ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will analyse the work of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby and UK comedians Lolly Adefope, Shazia Mirza and Bridget Christie. I will argue that although female comedians are currently enjoying increased access to the Western Anglophone comedy circuit and heightened opportunity for commercial success, they continue to experience pressure to conform to conservative racial and gender stereotypes and have a narrower range of choice than male counterparts. A review of this work demonstrates each comedian has experienced a different career trajectory and negotiated a challenging journey in the quest to hone a distinctive voice and identity. Reference to earlier and more recent work will demonstrate that despite consciously attempting to side-step stereotypical expectations of female comedians being ‘feminist’, ‘angry’ or ‘political’, critical reception has prompted them to alter and adjust onstage personae in order to embrace the energy and potential of the diatribe. They have embraced anger as a positive and generative emotion, observing, after Audre Lorde that ‘every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving process and change’ (Lorde 2017: 27). Rather than discuss the work of female comics in terms of the well-used tropes of self-deprecation and beauty this chapter will attend to changing attitudes within the work and exploit the negative emotion of anger as a forceful tool for change. These artists are repurposing failure by forging comic material out of their experience of marginalisation.
