls approached her after the show and attempted to compliment her by saying “You were actually surprisingly funny!” Although she was smiling and upbeat, she spoke of the incident with bitterness and had no issue dragging URI in the process. She then made references to how when she visits colleges, the only types of students that typically attend her shows are a) members of the LGBT community or b) women’s studies majors. She made a crack and how those two social groups also tend to have a lot of overlap.
Kelli’s heartbreaking sorority anecdote and her comment about audience attendance started to get me thinking about why it’s so difficult for women (including genderqueer women) to break into the comedy scene. There’s no world in which girls would be forced to attend a male comedy show as a form of hazing. And why do female and genderqueer comics only garner attendance from their respective “groups”? As I left the show, one of my friends made the remark that “The show was funny, but my boyfriend never would have g