Funny Cows

This is not about cows -- heads up for the uninitiated.

I miss this shit 

This is my final blog for the year, a year that has been very fucking funny and very fucking far from funny too.

It has been an interesting year you could say, on and off the comedy stage. I put on my first hour-long 'one-woman' comedy show at the Auckland Fringe Festival and it sold out. We even had to turn some people away. Some of my friends may never speak to me again. Serves them right for underestimating my pulling power. Hmm...

There were a lot of laughs at those three 50-seater shows and at one of them an English guy in the audience told my husband he should pack me off to the Edinburgh Fringe pronto: 'She's just as funny as that lot', said he. So you never know, after what happened later in the year, my husband may well do that.

Because after I made it to the semi-finals of the Raw Comedy Quest (to find the country's funniest new comedian), my second and final year of Raw, and performed to a very good reception on the night, applause break and all, I got royally shafted by the man who runs and judges the comp and had to watch yet another batch of less funny (on audience reaction) teenage and twenty-somethings, 70% of them male, be put through to the finals ahead of me for the second year in a row, some of them only in their first year of Raw, and I snapped. I became a very unfunny cow indeed.

And Friday last week, after months of wrangling with the Comedy Guild and then the Human Rights Commission over my claim of gender and age discrimination against that shafter in chief, I spent three hours in mediation with him and a woman called Holly who did her best to keep things civil between us but did not entirely succeed. Nothing was resolved (I'm sworn not to disclose any details of what was said there), so I might still take my complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal that is a public process open to the media, to get this thing out in the open and on record. It shouldn't happen, what he did to me. Change is needed.

Meanwhile the shafter in chief has banned me from his club, which happens to be the only comedy club in the city and the main club in the country, which has shut down my stand-up 'career' for the time being. Last month I also bailed on my Fringe show before cancellation fees for the venue kicked in, losing my nerve after all that has happened since the last one.

"Maxine Peake is magnificent in Adrian Shergold’s
unflinching drama about a stand-up on the 70's northern club circuit".
The Guardian.

All is not lost, though. I am still laughing indeed, not least at the Brit film Funny Cow, reviewed by The Guardian as a film full of 'grit and wit' that we watched a couple of weeks back and it reminded me of all that female stand-up, especially mature female stand-up, can be and and is, which was reassuring, even if I can't be doing it for the time being. It's one of the best films I've seen in years. You've got to hand it to the Brits, they do grit and wit better than anyone.

Hopefully I'll find a way back to stand-up some day soon and even make it to the Ed Fringe one day, preferably before I lose my grip on the wit.

Merry Xmas.    

Grace and gracelessness ('Not all men')

Grace Millane 22 murdered in Auckland last week.
National vigils held this week for her and all the women victims of male violence
in this country (and every other).

When I was researching and writing about male violence against women and the public-political response to it in the first decade of this century, there was no 'not all men' protest when there was a public outcry against this violence.

Apart from the global uptake of internet commentary since then, this was because a) there was scarcely any public outcry against this violence then, though it was no less rampant, and b) the male lament of blaming the feminist man-haters for making up stories to bring men, all men down was implicit in this lack of public outcry and in the much louder narratives written into law and public policies of female provocation, denial of the extent of the problem, especially with domestic violence, which was my focus, and the outrageous claim that women are just as violent as men when the facts tell of women experiencing injury and death at the hands of men at a rate for which there is simply no female-to-male comparison.

My own mother bought into all this women-blaming and denial of the problem, as did the vast majority of people, men and women, commenting and making decisions around male violence against women. Feminists have been fighting such an uphill battle for so long to get the public and parliaments of their countries to care about murdered, raped and maimed women, especially those in a domestic setting but really all of them. They are all connected.

This is changing as we speak as the vigils attended by thousands for murdered women like Grace and for all the women slain at the hands of men are a powerful sign of significant change. And it seems to me, as someone watching the public response to gendered violence for a long time that this change has been fuelled by the global female indignation over Trump's election and the Women's March in early 2017 and the Me Too movement that was also in part a response to this that has shown women who had not previously identified with feminist causes, and perhaps some men - but far from all men - that what we have here is a serious problem of male power and violence out of control and women being the main victims of this rampant power abuse and toxic masculinity but everyone being the victims in the long run.

And although thousands of men, many more men in fact than are joining the outcry against the violence, are contributing publicly to what one journalist here has well described as 'the astonishing selfishness of "not all men"'  protests, the fact that men are having to yell so loudly about how unfair we are being to them in protesting about male violence against raped and murdered women and are being rightly and widely shamed for this, is a sign that the balance of the public narrative and concern has shifted significantly and hopefully lastingly in favour of taking male violence against women seriously and in realising that the male sense of superiority and entitlement and unchecked power to disrespect and dominate women at every level of society is all part of the problem.

RIP Grace, your violent, tragic death has already sewn the seeds of a movement towards a world in which women like you and their daughters and granddaughters may indeed be able to rest (ramble and riot) in peace.

A Rock Between: Top Ten Comedians Now and Then

This image, the only one I could find that sort of fit Time magazine's ranking of the "10 best comedy specials" of 2018, is a little misleading. Hannah Gadsby's special was ranked top and Ali Wong's special was ranked third top. Chris Rock's special came in sixth. Yet this image puts him front and centre, like he's the main event.

The gender ratio is about right, the top ten included six women and four men, but the image doesn't really reflect the gender ranking, which had women in the top five spots. As this ranking is an unprecedented event in the ranking of male and female comedians anywhere it is surely the biggest news in this story, yet the article (which pictures Gadsby alone), as with this image used to advertise the list elsewhere, downplays if not distorts this part of the story.

If you compare Time's top ten with Rolling Stone's 2017 Top 50 stand-up comedians of all time, the gender ranking and ratio of Time's top ten is historically very big news indeed, because in RS's top 50 only one woman made it to the top ten (Joan Rivers), and only one of the women in Time's top ten this year (Tig Notaro) made it onto RS's top 50 last year, albeit RS's list was of dead as well as living comedians which is going to bias the list in favour of males, even if a significant percentage of the women included in that list are also dead.

Overall there were eleven women in the RS top 50, so a little over a fifth (22%), most of them in the bottom half, and just 1% in the top ten, whereas the Time top ten list has 60% women and all but one of these women ranked in the top half. Rock is ranked 5th best stand-up comedian of all time in the 2017 RS list, and none of the women comedians who outranked him on the Time list rank anywhere on the RS list.

Time and Rolling Stone are different magazines no doubt, and their lists were for slightly different purposes, too. But still the comparison and contrast of these two lists tells I think of a significant cultural shift in the industry driven by increasing numbers of women standing up, more of these women being given the platform to stretch their comedic legs on their own terms, not as one of the blokes - thanks mostly to Netflix - and then these women being recognised for these talents. The first move has been occurring for some years now but the second and third shifts have happened largely since early last year when RS presumed to tell us who the funniest stand-ups of all time are, and included five times as many men as women.

Since that time less than two years ago systemic sexism in the comedy and wider entertainment industry has been exposed and the cost of that sexism through women speaking out about sexist men, not least comedians like Cosby and C.K. (who both ranked in RS's top 10) - and Rock too, who made fun of sexism, indeed of rape, after the RS ranking had been published, and didn't get away with it as much as he had expected to - has been brought to light and taken seriously in a way that has not happened before in any industry.

So one way or another 2017 and 2018 have been watershed years for women in comedy, which means for men in comedy too, and for women and men everywhere else as well, because changed perceptions about who and what is funny changes everything, at least it has the potential to. Flying on our local Air New Zealand carrier earlier this year I tuned in to listen to 'The Comedy Hour: Various Artists', drawn by the 'various' as much as by the 'comedy'. Alas 'various' was not so various in this 2018 comedy line-up, recorded in this order (I didn't listen to all):

Louis C.K.
Joe Rogan
Bill Burr
Bill Hicks
George Carlin
Patrice O'neal
Artie Lange
Jimmy Carr
Eddie Izzard

The all-male comedy line-up suggests we have some way to go before lists of 'various' comedians include, for the sake of accuracy if not fairness, at least one representative from the other half of the human race, preferably more than one. Time's line-up makes a good start towards this much needed change.

Woman on a wire

Enough said.

Almost.

A quick apology to my younger son - and possibly all the sons - for using the Zeke filter; apparently it's the height of uncool. But I am out on a limb here, walking on a wire in boots and it's not easy to know how to achieve the right look and perfect balance when you're out on a wire in boots, especially when you're a woman. Wait, the explanation for that sweeping statement about it being harder for women follows.

A while back I searched images for 'analyst' wanting to develop an analysty logo for a new project I'm working on and every single person featured in the numerous images offered was a generic man in form and attire, which is why my 'woman' on a wire looks, shall we say, a little metro-sexual (if we can still use that slightly outmoded term), wearing a kick-out skirt over trousers, which is not an outfit I'd ever recommend or wear, nor is it an outfit suggestive of a particularly sharp analytical (or artistic) mind, especially the eyelashes, which kind of got away from me, possibly due to a subconscious menopausal hankering for the return of my younger lashes.

Though I do quite like 'her' all the same. Sometimes you can like people more for their flaws than their strengths, so the eyelashes that could be mistaken for eye fingers are kind of growing on me (if only they would!). And I think she's gutsy too for walking out on a wire in knee-high boots. I bet that Frenchman who needs a bloody great pole for balance (in addition to his other, rather shorter pole) when he walks out on a wire, couldn't do it in boots. In fact I have it on good authority that he wears special wire-walking shoes. Hmph! Men. They're always getting a leg up, or at least a shoe up.

Speaking of the French, I was reading earlier this morning about this remarkable French woman who had her head removed for advancing ideas of equality between people of all races and genders, as well as capital tax, social welfare and various other political reforms that came to pass eventually in some degree, if they are yet to be realised in full anywhere, two-hundred-plus years after she advanced them in 1791. Off with her head! Nasty woman.

So inspired by this 'nasty woman', who wrote possibly the first feminist treatise, which has been all but lost to history till quite recently, I decided this morning to add an 'e' to my 'overanalyst', which makes no difference to the spellchecker that rejects the word either way, and probably makes no difference to anything else, though it does change the pronunciation of the final syllable from list to leest, which I prefer, for my own reasons that are difficult to explain in brief, and we've run out of time.

Indeed I am partly calling myself an overanalyste in an attempt to recognise a slight personal flaw and work through that flaw by thinking and writing more concisely, as if I were indeed walking on a wire, without a pole of any length, or special shoes to help me, and having to focus on just one thing: namely, not falling. And getting to the other side. And wondering if I should have tied my hair up in a ponytail to look less like a transvestite and reduce wind resistance. So three things. And...   

Kave men

Enough said. 

Googling myself

Now normally I'm FAR too busy to waste time googling myself, but...

this afternoon, after a virtuous morning, I happened to have a spare moment or two and decided to treat myself to myself, as it were, and found this little line-up of ladies, one of whom, I won't say which (she's a different colour) is not me.

I think possibly the confusion came in because this other Sacha Jones has a fringe, though you can't necessarily see it in this picture, and I searched for my name with fringe, as you can see, even though in one of the pictures that is me I don't have a fringe. Confusing. But life can be confusing. 

Anyway, I just thought I'd explain that, as far as possible, for the record.

As you were.

Jane: In no man's shadow

If you didn't see Jane, the 2017 documentary film on Jane Goodall's pioneering research on chimpanzees at the cinema, then do not fret, because Netflix have picked it up. And it's a must see, a film for our times indeed, though the footage for much of it, previously unseen, was taken in 1965.

Jane's research was the first to challenge the notion that only man (men) possess the capacity for rational thought, by documenting  chimpanzees fashioning tools to procure food.

Jane discovered this by immersing herself in the environment of the chimpanzees in the wild and observing them closely and patiently, the first human to take that much trouble and to be fearless and humble enough to open her mind to the possibility that these animals might be able to teach us something about ourselves, and in the process to check our unfettered arrogance.

After many years of observing the same community of chimpanzees living in harmony with each other and their environment, Jane observed something less well publicised at the time about how this male-dominated species live. When the matriarch of the extended family finally died, her grown son in his grief stopped eating and within three weeks also died, and a part of the extended family broke away from the group, and were then hunted down and viciously killed for their defection.

So, it seems, chimp tribes are ostensibly led by a dominant male, but it is the strongest female that binds them together, apparently with something more meaningful than the fear-based dominance that typifies male power in all the primates, a quieter, more compassionate strength that keeps the males from killing each other and from losing the will to live.

We can learn from this.   

Tiny diplomat

A mighty miniature Ms

From Last Blood to First Baby, which is also a first blood situation, if not THE first blood situation, never mind the movie.

I don't think this UN ID for the youngest diplomat ever is real, as in actually required for access to the UN, the 'Ms' suggests something other than official bureaucratic business at work (alas), but that matters not.

For Ms Neve Te Aroha, New Zealand's first First Baby born while her mother was the Prime Minister, is also the first baby to attend the UN and with both of her parents, her mother addressing the general assembly and her father as her primary caregiver, and that shit couldn't be more REAL.

It is also no doubt working some international diplomacy of revolutionary proportions in a less than united world that has for so long justified the exclusion of women from the corridors of political power, decision making and diplomacy on the basis of our designated separate (and lesser) role as mothers and primary caregivers of children.

But that undiplomatic, divide and conquer, control and corrupt approach hasn't worked out too well for the world. On the contrary, while women have made babies in the political wilderness behind doors that only opened for men, those men have made wars and laws that have brought misery and fear to the lives of the majority of those babies, female and male alike.

And so that misery making will continue if those doors are not opened widely to women and their babies so that men, as well as women, but especially men, can be reminded where the first, and last, blood really comes from.

It's a girl! 

The First Mum's speech to the UN General Assembly     

Last Blood

Today a man (who looked like, and may have been, a frog) I had just met asked when my last period was. Quite a forward frog he was. I replied anyway, these are forward times and you’ve got to keep up. Go with the flow. "I’m on it. It’s now. It’s happening, as we speak!", I said, in a challenging tone, matching his forwardness and raising it some.

Ribbit.

His bull-frog face stiffened momentarily before the professional behind the frog re-emerged to ask: ‘How many days ago did it start?’ A forward frog indeed. I couldn’t remember precisely. My mind was boggling like his eyes. 

He was, of course, at least officially, a doctor with a professional interest in my blood work. We didn’t just meet on the street or by a pond. No. He was about to get down deep and dirty with my blood, as he duly informed me, not in so many words. He intimated that it would be in his hands – I didn’t look – that I was about to put my bleeding uterus and vagina.

Prior to this last-minute pre-surgical consultation out of which I could not get without unwinding at least five months of preparation and another year of procrastination before that, I had been led to believe the operation would be performed by a female doctor I had met several times who went by the elegant and trustworthy name of Abir. Now this frogman stood, well sat, in her place.

I can’t recall his name, given quickly, and there was no real explanation for this substitution, other than a small box at the bottom of a long form to be checked by me that waived my right to elect a specific doctor, or even species of doctor (apparently), to perform my procedure. I checked it with a brave, almost perceptible grumble.

Why do men get into gynaecology?  Hmm... Frogs might have additional motives, too. Perhaps a spell had been cast that only baptism by vaginal blood could undo and prince he could become once more. Stranger things have happened. The fact that I would be asleep during the procedure did not alleviate my concerns. And what had he done with Abir?

He hopped away, leaving me to change into my sexy backless hospital smock and shower cap and to think. Always to think. Is this regular? Why was nothing said before? Am I always the last to know? On the other hand, what's the big deal? So a half man half frog is replacing an elegant Arab woman as my vaginal surgeon at the last minute. It happens. First World problem. Get over it. Also, I used to collect tadpoles as a child, so I was probably asking for trouble with a frog eventually. 

He did ask me if I wanted to keep my removed tissue. Perhaps that was his way of getting the permission he needed to take off with my tissue and clone it into a real woman of his own who he could force to kiss him and so be returned at last to his princely form. Who wants to keep their tissue? I nearly said yes.

Ribbit. Ribbit.

Post-op update: Alive and all but intact, other than what was taken of my tissue by a frog with an attitude (and a scalpel) while I slept. Not yet hopping. Taking that as a good sign. Frogman wasn’t there when I woke up. Most suspicious.  

Thinking about Aretha

You really can't pay tribute to a singer like Aretha Franklin in pictures. Pictures might speak a thousand words but they can't sing a single note. Although you can almost hear Aretha in this picture, in the smile squeezed into her tight shut eyes as she opens her mouth to release a note of song so joyous that it speaks a thousand smiles and all who hear it are stunned speechless by the wonder of such a smooth smiling soulful sister sound.

Clearly words are inadequate to the task of tribute too, and maybe that's how it should be.

As for the furore over her funeral service which by most accounts failed to pay fitting tribute to the Queen of Soul, partly because men hogged the mic and did not show the RESPECT Aretha commanded and demanded from men on behalf of women, that is another example of how we struggle to pay tribute to such a woman. Although there we might aspire to do better. And so we will.

RIP Aretha, long live the Queen!




 

The perfect norm (for National Poetry Day)

The perfect norm

tofu and marshmallow
                              are indistinguishable
in the regurgitation
                frothy and cream white
                                                  alike teeth
        dissolved in the dream
                                   of the clean
                 good 
life like cloud
            before it darkens
                                     portending

storm, each becomes the other
                                           the perfect norm
      good and bad 
                               all are undone
                                       in my vegan vomit
                                                                       all is one
                                                                                                                                     
                                                             

"Stewbridge" the consummate comedy couple (and me)

I'm not normally into couples...

Stewbridge

"Brangelina" never passed my lips (either set), nor did "Posh and Becks" ever push my buttons -- and not for want of trying on their parts, I can assure you. Oh yes. But threesomes have never really been my thing. Call me old-fashioned.

But then I met (in print) Stewart Lee and Bridget Christie -- or "Stewbridge", as they might be called if they were A-list actors, sportspeople or singing fashion designers, rather than alternative Aish-list comedian writers -- and all that changed...

Unfortunately, Stewbridge is quite exclusive and reclusive, not even appearing as a twosome in public; the above photo-shopped image being the closest they get to public coupledom, which is a shame -- for me -- and for US, as I really think we could have had some wholesome threesome fun, us being comedians and all.

Still, it was kind of like we were all three together getting off on each other's wits, instead of tits, when I read recently (better late than never) their comedy memoirs back to back and laughed loud --especially with Bridget. They are yet to read my funny memoir, but it's only a matter of time. I am not going anywhere.

I had previously met Bridget, watching her Netflix special "Stand Up for Her" in 2017 -- the first comedy Netflix special by a British woman -- and blogging about it here. But Stew is new to me, though he's been on the Brit comedy scene much longer than Bridget and in his book talks favourably about his time spent in New Zealand performing at the Auckland comedy club I started out (and stopped abruptly in, with a sex and age discrimination complaint pending) doing stand-up. I will not hold that against him. His book is otherwise brilliant.

But it is Bridget's A Book For Her that shows us, like no other comedian has done, I think, what a genuine feminist laughs like, mingling substantive feminist insights and politics into a properly funny narrative and comedic life. Stew is a lucky man.

And I am a lucky woman to have found such a kindred comic spirit at a time when the women in my local community of new and pro comedians, most of whom call themselves feminists, have expressed their opposition to my discrimination complaint with an aggression and condescension far outstripping that expressed by the men in that community. Interestingly, Bridget says her fiercest public critics have been women.

Being a funny feminist is not for the fainthearted, indeed, but Bridget shows us that it can, and must, be done. And it will be.

“There is something unique about the social determination to keep women from being publicly funny. The persistence of all-male comedy panels, the comperes who introduce female comedians as if they’re something between a freak show and a child’s tap dance... this is distinct from what a female scientist might experience. Standup is an act of profound self-exposure, and laughter is the ultimate gesture of acceptance: I think it’s actually easier for society to concede that a woman might be good at physics than it is to countenance the sight of her being unguarded and shameless, and to approve of that.”

Zoe Williams, July 20, 2015

Guardian review of Bridget Christie’s A Book for Her

   

Painfully Rich

So we all know - and don't really believe - that being rich doesn't make you happy, unless, that is, we have been stinking, filthy, "painfully rich" as the condition is described by the the author of the book on the Getty family, on which the 2017 film All the Money in the World is partly based. Only then, it would seem, do we know, especially if we are the heirs to such painful riches, as J.Paul Getty's children and grandchildren were.

But now, with the production at last of this painfully real 'truth inspired' film of the 1973 kidnapping of one of Getty's grandchildren, we, the not painfully stinking, can finally see for ourselves just what BIG money can do to a man and his family.

And so I urge all to see this film, as I have just done, for that reason if no other. Although you won't only come away thinking how much better you feel about not being rich. For the story of how the grandfather, at the time the richest man in the world, refused to pay the ransom money for the safe return of his grandson, and as a result the grandson was kept in near squalor and fear for his life for five months and eventually had his right ear cut off, an ordeal that he never recovered from psychologically and died prematurely no doubt partly as a result of, will also shock you to the core, as seeing is believing - almost - to learn just how ruthlessly arrogant and heartless an insanely money-obsessed man can actually be, as if we needed any more evidence of this, which we don't really.

But the film is also illuminating on a gender front, as the mother of the kidnapped boy, who was just 16 at the time, fights such a valiant and tireless battle against this ruthlessness on behalf of her son, having asked Getty for no money to raise her three children when she was divorced from her husband, Paul Getty Jr, that her lack of greed, humanity and strength, which in the end sees her son finally returned to her, albeit scarred for life, provides a salient and reassuring counter to the man's corrupt, callous heart.

I feel reassured at least. And I wonder how many gender stories of this sort remain out there still untold, it took long enough to tell this one, though it is totally made for film.

When Getty senior died he left not one penny in his will for the kidnapped grandson (though he himself had inherited a business worth 10 million from his father). What a fucking arsehole, even if, in theory at least, he might have been doing the boy a favour. Alas, it was too late for that.

Yes, yes, Nanette (Hannah Gadsby)

'Remarkable', though 'not that funny', according to one male reviewer

Just when I thought I knew all the western cultural heroes who were brazen misogynists, now Picasso must be added to the long list, thanks to Hannah Gadsby's insights on the man and art delivered in her devilishly daring, honest and brilliant Netflix stand-up special Nanette.

But this is not what Nanette is about - misogynist men - at least not mainly. Nanette is a comedy, for starters, if a very new and cutting-edge comedy that stretches the boundaries of traditional stand-up to a new and, I believe, distinctly, if also challenging, feminine shape, or shapes. This is no one-size-fits-all reshaping.

But Nanette is mainly a show about WOMEN, and FUNNY WOMEN more specifically, and funny, lesbian and otherwise "different" women who do not fit nor want to fit the man-made mould of what it is to be a human female in this male dominated and distorted world, most specifically.

"Nanette" rejects the mould of female comedy in which women find themselves in a self-deprecating mode in order to get laughs from men, as well as those women who, like Hannah previously, are too ashamed to be themselves and own their anger about the way they are judged and abused simply for being women, and especially for being "different" women. Hannah will carry that shame no more and if that means the end of her comedy career then so be it, as she says on stage in a perfectly timed and balanced performance that pulls no punches and is brutally honest, while knocking its audience over by shouting and repeating its rarely spoken, deeply personal and political feminist rage.

And as a woman, a different and funny if straight woman who has been wrestling with speaking my own feminist truth for decades, and most recently in reaction to an experience on and around the stand-up stage that I believe was seriously sexist and discriminatory towards me as a not-young woman, Nanette feels more than timely and gives me strength to continue fighting that battle.

And so I believe this is our time, hers, mine and yours. Women are not only proving we are funny, as so long denied, but we are showing we are funny (and fierce) fighters in a way that male comedians are not and never have been, indeed never have had to be. Seinfeld, for example, has just told Dave Letterman on his show that he has no interest in speaking about Trump in his act, instead he offers twenty minutes on chocolate raisins. Kathy Griffin, on the other hand, did speak out in anger about Trump in her comedy immediately after his election and was exiled from her country for a year for her troubles. Michele Wolf took a similar risk at the White House Correspondents' dinner this year and was pilloried by many in the press, and Chelsea Handler was similarly outspoken about Trump before and after his election. And unable to stomach his outrageous success and stupidity, or to make light of life through humour in the face of it, Chelsea walked away, after only two seasons, from her own show as the first female evening talk show host in the US.

Indeed Hannah says she has to get out of comedy because she is no longer prepared to hide her history of being abused nor the anger and shame she has felt about being a lesbian and a victim all these years, truths that are generally not funny. But with the incredibly positive reaction to her Netflix special worldwide, it is more than likely that Hannah will have a career in the international public eye speaking her hard and not always funny truth for some time, whether we want to call that comedy or not is up to us.

I would like to think that comedy in 2018 and beyond can and will stretch to this sort of very personal and political truth-telling, warts, wounds and all performance. Because as funny as Seinfeld is, or at least was, twenty minutes on raisins by a straight white male comic in the age of Trump, I think says as much about the limits of his kind of comedy going forward as Griffin's daring decapitated head stunt says about the potential of hers and others who work harder and braver to forge the laughs in light of the most inconvenient truths of our times than traditional comics have ever done, as far as I can see. And watching Letterman last night, I got the feeling that he saw this in Seinfeld too, as close a friend and fan of Seinfeld's as he is.

So thank you Hannah and Kathy and Michele and Chelsea and others; your (our) time has finally come. Paint that, Picasso. 

Funny girl?

While the comedian's away (in Australia helping my very old mother recover from a life-threatening hip break and post-op stroke), a man, in the rain, at night, turned up on the doorstep of our house in New Zealand to deliver to my husband a copy of the magazine with this article on me based on an interview I had done several months prior on my new and, at that time, burgeoning career as a stand-up comedian.

NZ Life & Leisure June-July 2018
The online version now out here

Life can be funny like that sometimes. Because the day before I got the early morning call from my sister's new boyfriend, who I had never spoken to before, that my mother had had a post-op stroke and was, as we spoke, being rushed across Sydney for an emergency life-saving procedure, I had submitted a 25,000-word gender and age discrimination complaint to the NZ Comedy Guild, in which I allege that my exclusion from the finals of the national Raw Comedy Quest to find NZ's best new comedian was sexist and ageist (an associated form of gender discrimination), and not, as otherwise assumed, due to my lack of comedic ability.

As this formal complaint (yet to be answered by the Guild) has put my comedy career on hold and ostracised me from the NZ comedy community for the foreseeable future, and possibly forever, the title of this much delayed article is now in some serious question, and that's even before we go into any issue that I, or others of the feminist persuasion, might have with the descriptor 'girl' to refer to someone of my vintage.

But the good news is that Mum survived and two weeks later is showing signs of regaining the will to live, something that, after losing almost all her mobility overnight, had all but deserted her. And one of the clearest signs of hope is her ability to make light of and even laugh at her predicament. Finding herself bewildered by the large Italian male nurse's aid asking her, in a thick accent, 'Do you want to move your bowels?', having already christened him 'Hercules', she offered him in response a flirtatious smile and said hopefully: 'You are very strong!' Which, although not exactly answering Hercules' question, provided some light relief to all in the near vicinity, and to Mum when I explained to her the question -- just in time to avoid testing how strong Hercules really was.   

Humour helps, is what I say to this, even when, perhaps especially when, in our darkest and least dignified hours. And so we must fight for our right to make laughter out of the variety of challenging situations that life throws our way, many, if not most, of them long beyond our youth, especially as women.

Mum (in dark blue) and friends, shortly before her fall

    

When women win

...we all win.

This is my first blog for a while on account of some seriously stinky sexist shit hitting my feminist fan a few weeks ago and making it VERY hard to breathe, much less type.

Also, Blogger decided, roughly at the same time, almost certainly in conspiracy with the sources of that stinky shit, to shut down my access to the function that allows me to see views and post news.

But, as if a lovely little lady leprechaun (leprechauns are supposed to be male and mischievous, but those ones aren't real, not anymore) worked her lovely lady magic to make THIS happen in the land of leprechauns and with it released my airways and fingers -- simply by signing out and in again under another name -- to type back.

The women of Ireland, at long last, deemed to be worth more than the smallest of their parts

The fan shit here still stinks and I am doing what I can elsewhere to clean that mess up -- I will let you know how that goes in due course -- but thanks to the brave women of Ireland who fought for their right to be considered more autonomous and human than a minuscule fertilised egg residing within their own bodies and won, I feel stronger this morning to carry on the fight to prove that I too am more, so much more, than a walking, weeping womb. I can talk and type back, too.

    

Bigger than Bill (Cosby, Constand and Consent)

Andrea Constand stands strong 
against systematic victim blaming and shaming

'This trial and verdict is bigger than Bill Cosby, it sets the groundbreaking precedent for the standard of consent... 

From opening statements to closing arguments, the defence used tactics of victim blaming and shaming... 

Cosby’s attorney told the jury that Constand’s rape was her fault, declaring that she wasn’t “acting like she was raped”...

These are tactics that are used to intimidate survivors—but Andrea Constand stood strong and was not intimidated.' Carmen Rios, Ms. Magazine

The Guardian describes this long overdue and in many respects unprecedented verdict in the re-trial of comedian Bill Cosby as 'a major milestone in the #MeToo movement against sexual assault', and it would seem that as his previous trial in 2017 prior to the first #MeToo revelations was deemed a mistrial, that without that movement Cosby would likely never have been convicted of sexually assaulting anyone, though he had already admitted in court to drugging women with powerful sedatives in order to prevent them from resisting his sexual advances. 

Six of Cosby's victims in court last year

Still, as it stands for the 80-year old comedian, who has continued to perform until last year, though Constand first came forward with her allegations against him 13 years ago, and by 2015 more than 60 other women had made similar public allegations against him, the decision (by a jury of 7 men and 5 women) that might send him to prison finally is the least the justice system can do to uphold women's human rights against sexual abuse and to deliver the message to boys and men that girls and women are not their sexual play things to be used and abused without punishment.

But it's a bloody good start.

Two Women Leaders and a Baby

April 17, Berlin

It's not often you see two female political leaders side-by-side at a podium, and it's never that you see two female leaders side-by-side at a podium when one of them is pregnant! Indeed it's a wonder this unprecedented event last week did not break the universe, as TV's "Veep" predicted would happen in the US if the president and the veep were to both be women.

Alas, Veep's pre-Trump prediction was proven painfully prescient for that country, the universe of the USA proved that it could not hold together with the thought of even one female leader at the political podium.

However the backlash against that disastrous and misogynistic decision just might have contributed to bringing about this unprecedented podium we see here, with Merkel partly motivated to stand for a fourth term in office after Trump's win (worried as she was for the universe with a moron in charge of its only inhabitable planet), and the Women's March with record-breaking attendance here in NZ and around the world protesting this political outrage firing up voters against the political patriarchy of old here, whether on the left or the wrong wing of politics.

I for one gave more money to the party's campaign and attended it's campaign launch where Ardern gave her first official speech as leader, solely because she had taken over the reigns of leadership, having had little faith in the man who was leading the party before her and believing that gender politics matters in itself. Believing indeed that our present, still deeply unbalanced global political situation of only 11 female prime ministers or presidents in almost 200 countries, is the first thing that is wrong with the world of politics -- and indeed with the world altogether, given the ramifications of political patriarchalism.

And this picture above speaks a million words in favour of positive and critical change on this subject, not least because one of these women leaders is pregnant, and visibly so, sending the message to hundreds of millions, if not billions of women (and men) that pregnancy is not a disability and women can, and must, if they choose, combine motherhood and the most exacting jobs in the paid workforce and the universe will not break.

April 20, London

Indeed it might just be what saves our beleaguered 'universe,' if, that is, we have not left our matriarchal move too late.


   

A Quiet Place (please!)

Blunt and Krasinski and daughters last week

I think it's more than likely that Krasinski, who rewrote the screenplay for this film he also directs and co-stars in, and which begins with a ten-minute segment of agonising silence through which my teeth were poised painfully over the crunchy nut-choc top of my rapidly melting ice cream, was drawn to the project due to the arrival the previous year of his (and wife Emily Blunt's) second child.

'What's this script? "A Quiet Place"? I'm in.

I could be wrong.

Apparently Emily took a different view of the situation, though. She had to be persuaded to do the film, perhaps thinking it was not possible or believable to make a film that requires young children to be almost totally quiet for any period longer than, say, four and a half seconds. Aliens, yes, silent young (not asleep) children, no.

Or it might just have been that she was feeling a little postpartum still, having delivered their second child less than a year before hubby pitched the project to her.

But although she is partly right about the challenging premise, the film that she and John co-star in is a triumph on many levels and already a box-office hit. Other people love silence too, it seems.

And horror.

And Blunt and Krasinski paired, no doubt.

It's a rare thing to see real-life husband and wife films, not least because Hollywood is not known for its success in breeding happily married couples. The couple who make films together stay together, is not a thing. Until now, I suspect. These two are showing us how it's done. Never mind aliens with massive pointy bullet teeth and surprisingly noisy (the aliens aren't silent) shape-shifting heads. Give us a believably loving and respectful Hollywood couple and we're in.

At least I'm in. And, I suspect, a demographic that doesn't normally embrace horror is in for this film that is not only well acted by adults and children (and aliens) alike, but well re-written by Krasinski, who, I am guessing, modified what were probably more generic gender characterisations in the original script by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, to present a more balanced than usual distribution of blame and bravery between the male and female characters.

I could be wrong (again). If so well done to Woods and Beck, who wrote the original screenplay and who are contracted to write the sequel. I guess time will tell.

Certainly some of us are, unlike the aliens - who look remarkably similar to last century's aliens - finally beginning to evolve into gender-conscious and responsible beings who accept that the principles of feminism are the future, or at least the present and near future. Beyond that, it will depend on the backlash. If the guys with the money, madness, misogyny and might get their way, it might be a never-ending human silence as we self-destruct and the planet is taken over by screeching, shape-shifting aliens with bullets for teeth!

But let's hope not. Let's hope for a quiet(ish), kind place instead.         

Is that my son???

Now normally I don't worry about my children...

Dunedin 10 April, 2018

but these are not normal times...

Now I know the EPIC storm that hit our little island(s) yesterday is not ALL about me and mine -- there has been serious flooding and mud slips and record hail and airport closures from the top to the bottom of this normally quite sensible country when it comes to weather (if you discount earthquakes). But our youngest moved down south to Dunedin a couple of months back and HE IS NOT ANSWERING MY MESSAGES TODAY REQUESTING INFORMATION AS TO HIS WELL-BEING AND THE WORST STORM DAMAGE IS IN DUNEDIN!!

So I am a little worried.

If this is him -- those black jeans look awfully familiar -- then I am not reassured that he is totally fine and looking after himself as he promises us he is!  

If it is not him I am even more worried as he might be in worse straights than this! At least this chap is running! Our youngest is so nonchalant these days he is liable to stroll through a storm (or try to). 

Alternatively, he might be asleep. I never thought I'd be pleased to know one of my boys was asleep after midday, but at this point that's presenting itself as the best case scenario. Fingers crossed.

Some more photos of yesterday's storm from the north island (Auckland and the Bay of Plenty) --

News flash! Number two son is alive and well (and awake), enjoying the unseasonable autumn snow in Dunedin and not running around in the rain. 

Actually I was kind of hoping it was him in the hoody running, not only because he's running, but because it's been a few months since I've clapped eyes on him doing anything, as he resists my requests for photos. 

Have to wait for the next storm, I guess. 

         

"Diamonds at the meeting of my thighs"

... and still she rises -- ninety years to the day, with a touching tribute from Google...

Going Going Gaffigan

We were going to see Jim Gaffigan last year in Auckland but the tour was cancelled when his wife's doctor discovered "a tumour the size of a pear" in her brain. So we went to see him last night instead...

And he was great, well worth the wait. 

Better still, his wife Jeannie is with him on this down under tour and, as he told us last night, is now in pristine, pear-free health, and was happily minding their five kids, who are also on the tour with them, back at the hotel. They were no doubt the reason the show was scheduled for a 7pm start instead of the usual 8pm. 

We were wondering how he would deal with this frightening episode in their young family's life and were impressed with his ability to joke about it - "I was thinking, if anything goes wrong, these kids are going to have to be put up for adoption!" - but still convey his genuine relief, love and gratitude for his wife and their kids at every turn. 

A good portion of his show is about his wife and kids, which is relatively new subject matter for male comedians, though "the wife" has of course been the butt of comedian's sexist jokes since the beginning of comedy, the kind of 'comedy' that adorns this charming black-painted van that has parked itself outside our house for the last two weeks as if trying to tell me something. My husband's not responsible for it, but some other lucky woman's husband/ex clearly is, as it's definitely the work of someone with a (very small) penis, and as such I am sorely tempted to spray paint over the opening 'you' and replace it with 'women'. But I can't be arsed with trolls.

Apparently this sort of cheap sexist comedy is still going strong for some. It's got a long pedigree of course. I remember Billy Connolly's joke about how a guy killed and buried his wife face-down in the garage with her bum sticking out so he would have somewhere to park his bike. He told that joke on Aspell near the start of his career, so I guess it worked for him then. Perhaps not today so much.

His later comedy, after he'd been happily married and a father for a number of years, was rather less sexist, and perhaps the comedy industry grew up a bit with him.

Gaffigan is considered a 'clean' comedian, unlike Connolly and most other male comedians, largely because he doesn't swear or tell jokes about killing women. But 'clean' is hardly an adjective any kind of artist would seek out or welcome as it suggests playing things safe and going with the mainstream,  which is not at all what Gaffigan does.

Rather than clean, I would say that Gaffigan is a clever comedian who knows that there is a place for swearing and on stage is not always it, though I have heard some very clever female comics make good use of various S, M, F and C words. But women swearing well tends to challenge stereotypes in a way that men swearing doesn't, and challenging narrow assumptions about groups of people is surely something that comedy and all art should do.

As far as the man-woman thing goes, Gaffigan, who writes with his wife, seems to get, better than most, that the best comedy is made from making fun of yourself first, those people who take themselves a little too seriously second, and third, those people who fuck up life for the rest of us (eg Trump voters and the van artist on our street), even if he is not what you would call a political comedian, although non-sexism from a male comic is fairly political.

Anyway, go see him if you get the chance, he's heading to Melbourne tomorrow.

I've been writing this on and off practically all day while trying not to take myself too seriously eating deep brown eggs, walking through water, partaking in family gatherings, speaking long distance to my mother and son, etc. So it is time to end it now (food is on its way).

I leave you with an image of the awesome eggs that my good man gave me today for Easter, which, apart from anything else, suggests to me that he, for one humble husband, does not wish he were dead. And thank fuck (and Jesus) for that!