The business of comedy with Funny Women

In the second of my #AYearOfNewThings adventures, I decided to join Funny Women CIC 's Stand Up To Stand Out comedy workshop in London this past weekend.

Funny Women was founded 20 years ago by the brilliant Lynne Parker to help more women get into stand-up comedy. They offer training and support for new female and non-binary comedians, as well as running an annual awards programme that saw over 2,000 applications in 2023.

One look at their website shows some of the household names who have been previous award winners and runners-up, many of whom came through the Funny Women training and mentorship programme to get there. Just a few of their hall-of-famers (who are also some of my personal comedy heroes) include Desiree Birch, Rosie Jones, Masie Adam, Sophie Duker, Sindhu Vee, Sofie Hagen, Rachel Paris, Katherine Ryan, Sarah Pascoe, Andi Osho, and Sarah Millican.

I wanted to take part in the workshop to refresh my public speaking skills and to lean further into the humour that I've always tried to bring to conference presentations and workshops.

It was a wonderfully full day and I went home tired but very happy. There were 18 of us in the group including the workshop leaders, and some of us were already gigging as amature stand-ups, successfully running comedy nights, or had experience in TV and radio as comedy writers. Others, like me, were brand new to the whole thing. Some had attended previous Funny Women workshops and courses, others were meeting the organisation for the first time.

The day included workshop exercises on improv, led by Monica Gaga who is a talented standup herself, as well as an excellent workshop leader, as well as sessions on the business of stand-up (self promotion, booking gigs, and more) by Vix Leyton , and collaborative writing sessions before we each performed a 2 minute 'set' at the end of the day.

My two minutes at the front of the room went much more quickly than I expected, so I didn't get to the punchline of my story. Everyone laughed at some of the bits in between though!

An unexpected distraction and funny moment came when the voice assistant of the laptop being used for the projector thought I was talking to it, and so it started answering me! I didn't dare stop talking as Lynne was very strict about timekeeping so I just kept going! One of the other attendees kindly jumped up and switched it off, but it had me stumbling a little.

I laughed so much during the time I spent in the workshop, I'd recommend attending just for that. However, I learned a lot too.

Here are some of my key takeaways from the day:

• Taking on scary new things can be a lot of fun. It's not just about the satisfaction or sense of achievement at the end.
• When interacting with others it's important to be in the moment. Really listen to the other person and don't just be thinking about what you're going to say when it's your turn.
• It's easier to offer a useful contribution in response to someone's encouragement ('yes' or 'yes and...') than it is to a negative comment (whether it's a straight out 'no' or even a 'yes but...').
• It's also hard to have to say no - especially for many women.
• The essence of personal branding is showcasing to others the 60% of yourself that you want people to see, whether that's in person, via social media, or through your headshot.
• Being helpful to the organiser of anything you want to get involved with will ensure that they remember you positively and will be more likely to help you in turn.
• It's hard to sell yourself, but your friends and colleagues can help you identify the best points about you (or your work) to use to describe yourself.
• Finally, I was reminded that women's groups are some of the warmest and most supportive environments around.

If you want to know more about Funny Women, and especially if you would like to support their work, visit their website: www.funnywomen.com. As a CIC they are not a profit-driven organisation so each new Patreon supporter or corporate collaboration helps to keep them going and enables Lynne to open up support to more people. There's also a brilliant Radio 4 documentary about the organisation available to listen to online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qszl.