By Julia Trupp

Photos by Andrea Johnson // Illustration by Raleigh Anderson

Flick. The humming stage lights go up, and the pre-show music fades out. The full audience hoots and hollers as the group, waving their hands and smiling, runs out onto the stage. She runs with them, wearing nude heels and a Dreamsicle-colored dress that might have belonged to a prom queen in 1957.

But she isn’t here to dance or host American Bandstand.

Michelle Benton is here to do improv comedy at the first Huge Lightning Comedy Festival in Fayetteville with an all-female group, GirlsGirlsGirlsGirls. All-female groups are rare in comedy, and the comedy scene in Northwest Arkansas, while smaller than most big-city arenas, is making a name for itself. This all-female group happens to be a part of that magic.

By her looks, her strong personality, her passion for improv, it’s understandable why she could come off as intimidating to other women on stage, such as myself. Michelle is a strong initiator, and she isn’t afraid to jump out and add to a scene. Michelle puts herself out there and wiggles her way into the boys’ club that improv often is.

An all-female group like GirlsGirlsGirlsGirls, or this year’s beSHEmoth at the second annual Huge Lightning Comedy Festival, is a great opportunity for female comedians to perform and not feel like they are being overpowered by the male bravado in comedy, which some of us so often feel we are up against.

Michelle and I met at an improv workshop at the University of Arkansas when the university’s comedy committee announced the formation of a new improv comedy group, Laugh Track and Field. Being a new freshman on campus, I constantly searched for involvement opportunities, and this one struck me. I forced my roommate to join me at the workshop, and once we arrived, I noticed that, besides the two of us, Michelle was the only woman in attendance. Seeing her in a room of loud men cracking dick jokes reassured and relieved me.

But when I officially joined the team a few months later, Michelle disappeared, for reasons I didn’t know at the time. I later found out she left because of the artistic director – we’ll call him Jerry – and discriminatory remarks he made, which we will get to. As part of the team look, we wore track jackets, a play on our name, and instead of ordering my own, Jerry passed Michelle’s along to me. She wouldn’t need it anymore. Right after I got the jacket Jerry told me that besides the fact that I could perform decent improv, he put me on the team because I was hot. Michelle experienced similar sexism.

That moment was the first glimmer I saw of the gender gap in comedy. Although Michelle was a founding member of Laugh Track and Field, she never felt like she was a part of it. Some days she would open up her social media pages and find that filmed sketches had been posted and she was never informed about them, or she would be excluded from group discussions led by Jerry. On top of that, he would often play stereotypical female characters “that were rather sexist in their depiction,” Michelle said.

For example, in some scenes, Jerry would pretend to be a housewife baking in the kitchen, promising sexual favors in exchange for her scene-husband’s protection from whoever else was playing the scene. Or during some practices, Jerry ensured any woman on stage with him became an overly sexualized character and to continue the scene the women in the group, including myself many a time, had to “yes, and” the character.

In improv comedy, one of the first and most basic rules for a good and successful scene is the “yes, and” principle. To put a scene in action and have it chug along the train tracks of comedy, performers must affirm what their scene partner just said, and then they add to it. So let’s say Improv God #1 is doing a scene with Comedy Pal B. If Comedy Pal B says, “Hey man, I like those blue shoes, they remind me of my childhood,” Improv God #1 shouldn’t say, “What, these aren’t blue. They’re obviously red.” The scene cannot go any further with negation, so Improv God #1 should say, “Thanks dude! They were a gift from my grandma, who got them as a gift when she dated Elvis Presley back in the day.” Much better. Man, I’d much rather perform improv than write a fake scene. But anyways, if someone wants to bring a scene to life, they must “yes, and,” even if the person they are on stage with is an ass and is burying the other in their poor, cheap jokes.

“I think he accepted me into the group because at the time I was one of, if not the most, ardent lover of improv who was a student at the university that also had three to four years of experience by that point,” Michelle said. “He rarely asked or took my opinion during our notes or post-scene discussions.”

I, too, experienced similar feelings when Jerry was the artistic director, and near the end of my second semester on the team, I stopped initiating and performing in certain scenes because he made me so uncomfortable, whether it was through his scene work, side comments or contempt that I wouldn’t sleep with him – it always felt like I owed him something for making me the only woman on the team after Michelle left. Audience members started noticing my own lack of motivation after the shows: “Why didn’t you get out there?” “You’re funny, what happened up there?” “You looked like you wanted to jump out but were hesitant.” That’s why Michelle only stayed with the team for a semester.

THINGS ARE A’CHANGIN’

Michelle knew she loved doing improv from the moment she started. When she tried stand-up the next year, it took her a bit longer to get a feel for the medium. She knew she wanted to keep going when she did a set aimed toward women last summer and was delighted by the contrasting audience reactions she received. Her set brought up women’s issues, and a woman in the audience yelled “About time someone said it!” A man in the audience wasn’t too excited about the truth of the set, shouting out “That’s fucked up!” but he stayed to listen to more.

“Dream come true. That’s why we speak,” she said. “We voice perspective. Highlighting diversity to spark change. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and by phrasing things in a clever, funny way the notion can grow in popularity and ignite real change.”

Bitch Media, a feminist nonprofit magazine, did a study on the gender gap in comedy and found that at a popular Manhattan comedy club called Carolines on Broadway, only 833 mid-level comics out of 5,908 were women from 2011 to 2014, which translates to just 14.1 percent. Out of 1,398 emcees, only 290 of those were female, which translates to just over 20 percent. While the numbers are small, women are making the first move in the relationship with the comedy world and changing the way they are seen as professional comedians.

Kelly Vernon, 22, goes to school at Emerson College in Boston and considers herself to be “a newborn babe” in the comedy world as she has only been heavily involved with the scene for a year, unlike Michelle who has spent close to 10 years in the biz. Kelly spent years secretly writing jokes in a little notebook, acting and loving improv from afar. At the end of 2014, she read Amy Poehler’s beautiful book, “Yes Please” – it’s this book that propelled me into comedy as well – and immediately sought out improv classes in the city. Once she found one, she started going every week and found her niche.

“It’s like once you’ve been doing comedy for a year, then you’re zero. Then after the second year, you can call yourself one. It’s easy to forget I’m a zero and playing with kids who are 10 and up … But it’s the best because I learn so much from those vets,” Kelly said. “I didn’t work up the courage to try stand-up until August of 2016, but once I did it for the first time I really hit the ground running and became obsessed and going to mics every night and staying out until 2 a.m. at bars with 30-year-old dudes with beards and flannels.”

Not long afterwards, she started school at Emerson and joined a sketch team, so she started to spin in the flurry of Boston comedy, performing at DIY venues and bars before graduating from Improv Asylum’s training center and becoming part of their Sunday and Monday night house teams.

“I noticed early on that being a woman wasn’t going to keep me from finding opportunities to perform, but I do feel held to a higher standard because I’m a woman,” Kelly said. “Because there are fewer of us, I represent comedy when I perform. I also stick out in a show – if I have a bad show it’s more memorable than if one of the 30 white guys wearing the same toothpaste-stained shirt has a bad show. But it’s also an advantage if a woman can rise to the occasion and knock it out of the park – she’ll succeed at a more accelerated rate because she’s a commodity.”

Take “Inside Amy Schumer,” for example. More than 50 percent of the show’s staff are women. One million viewers tuned in to watch her third-season premiere, according to Deadline. “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” has spiked its ratings since the election, at one point substantially passing “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” according to data from Nielsen.

“Portlandia” features a 40-percent-female writing staff and two prominent and feisty female characters who run a feminist bookstore. Seven-months-pregnant Ali Wong debuted her Netflix Original special and toured over the summer – and we can’t forget the successful women of “Saturday Night Live” fame, even if John Belushi regularly tried to “fire the girls!” back in the ‘70s.

When Emily Geller was in high school in small-town Celina, Texas, where the school was surrounded by farmland and cows, she would hear her guy friends talk about how women comedians just weren’t funny, and that’s why they didn’t like them, even though they knew she was interested in that path.

“That’s kind of messed up to me,” 24-year-old Geller said. “We’ve got women absolutely killing it out there writing and producing sick comedy on the regular. Comedy isn’t a man’s game. We’ve got voices and they are pretty damn funny.”

She enrolled in theater classes in high school and continued pursuing the art in college with improv classes. Then, once she graduated, she decided to audition for Fayetteville’s Rodeo Book Club in 2016 after she saw a post specifically seeking “ladies and not white guys.”

“There are nine of us in the group, and only three are women. If you look at other groups, especially in Northwest Arkansas, there seems to be a similar ratio: three to one,” she said. “I’m not sure if this is the first time I started paying attention to this, but it’s pretty fresh on my mind.”

Tamar Stevens, 26, a former member of the Upright Citizens Brigade Touring Company in Los Angeles, started her improv comedy journey in college – one of her college group mates told her she was surprised they let any more girls into the short-form-turned-long-form college group because “there was already a girl, and she liked being the only girl,” Tamar said about her groupmate.

After she graduated, Tamar began classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles, where she was invited to be a part of the touring company. When Tamar’s touring company came to Fayetteville a couple years ago to workshop with Laugh Track and Field and then perform a show later that night, she was the only woman on the four-person team, but it didn’t bother or intimidate her. But it did remind her of her college group mate’s idea of their improv troupe: being the only girl was fun to her, but to Tamar, things needed to change.

I’m guilty of this myself. For so long, I would tell my own team not to accept any girls – if they even auditioned; audition attendance was pretty low for a few semesters – because it was cool “running with the boys.” My immaturity contributed to the gender gap in my own world and I didn’t even realize it – and we got some pretty great ladies on the team anyways, my version of sorority sisters. I even told Tamar this when she came to Fayetteville with the touring group.

IT’S BEEN THE NORM, BUT NOT FOR LONG

I can say from experience that the character developments and opportunities are endless – it only depends on the relationship each performer has with the other. We’re taught to trust each other, work together, “yes and the shit out of each other,” as multiple directors have told me. If one person in your group wants to be the main person of the scene – cue Jerry, from before; every team experiences one at some point – the scene can’t work. But sometimes on-stage factors aren’t the only downfall of a scene.

Tamar said she thinks a huge part of the dwindling-but-present gender gap comes from the audience, similar to what Kelly said.

“Audiences are less forgiving of women. Women can’t be too pretty, they have to have a really clear schtick. There’s not a right or wrong way to be a man in comedy, but there’s a lot of wrong ways to be a woman,” Tamar said. “That’s starting to change. Improv specifically has had a diversity problem that goes beyond gender. It’s always been a white guy’s game. People are fighting to change it, and in Los Angeles, at least at the UCB, it’s really become a priority.”

Luckily for me and the rest of Laugh Track and Field, Jerry moved away to pursue another graduate degree at the start of my junior year in 2015, and one of my best friends, Justin, became the new artistic director, and he ensured sexism would be no more.

Caroline Kitzmiller, 22, joined Laugh Track and Field the next semester after performing monthly shows at former business Common Grounds with another local team, the all-female group 5 Months Pregnant. She graduated in 2017 and now runs Little Sister Bake Shop in Fayetteville.

“I feel that in the beginning I was pretty sheltered from the gender gap. Being a part of an all-female group blinded me from the issues a lot of women face in the industry,” Caroline said. “I know that there used to be issues within the group (Laugh Track and Field) in terms of sexism, but our directors are incredible and kind and just decent human beings who avoid any gender-based problems. That being said, sexism is huge in comedy. I feel like I’ve been a rare case in not experiencing a lot of gender discrimination in my experiences with comedy.”

Keywords: not experiencing a lot of gender discrimination in her experiences with comedy. Caroline applied to work for Conan O’Brien in February 2016 and was offered one of 20 unpaid production intern positions the next month. They did typical intern work: coffee runs, meal ordering and delivering on set, script coverage “and ran around the Warner Brothers lot like we were at camp,” she said.

As she decorated a spring cake for a client of her new at-home baking business, Caroline reflected on her time at the CONAN studios. She noticed women in top executive positions, but not so many in the writing department, which is where Caroline wants to be eventually.

“But, I have a lot of other things in my life that I’d like to dabble in. My plan is to have no plan, I guess,” she said. “Comedy has always, most importantly, given me a community of people who make me laugh and make life more fun. I’ll keep that as long as I can.”

Los Angeles-based comedian Natalie Palamides, 27, voices Bubbles in the new spinoff of the Cartoon Network-classic The Powerpuff Girls, and when she isn’t in the studio or auditioning, she performs in a one-woman show called LAID, which is about a woman who lays eggs, and she must decide to raise it or eat it. The show has been so successful in LA that she took it overseas to the largest arts festival in the world, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where she won the festival’s Best Newcomer 2017 award in August .

Ever since she began her comedy career in LA four years ago, there has always been more males than females, and because it was considered the norm, she didn’t think anything of it. She compared it to construction work: there aren’t that many female construction workers, and when she sees an all-male group of construction workers, she doesn’t think anything of it because that’s how it’s been.

“That’s maybe not the best metaphor. Construction is not the same as comedy, but you get what I mean – we need more females in comedy and construction. However, I have noticed more and more women getting involved in comedy,” Palamides said. “Now, my sketch team at UCB, Karate Karate, has more females on the team than males.”

And she wants to stick with her group and the LA scene while she can: “I love making people laugh, including myself. I can’t really imagine doing anything else. Sorry, mom.”

COMEDY FESTIVALS AREN’T BOYS’ CLUBS

Comedy festivals have popped up all over the country, from the nationally known Dallas Comedy Festival to the Women’s Comedy Festival in Boston and of course in New York. Last year, Northwest Arkansas joined the festival scene with the Huge Lightning Comedy Festival, which was formed by 27-year-old Hope Haynes and her husband, Jordan.

Hope and Jordan met at the University of Arkansas when they were both pursuing a theatre degree. Jordan spent a semester studying at The Second City in Chicago. Once they graduated and got married, the Haynes moved to the Windy City, so Jordan could pursue comedy full-time. Hope knew she wanted to work behind the scenes, so she got a job in the box office and quickly worked her way up to the core producer team. She mainly worked as a production assistant, but for several months she took the lead as main producer for the Second City UP Comedy Club, where she cast shows, built the yearly budget, helped the vice president write a book and organized a summer alumni show.

The Haynes moved back to Fayetteville after four years, so they could be closer to their friends and family, especially after the death of their friend Sean Phillip Mabrey. Hope said Second City was the most influential place she had ever worked.

“I was very lucky working at Second City because several of the producers I worked with were badass women who had been there for 15 years and totally ran the show,” she said. “On the other hand, as performers, so many of my female friends were facing an uphill battle all of the time. The comedy scene in Chicago has been a boys’ club for a long time, and it was a constant fight to be heard, be seen and be respected. Thankfully, in the last several years, there has been a movement by these women to close that gap, but it’s an uphill climb.”

Emily’s high school guy friends weren’t the only ones who were programmed to think women aren’t funny. Do a quick Google search, and you’ll find a rockin’ documentary called “Women Aren’t Funny,” by comedian Bonnie McFarlane which is about the issue and plenty of articles asking why society is programmed to think that way. Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens sparked outrage when he wrote a piece that described all the ways he finds women unfunny. Like other controversial topics, this one is persisting through the early 21st century, but all signs that point to the exit for women at comedy clubs are losing their sheen.

Like other women getting their feet wet or their whole bodies drenched in comedy – I’m somewhere on that spectrum – it’s a form of expression, an outlet for all of us. Even if we can’t predict how a set is going to go, we know one thing for sure: it’s something we want in our lives.

“I do see myself doing comedy long term,” Kelly said. “I think I avoided saying that for a long time because I want to be an extra-chill gal and not care in case I fail. I spent a long time being afraid of the cool police, you know? Fuck the cool police! I love doing it … It makes me feel powerful and glowy like a lightbulb. It makes me feel like I have a voice and like I’m holding something that I love and handing it to a stranger and hoping they don’t break it. But sometimes they do, and that’s OK because I get the pieces back, and I know how to put them back together.”