?And next we have some estrogen coming to the stage. Please welcome Maggie Gallant?.
That’s how I was introduced to the stage on Tuesday night. By an MC that I hadn’t met before, in a show with 5 other comics, all male. One of the other comics was black but this wasn’t mentioned in his introduction. Shame we didn’t have a crippled comic or perhaps a midget. It would have been an interesting experiment. Not that I’d experiment on cripples or midgets, because that’s wrong. I just mean it would have been interesting to see how the MC handled it.
Even so, the estrogen line was better than some of the other intros I’ve had over the past year:
?this next comic is pretty funny .. for a woman?
‘I haven’t seen her material but I’ve been staring at her tits all night …?
The less offensive intros seem even worse because they’re so ingrained in the comedy scene. Go to any comedy club in this country, maybe with the exception of NY, and if there’s a woman on the bill you’re very likely to hear a variation of ?are you ready for your first female comic?, ?this next lady comic? (which sounds too much like ladyboy), or the one I dislike the most, ?…next we have a comedienne?.
Try bitching about it and you’re being overly sensitive, probably because you’re having your period. And don’t expect sympathy from the audience. They’ve still got their arms folded wondering if you’re going to be funny.
I don’t need girl power, or femi-darity, I’m just another comic. I don’t even need an epithet like ‘funny’, ‘talented’ or ‘old’. I can prove all that myself. And as ‘just another comic’, I shouldn’t have to follow any ridiculous code of conduct about how I present myself on stage. This is aimed at the Dallas stepford wife who lectured me after a show a few weeks back on how my material was ‘inappropriate for a woman to be talking about’. Well thank goodness for that. The day I appeal to someone like her will be my last day in comedy. She may not have been from Dallas, I made that up. But I bet she was.
And just so you know, my set that night was primarily about the London bombings and irritating parents. That’s two entirely separate subjects. I don’t think the bombings can be blamed entirely on the terrorist’s mothers, although all that nagging can sometimes really get to you. Future parents be warned.
Anyway, I thought of a pretty good comeback, at about 2am the next morning and if I’d had her number I would have called and said ‘well I’m sorry, I’d just run out of period and chocolate gags and this was all I had left.’ Instead I think I thanked her and she probably left feeling happy that she’d provided such valuable guidance. Still that night I wrote a hilarious joke about my pap smear.
My final and perhaps only point is that as much as I might like to introduce some male comics as ?this next prick coming to the stage …? I don?t. I leave it to the audience to figure that out for themselves. Just as most audiences can figure out that I?m a woman. Something to do with the tits and the absence of knob (dick) jokes and dated pot references.