Jo Brand's very funny BlogFest keynote

hello hello I'm sorry I literally have just arrived it's taken me two hours to do a half an hour journey and I have been quite a lot of rally driving as well so apologies if I talk bollocks for the first five minutes some slightly not enough cigarette ish um okay how are you all I hear it's been a bit fractious don't worry I'm here to calm you and what well might not work um do we have any children here do we we do where are they tiny ones where right okay so if I said a couple of rude words would they remember them someone's making their thumbs up will it traumatize them for life and the reason I'm here is to talk to you just very generally about women's voices really and how women's voices can be heard now let me just say obviously I am a stand-up so as an ex-nurse myself I do believe that laughter is the best medicine all I find that tends not to work in the case of impotence but for me it is a pleasure to be speaking to an audience like yourselves I don't always have audiences that are a pleasure to work in front of in fact quite a lot of the time it's it's absolutely the opposite for example a few months ago I found myself in Southampton speaking to 600 builders YUM my favorite and as I came on stage I was actually a surprise and as I walked onstage there was an audible sigh of despair shall we say when they realized it was me and they were looking at me as if they're thinking what on earth kind of fat menopausal woman possibly know about building and I said then we would be surprised actually because my dad's a structural engineer my brother's a quantity surveyor and husbands a plank so I know a lot actually so sit back and enjoy yourselves um now as far as women's voices being heard I believe that this is possibly the best time in history for women's voices to be heard given the sophistication of technology and the fact that women can take their writing into their own hands and get it out as widely as possible if we look back over history it's not always been that easy just very briefly hundreds of years ago the only women you heard from were either religious women or posh women or royal women because working-class women and ordinary middle wealth women just did not get a look-in but gradually as time went on we had heroines of mine like Mary Wollstonecraft for example who somehow threw away from her a previous life involving a violent alcoholic father and managed to come up with that wonderful pasty vindication of the rights of women which really was like the first feminist piece now I am what I would call a feminist I know over the years we've been vilified and cartoon eyes dove you like and you know people have often thought of me as a doc marten wearing short hair dungaree wearing a nightmare and to me that's not actually a feminist that's a plumber but and I have to say I just want to talk to you very briefly about my personal favorite piece of writing about written by a woman from that era and that woman I'm sure you've all heard of her is Fanny Burney which people always say to me is that a euphemism for cystitis no it isn't she is an amazing writer if you haven't read her piece about having a mastectomy without an anaesthetic at her home in Paris it's well worth read and you will say to yourselves thank God I live now and not then now of course other very well-known women writers from two-three hundred years ago we of course have Jane Austen who is universally acknowledged as the right of the finest line of all time by a woman and I don't know if you know recently but an American singer called Kelly Clarkson attempted my ring belonging to Jane Austen and take it out of the country now let's just compare them the first line of Pride and Prejudice it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife that's Jane Austen Kelly Clarkson my life would suck without you now I don't think you can really compare those two lines and thankfully someone forked out and Jane Austen's ring stayed in this country now as time went on and women got more power women were able to write about their experience of their lives I'm not too sure about the way certain things are heading for women's for women writers I've particularly noticed these days that in the promotional sense it's quite good if you're a very beautiful woman writer because then you get your picture very large on the back of your novel and you're invited on telly quite a lot and obviously as things are dropping off for women my age on telly I'm I'm quite surprised I haven't been banned actually and I'm put in a big cave with Mary beard and others but thankfully I haven't now are you all bloggers here yeah okay at any bloggers here writing a novel quite a few of you okay you must be pissed off with celebrities because it seems like celebrity autobiographies are too penny these days and if you've been on telly once you normally get requests from a publisher to write your autobiography as I did and to be quite honest it's difficult to say no really and I apologize for that I've written two autobiographies in two parts and looking at you looking at me I kind of wish I hadn't now but anyway sorry um now given that women's voices are much easier to hear these days I wonder what it is that is possibly putting women of being truthful and talking about their lives well from my own experience and I would just want to give you a few examples of how it actually can be for women I mean I was asked several years ago ten years ago also to engage in a debate at the Oxford Union which is obviously the highest seat of learning in this country and according to most people and the debate was actually about feminism and whether it it played a valid part in our lives today now when you go to the Oxford Union basically they give you a posh dinner first and then you go and have the debate now while we were having dinner a woman came up to me and she said my son is speaking against you in the debate my son Rupert and I said okay and she said I'd it's the first time he's done this I'd really appreciate it if you were nice to him so okay now I know and so I said well you know let's see how it goes madam shall we let's see how he kicks it off and I kid you not this was his opening line and it was Joe brand is obviously a feminist because she's got hairy legs and she doesn't wash her hair now I to be honest I'm absolutely appalled that that is the level of debate from an academic seat of learning that creams of the best and brightest in our country i I really really found that that hard to take him I'm afraid I to droop it up and I spat him out because because because I kind of felt he deserved it really and if you look at the Oxford Union writ large basically its Parliament isn't it and that is why women still in this day and age tend to be trivialized when they're trying to speak in Parliament look back for example to David Cameron's remarks when he told someone to calm down dear in inverted commas are taking that speech from Michael winners advert for a shore insurance and as we know throughout his career it's unlikely that Michael Winner ever had to say that to a woman in bed and finally just just to give you a sort of idea of the attitude that people have towards me and it is actually quite scary I did a massive advertising awards a few years ago and one particular company's name kept coming up they they were winning everything basically so I was what I thought gently taking the piss out of them and just joking about them and at the end they actually won the overall prize of the evening and the CEO who was a man came up to the stage to receive the trophy from me and he walked towards me and he shook my hand and as I was handing him the trophy he said to me and I always realize that you were a rubbish comic but I never realized what a you were that is the CEO of a very well-known advertising company that you would have heard of I will but I can't remember their name I just need to think about it obviously I've repressed it but um it was one of those companies with three names that it will come to me at some point but the thing is I think that is the ultimate in bullying of a woman right I think it's misogynist he didn't do it loud enough he didn't have the bollocks to do it loud enough for everyone else to hear and I think what he hoped I would do is be so ashamed and humiliated by that that I would just slink off the stage and and not ever come back now I thought I'm not having that you know it's just not on so at that point it was the end of the evening and I said to the audience I'd like to thank you all for coming apart from the CEO of that company who's just said this to me and I told the entire audience and I have to say after that about 15 or 20 of his staff mainly women came up to me and said he treats us like that as well and in this day and age in it's just unbelievable isn't it really so I think that women are constantly fighting this because if you're a very beautiful woman you're treated as if you're a thing and if you're not a very beautiful woman you're treated as if you're some horrible old harridan that you just shut up and go away and I personally believe that that should encourage us to open our mouths more and to keep on and on and on now as a stand-up I just want to talk about women's experience in writing as a stand-up now I was brought up in a little village in Kent I have two brothers all my family are funny which is quite annoying and I always wanted to do jokes when I grew up but you know quite how to get that across and what I what I wanted to do jokes about was feminism really but I think the very important thing to say first of all if you're trying to do comedy it's all very well doing politics but actually if it's not funny don't bother so I made sure right from the kickoff that as a comedian that all the jokes as I did were funny first and they sneaked the politics in under the wire as it were because at least you need to have you need to have an audience if you're if you're going to be preaching at people and as a comedian you know it was important that that might that my jokes were good and that people listen to them now I'm not always saying and that I got it right as a comedian I certainly didn't for a long time I got it wrong I misjudged things um my first joke that I ever did right was I used to wait offstage put a blood capsule in my mouth and I had a big white baggy t-shirt and they used to come on cough what looked like blood all over my t-shirt and they go oh must give up smoking and that never went down very well at all but I loved it I loved it iíve also misjudged things on on a lot of occasions I I particularly remember this is a very bad idea as a pro-choice benefit and I talked about having a termination myself and saying that I was slightly upset because my boyfriend's at the time came in with a bunch of flowers and a bag of jelly babies but I know that's terrible and I'm ashamed of it and they did exactly what you're doing which is going no no you must do that you're such an adolescent so I've learnt a lot over the years in terms of writing and talking about women's experience now I was asked also just to mention a series that we've done three of call getting on which is a series set in a ward full of elderly women in the NHS and that I certainly when we first talked about doing it wanted to make sad and funny and at the same time and because I don't think that happens very often and I also don't think you get very many comedies which are totally focused on women older than the 20s we managed with getting on to get middle-aged women who were the nursing staff and elderly women and virtually nobody else apart from like two blokes into it so you know that sort of seemed to work very well and I have to say since we've made getting on a lot of women have come up to me and talked about their experience in in the Health Service and asked me if I could put their experiences into getting on when we were writing a new series and my favorite was as it actually I was at my nephew's wedding party and a woman who's who was I think she's in her early 90s came up to me and she said oh I've been in hospital recently and something happened to me and I wonder if you could put this in your series getting on and I said well what was it she said well I was put into a mixed ward and basically I was in it in a bed next to an elderly man who wanked for 24 hours a day and I said I'll see what I can do and unfortunately I haven't been able to get that in so I apologize to her we will do hopefully at some point now I am a complete Luddite in terms of how many people on Twitter here oh my god yes you're all under 87 which is my age now I'm I'm not on Twitter um I have to say although there are about three or four people impersonating me on Twitter and their lives do seem to be quite a lot more interesting than mine so I've just let them get on with it in a way there was one very creepy one on Twitter that said they were me and talked about what I was planning to do with my children at the weekend and stuff like that which I found slightly unsettling so I've managed to get rid of them by well by having them killed but um what I would say is because I mean I do I read blogs and I think blogs are absolutely essential to examine every facet of women's lives now I think if you're writing a blog one thing that's really really important is to be yourself however much you think that your experience isn't valid or your blog is not going to be very interesting I totally agree with that because I'm gonna disagree with that because I think everybody I'm sorry I hate Sigmund Freud um no I totally disagree with that because I think everyone's experience um is as valid as anybody else's now one thing I've actually noticed with blogs is you seem to have two sorts you have one sort where the writer is anonymous and they say all kind of very close to the wind in the sense of almost revealing their identity and I think unless you've absolutely decided that eventually going to tell people who you are that that's something that you need to think very carefully about because once your identity is revealed if you're writing a controversial blog well you know don't you that the opprobrium of the entire Daily Mail readership is going to be heaped upon you at once your lted and I actually have a friend who was writing a blog about the mothers in her community and I have to say being pretty vile about them really and she got to the point where people knew it was her because of what she was talking about and so she had to stop blogging and couldn't do it anyway anymore and in a way I kind of feel that served her right really because you know it's it's not on to anonymously um Schlag people off without justifying what you're writing and we all know what trolls are like and I would just say for anyone who's who's pulled out of Twitter because they they can't put up with the abuse my feeling about that is the in theory if you're on Twitter 70 million people or have many people that are in this country have access to you and let's face it what are the odds of even one percent being quite disturbed misogynist they're very high aren't they and you know I think I think the thing is we all have to learn some way of dealing with that abuse you know and I believe you me I have had so much abuse like that I've had abuse in public weirdly I was walking home the other night and through the West scent and some bloke just went past we went or like that you know yes so but also you know I I've put up with the appalling misogynist abuse in the papers that people that men just would not have to put up with quite honestly and for a long time I had a long-running feud with the son writer called Garry Bushell who used to be absolutely vile about women and one of the milder things he wrote about me was that I was a hideous old boiler and I used to say look you know Gary bushels not exactly an oil painting himself is he you know how dare he not unless there is an oil painting around called constipated warthog licking piss off a toilet seat there might well be I don't know so I would say as a blogger um just go forward with a bit of kind of righteous indignation really try not to be put off or find a way of getting support for yourself to not be put off by the sort of basically at vacuous misogynistic men that are going to criticize you and let's face it there's there's a lot of them around you know there aren't a lot of them around you know for a very long time all the tabloids just assumed because I did jokes about men that I must be a lesbian you know to the point where over the years I got petitions from lesbian groups saying please you know can you tell people you're heterosexual because you're giving us a bad name they just didn't want to be associated with me and who can blame them so I don't think I've taught you anything today and I wasn't actually trying to I was just trying to give you a little bit of a perspective on my life and I think actually what in the long run has really helped me is that having been a psychiatric nurse for ten years of my career so far I have to say that individuals with mental health problems are more creative more interesting and just far more powerful in their abuse than any old get in an audience's so I kind of learned how to deal with it very early on now I think just seeing that am i stopping for a bit of a Q&A before I bugger off is that all right um so I hope that was in some way interesting and thank you very much if you haven't got any questions we'll all just go and get oh um okay hi alone Laverne I live in Southwark not far away from you and have you been stalking me haha I just wondered it's a bit of a cheeky question oh here we go I'm sorry everyone 36:23 no I'm a founder of a charity that gives a voice to young people about things that better and I think it would be really wonderful if you could somehow be a distant patron for us oh I say yeah put me on the spot why don't you no thank you that give me give me your details afterwards okay thank you haha great anyone like me to come in to clean their house I'm available yes yeah it's quite happy to do that two men who say I'm not funny I just invite them to come and watch an audience watching me really and I think the thing about the comedy and humor is that actually not all comics are the same you know there are comics that I don't like that I don't think of funny but I know they are because I know that people laugh at them so I would just say be a bit more intelligent really can you come to bloodfest next year but what will I talk about next year I've got some recipes I could I could bring yes okay oh I'm committing myself a bit here what would it take to get you on Twitter please sorry what would it take to get you on Twitter more time I'll give you really I'd well and now I just simply don't have time really who have such a busy life and I can't ever remember over the last well since I've had kids when I actually sat down I thought oh good now I've got 10 minutes to myself so once I sought that problem out maybe I will yes eventually apparently so maybe do they write well they're 11 and 12 so I've got a bit of a while but now they've got their shift in the pub in the evenings I might be um I might be a bit freed up hello hi um do you think that it's getting easier for women in comedy mmm yes I do really because I think there's just a general sort of confidence increase if you like amongst women for example if you look at what happened this year in Edinburgh a fantastic comic called Bridget Christie won the foster's award with a show about feminism and I can't think of a time when that's ever even we've ever even come close to it so I think also women are kind of having the confidence to muck about a bit you know certainly in my day we all thought we had to just come on and shout cut men's bollocks off and see what happened but I think these days women are kind of more they're more subtle than they were you know for example someone like Sarah Millican who I think is a wonderful person and she's a real strong supporter of feminism although she's she's not someone who kind of shouts about it she's what you'd call a quiet feminist and I might eat me personally I'm a bit of a liberal you know I think there's room in feminism for every kind of feminist you know from you know this continuum at one end where you have very sort of left-wing radical feminists who hate men all the way through to feminists that would like wearing nice clothes and wearing high heels now I brought with me is I'm sort of that sort but I look like that sort you know so people get a bit confused really but I think if a woman wants to support women she can do it in any way she likes as far as I'm concerned and welcoming really q pies being thrown at me yes please um hi yeah what's my favorite biscuit well I love custard creams but only if I've got a cup of tea to dunk them in what's yours Mary lank oh yeah I also quite like those ones that are a size of a plate with Smarties on hide Oh Oh sir hello I'm here hello I was just wondering and who's your favorite comedians and do you prefer doing stand-up or going on shows like a brenda's you're fired um I prefer to stand up to anything else really because I think it's kind of the pure form of the art really and it suits my lifestyle very well you go there you do your jokes they laugh hopefully and you go home whereas like telly is such a nightmare you know I mean I for example trinny and Susannah as an example of telly was like I you know I just ended up looking like some Dowager kind of elderly bloody bozo and I was so uncomfortable and also I think TV is kind of very manipulative it's very prescriptive and you know I just so many occasions been disappointed in the way that they've treated women in terms of it being most important for them to look good before they open their mouths the sort of thing so we'd stand up you can go on that you could anything you bloody like it's great how do we get more female comedians on TV on programs like mocks a week it just depresses me every time I see it that there's hardly ever any women on them well I think the answer to mock the week is quite sensibly most female comedians don't want to go on it and and a lot of very nice male comedians don't either and that's what people don't realize is that actually amongst them male comic Fraternity you've got a group of male comics who are quite happy to compete in that arena and to elbow others out the way in to shout others down but also you've got a load of lovely sweet temper DeGeneres male comedians like Robin inch for example or someone like that he and I actually the last time I did mock the weight he and I were on it together and we were both completely traumatized afterwards so I don't think it's just women that find it a problem I think it's nice nice blokes as well you know and there's one in every town come on let's be honest so how do we get more programs with with nice comedians how do we get more programs when well I mean again I you know you have to go all the way up to the to the top and there are more women commissioning editors coming along and doing really great things but it just takes time really and the problem is you get a great woman commissioning editor who commissioned something that she leaves and goes on to another job and gets replaced by someone else who doesn't like what you do and then you have to take a step backwards so it just takes very long time really high yeah no we well we all did different types of jokes my dad did appalling jokes to be honest because he's a dad you know and so if he did a joke we would have God's sake and put our face in the soup or whatever it was and my big brother is is brilliant I'm very good at telling jokes and we all laugh a lot at him and my mom is just outrageously badly behaved in many ways and that's why we love for her so we're all a mixture really we do right okay what I would say first of all is research the comedy circuit in London because there is a big one and go to the clubs that you think are the most gentle to start off with because I think if you start off with like a really rough place like The Late Show at the Comedy Store which basically Friday night at midnight and a lot of kind of city boys just vomiting over your feet which very unpleasant and being quite abusive as well but there are a lot of nice small clubs which are kind of very welcoming and they're encouraging you know so I would say write what you think is a very good five minutes and go and do it at the smaller clubs right five heckle put-downs ranging in power from whimsical to nuclear if you have to start off with nuclear you might as well go home really if you're just starting off but they're always useful to have it's kind of like armor you know um you know feel free to Nick other people's put-downs because they all seem to be shared around the circuit anyway but to me the biggest thing always was when I started off if audiences sense that you're in any way faltering or you've been upset by what someone said or their reaction it seems to be human nature that they don't encourage you and support you and go no we'll give you another chance they just try and kill you so I just always pretend that I don't care however appalling someone is being to me and believe you me that has happened a lot and you know I've just had blokes let's say the most appalling things at student gigs you know and threatening to kill you but like in the most unpleasant way imaginable but it but if you look like you're getting upset then they just do it more you know you just have to do a bit of acting really and pretend you don't care and I think that really helps hello what would you tell your 20 21 year old self what would I tell my 21 year old self well um by the time I was 21 I've actually been living on my own and working for four or five years so I got thrown out of home and I was 16 quite badly behaved I suppose and so by 21 I kind of felt that I was I was grown up and I I was a very responsible person because I'd you know I've had really serious really shitty jobs that I hated that stuck out um just to earn money so I think I would tell myself to do stand-up a bit earlier because I didn't start stand-up - I was thirty because I didn't really feel confident enough so I think when you're thirty it really care quite so much what people think about you put it 21 you're slightly might be sensitive hi yeah hi do you want to go for a you do don't you look at the state of you gone madam please do honestly well I think we've gone past the time any where haven't we Justine so one more okay okay I was called do you motivate yourself say that again how do you motivate yourself how do I motivate myself um oh god how do I motivate myself well it's quite way because I think of myself as it as a lazy person but actually if I look at the reality of it I get up about half five quarter 6:00 every day and I don't go to bed till about midnight normally and I just have to do a huge amount every day and what I think that's about is is wanting to do it really I mean I've got two lovely kids so I want to do lots of things with I love my job and so actually I'm very lucky and I don't actually need to motivate myself that much I want to do all the stuff that I do and I just wish days were a bit longer so I could fit a bit more in really and drugs

Channel: Mumsnet

Views: 31,610

Rating: 4.4709678 out of 5

Keywords: Jo Brand (TV Writer), Mumsnet (Website), humour, Funny, Feminism (Literary School Or Movement)

Id: RbSFRiUPJzE

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 10 2013