'Ding-dong the witch is
dead, the wicked old witch is dead...'
... is a celebratory song
lyric written by a couple of musical men in the 1930s for one of the most popular
films of all times, The Wizard of Oz.
And for fans of this song, film and character – the Wicked Witch of the West, whose
death they so joyously celebrate, a character widely voted ‘the best witch’ and
female villain of all time – you will be pleased to hear that they have been resurrected
recently by a bar in central Auckland called Ding Dong Lounge that hosts a regular
Thursday night open-mic comedy gig known as Dead Witch Comedy. The witch may be
dead – ding dong – but she lives on every Thursday night in Auckland.
As it happens I do a
bit of stand-up comedy and performed fairly regularly at this open-mic venue last
year, but that was before it was renamed for 2020 as Dead Witch Comedy. Then it
was more innocently known as Comedy at Ding Dong, and on those occasions, standing
up under a green light, with my big nose and pointy chin (and mic stand for
broomstick when needed), I was probably the closest thing to a witch in body if
not name, living or dead, on the premises. Probably; one never knows for sure
with witches. But I was certainly the only woman over 40, the minimum age for
witches ‘real’ and fictional in these line-ups that were routinely young-male heavy.
But with the re-naming
to Dead Witch Comedy to bring in the new year and decade, along with a new logo
depicting a young naked woman on a broomstick in rear view, I decided I was not
comfortable performing there anymore and got in touch with the man who runs the
gig, telling him that I would not return while this new name and logo were in
place and requesting that they be removed. He replied that he had no control
over the changes but defended the naked woman logo by telling me it was taken
from a 1910 painting. Oh, so it’s art. That’s alright then.
Except by my
reckoning it is not alright. Art has come a long way since 1910, but it needs
to come further still. And so I have not been back to do my funny dance under
the green light at Ding Dong since these changes – their loss. Only it’s my
loss too of course because comics need as much broom time as we can get.
The NZ Comedy Trust and
Guild have just received a chunk of money from Creative New Zealand,
some for Covid relief and the rest, they say, for working to make our comedy
industry more diverse. But the Guild has regularly advertised this open-mic gig
on its Facebook page, as has the Auckland Comedy Community online group, a gig in
name and logo that brazenly panders to the juvenile and sexist sensibilities of
some straight men, especially young
straight men, the dominant comedy demographic by far, while sexualising young
and demonising older women, the most underrepresented demographic in comedy by
some measure. And sure enough the line-ups for these DWC gigs that comics
volunteer to take part in continue to see far more men than women signing up,
with the average line-up being 10 to 2 men to women, as well as a male MC.
And
these numbers are repeated across the vast majority of comedy line-ups for
rookie and paid pro gigs in Auckland and beyond, because the problem of male
bias in comedy is of course not only at Ding Dong. They’re just the most brazen
and, you could say, honest about it. But the problem is global and in my
observation increasing, not decreasing, as it should be with more women every
year trying to break into the industry and ‘killing it’ on the comedy stage
when they are given the opportunity.
It does not help that our
physical safety is at risk in this industry, as recent, and not so recent, sexual-harassment
and abuse complaints by women comics here and in the Irish comedy communities attest
to, as does the tragic 2018 rape and murder of a young Melbourne comic on her
way home from a gig and the penis graffiti mocking her violent death that was drawn
at the site afterwards by an established male member of the Australian comedy
community. This is already more than enough to put women off turning up to perform
at open-mics and other comedy gigs, without us having to do so in the name of dead
witches and naked women on broomsticks.
I would like to end on
a joke but I am a little out of practice. Also, I don’t feel exactly amused by
this situation, not least because I have already had a previous complaint about
it publicly mocked and shut down by men and women in the NZ comedy community. But
if we are serious about making the industry more diverse and spending public
money wisely and fairly, my two cents worth (I’m not making a lot of money
here) is that we need to take active measures to ensure we have more inclusive and
less abusive ways to ‘kill’ on the comedy stage than with bare bums and broomsticks. Ding dong.
