Title: She’s Having a Laugh: 25 of Australia’s Funniest Women on Life, Love and Comedy
Author: George McEnroe (editor)
Genre: Non-fiction
Intended audience: Adult
Date Read: 17/12/2020– 20/12/2020
Rating: ★★★
Review:
I have to admit that given the title of this collection of essays, I was kind of expecting them to be, well, funnier.
Maybe it’s just that my sense of humour didn’t gel with the majority of these 25 women. In many cases, though, I don’t think the authors were intentionally setting out to be funny, and maybe my expectations were at fault.
There were a couple of essays that I found quite moving, especially Jodie J Hill’s chapter about performing for deployed military. I had read Corinne Grant’s I’m Not A Female Comedian essay somewhere before, but I found it quite powerful once again. Anita Heiss’ Seven Deadly Sins and Lorin Clark’s The ‘Women in Comedy’ Conversation were the ones I found the funniest. These were all towards the end of the book, so for a while I thought I was probably only going to give a two-star rating, but these bumped it up to three.
I do want to address the issue of there being an n-word casually dropped in the second or third essay. This may have been fine if the essay was by a black person reclaiming the word, but as far as I could tell, this was a white author using the word to demonstrate how inappropriate hers and her mother’s sense of humour were. I’m sure there were any number of ways that this could have been demonstrated without using a racial slur. I think that coloured the rest of my reading of the collection, even though it’s not the other authors’ fault that this one used inappropriate language.
I will admit I am generally not much of a non-fiction reader, and maybe that also affected my enjoyment. I am sure that the right reader will really enjoy these insights into Australian women in the spotlight.
This review is part of my 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge. Click here for more information.
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