Why Men and Lesbians Dominate Comedy
Stand-up comedy is dominated by men and lesbians. Why? Here's my theory: it's mainly because comedy is risky, and men and lesbians take bigger risks. This behavior is highly innate for men, and plausibly innate for lesbians.
I. The Numbers
Men and lesbians are vastly overrepresented in stand-up comedy. Let’s look at men first, where the trend is more familiar. Netflix has released over 300 stand-up comedy specials, and about 75% are by men.1 This pattern reaches back decades: when Paste and Rolling Stone each ranked the best stand-up comedians of all time, men claimed 77% of spots.2 Both rankings placed Richard Pryor at number one. George Carlin and Chris Rock closely followed, landing in the top five of both rankings.
The disparity has long been observed in the club scene, as well. Over a recent three-year period, men were 86% of performers at a major NYC comedy club.3 (A club that was female-owned, no less.)
Lesbians in stand-up are even more overrepresented, especially among women. Surveys consistently find that lesbians are just 2% of the female population.4 Yet among Netflix specials by women and non-binary people, 17% are by out lesbians.5 Hannah Gadsby and Fortune Feimster each have three specials; Wanda Sykes and Ellen DeGeneres each have two. There’s one special each by Sam Jay, Tig Notaro, Robby Hoffman, and Urzila Carlson.
Moreover, in the Paste and Rolling Stone lists, lesbians claim a whopping 32% of spots held by women. Moms Mabley appears in both lists, as does Sykes; and Lily Tomlin, Notaro, and DeGeneres are each listed once.
Or take a recent documentary about the history of women in comedy.6 I heard soundbites from 24 female stand-ups, and seven were lesbian: Carol Leifer, Marsha Warfield, and Rosie O’Donnell; plus Mabley, Sykes, Tomlin, and DeGeneres.
Gay male comedians provide a sharp contrast. On Netflix, they possess only 3% of specials by men, matching their share of the population. And they appear nowhere in the Paste or Rolling Stone rankings. What gives?
II. The Nature of Comedy
Comedy has always been risky, both socially and physically. For stand-up comedians, by far the most common risk is bombing. They perform on stage, usually alone, while an audience relentlessly signals success or failure. Jokes should draw immediate laughter, but they could be met with silence, groaning, booing, or heckling. The risk heightens for beginners; Mitch Hedberg apparently bombed for years before he gained fame.
In fact, successful comedians bomb all the time. It’s not easy to predict what people will find funny, so comedians test their new jokes on live audiences. The more promising jokes, including those intended for specials, are then practiced repeatedly in smaller clubs. This process involves a lot of bombing. I regard John Mulaney as the best stand-up of his generation, yet on smaller stages, he’ll bomb.7
Comedians who push boundaries also risk making people angry. They’ll flirt with taboos like sex, death, and politics; then insult groups based on their race, gender, or religion. Outrage over such jokes has always existed, and thanks to social media, it’s more visible than ever. Some comedians will avoid jokes and focus on social commentary, a tradition since the 1960s. When Hannah Gadsby or Dave Chappelle joins in, plenty of people take offense.
It’s not unusual for comedians to face verbal abuse, death threats, or actual danger. Governments have hounded comedians for ages; Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor were all arrested for “obscene” language. Finally, the risk of physical assault is not zero – we’ve seen Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Jim Jefferies suffer attacks while on stage. Many less famous comedians have shared that experience.
III. Risky Business
Men take much greater risks than women do, on average. On a physical level, there is little doubt about this.8 Men in our society work more dangerous jobs and play more extreme sports. They drive more recklessly, have more gambling problems, and end up in more violent conflict.
The social realm, too, is where we see men being riskier. Roy Baumeister has pointed out that in jazz music, not many improvisers are women.9 What’s more, women in jazz seem most drawn to singing, where there’s less emphasis on improvising. In jazz studies programs, singers are a tiny slice of male faculty yet close to half of female faculty.10 After all, jazz improvisation is risky – you could easily make mistakes. (The best jazz musicians hide their mistakes well.)
As for lesbians, I argue that they’re riskier than other women. This is most visible within dangerous jobs. Security, landscaping, and construction are the fields where lesbians are most overrepresented among women.11 Note that, as with comedy, those fields have long been male-dominated.
Further, in women’s professional sports, the rougher ones are packed with lesbians. By my count, among currently ranked or champion UFC fighters, 21% are out lesbians. Lesbians are also reportedly 29% of basketball players in the WNBA.12 At the last soccer World Cup, an estimated 19% of players from more tolerant countries were lesbian.13 Compare those sports to tennis – a non-contact sport – where last year lesbians were just 2% of women at major tournaments.14
IV. Innateness
We know that men’s greater riskiness is highly innate. That’s because the sex difference holds across diverse societies. Around the world, children’s rough-and-tumble play involves many more boys than girls.15 Another global study looked at societies with combat sports like boxing, wrestling, and stick fighting.16 Males were the sole participants in nearly all of them. Men’s work is more dangerous even in primitive societies, where they hunt large game basically on their own.17 Warfare, too, is waged almost entirely by men – there is no known society where groups of women raid villages.18
Lastly, we can look toward other animals. With few exceptions, across mammalian species it’s males that are more aggressive.
This is largely explained by one of biology’s most important theories, Parental Investment Theory.19 See one of the sexes taking bigger risks? Almost always, that’s the sex that can invest less in reproduction. In humans, that’s men. Reproduction for men, at minimum, is a few minutes of shagging. For women, reproduction requires nine months of pregnancy, and in nature, two or more years of nursing. That’s costly, so women had to be cautious during the evolutionary past.
Powerful evidence for this theory comes from species where the roles are reversed. In pipefishes, for example, it’s males that get pregnant. Predictably, female pipefishes are more aggressive, while male pipefishes are tamer.
What about lesbians – is their risky behavior innate, to some degree? It’s not clear, but it’s plausible. Here are three reasons:
Childhood play. In general, gay men and women recall being gender-nonconforming early in life.20 Compared to other women, lesbians say their childhoods included rougher play and more sports with boys. Similar reports come from lesbians outside the West, in Peru, Brazil, and the Philippines.21
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This is a condition where babies in the womb are exposed to extra testosterone. It doesn’t seem to affect boys’ sexual orientation. Yet the girls become lesbian or bisexual adults at very high rates, relative to peers.22 Across studies, some 30% of women who had this condition say they’re not straight.
Proven effects of testosterone. We saw that lesbianism could be linked to prenatal testosterone. (For men’s sexual orientation, such a link is elusive.) Well, a massive literature finds that testosterone fuels risk-taking and aggression, in both humans and other animals.23 The hormone has a masculinizing effect. As it happens, lesbians in stand-up comedy present as more “butch,” with more masculine hair and clothing.
V. Weaker Theories
There could be other reasons stand-up has so many men and lesbians. I’ve thought of at least three other interesting theories. They’re compatible with my main theory, but weaker.
Socialization. On this theory, some children are socialized into being quieter and less funny. One review finds that starting in elementary school, boys express more humor than girls do.24 The author mostly blames socialization, in which boys get more encouragement – but zero evidence is provided. Besides, we actually discipline boys more, likely because they’re more disruptive class clowns.25 And oddly, this theory implies that girls who’ll turn out lesbian are treated more fairly than other girls. I think few would endorse that.
Workplace harassment. A U.K. website asked comedians about their treatment by audiences, peers, and others in the industry.26 Sexual harassment and violence were reported often by female comedians. Male comedians, however, reported more non-sexual harassment and violence than females did. It’s not clear who fares worse. Although, it’s possible that lesbians in comedy face the least overall harassment.
Mating. There's some evidence that lesbians and straight women seek similar traits in mates.27 Compared to men, women as a whole place less value on good looks and more value on personality. So both men and lesbians could be trying to attract women by cracking jokes.28
Indeed, humor could be an adaptation – a trait that evolved to help our survival or reproduction. It seems humor can strengthen social bonds via laughter. Whatever the case, stand-up humor will keep featuring lots of men and lesbians.
[Edits: wording, formatting]
Specials analyzed are Netflix originals in English. I excluded showcase and compilation specials. See my spreadsheet. Data from Wikipedia.
Paste, 2017; Rolling Stone, 2017.
Hannah Gadsby has identified as both lesbian and non-binary.
“The Funnier Sex,” episode, The History of Comedy (CNN, 2017).
James Byrnes, David Miller, and William Schafer, “Gender Differences in Risk Taking: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 3 (1999).
Roy Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 43-44.
Lara Pellegrinelli, Jazz Counts: Measuring the Jazz Faculty Gender Gap in Higher Education (Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, 2025).
Ryan Finnigan, “Rainbow-Collar Jobs? Occupational Segregation by Sexual Orientation in the United States,” Socius 6 (2020): Table A1.
Stuart Leung for Interbasket, 2025.
Douglas Fry, “Rough-and-Tumble Social Play in Humans,” in The Nature of Play: Great Apes and Humans, ed. Anthony Pellegrini and Peter Smith (Guilford Press, 2005), pp. 64-66.
Robert Deaner and Brandt Smith, “Sex Differences in Sports Across 50 Societies,” Cross-Cultural Research 47, no. 3 (2012): pp. 280-82.
George Murdock and Caterina Provost, “Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethnology 12, no. 2 (1973): p. 207.
Francis McAndrew, “War,” in Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, ed. Todd Shackelford and Viviana Weekes-Shackelford (Springer, 2021), p. 8471.
The seminal version is by Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971, ed. Bernard Campbell (Aldine, 1972).
J. Michael Bailey and Kenneth Zucker, “Childhood Sex-Typed Behavior and Sexual Orientation: A Conceptual Analysis and Quantitative Review,” Developmental Psychology 31, no. 1 (1995).
Frederick Whitam and Robin Mathy, “Childhood Cross-Gender Behavior of Homosexual Females in Brazil, Peru, the Philippines, and the United States,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 20, no. 2 (1991).
Elisabeth Daae et al., “Sexual Orientation in Individuals With Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 14 (2020).
Carole Hooven, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us (Henry Holt and Company, 2021).
Doris Bergen, “The Development of Sex Differences in Humor Initiation and Appreciation,” Humor 33, no. 2 (2020).
Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 107-08.
David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Basic Books, 2016), pp. 71-72, 98-99, 132.
Jesse Bering raises this possibility in “Why Do Funny Ladies Like the Ladies? The Over-Representation of Lesbians in Comedy,” Scientific American, 2011.