by Sarah Jensen
If you were asked to think of top comedians, who would you think of? Would they be male or female? Pop culture is rife with inequalities in the field of comedy—a grossly male dominated field. I recently read an article “Where are all the 
female standups?” in a UK paper the Guardian and it made me think about these very questions. Personally, my favorite comedians are a mix of male and female: Anna Faris, Whitney Cummings, John Stewart and Simon Peg to name a few, but I could not think of more than a dozen popular female comedians. However, there are triple, if not more prominent male comedians in pop culture. Can men be that much funnier than women? Standup comedian Josie Long gives her perspective in the Guardian article: “There is an opinion at large out there, which Long estimates she hears 300 times a year: that women aren’t funny.” It shouldn’t be an issue of gender, but of material; if a PERSON is funny, than they are funny, regardless of sex. Why then is culture so obsessed with categorizing entertainment by gender? “I am genuinely a comic before I am a woman,” Millican says, “It sounds ridiculous, but I have never felt more at home than I do on stage”. The field of comedy is growing, and opening up to new generations of women, but whether or not the discriminations against women will go away is yet unknown—statistics show the entertainment industry in general is a mess of inequality. 14 of the 40 “Top Comedians”—icomedyTV are women and this is only one list. Clearly, the comedy division of pop culture entertainment is vastly uneven.
[Credit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/20/female-standup-comedy-void
http://www.icomedytv.com/Top-Comedians.aspx]