Just days after being called out for its male dominated bills

Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club is to launch a weekly all-female comedy night, just days after being called out for the lack of women on its bills.

Crushing! kicks off next Thursday, compered by Hatty Preston, pictured, and also featuring Kay Nicholson, JoJo Sutherland, Blank Peng and Kate Tracey. 

The venue says the new night demonstrates its ‘commitment to offering more stage time and support to women in comedy’.

Just last week, Lucy Beaumont tweeted a number of all-male line-ups from comedy clubs across the country, including Hot Water, and asked the Liverpool club: ‘Where’s all your fucking women?’

Subsequent analysis by Chortle found that of the comedians listed for its prestigious weekend line-up shows one the next two-and-a-half months, just 14 per cent were female.

Announcing the new night, Hot Water co-founder Paul Blair said: ‘We’ve consistently featured a strong line-up of women across all our shows, from emerging stars to some of the top headliners in the industry.

‘With this new show, we’re offering even more opportunities for female performers to thrive, addressing the ongoing gender imbalance in the comedy scene nationwide.’

Further research by this website suggests the club has some way to go towards achieving gender balance. 

Of the last 100 stand-up and comedy roast videos the club has posted to its hugely successful YouTube channel, just one has featured a solo female comedian, and four more contained both men and women. 

Almost half those clips featured regular compere Paul Smith, but even taking him out of the equation means the solitary clip – featuring Preston – is still less than two per cent of the total.

Crushing! takes place at Hot Water’s Blackstock Market home every Thursday, with free entry, or £5 to guarantee entry (book here). The club says there will also be  a female show manager and an all-woman security detail ‘ensuing a supportive and inclusive environment’.

When Chortle first reported Hot Water’s gender imbalance last week, the club responded by tweeting out that almost 90 per cent of our reviews published at the Edinburgh Fringe were written by men. 

Editor Steve Bennett admitted: ‘That’s not a great figure, and a couple of recent initiatives to widen the diversity of our team haven’t paid off… but the figures come from a very small sample size. We only had six reviews this festival – compared to the hundreds of comedians Hot Water employs over the year – and I wrote more than 60 per cent of the reviews myself, so that’s bound to skew the statistics. ’

Of the acts we reviewed this Fringe, 52 per cent were male and 41 per cent female, the rest mixed groups or non-binary performers.

Published: 20 Sep 2024