Last Friday night, I performed at the Queer Community Comedy Night at Boom Chicago in Amsterdam. It was such a great experience. The reality is queer stand-up comedy events just have a different energy about them. In my experience, the audience is often way more hyped and far more supportive, and the comedians are more comfortable letting themselves go and act silly. But why are these nights important to the queer community and comedians?
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who has performed stand-up regularly for the last year, I love comedy nights of all sorts. But, as this is something I have heard questioned many times in the past year, I want to break down why queer comedy events are important spaces for queer comedians and audiences.
Stand Up Historically Straight
Looking back on the history of stand-up comedy it has been dominated by straight people for years. To get more specific, straight, white men have dominated it. Even today, having a lineup of solely men is normal and acceptable. Don’t believe me? Follow any middle-of-the-road male comic on Instagram and see the proportion of male-to-female comics in their lineups. I genuinely didn’t realise quite how real this problem was until I started following some British male comics (it is less of a problem in the Netherlands). People don’t tend to think beyond balancing gender when creating a lineup if they think about diversity and representation at all.
This is beginning to change with a boom in what they call “queer comedy”, which is just people who are queer doing comedy. However, as a newbie comic, you almost always start by grinding out gig after gig in small pubs. Pubs that are often not very welcoming to queer comedians; either because of the clientele, the audience, or due to the other comedians, many of whom still make offensive jokes about queer people and especially transgender people.
Whilst these jokes may not offend you, it is hard to feel free to be silly and funny in a space that feels, and maybe even is, unsafe to you as a queer person. So naturally, you cannot fully let go in the same way that you can in a queer space, where you are welcomed and even celebrated for your queerness.
Bridging the Gap
A big part of getting the audience on your side and comfortable enough to laugh is finding a way to be relatable or relate to the audience. Even in more welcoming spaces, queer comics have to spend a lot more of their time and energy bridging the gap between queer experiences and the, predominantly straight, audience.
Whilst obviously there is no one queer experience, as there is no one straight experience, there are general experiences that many queer people can relate to or have gone through themselves. These are experiences that straight people are less likely to understand and, therefore, will need an explanation for. When you get only 5 or 10 minutes to perform, constantly bridging this gap makes writing trickier. It’s harder to be “relatable” to an audience that doesn’t really have knowledge of your experiences.
At a queer comedy night, it is much easier to bridge this gap. Instead of being the ‘other’ and a spectacle, you are on the side and understood by the audience.
Playground to Empower Queer Comedians
Playing to a queer audience as a queer comedian is just a lot of fun. You can play around with tropes and aspects of queer culture that a queer audience will know anyway. Gold star lesbian? U-haul lesbian? Otters and bears? Your audience is just way more likely to care about and relate to the things you are talking about. That means you can talk about exactly what you want without first having to figure out if a straight audience would understand.
Laughing Through Trauma
Some of the best comedy comes from a place of trauma. The great thing about queer comedy nights is that you can laugh your way as a community through trauma that many of us shared or experienced. This is a great way to realise that you are not alone in your experiences and is a hugely healing and connecting experience.
It’s almost laughable how differently this can hit in spaces that are not queer – which is also fair. For instance, I have a part in my set where I talk about being bullied as a teenager for being gay. When I perform this section in a queer comedy space, the audience cheers and relates to what I am saying – because many of us have been bullied for being gay. When I say the same bit in a predominantly straight space, it can get awkward. I have to work much harder to stop the audience from feeling uncomfortable about what I am saying.
Queer comedy events give us the space to laugh through and process the trauma of being queer in a world that is often not queer-friendly. It gives us a space, as a community, to connect and heal.
LGBTQ+ Representation
Growing up in the rural UK, I saw very little LGBTQ+ representation until I moved to Amsterdam. It is just a reality that until recently there has been very little queer representation in many industries. Comedy is definitely not the only industry where this is the case.
However, seeing your identity and experiences represented is such an important part of learning to understand and navigate your life. I almost certainly wouldn’t have realised I was gay without Tiktok. Instead, I would’ve just carried on feeling shit and confused. Representation is so important in helping people accept and embrace who they are. Queer comedy nights allow us to forefront and create a platform for comedians representing a less visible group of people.
Not only does it help visibilise different queer experiences, but it also shows queer people that they too can do comedy and there are spaces where queer comedy can flourish and be celebrated.
A Place to Be Unapologetically Queer
The overruling theme of all of the above is that queer comedy spaces provide a place for comedians and audiences alike to be unapologetically queer and celebrate queer culture. It provides a space for us to be fun and silly and laugh through trauma, joy and everything in between. It lets us be ourselves without having to be palatable for the general audience and without having to bridge a gap of experiences. We can just be the gay lil things we are!
Overall
There is a lot to be said in favour of queer and non-queer stand-up nights, which is why I am glad that there are comedy nights of all sorts, sizes and shapes across the Netherlands. These provide a great place for people to come together, laugh and connect. But queer comedy nights will always have a special place in my heart.
In fact, so much so, that I actually run a monthly queer comedy evening called Proud to the Bone in Amsterdam. If you are local or want to support it, you can find out more on our Instagram or Facebook page @ProudtotheBone.
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