Abstract
Following changes prompted by the alternative movement of the 1980s in the UK, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw the establishment of several women-only comedy nights and organisations. These organisations were established with the goal of provoking changes to the experiences of women starting out on the comedy circuit and were founded in direct response to the overt sexism encountered during that time. This chapter focuses on these women-only comedy nights and events and asks the question: how do both performers and audiences understand these nights as ‘alternative’ to mainstream live comedy spaces and/or televised comedy? The chapter examines what these events provide for audiences, their expectations when attending women-only comedy line-ups and to what extent these expectations are linked to binary gender stereotypes.
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Tomsett, E. (2022). ‘Less Dick Jokes’: Women-Only Comedy Line-Ups, Audience Expectations and Negotiating Stereotypes. In: Double, O., Lockyer, S. (eds) Alternative Comedy Now and Then. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97351-3_11
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