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(Un)Funny Women: TV Comedy Audiences and the Gendering of Humour

This piece presents findings from my PhD thesis, which is entitled The Cultural World of TV Comedy Audiences: Nationality, Gender and Humour. I here contribute to the ongoing academic debate around the role of women in comedy by examining audience perceptions of the relationship between gender and humour in TV comedy. The analysis demonstrates how research participants marginalised comediennes by constructing shows centred around female characters as being “for women”, while shows centred around men were not seen to be gender-specific. The lack of high profile women in comedy is often a topic of debate in popular media, and this article helps shed light on some of the ways in which audience perceptions pose a challenge to progress in this area. Within the research centre, my interest in gender issues is shared by colleagues such as Faye Davies and John Mercer. It has also remained a key topic in my postdoctoral work, which includes research on Twilight audiences, romcom audiences and online audience responses to female comedy performers.