Dawn French and her partner Jennifer Saunders showed the world that women can be funny. Their goofy, yet satirical routines that included farcical and ludicrous work transformed the comedy landscape for women in the UK. “We never talked about being feminists, we just were,” says Dawn French. “Doing our job was being a feminist. That was the point of it really,” she continued in a new BBC documentary about their partnership. According to the documentary, when the duo first started back in the 1970s, the comedy scene was far from what it is today. For starters, the industry was mainly male-dominated where old-school stand-up comedians such as Bernard Manning were mainstream. In today’s world, these routines would be considered controversial.
“When I was growing up, the women [on-screen] were either bikini-clad babes, or not very attractive mothers-in-law, and were the butt of jokes, rather than telling the joke,” said the actor and director, Kathy Burke who appeared with the dup on their sketch show. Maureen Vincent, French, and Saunders’ agent for more than 40 years said in the documentary that many TV executives who were in charge of what programs and performers appeared on national television thought women were not funny. He said that “were actually heard to say so”. “Most of the comedic women were playing supporting roles to men in sitcoms,” he continued.
But at the end of the 1980s, the scene started to change. As French and Saunders came into the comedy scene, many other women also joined and proved that they could be comedians as well, the funny ones. Along with this duo, many other female comedians such as Pamela Stephenson and Victoria Wood began to change this establishment thinking, slowly, but steadily. All these funny women showed that women could easily stand alone, or as a double act, and become popular and funny.
Speaking about how the duo met, both French and Saunders wanted to become drama teachers when they met at the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1978. Saunders said, “I remember thinking she looked quite old-fashioned in a funny way and quite grown-up because she arrived and she was ready.” “I arrived [at] the other end of the scale, completely unformed and unready,” she continued. French also recalls her first impression of Saunders and says that she thought Saunders was beautiful, elegant, and definitely posher than she was. “I think she found me quite annoying,” she says. “I talked a lot. I thought she was wondrous but I didn’t think we ever were going to be chums,” French commented.
It was when they shared a flat together, that both women realized that they shared the same sense of humor and the same threshold of boredom. So they started inventing fun and pranks to keep each other amused. “We’d dress up as punks and go on the tube and see if we could frighten anybody and we’d shout things to people on the street,” says Saunders. The pair then began to perform comedy sketches at the actors’ cabaret at drama school. But it was actually at a comedy show in a strip club in London’s Soho in 1980, that the duo first began to break the stereotypes.
