Making feminism funny

“Feminism is so toxic now,” muses Mary Bourke, in her disconcertingly distinctive manner: a calm, quietly-spoken but fiery-eyed fury. “So much toxic baggage, that word.”

We’re on a plush sofa in a posh private members club in Soho, a slightly odd setting for a conversation about a cause that once elicited hunger strikes and the burning of public buildings. Just to emphasise the anomalous air, sitting behind us in full "mwah, darling!" mode is Davina McCall, presenter of prime-time reality television and ads for grey-concealing hair dye.

“She has got lovely hair,” Bourke confirms, having snatched a quick peek. Again, it’s not the sort of thing you’d imagine from Emmeline Pankhurst. But then we’re in a very different era.

The Dublin-born comic is here to discuss her new Fringe show, Muffragette, which promises to give feminism a more accessible, post-millennial makeover. How does Muffragettism differ? “No difference,” she readily admits, it’s just “a really crass rebranding” — but one that might just be welcome.

The concept came to Bourke last November, after she read a contentious interview with food writer, Mary Berry. Asked about feminism, the Great British Bake Off judge scoffed at the notion, then offered some curious business advice. “This awful stuff about ‘never hire women, they always get pregnant, they always leave,'” Bourke recalls. “And that feminists shout at men.”

Actually Bourke’s comedian husband, Simon Clayton, will be making a cameo each night, and the couple will then do their own show, Bourke and No Hair, an hour after Muffragette ends. It all sounds fairly harmonious. But the comedy scene itself is also culpable. “The misogyny on the new act circuit is just abysmal,” she says. “What happens is all the open mic-ers just play to each other. And when you play to other comics, you try to shock them.”

It’s a sort of self-perpetuating ring of misogyny? “It’s a rape circle!” But didn’t Bourke used to do a rape joke too? “I had a great rape joke,” she concurs, “a brilliant rape joke, thank you very much. A feminist rape joke.”

Search for her name on YouTube to hear what one of those sounds like – and she’d probably be happy to discuss it with you afterwards, as an advocate of confronting comedians. “I will always pull people up on stuff if it’s misogynistic, and just ask them why they do it. Not the joke itself, but what’s the motivation behind it?”

Presumably to shock, primarily? “Yeah, and is that enough? People are really surprised [when I complain], but if you put it out there you should be able to defend what you do.”

Also increasingly infuriating for Bourke is girl-on-girl negativity, the “Daily Mail takedown” as she puts it. “Very depressing,” she says. “Someone like Liz Jones has a go at Rihanna and you think ‘Oh, Rihanna just does what Rihanna does.’ It’s nothing.”

“I’m always amazed when people say they’re not feminists,” she says. “People obviously have answers like ‘I’m a girly girl’ or ‘I like make-up’. But no, I think something happened in the 1970s where feminism got derailed, it took a bit of a strange turn and left the mainstream.”

“At the beginning of the show I always ask ‘how many people here are feminists?’ and in all the previews I’ve done so far, I’ve had maybe two people put their hand up.”

That’s not uncommon, I venture — ask how many people are human beings and you’d probably only get half the hands up. But chatting to those audiences has confirmed her belief that the concept of ‘feminism’ is now almost counter-productive. “I couldn’t get a show off the ground if I put ‘feminist’ in the title,” she says. “People look at that and think ‘oh, some dreary woman shouting at us'.”

As we prepare to head off I suggest that she pops over and gives a promotional badge to Davina, perhaps get it in the papers. “Too shy,” she says, tactfully, but clearly has her own plans in place. The Muffragette movement starts here.