But "comedian" to me suggests the ability to tell jokes in isolation, rather than as part of a conversation with someone you gel with, which in my experience is when humour most happens. Maybe that is more a male thing, with the abstraction and the competitiveness and whatever. Having said that, I couldn't do it.
What matters is the ability to do it in a room filled with strangers, people of whose own sense of humour one is not aware. This is probably why a lot of stand-up humour relies on stereotypes**: it's a way of restricting the humour to assumed areas of common knowledge. When one is with one's friends, you can play with their (real and fantasy) natures; one can build on previous jokes involving these (real and imagined) characteristics. One can say things that aren't going to be taken the wrong way and thus won't end in physical retaliation. This is all easy, which is why so many of us can do it. We never have to leave our comfort zone.
Doing it on stage is
entirely different and very few men can do it successfully. I couldn't. (But, thankfully, I wouldn't want to even try.)
It requires a lot of self-belief and courage; it requires many of those characteristics that we have been brought up to believe are "not the proper province of women". In time, there will be more female comics and comedians, because women are just as capable of doing it as men. But good*** male and female comics will remain a tiny majority of their respective genders.
** - In both good and bad ways (observational humour and racist quips respectively).
*** - The downside of having to have non-comic attributes to get on - such as a rhino-like skin - is that quite a few so-called comics aren't that funny. There's one comic, who's had a few series on the radio, who just about bombed on one of those
Live at the Apollo-like shows. I've never heard him make one humorous remark. (He must be friends with someone at the BBC.) And I expect this explains those female comics who've been criticised above: they're in front of us as much because they're willing to try as their talent. (Having said that, some female comedians associated with "women's-problems jokes" are seriously funny once they're prised away from what they thought they had to say to get a laugh earlier in their careers.)
