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Taking a stand during comedy's 'MeToo moment'

Kiri Pritchard-McLean is among a group of women campaigning for change on the comedy circuit.

Recent revelations of sexual harassment on the comedy circuit have shone a light on the backstage behaviour of some male comics. As these stories emerged, it was suggested that the stand-up scene was experiencing its own .

The comedy scene has long been a home to demeaning and disrespectful attitudes towards women, according to Kiri Pritchard-McLean.

Comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean on stage at the Fringe.

This can manifest in a variety of ways, from difficulty getting a gig, to inappropriate conversations, to abusive behaviour.

“It’s common knowledge that the comedy circuit’s quite sexist,” Pritchard-McLean told Stephen Jardine on Mornings.

“Quite frequently people won’t book more than one woman on the line up.

“If you get booked by a club or you get a television or radio gig people will go, ‘Oh, they must have needed a woman’. Your ability is not brought into it. It’s presumed that anything you get is by virtue of your gender."

'We trusted people to do the right thing'

Recently female comics have spoken of their experiences of assault and improper behaviour by male comedians and promoters.

Kiri Pritchard-McLean is among a group of comedians trying to fix that situation by setting up a standardised sexual harassment policy for clubs to deliver to performers.

She says the policy could be “attached to the end of your email conformation, like the running order is, so everyone’s aware of what’s expected of them and what protection they can expect.”

"But most importantly we want to provide something for the clubs afterwards because we’re not pretending that these events aren’t going to happen …. what we’re trying to do is support the clubs to deal with behaviour in the correct way."

Pritchard-McLean continued, “[The comedy circuit is] an unregulated group of people wafting around doing their own thing, which is one of the reasons why it’s brilliant."

"But the problem there is that we’ve all just trusted people to do the right thing and for decades people haven’t been doing that.”

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