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As if it weren’t hard enough to stand onstage in front of a stone-faced crowd and tell jokes, women comedians in Miami have to deal with misogynistic jeers too. In a scene long dominated by men, sometimes the heckling even comes from fellow male comics.
When 25-year-old Dom Gelin began making the rounds on the Miami standup circuit earlier this year, she was shocked at the open sexism she found in comedy rooms. One time at Taurus, a bar in Coconut Grove, she wore a tight-fitting T-shirt, and a man approached her after her set to say, “I’m sure you know this, but you’ve got great tits.” Another night, a male comic said, “I’m not going to sexually harass you. Yet.”
“And he thought it was hilarious,” she says. “I knew he was kidding, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around how he thought that was funny at all.”
As part of this week’s feature story about female comedians taking over Miami’s scene, New Times sat down with local comics Emily Winter, Dom Gelin, Elise Valderrama, and Kat Toledo after a show on a recent Tuesday night to find out some of the annoying shit people say to them. If you want to avoid making cringe-worthy comments to a comic, watch this video.
