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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Top Bitch

Jenny Eclair

Channel 5 · 1998 · 60 min

An hour of nineties British smut and aggressive physical comedy.

Jenny Eclair attacks the stage in red stilettos, substituting the polite expectations of female comedy for aggressive physical clowning and deliberate filth. Her energy is breathless. She paces rather than sits, acting out her premises. A bit about enduring a routine smear test turns into a contortionist act. Another segment addresses post-childbirth anatomy by comparing herself to a stretched-out wool sweater that requires rolled-up duvets in place of tampons. She positions herself as an anti-wife and an unapologetic smut peddler, leaning hard into the grotesque.

Filmed at London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre, Top Bitch immortalizes the hour that made Eclair the first solo female comedian to win the Edinburgh Fringe’s Perrier Award in 1995, though this video recording was released a few years later. Her loud, expletive-heavy approach to the female body was a direct provocation to the male-dominated UK comedy circuit of the nineties. The Independent named her the standout comic of the year. The set eventually became a regular subject of academic study, analyzed by gender researchers for how effectively it weaponized dirty jokes and physical space against traditional hierarchies.

The set list

2 bits

  1. Having a six-year-old daughter

    Expresses excitement for her daughter's teenage years so she can steal and have sex with her boyfriends, telling her she did it because she failed to clean her room.

  2. Observations on motherhood

    Declares that 'All mothers are bitches from hell.'

How it plays

Tone
Obnoxiously and gratingly coarse, beyond rude, aggressive, and transgressive.
On stage
Self-described 'pissed-up old whore who smokes too much' ('The Rotting Old Whore of Comedy'), characterized by critic John Doyle as a 'man-eating, child-hating barracuda.'
About
Female body and sexuality, Motherhood and mothers, Profanity and expletives, Gender dynamics

What the critics said

Regarded as unprintable and gratingly coarse by television critic John Doyle, who admitted to being vaguely appalled while predicting female audiences would thoroughly enjoy it; academically analyzed as a paradoxical work that both overturns dominant gender hierarchies and risks reinforcing sexist readings.

In the room: Overturns traditional gender hierarchies by making men in the audience laugh at female-directed humor while strongly appealing to female viewers.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: comedy.co.uk, extra.shu.ac.uk, theglobeandmail.com, watch.plex.tv.

Backstory

Filmed version of her Perrier Award-winning stage show, notable in feminist and comedic discourse for directly challenging traditional feminine speech styles by adopting conventions of stand-up often associated with masculinity.

Details

Released
Taped
Her Majesty's Theatre
Runtime
60 min
Where
Channel 5
Honors
Perrier Comedy Award
Topics

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