They are called Tania Dutel, Alexandra Pizzagali or Farah. All are comedians. As women, they suffered gender discrimination in their profession. To turn this situation to their advantage, they all decided to laugh about it. All explain why and how in Women prefer to laugh, a documentary broadcast by France 4 on Friday evening. “My darling, a black actress in France, with an accent like mine. Hmm, you’re going to have a hard time!”, The comedian Roukiata Ouedraogo laughs in the film.
Marie Mandy, the director of this film, held out her microphone to women with a committed sense of humor, the Belgian comedian Farah. The latter shares at the microphone of Europe 1 her view of the current situation of women in the field of laughter. “Since MeToo, we have passed a first stage: young people have accepted that there was more than one female comedian. Before, there were one or two per decade. We accepted that women were funny and also funny than men”, she analyzes.
“Making someone laugh makes it easier to convey messages”
“Now, we have to make it understood that there is not just one woman, that there is not THE woman comedian, but women comedians in the plural, in gender and in subject matter. Women Comedians don’t all talk about their periods or motherhood,” she warns.
According to Farah, laughter is a very good vehicle for conveying feminist messages. “Laughter is a positive emotion, so making someone laugh allows you to convey messages that would be much more difficult to convey in a classic debate at a dinner party,” she believes. “When we speak in the first degree, people are more likely to turn their backs and camp on their positions. Whereas once we have made someone laugh, even if in the end the person does not agree with us, there is something that facilitates the acceptance of another vision of things.
Women prefer to laugh is broadcast Friday evening on France 4 (channel 14 of TNT), from 9:10 p.m.