screenshot: what miranda did
The year was 2011. Kristen Wiig, of Saturday Night Live fame, and director Paul Feig were about to join forces to pen the newest chapter in the history of the chick-lit genre: a polished comedy with a female-centric cast which would go on to garner a whopping 46 nominations and win the People’s Choice Award for best comedy film. If 2012 was the year we acknowledged activated almonds, 2011 was the year Hollywood critics and movie-goers acknowledged that women can be funny.
Armed with fairly repulsive vomit gags, an impressive cast and the collaborative dynamism of director Paul Feig and producer Judd Apatow, Bridesmaids was a box office hit, after being the subject of second-guessing over whether funny women could ever hope to make it on the big screen. After an influx of bromance comedies (The Hangover and its sequels, Wedding Crashers and Superbad, as well as the better late than never coming-of-age tale Knocked Up) positioned women at the sidelines, Bridesmaids evened the score and placed women at the storyline’s centre. A widely-lauded comedy written by women, about women, is a breakthrough, but for many it was enough that Wiig and her pals were actually funny. Because imagine that –a film where women have a sense of humour. Just what will Hollywood think of next?
Yet women have been challenging the grossly inaccurate, but widely held, assumption that anyone with a vagina can’t have a funny bone for years. From Carol Burnett in her critically acclaimed self-titled series The Carol Burnett Show, spanning twelve seasons and 287 episodes, to the comparatively recent BBC offering The Catherine Tate Show, starring famed British comedian (and Doctor Who favourite) Catherine Tate. But Bridesmaids, a film where the phrase “chick flicks don’t have to suck” was heralded as the new mantra to sweep the ageing genre off its feet, didn’t invent the idea that funny women have a place onscreen. It was first pioneered by Gracie Allen in the 1930s before being reinvented by Tina Fey, Ellen Degeneres and their ilk in the 1990s, with Ellen and Saturday Night Live skits showcasing the diversity of female characters – and comedians, an idea met with notably more success on television than the big screen.
But women still have a comparatively low presence on screen — a trend that’s even more pronounced if she’s ethnically diverse or larger than a size 6 or 8. Comedy, and the world of stand-up in particular, has long been seen as the last bastion of the boy’s club – and not without reason. In 2012 only two solo female comedians out of 54 nominations were shortlisted for Britain’s Chortle comedy awards, with the BBC admitting there is still some way to go to ensure a greater number of female comics make it on television.
We need only to look to the Brits to see how it’s done. Case in point: Miranda Hart. Hailing from Torquay on Britain’s South West coast, Hart rose to comic glory after winning several nominations in the the British Comedy Awards for her efforts on the sci-fi television show Hyperdrive in 2006, yet it wasn’t until 2009 when the first season of her self-titled show Miranda aired on BBC2 that the 41-year-old really emerged into public consciousness. Written and starring Hart herself, the show follows the daily life of Miranda, a socially-awkward 6 foot 1 inch tall 30-something as she navigates every day dilemmas while being a constant disappointment to her mother.
Sure, the light-hearted slap stick premise might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a formula that works. The opening episode of Miranda‘s third season saw 11.5 million people tune in, making it one of the most watched shows in the UK during the Christmas period. In December 2011 Hart won Best TV Comedy Actress at the 22nd British Comedy Awards and, more recently, she was nominated for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme at the 2013 British Academy Television Awards, and this year she’s headlining the Glasgow Comedy Festival.
How, amongst a sea of naysayers, has Miranda met with such success? Where Joan Rivers once said ‘nowadays, you can’t even get on open mike with less than a C cup,’ and the likes of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler proving you can bring funny back to the Golden Globes, but only armed to the teeth in Carolina Herrera and Stella McCartney, Hart has come under criticism for daring to draw attention to her plain looks.
In her September 2012 article, The Guardian‘s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett asks, in response to Hart’s poking fun at her own appearance, ‘What’s wrong with having brushed hair, clean knickers, a great sex life and an exceptional grasp of mental arithmetic?’ To which the answer is, absolutely nothing. But it begs my question that Cosslett never really got the other side of the spectrum, because we so rarely see anything even approaching an alternative. Is it so bad that Hart relishes in the freedom of being plain, making little effort to conform to a showbiz ideal?
In a 2010 interview with the Guardian’s Emma John, Hart said it would take time for the prejudice of gender to die out in comedy.
‘There’s a few more [women in comedy] than there were but it’s still obviously male-dominated. That’s how it’s going to be, certainly for the next 200 years. Just like politics. There are some professions that culturally and sociologically take a long time to change, and because of that there’s still sexism in comedy audiences,’ she said to John.
Indeed, cast Hart’s name into the murky waters of human consciousness that is Google’s search engine and the most popular associated search terms are ‘tour’, ‘married’ and ‘weight loss’, which says a lot more about her audience than Hart’s brand of comedy. Perhaps, to recognise the sexism inherent on stage, we need to reconsider our role as the audience. Bums on seats, or lack thereof, speak louder of a culture condoning of sexism and token gender participation than heckling ever could.
