UK COMEDY
A recent meme on the social networking site Meta (FB) claimed that a poll had been taken about the greatest women of all time in British comedy and that Rosie Jones and Eddie Izzard were at the top. I can find no evidence whatsoever of who was conducting such a poll, or the identities of those who responded. The ‘poll’ was more than likely the work of someone with an axe to grind. Mark Ritchie writes:

Great women in comedy? Well, it is all a matter of opinion and I would venture to suggest the answers will depend very much on who is asked. Funny women in variety and even further back in Victorian music hall created many big-name attractions. Going back to Marie Lloyd and her naughty songs, to much later with Tessie O’Shea and her comedy with ukelele. There is huge list of names which could be highlighted here. Some of the great funny women must include the likes of Hylda Baker Marti Caine and the great comedy monologuist Joyce Grenfell, although back in the day many women in comedy were used as stooges for their male partners, Mrs Sandy Powell being a notable example. During the variety days, women were often silent sidekicks, or objects of sexual innuendo in the case of male comedy stars such as Frank Randle, Old Mother Riley (Arthur Lucan) with the hapless Kitty McShane and of the course the famed ‘Betty’, of Wilson Kepple and Betty.
A poll about funny women would surely find any inclusion of Victoria Wood easy to applaud. The Lancashire born musician, writer actress and comedian was a very special talent, leaving a gaping hole in the UK comedy scene, after her sadly premature death in 2016. I saw her live on stage once at The Alhambra Theatre in Bradford and even had a strange kind of encounter with her many years before, the details of which are included in my latest book, 100 Heroes Of UK Comedy…And Me!
Eddie Izzard is also included in my new book, even though I have met Eddie just twice, thus far in my life. His inclusion within a poll of female comedians in such a presumably fictitious poll would, I imagine, be posted as clickbait to entice those judgemental enough to display both their ‘anti-snowflake’ credentials and their general bigotry.
Now we move to the rather awkward bit. I saw Rosie Jones on last year’s Royal Variety Performance and I also witnessed the schism her appearance seemed to create amongst the audience. Many were very much on the side of this women, who began as a comedy writer. Despite her all too apparent speech problems, the giggly and gregarious Rosie was soon finding herself invited onto telly panel shows and the like. Hailing from the Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington, Rosie incorporated her cerebral palsy into a comedy act. I heard some people in a bar at The Royal Variety deep in conversation. One opined that he could not tell what Rosie was saying. His partner countering with his view that in comedy, timing is everything and although Rosie cannot make a tag-line trip off the tongue, she is endearingly funny.
All of which is beside the point. Surely in 2024 we should be championing funny women and proudly admitting them to what was once almost exclusively a lad’s gang. Comedy is completely in the eye and ear of the beholder and the job is so hard, exactly because a/ everyone has an opinion on what they think of as funny or otherwise and b/ there are people as this phoney poll suggests, who cannot just chill out have a laugh and leave their own petty prejudices at the door.