The Network of Female Standup Comedians in the UK

Explore the network of UK female standup comedians below (the interaction means that it's best done on a laptop not a phone!) Each circle represents one comedian. Hover over a circle to see the comedian's photo (as taken from Twitter). Click on the circle to see the comedian's Twitter feed. You can search for and highlight a comedian by using Ctrl-F (your normal browser search function). See below for more details. You can find this page at bit.ly/femalecomedians

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Exploring Standup Comedy in the UK

The network graph above represents a (mainly) crowd-sourced view of UK, female standup comedians.

Initiated by a Twitter request to tag "your favorite [sic] female comedians", the 267 responses were mined for Twitter account names (729) which were then examined to filter out non-comedians (a suprising number of US politicians were nominated), non-UK-based comedians (the request was originally posted by an American comedian, but it quickly gained traction from a UK audience) and male comedians. Various other accounts were added by scrutinising followers of those accounts resulting in 375 (as of v3) identified Twitter accounts. Tweets between all pairs of those accounts (ie response tweets and mentions) were obtained (limited to the last 100 tweets to any individual) to form a conversational graph based on that network. This graph is drawn as follows:

Caveats

This is not a true map of all of the UK's female standup comedians: it's just what can be seen of them from Twitter. Not all performers use Twitter. Many prefer Instagram as a way of communicating with their audience. They will either be missing from this page, or appear less well-connected than they really are.

Who counts as a UK female standup? Performers are often identified as "comedians" in their writeups, reviews and Twitter bios. I have used locations, recent gigs and pronouns to help make that decision. How do I discriminate between comedy actors and standups? Poorly - if there is any evidence that they have done gigs recently, they're in.

How thorough have I been? I have not yet tried scraping names from open night gig set lists and looking up Twitter accounts. That'll come when I have some resources. Having said that, I do have a decade of Edinburgh Fringe PDFs to hand. Hmmm.....

Is it problematic that a 56-year-old white male gets to act as gatekeeper to an artefact claiming to represent female accomplishment? Absolutely. Why do it then? Because women shouldn't solely have the burden of promoting female talent and leveling up the playing field a bit. Any voluteers to help? See instructions below for contributing names.

Is this this map useful? Insightful? Does it add any knowledge? The network visualisation algorithms do tend to group comedians together broadly according to the stages of their careers. This probably reflects some form of homophily - professional comedians communicating mainly with their peers, club comics responding to people that they work with, and open mic comics tweeting people they see frequently on the open mic circuit. More work required!

Updates

As of Monday 6th July 2020, this map is version 3, with the following comedians most recently added: maggiekcomedy, SavenChadha, TallDarkFriend, rachelwheeley, ShaWylie, sarahbridgeman, FranKissling, Amycromack, stefftodd, ambikamod, beth_o_b, emilylloydsaini, fionaridgewell, floradonald, frances_g, hattie_delaine, hfcripps, isysuttie, katykoren, loutaylortrash, madeleinebye333, mariashehata, shaziamirza1, thatsusanmurray, cerysnelmes, laurendouglin, louconran. To be added in v4: Wendy_Wason, amyxander27, louisakeight, CapriellaHooper, EsylltMair, siannybach, LeilaDoesTweets, Eleri_Morgan, sexynedflanders.

To nominate a comedian (even yourself), please tweet me at @lescarr

Motivation

I'm a Professor of Web Science. As an academic I have a professional interest in how standup can be used to communicate ideas to a diverse audience. As a Web Science researcher, it's fascinating to me how this grass-roots arts industry has come to use digital platforms to organise itself. (And, with the Corona Virus lockdown, has come to perform and connect with audiences in new ways.) There are different stakeholders - performers, venues, promoters, event organisers, agents, festivals, pubs, clubs - and newcomers to standup have to start developing their skills (at open mic nights) and their network of contacts. What role does the Web play in this - Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, edfringe.com, chortle.co.uk, NextUp - the various social and media platforms that allow comedians to be seen and to connect with their peers and their audience. How does the Edinburgh Fringe festival use the Web to engage tens of thousands of perfomers with millions of visitors (mainly tourists) in a single month?

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Felicity Ward (see below) who helped me to discover a riot of female talent, to Funny Women for promoting and supporting funny women and to Ruby Carr for introducing me to the standup circuit.

My new answer when someone says to me after a gig “I don’t usually find female comedians funny.”

Me: What is your twitter handle? I want to send you something.

(PS this list is not definitive. Feel free to make your own list ready to give to someone) pic.twitter.com/98vmghCAtB

— Felicity "The Muscle" Ward (@felicityward) September 1, 2018