third draft

Archive for the ‘Misc.’ Category

“So why are there so few women performing stand-up?”

In Misc., Politics on October 1, 2011 at 4:42 pm

A few months ago I wrote something on the lack of women on TV comedy panel shows after a long conversation on Twitter with friends in and around the industry. Here’s a persuasive alternative perspective from Bethany Black.

Killer quote: “If any part of comedy is sexist, it’s the audiences.”

Update

In Misc., Theatre on September 2, 2011 at 7:05 pm

A little news:

  • first, stevegreer.org, a website with my name on it, and queer theory reader, a tumblr for day-to-day linkage and cultural politics commentary.
  • The first draft of my book on contemporary British queer performance is now with my editors at Palgrave Macmillan; hopefully, I’ll get to share it with you later next year. I’m also writing a paper on queer publics in video-gaming culture which should appear rather sooner; a book chapter in a collection titled Performance After Identity should also appear in the spring.
  • Though there was no main Penny Dreadfuls show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, Thom, Humphrey and Dave all took strange, beautiful and funny solo shows to the festival. Humphrey, to his annoying credit, won the Best Newcomer comedy prize for Dimmock Watson: Nazi Smasher. Neil worked on Dave and Humphrey’s shows with his usual cunning, and Idil camped out in the Pleasance press office as the venue’s official photographer. I took ten days in the festival to actually see some theatre, something I’ve largely managed to avoid for over ten years.
  • I’m itching to make some kind of theatre & comedy circuit podcast, an impulse I’ve managed to strangle twice before. Time to give it a whirl?

further explanation

In Misc. on March 14, 2011 at 4:53 pm

As a minor follow-up to my earlier post on women in comedy, ITV’s Comedy Juice managed to break the chaperone rule1 by featuring no less than four women to three men (including the host, Keith Lemon). Leaving aside that the panellists were minor celebrities and TV presenters rather than working comedians, I’ll just note that the episode was advertised as a pregnancy-themed edition.

On the one hand, we could call it a piece of savvy marketing that made the most of the fact that Holly Willoughby, Myleene Klass and Emma Bunton were all expecting children. On the other, I might cynically observe that men doing comedy is just comedy – while women doing comedy is a special event that requires further explanation.

  1. The unspoken chaperone rule of British television dictates that women doing comedy on television must be accompanied by an equal or greater number of men. [↩]

Flyerface

In Misc. on August 9, 2010 at 4:07 pm

The rules of FlyerFace are simple: fold/tear existing flyers to make at least one new face out of two old ones. One of the nicest things about this game is that it makes you genuinely pleased to get new flyers which – if you’ve ever sat in a fringe venue – sounds almost impossible. The obligatory tumblr is over here; the hashtag on twitter is #flyerface.

Notes:

1. No Collage. We’ll leave the Modernist Cubism to the Cubist Modernists, thankyouverymuch.
2. Advanced practitioners may request actors / comedians to pose with their own flyers. Good luck.
3. If in doubt, Simon Callow. A tremendous actor, and a headshot that’s hard to beat.