Comedy and Inclusivity: Who Gets to Be Funny, and How Rooms Change
The history of comedy is partly a history of who was allowed on the bill. How the line-ups widened, what actually changed it, and what promoters can do in their own rooms.
Every comedy scene has an unwritten rule about who belongs on stage. For most of the twentieth century, in most clubs, that meant straight white men, with a few exceptions per night. Comedy inclusivity is the long, uneven process of widening that bill, and the parallel question of who the jokes are for. This page covers how it happened, what actually made the difference, and what it looks like in practice for promoters and comedians today.
Disability has its own practical dimension, from step-free venues to captioning, so it gets a dedicated page: see accessibility in comedy. For the ethics of jokes about identity, see comedy ethics.
Alternative comedy began as an inclusion argument
The alternative comedy movement is partly an inclusivity story. When British alternative comedy emerged around 1979, at the Comedy Store in Soho and then the Comic Strip, one of its founding principles was a rejection of the racist and sexist material that dominated working men's clubs and television at the time. Performers like Alexei Sayle made that a stated position. The scene also gave early stages to women such as French and Saunders and, later, Jo Brand.
It was not a utopia. The early British alt circuit was still overwhelmingly male and white. But it established something important: that what you joke about, and who you joke at, is a choice with consequences. Our history of British alternative comedy tells that story in full, and what is alt comedy? explains the wider movement.
How the bill widened
Representation in comedy has rarely changed because the industry decided it should. It has changed because performers built their own rooms and then proved there was an audience.
Women
Women have always been in comedy, from Moms Mabley and Phyllis Diller to Joan Rivers, but for decades clubs and television treated "female comic" as a novelty slot. Changes came in waves. Women's nights and showcases gave performers stage time that mixed bills did not. Jenny Eclair became the first woman to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award outright in 1995. In the UK the Funny Women awards, founded in 2003, created a dedicated route for new talent. In the US, the success of performers such as Tig Notaro, Ali Wong and Maria Bamford in the 2010s killed the lazy argument that audiences would not turn up for women headliners.
Black comedians
Black comedy has its own long history, through the Chitlin' Circuit, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor and Moms Mabley. Television caught up slowly. HBO's Def Comedy Jam (from 1992) and The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), directed by Spike Lee, showed huge audiences for Black stand-up that mainstream clubs had underserved. Sketch shows from In Living Color to Chappelle's Show and Key & Peele carried that into television.
Queer comedians
Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres and Margaret Cho were for years among the few openly queer stars. The 2010s brought a generation for whom queerness was simply part of the material: Tig Notaro, Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher (who made Take My Wife in 2016), Hannah Gadsby, Mae Martin and Bowen Yang, who joined Saturday Night Live in 2019. Trans comedians like Patti Harrison now work at the centre of the alt scene rather than its edge.
Asian, Latino, Muslim and Indigenous comedy
Margaret Cho's sitcom All-American Girl (1994) was a landmark, and a cautionary tale about network interference. Two decades later, Ali Wong, Ronny Chieng, Jimmy O. Yang and Atsuko Okatsuka were headlining specials on their own terms. Cristela Alonzo's Cristela (2014) made her the first Latina to create, produce and star in her own US network sitcom. Muslim comedians built a wave of TV in a few years: Ramy Youssef's Ramy (2019), Mo Amer's Mo (2022) and Nida Manzoor's We Are Lady Parts (2021). And Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi with an Indigenous writers' room and cast, proved that a comedy could be specific to one community and loved by everyone.
Representation versus tokenism
Booking one woman or one person of colour on an otherwise identical line-up is not inclusion. It puts the weight of an entire group on one performer and often pushes them into material about their identity because that is what the room expects.
Genuine inclusion looks different:
- Line-ups where no one is "the" woman, "the" queer act or "the" Black comic.
- Comedians from marginalised groups doing whatever material they like, including material that has nothing to do with their identity.
- Behind-the-scenes diversity: bookers, producers, writers' rooms and commissioners, not just faces on stage.
- Audiences that reflect the city the show is in.
Writers' rooms matter especially. A show can have a diverse cast reading jokes written entirely by one kind of person. Programmes such as NBC's Late Night Writers Workshop and studio writing fellowships have tried to widen that pipeline; the shift towards smaller streaming-era rooms has made breaking in harder for everyone, as our page on comedy education explains.
What still keeps people out
Even with a more varied top tier, the grassroots of comedy can still be hostile. The common barriers are mundane:
- Late nights in bars. Open mics typically run late, in drinking venues, which excludes parents, carers, people who do not drink and anyone who feels unsafe getting home.
- Unpaid stage time. Years of free spots favour people who can afford to work for nothing. That is a class barrier above all.
- Bringer shows. Rooms that require performers to bring paying friends exclude anyone without a local network.
- Hostile rooms. Heckling aimed at a performer's identity, and hosts who let it slide, push people out of comedy quickly.
- Access. Venues up a flight of stairs exclude disabled performers and audiences outright. See comedy accessibility.
Class: the barrier nobody books around
Conversations about comedy inclusivity tend to focus on identities you can see on a poster. Class is harder to see and arguably the biggest filter of all. Becoming a professional comedian usually takes years of unpaid or barely paid stage time, travel to gigs in other towns at your own expense, and in Britain a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe that can cost a performer thousands of pounds in venue hire, accommodation and publicity before a single ticket is sold.
That favours people with savings, family support or flexible jobs. It also shapes what comedy sounds like: if most of the people who survive the unpaid years went to university and work in media, the material will reflect that world. Paying open spots, free-to-perform festivals and venues outside expensive city centres all chip away at this, as does the internet, which has let some comedians build an audience without paying their way through the circuit first.
Does inclusive comedy mean "safe" comedy?
This is the question the debate keeps returning to. The short answer is no. Inclusion is about who is on stage and who the joke is aimed at, not about which topics are allowed. Some of the most inclusive comedy is extremely filthy and dark: Gadsby's material on trauma, Wong's on pregnancy, the gleefully transgressive humour of queer alt nights.
What inclusivity does challenge is a specific kind of joke: one whose whole engine is that a group of people is inherently ridiculous. There is research behind that concern. Studies of "disparagement humour" have found it can make people who already hold prejudices more tolerant of discrimination (we cover this on the comedy and social change page). That is not an argument for banning jokes. It is an argument that the target of a joke is part of its meaning.
Building an inclusive room: a checklist
If you run a night, these are the changes that make the biggest difference:
- Book deliberately. Look beyond the comics who email you first. Watch other nights, ask performers for recommendations, and avoid the single "diversity slot".
- Pay everyone, even a little. Paid spots widen who can afford to do comedy.
- Brief your host. The MC sets the tone. Agree how to handle heckling aimed at a performer's identity before the show.
- Publish a short code of conduct. Make it clear harassment of performers or audience members will not be tolerated, and say who to tell.
- Fix the venue. Step-free access, accessible toilets and clear access info on the listing. Our accessibility guide covers the details.
- Vary the time. An early or weekend afternoon show reaches parents, carers and people who do not want a late night in a bar.
- Make sign-up fair. A transparent open mic list beats who-you-know booking.
For how grassroots scenes organise themselves, see comedy communities and our page on micro-venues.
Frequently asked questions
What does inclusivity mean in comedy?
It means two things: who gets booked, hired and promoted (women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, disabled and working-class performers), and who the comedy is for. An inclusive room is one where a wider range of performers can get stage time and a wider range of audiences can laugh without being the target.
Does inclusive comedy mean comedy with no offensive jokes?
No. Some of the most inclusive comedy is extremely rude. Inclusivity is about who is on the bill and who the jokes are aimed at, not about avoiding difficult subjects. Comedians from marginalised groups often write the sharpest material about their own experience.
Is comedy making bigotry socially acceptable?
Some research suggests disparagement humour can make already-prejudiced people more tolerant of discrimination, because the joking frame suggests the normal rules are suspended. But comedy has also helped normalise groups that were once mocked. Which way it pushes depends on who the joke is aimed at.
How can comedy shows be more inclusive?
Book varied line-ups rather than a single 'diversity slot', pay fairly, have a clear code of conduct for performers and audience, make sure the venue is physically accessible, and give new performers a fair way to get stage time. Hosts set the tone, so brief them.