Sarah joined John Bishop, Mick Ferry and headliner Jason Manford at the well-known venue. Once again she was surrounded by some of Britain’s most talented comics, and once again she didn’t disappoint.
Dressed in a frilly red dress over baggy jeans, she was announced by McIntyre and gave a huge smile as she sauntered on stage. She was her usual self-deprecating self… ‘I had a bit of a new year’s resolution this year,’ she confided in the audience. I decided that I was gonna start watching my weight. My downfall is cakes and puddings. I don’t really drink an awful lot and I was going to say I don’t do drugs, but I did have a space cake once – I just heard the word “cake”. But I just found it really dry… I might not know drugs but I do know cake, and I think a bit of buttercream wouldn’t have gone astray. It’s almost like they hadn’t thought about the cake part at all…’
Sarah instantly had the audience on her side with her chatty and down-to-earth style and they were soon crying with laughter.
‘In a moment of confidence I did recently toy with the idea of getting some thigh-high boots,’ she told them. ‘Fishing for compliments I asked my sister, “Where would I get thigh-high boots that would fit my thighs?” And she said: “Well trannies must get them from somewhere…”’
The difference from her earlier stand-up work was obvious. Millican had started to focus on very different areas of her life, leaving her painful divorce behind. And with people still laughing, she was proving to herself that she was no one-hit wonder. She was in fact a very talented comedian – one that audiences both loved and admired.
The day after the show was aired, Sarah’s mailing list had a huge surge in numbers. And her email went crazy with women asking where she had bought the bright red dress she had worn to perform in.
The roadshow had been very good for her career. Pulling in viewing figures well into the millions, when it comes to building up a fanbase, that kind of showcase is the equivalent to years of touring for a comedian.
John Bishop and Kevin Bridges both saw their careers skyrocket after appearing on the show, and Sarah agreed it was a positive move. ‘It’s a quicker way of doing it than working your way round every comedy club where most people there are already fans,’ she told one journalist. ‘Some people think that comedy on telly kills the live scene but I disagree – I think it feeds into it. A lot of my audience say that my show was their first live comedy experience. People will watch something on TV and then they’ll try and get tickets to see that comic next time they’re in their town.’
Sarah had definitely proved popular with television audiences and she was soon back on our screens – this time with Charlie Brooker, for his new show, You Have Been Watching.
It was right up Sarah’s street – a panel show quiz about what’s on the television. Filmed at London’s Riverside Studios in July 2009, Sarah was asked to watch various programmes before going on the show, where she would be asked to suggest hypothetical improvements on their format and critically assess them. She would also have to answer a series of fun quiz questions about what she had watched.
Sarah is a big fan of watching TV so it was no hardship for her to do this piece of pre-filming homework. Joining her were Frankie Boyle and Reece Shearsmith, who eventually beat Sarah to win the quiz.
After a whirlwind few months, Sarah now had every reason to look forward to Edinburgh, which was by now less than a month away. The promotional poster she had printed for the Fringe reflected her boost in confidence. With sleeves rolled up, Sarah recreated the iconic pose of Rosie The Riveter, the bicep-flexing lass who inspired factory-working women during World War II.
With her newly-highlighted brown locks tucked away under a headscarf, her look of steely resolve concealed the burden of expectation critics felt she must have been carrying after such an impressive debut the year before. It was the perfect look for Sarah – a brassy girl who speaks her mind about everything.
Unlike for her previous show, the poster was littered with reviews: ‘British comedy needs a new female star and might just have got one…’ – The Herald.
‘Wonderfully wrong… Incredibly funny…’ – Metro. ‘Her set is as neatly constructed as her individual, triplepunchline jokes…’ – The Daily Telegraph.
It neatly summed up Sarah’s identity and attracted a lot of Fringe-goers to her show, which once again took place at the Pleasance Courtyard. Tickets went on sale priced at £11.50 and her entire run sold out in a matter of days.
Everyone wanted to see whether the darling of Edinburgh 2008 could prove successful in 2009 – including the army of Fringe reviewers and journalists. One by one they came to experience Sarah’s new show – Typical Woman. And one by one they raved about it. ‘Sarah Millican might be playing the same thimble-sized hut as at last year’s Fringe, but she has come a long way in 12 months,’ wrote The Evening Standard. ‘A panel-show regular who can hold her own in television’s testosterone-fuelled bearpit, this deceptively soft-spoken Geordie excels at being smart, risqué and witty, a marketable package indeed.’
Everyone could see that Sarah had moved on from her post-divorce tales and rocked with laughter at Typical Woman, which covered everything from sex manuals, rape fantasies, the joys of eating cake and why she thought she would make a terrible lesbian.
Even highbrow newspaper The Independent, which was slightly more subdued in its praise, singled her out as a formidable talent: ‘One of the things that I enjoyed most about Sarah Millican’s if.comedy newcomer award-winning show last year was its earthy and bawdy tone as well as the canny pacing of proceedings. Following up a winning show is never easy and while this one reinforces the natural ability of Millican for comedy, it is muted by comparison. Many new to Millican will still walk away impressed by her, recognising that she is up there with the big boys, breaking down the stigma that suggests that women just aren’t funny. One minute feisty, the next almost tender, Millican doesn’t go for the jugular as much as she did last year and it’s down to individual tastes as to whether that is a good ploy.’
As with the year before, Sarah got the audience involved in the act, as each night she attempted to work out whether she was more male than female. Asking the crowd to shout out typical male and female traits, she jotted them all down before ticking off which ones she felt best described her. Whichever she had the most of, would decide if she was more a typical male or typical female.
She proved a worthy opponent for a group of male students when they told her that loving Star Wars was a male trait – her knowledge of the trilogy was formidable. Although she did nearly come undone when she asked: ‘Which one was the one with all the teddies in it again?’
‘Playing in the mud’, was another male response, along with ‘football’ and ‘urinating standing up’. Sarah had them with that one – ‘Ah, but I’ve bought a She-Wee’, she said proudly, talking about a new device that women can use to wee standing up.
A surprising number of men were envious of what they perceived was the female’s blissful bathing ritual, while an entirely predictable number said that if they were female they would spend a lot of time playing with their own breasts.
It was a clever piece of theatre and one that got her more than a few laughs. And as each night was different, each show appeared fresh and off-the-cuff. ‘We are all a bit man and a bit woman,’ she explained to the Scottish Sunday Express. ‘Someone is perhaps really masculine, or really feminine, but we are all the same.’
Another reporter quoted her as saying: ‘You can’t generalise that this is what men do, this is what women do… All of my stuff is based on personal stories to back up my arguments.’
The Evening Standard’s reviewer found the show culturally fascinating, as well as funny, saying: ‘Her new show, Typical Woman, dabs a thin coat of high-concept gloss on comedy’s ubiquitous gender debate template. Millican is the kind of thoroughly modern complex feminist who gets offended when a man admires her breasts but is quietly flattered that he has admired them. She ha
tes being categorised as a “typical woman”, while confessing she cannot nail a mirror onto the wall.’
It went on: ‘Instead she puts a mirror up to her fans’ lives, spinning out saucy stories about her own boyfriend that everyone relates to and reels in the audience with intimate front-row chat. Though the latter might be harder in the future when she is inevitably playing big theatres. If the terrain occasionally feels well-trampled, Millican’s expert gift of the gab lifts it way above the norm.’
Sarah had succeeded in taking a tired comedy concept – the difference between men and women – and reinventing it in her own inimitable way. ‘It’s all very well to be a feminist, but it’s nice to know you’ve got good knockers,’ she quipped, before talking about the time she was flattered to be mistaken for a prostitute. ‘I recently walked past a prostitute and she gave me a look that said, “Get off my patch…” I was thrilled. She thought I could sell this,’ she said excitedly, pointing to herself.
She went a step beyond comfortable when she revealed that she and her boyfriend had ‘indulged’ in a little rape role-play – ‘I genuinely don’t think he expected me to be armed…’ And it was all delivered in a sweet voice that one reviewer described as ‘a Geordie Minnie Mouse’.
Critic Brian Logan wrote in The Guardian: ‘The difference between men and women is the hoariest subject in comedy. But it’s not what Sarah Millican‘s show is about. Oh no. Millican’s Typical Woman, which consolidates the success she had last year as the winner of an if.comedy best newcomer award, contends that those differences are overstated, and we’re all a mix of male and female characteristics. A nice theory – which in practice legitimates lots of jokes about the, er, different characteristics peculiar to men and women…’
The sold-out show was an instant success. Each night, a diverse audience left the Pleasance hut and walked away still laughing from her one-hour routine. One woman even came up to Millican after the show and told her she’d had chest pains during the show because she had laughed so much.
Sarah was pleased to see a lot of men in the crowd too. ‘No comic likes a single sex audience,’ she told one festival reporter. ‘You want a mix of ages and backgrounds, couples and groups. Still, I love it when I see tables of blokes howling at my stuff, because I often think “you never thought you’d laugh tonight”.’
But after a solid week of successful performances, she was still cautious. ‘Everything is going okay,’ she told the Scottish Sunday Express. ‘If you’re not prepared now, you never will be. It’s a bit like with an exam and it’s the last moment of revision. You know that way, how the night before you think you’re ready so you go off and put the telly on. My hope really is that the audience goes away having had a brilliant hour, that’s the main thing. Sell-out shows, good reviews and nominations for awards are good – as are the plaudits placed on you by other people – but the main thing is just to try to make the audience laugh. It’s not about changing the world.’
Reviewers confidently predicted her chances at the Fringe Awards, and when her run ended they were proved right. It wasn’t a major accolade like the year before, but Sarah was given the recognition she deserved when she placed third in the annual funniest joke competition.
Gagster Dan Antopolski walked away with the £1,000 first place prize, leading the 27-joke shortlist picked by nine comedy critics for TV channel Dave. Taken from his Silent But Deadly show, his quip was: ‘Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?’
Paddy Lennox came second, with: ‘I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought, “This could be interesting”.
Sarah’s third place spot was given for her boob joke: ‘I had my boobs measured and bought a new bra. Now I call them Jennifer Warnes and Joe Cocker because they’re up where they belong.’
It had been a long run – one that had been ultimately successful for the South Shields lass. Through hard work, hours of revision and practice and a lot of determination, Sarah had once more conquered the Fringe. But when the main awards were announced, Sarah wasn’t on the list. Neither were any other female comedians – it was an entirely male shortlist. Was sexism rearing its ugly head?
The Guardian asked Sarah to give her opinion on the matter, and her response was suitably scathing. ‘Upon hearing about the six nominees for best comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and the five for best newcomer, the thought never crossed my mind. The following thoughts did: “Ah, brilliant, Kevin Bridges is there”. And: “Bugger, I’m not – I’m going to buy myself a ‘not on the shortlist’ top”. That’s how it works.
‘Of course, one of the questions implied is whether women are funny, and I can’t be bothered to answer that again. It’s a question I get so bored of and refuse to fuel the fire of a debate that shouldn’t – and mostly doesn’t – exist.’
She went on to say that she was confident that the reason she wasn’t selected was nothing to do with her gender. Nor was it because her show wasn’t good – the glowing reviews she had received were testament to her popularity.
‘It’s that it wasn’t what the judges were looking for this year,’ she said. ‘Last year, when I was nominated alongside Pippa Evans and Mike Wozniak for the best newcomer award, no one wondered why there was only one man. Is it that men just aren’t very good at writing their first show? No, it’s because the shows that Pippa, Mike and I wrote were popular among a group of people who happened to be judges.’
If she had ever thought she had made it onto a shortlist because of some kind of box-ticking tokenism, Sarah would be outraged. ‘I would have wanted to be removed from the list,’ she explained, before adding: ‘The other question is whether it’s harder for women. No, it’s not. It’s hard for all of us. And we all (nominees included) are tired and want to go home now, please.’ But history has a long record of sexism in comedy. Did The Guardian have a point?
CHAPTER 12
Women in Comedy
‘I am not female: I am a comedian. I want to be judged alongside other comedians on merit, not on gender.’
Let’s fast forward for a moment. In December of 2011, sales of Sarah’s debut DVD Chatterbox passed the 150,000 mark. It was an astonishing achievement, making her not only the highest selling female comedienne since French and Saunders, but the biggest female British comic of all time. It was an appropriate milestone and many in the media said it was the beginning of a new era – one in which women were seen as real rivals to men in the industry, rather than merely support acts, which many had accused them of being up until that point.
Much was made of how not just the changing world around her had brought about this situation, but also about how Sarah’s comedy itself was responsible for what she had achieved.
By employing her lewd and bawdy style, with its assaults on expectations of decency and some would say ‘masculine’ content, she was taking on the male comedians at their own game. People who said women were not capable of being as funny as men, suddenly had to rethink what they had believed for years. Here was a woman who was matching men, gag for gag. Was it that women weren’t as funny? Or was it the material they had traditionally used?
But, in many ways, what Sarah was doing was picking up a comic tradition that had been around for generations. Only, it was a tradition that had been lying dormant for nearly a century.
Not long before he died, the revered left-wing writer and critic Christopher Hitchens famously said of female comedians: ‘It’s a tragedy that the two things men prize most – women and humour – should be so antithetical.’
It wasn’t a new point of view. It was one that had been said repeatedly in the previous century. It was hardly surprising. In the late 20th and early 21st century, the vast majority of the comedians that received critical or popular success were men. There had to be a reason why.
Even as recently as 2009, such esteemed feminists as Germaine Greer have stated on record that they believe women are not
as funny as men, despite being equally intelligent. She put it down to sex, in that, men end up being more effective at comedy so that they can have more sex. Women don’t need to be so funny as they don’t need to try so hard.
Greer said in The Guardian in 2009: ‘Can it be that women are programmed to laugh at men’s jokes, as they are not to the jokes of their sisters? Comedian Arthur Smith once said, “Women don’t get shags after gigs. Men do.” This may be more revealing than Smith knows. Women comedians are probably not looking for shags in any case; if they were, they probably couldn’t say so.’
But the accusation that women can never be as funny as men goes back a long way. And the explanations for it are many and varied.
As early as the turn of the 20th century, philosophers and psychoanalysts had written off women as being incapable of creating anything new or anything that might interest people. Sigmund Freud, in a 1925 paper on the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes claimed that, ‘Women oppose change, receive passively and add nothing of their own.’
In saying this he was developing his theory of male envy by saying that because women had started out wanting to be men but were never able to be so, they became so insecure that they ended up being afraid to contribute in case it made them hysterical. He believed that women who tried to act like men ended up suffering from hysteria – the result of trying to be what they were unable to be. He claimed several of his case studies showed women who demonstrated male tendencies like fantasising about sex, ended up suffering from hysteria. Hysteria often resulted in women being sent to asylums. As a result, women who were being sensible, avoided adding something ‘of their own, and acted ‘passively.’
He was writing at a time when the role of women was more defined than it had ever been in history. During the Victorian era and into the 20th century, the world of work had fractured so that men were increasingly required to do the manual or intellectually challenging jobs, which tended to pay much more, whereas women ended up doing more menial work like dress making or domestic service. Women were expected to know their place in case they thought they should be doing the sort of work that would allow them to earn as much as a man.
Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy Page 11