Helen Charman (pictured) explores the misrepresentation of satire Atri Banerjee

The term ‘parody’ was first used in English Ben Jonson’s 1598 play, Every Man in His Humour: "A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was”. The OED tells us that the verb ‘parody’ can variously mean “to compose a parody on (a literary or artistic work, author, or genre); to produce or constitute a humorously exaggerated imitation of; to ridicule or satirise”. 

Our goal, in writing Female Personality of the Year, was to do precisely that: to satirise. Unfortunately, Rinna Keefe’s review in Varsity misunderstood this crucial aspect of the show: this article attempts to respond not to the notion of an unfavourable review—opinion is by necessity subjective—but to clarify a broader issue: if the show is taken at face value, it becomes an instrument of exactly what we intended it to undermine.

The awards show celebrating successful women has become a common phenomenon in recent years, something not unrelated to fourth wave feminism and new online forums for debate. To attempt to outline here the complex relationship these shows have with notions of positive discrimination would be tilting at windmills, but the troubling way these lists and the shows broadcast in tandem with them perpetuate harmful female stereotypes is certainly a worrying disadvantage. The women interviewed can’t just be successful businesswomen, political figures or broadcasters: they also have to talk about their family values, or their ‘workwear wardrobe’. These aren’t bad things in themselves, but interviews with equivalent male figures are never structured like this.  It’s as if those in charge of the awards are anxious to reassure the audience that these women aren’t abnormal; reaffirming the notion that the powerful woman is an intimidating creature, desperately in need of a reassuring ‘human’ side.

In the 2014 Radio Times list of ‘powerful women’, Mary Berry came second. Regardless of how good he is at making bread, it’s hard to imagine Berry’s Bake Off colleague Paul Hollywood reaching a similar position in an equivalent ‘powerful men’ list. The Barclays ‘Women of the Year’ award is sponsored by Good Housekeeping magazine. The Marie Claire article describing their ‘Women at the Top’ awards in the October 2014 issue of the magazine ends its glossy spread of photos of the winning women posed lying on sofas in expensive cocktail dress, like this: “The night ended with champagne and sweet canapés, while our guests walked away with amazing goody bags, including a selection of Schwarzkopf hair products”. 

Female Personality of the Year is parodying this consistent, reductive need to portray successful women as stock characters—the entrepreneur who still has to wax lyrical about potty training; the television chef who can’t swear like her male counterparts—not buying into these stereotypes and mocking the women they represent, as Keefe’s review assumes.  “Have you heard the one about the career woman who’s a bad mother?”, she asks. Yes. We all have, and that’s why we’re, to paraphrase Jonson, highlighting their absurdity by making them even more ridiculous. Perhaps this baffling belief that the show presents three-dimensional characters is symptomatic of the very issue we’re talking about: it all comes down to gender. The Thick of It didn’t have to start with a disclaimer reassuring the audience that they don’t actually think spin doctors can walk through walls. 

It is a rarity in Cambridge even to see a comedy show entirely written and (mostly) performed by women. This is frustrating ground to have to cover in 2014. Tina Fey, in a 2014 interview with Hollywood Reporter highlighted the fact that a huge part of the problem with gender imbalance in comedy is the way that female comedians are still treated as anomalous: “the only disadvantage women have is have to keep fucking answering the question of, ‘Is it hard and are women funny?’" The men don't have to answer that question. That's the only impairment”. It is unsettling how many otherwise intelligent people subscribe to the idea that the distinction between funny men and pretty women is some kind of evolutionary necessity.

Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 Vanity Fair piece remains the best example of this. In it, Hitchens makes the serious suggestion that the reason there are so many ‘dyke’ (his word, not mine) comedians is because they, like the male sex, have a sexual motive to seek the “sweet surrender of female laughter”. Not only are women not funny, then, but any self-identifying female in any comedy audience is only laughing because they’re sexually aroused. Thanks, Chris! Hitchens also declares that women don’t make jokes about sex because, “for women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing”. The outrageous heteronormativity of this statement aside, this reinforces the notion that whilst dick jokes are ten a penny in a lot of mainstream comedy, the vagina very much remains seen—in an airbrushed, sexualised context—and not heard. The vaginas in our show are pretty loud. What Keefe describes as “the mythical beast of a concept, The Baggy Vagina”—the childbirth induced distortion of the female genitalia—is indeed a problem, and male comedians often make jokes about the decline in their sex lives that results from it, but that’s why we make such a point of including it. We’re on your side.

Any comedy—particularly student comedy, which is a place for experimentation—will not make everybody laugh. You might think our play simply isn’t funny. That’s okay. We might not like your cooking, or your clarinet playing, or think your small charcoal drawings of zoo animals are sub-par. By all means, criticise us (constructively) for that. But don’t—please—buy into the pervasive misogyny that we are trying our level best to highlight.