I don't know why you lot are accusing Andrew Lawrence of not being a Comedian. I thought his Facebook response was hilarious:
Here are a few clarifications of what I meant in my October 25th post- 'Can't help but notice increasingly...'.
-A post which has attracted a level of attention I neither wanted, nor courted.
Firstly, here is what I intended by the term 'ethnic comedian':
A comedian from a minority background who uses their own ethnicity as a foundation for the whole of their act, rather than looking at wider aspects of society and exploring outside of their own personal experience.
Now, here is what I intended by the term
'Women-posing-as-comics':
Director of BBC television Danny Cohen's aggressive diversity politics are well documented.
Quotas have been introduced, whereby every panel show must book a certain number of female and ethnic comedians, regardless of ability or merit.
Objectively then, there are comedians on panel shows who are there first and foremost because of their gender or ethnicity.
Some of these comedians are very good.
Because there is currently not a sufficiently large enough pool of female comedians with the requisite experience and ability to fill the quota, there are females who've been booked for these shows who are either poor comedians, not comedians at all, or aspiring female comedians that are still learning their craft, but have not yet reached a decent professional standard.
These females I have described as 'women-posing-as-comedians'.
The upshot of all that is that there are still many women coming across incredibly badly on panel shows, which is helping to perpetuate the myth that women aren't funny.
The hope is that women currently on panel shows, will further legitimise stand-up comedy as a career for women and encourage other women to take up comedy. Which is an admirable aim.
Unfortunately for every female who gets on a panel show, there are very many male comedians with more ability and experience who are not and will never get the opportunity to be on one. I think that's a great shame for TV audiences.
There are also male comedians who've been doing these shows for far too many years and have become incredibly stale, too lazy to move on to other things.Some of them are fat and balding.
Oh, and I don't have a problem with properly regulated immigration and I don't have a problem with immigrants.
I do have a great deal of concern about the lack of border controls in this country and subsequent gross overpopulation as a result of EU legislation, which I believe adversely affects all our quality of life.
Something needs to be done about that BBC quota that requires every panel show to have a 'certain number
* of comedians' who 'use their own ethnicity as a foundation for the whole of their act, rather than looking at wider aspects of society and exploring outside of their own personal experience'. Although thinking about it, that does explain Jeremy Clarkson.
And I love his 'for every female who gets on a panel show, there are very many male comedians with more ability and experience who are not and will never get the opportunity to be on one'. How he managed to resit not following that with 'Me! Me!' I don't know.
* Andrew, I think you'll find that number is '0'.