Reclaiming Female Authorship in British Television Comedy, 2010-2020

Female comedy writer/performers have radically changed the mediascape and contemporary iterations of womanhood from 2010 to 2020. Though American TV comedy has typically been at the centre of discussions surrounding women in television comedy, this thesis contends that there has been a veritable explosion of female-centred and female-authored comedies in Britain that are equally as significant but have received less academic attention during this period. As such, this project examines four case studies – the oeuvres of Michaela Coel (Chewing Gum, I May Destroy You), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Crashing, Fleabag), Caitlin/Caroline Moran (Raised by Wolves), and Julia Davis (Lizzie and Sarah, Hunderby, Camping, Sally4Ever) – to examine how these writer/performers revise and reinscribe our understanding of comedy through specific televisual techniques, arguing that, while comedy has typically been androcentric and Americentric, these women reclaim agency previously denied in the genre. Using Kathleen Rowe’s ground-breaking theory of the ‘unruly’ woman (1995) to underpin this analysis, I contend that there need to be new ways of understanding the contribution women have made to comedy in the 2010s by defining these women as 'fastidious'. I use the term ‘fastidious’ to outline how women demonstrate delicacy and precision in their tightly and carefully crafted TV series. This is not to suggest that the ‘unruly’ woman conceptualised in the 1990s does not demonstrate these qualities, rather, that the ‘messiness’ associated with this figure needs to be reconfigured to account for the controlled and measured attention to detail that goes into creating female-authored comedy. As I argue, ‘fastidious’ women, through their careful and cautious sensibilities, navigate the (political) landscape to produce spaces in which women’s humour can thrive.