It's a Joke, Joyce: Australia's Funny Women

by Wendy Harmer

Here they all are! The music hall comediennes and cross dressers, the vaudeville soubrettes, the first radio and TV performers, the musical comedies, the cabaret club circuit, sit-coms, the boom of the stand-up comics and the new clubs of the late 70s and 80s. It's a Joke, Joyce is an album of over 100 women who over the years have made Australia laugh. Alongside revealing and hilarious interviews, there are fascinating photos, anecdotes, and each woman's chosen script or cartoon.

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Wendy Harmer is an Australian author, writer, radio show host and comedienne. A former political journalist, Wendy is the author of seven books for adults: It's a Joke, Joyce (1989), Backstage Pass (1991), Love Gone Wrong (1995), So anyway-- : Wendy’s words of wisdom (1997) (a collection of her weekly columns from The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend Magazine), Farewell My Ovaries (2005), Nagging for Beginners (2006), Love and Punishment (2006), and Roadside Sisters published in April 2009.

Harmer's books have been described as being in the genre of Chick lit. They are popular light novels and very humorous.

Wendy Harmer has also written a series for young readers called the Pearlie in the Park . They are bestsellers in Australia and have been published in ten countries around the world. The animated Pearlie series has screened on Australian TV.

I Lost My Mobile at the Mall (2009) is Wendy's first novel for teens.

She has written for numerous Australian magazines and has been a contributing columnist for Australian Women's Weekly, New Weekly, The Good Weekend and HQ.

Wendy contributed to Marie Claire’s What Women Want in 2002, My Sporting Hero edited by Greg Gowden which was published by Random House Australia and a volume of The Best Ever Sports Writing . . . 200 Years of Sport Writing. She also wrote the libretto for Baz Luhrmann’s Opera Australia production of Lake Lost.

Reviews

[Mender · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. Lots of points for the style of this book. The introduction is done very well, explaining how most of the sketches were performed with men, or written by men, or produced by men, and that female comedy isn't separate but a collaboration. This book is a celebration of one side of comedy, and the new forms female comedy has been able to take over the past decades. A feminist book comfortable in its own skin.

Another big plus is that it introduces the work, interviews the artists when possible, and then lets the work speak for itself. The original sketch dialogues is here and that is amazing stuff.

What I get from it most clearly is the truth of the phrase drama is easy, comedy is hard. Because with just a bare script, you can see that each routine is a bit funny. But very few made me laugh out loud. Because so much of what gave them their power must have been intonation, timing, inflection, expression. The words don't capture what a comedian brings to their work. I am deeply impressed.

I'm not sure why they chose the format they did for this book. It's an A4 softcover book which is why I think it took me so long to read it. First impressions are everything, and this book I fear would have looked dated and cheap right when it was published, because anyone with a printer, any school and office, prints out on A4 paper with a cardboard cover. This book took effort to make but I think the presentation inadvertently belittled it. It's an awkward size, you can't carry it in your handbag, it's hard to stop it from getting bent pages. I don't know if it did well when first published but if not, I suspect that its format had something to do with it. It's like they made a coffee table book but were too cheap to put a hard cover on it.

But it's good, and I'm glad I read it, even though I knew almost none of the names. It's a slice of history, and fascinating for it.