It\u2019s 2012 in Savannah, GA and the bouncer at King\u2019s Inn had a problem. Staring down the female college students before him, brandishing under-21 ID\u2019s, the strip club doorman shook his head and began to deny entry. Cherith Fuller, 19, felt immediate relief. Only a few months into her comedy career, Cherith had excitedly traveled the four hours from Athens, GA alongside fellow comedian Samm Severin, to compete in the contest for a cash prize. Severin had neglected to inform her, however, that the stand-up comedy would take place in a dilapidated strip club on the rougher side of town.<\/p>\n
Severin didn\u2019t want to leave so easily. We\u2019re preforming tonight, she told the bouncer. He eyed them skeptically. We\u2019re comedians, she clarified. The bouncer waved his hand and they nervously shuffled into the nearly empty club for what Cherith now calls a \u201cnightmare gig\u201d. In between rounds of poll dances, they preformed to an apathetic crowd and angry strippers who heckled them for stealing stage time. <\/p>\n
Four years later, Cherith Fuller\u2019s career has come a long way from the strip club circuit. A mass media arts graduate from UGA, she now works as a production assistant and junior writer\/producer at Cartoon Network. She preforms multiple times a month at shows around Atlanta and held the resident comedian position at Laughing Skull Lounge in Atlanta last year, preforming at all the weekend shows. She\u2019s preformed throughout the Southeast\u2019s stand-up comedy scenes, and has traveled to NY and LA on multiple occasions for shows. <\/p>\n
According to Number Crunch, of the 157 stand-up comedy specials on Netflix in early 2016, only 14% were exclusively female performers. This is actually a very slight increase in female comedian on the major streaming platform since 2014. While female stand-up comedians like Amy Schumer have been massively successful in recent years, many still point to a disparity in the number of women entering, and succeeding professionally, in comedy on various levels.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes there definitely can be a boys club. But it\u2019s not a malicious boys club,\u201d says Fuller. <\/p>\n
Particularly in professional club venues, Fuller believes it\u2019s just a little harder for women, whether it\u2019s getting booked for shows with male headliners or being seen as more than just a female comedian. <\/p>\n
\u201c I think most of the time the headliners who come through are men, mostly straight white men. So there\u2019s this belief that if you have a male headliner, you want men who are hosting it, featuring in it. So it\u2019s harder for women to get forward in that regard sometimes.\u201d <\/p>\n
Fellow female comedians echoed Fuller\u2019s sentiment on sexism and the \u201cboys club\u201d in many stand-up comedy circles. Samm Severin believes better known female comics in Atlanta, like Cherith and herself, may be shielded from the worst incidences of sexism. The rare predatory behavior she has witnessed has been \u201ccalculated\u201d towards newer female comedians, some of whom she believes feel \u201cpushed out\u201d of the scene after inappropriate comments or incidences. Like Fuller, she believes that for the most part male stand-up comedians aren\u2019t purposefully antagonistic towards female comedians. <\/p>\n
Ruthie Lichtenstein, a stand-up comedian who previously lived in Atlanta, cites recent scandals involving date rape druggings at shows in Chicago\u2019s stand-up comedy scene, and the attitudes of male and female comics in the aftermath reluctant to acknowledge issues of assault, as illustrative that problems actually run far deeper than just a mere boys club mentality in stand-up comedy today.<\/p>\n
One thing is certain, Cherith Fuller has gain respect from male and female comedians alike for her fearless performance style. Fellow comics describe her as something of a rarity in stand-up today, someone who has both a strong stage persona and sharp writing skills, while most comics tend towards one trait or the other. She\u2019s unafraid to do \u201ccrowd work\u201d, or frequently involve the audience in her performances, something that can make even seasoned comics nervous. <\/p>\n
\u201cCherith definitely had phases – and if you asked her, I think she\u2019d tell you the same thing – where you could hear her doing somebody else\u2019s voice in the beginning. Because that\u2019s what everyone does,\u201d said Walker Smith, a former Athens\/Atlanta comedian now based in Chicago, who preformed alongside Cherith at shows for years. Smith said two or three years into Fuller\u2019s career, her comedy completely changed. He credits her rigorous amount of preforming and increased success in Atlanta to her evolution. \u201cParticularly in Atlanta because she just had more stage time, you could hear her really decide what her show was about. That\u2019s the really cool thing, [getting] to see people find what they\u2019re actually good at. Because it takes so long.\u201d Smith says even though he\u2019s living in Chicago now, he frequently sees videos of Fuller\u2019s comedy making the rounds on social media and the internet.<\/p>\n
Cherith hopes to ultimately segway her work in stand-up comedy and work at Cartoon Network into a successful career as a television comedy writer. Even if she lands her dream job, she plans to continue doing stand-up comedy indefinitely. Lately, she\u2019s been hearing the siren song of New York and Los Angeles, the two destinations any comic seems destined to call home if they\u2019re serious about their craft. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 2012 in Savannah, GA and the bouncer at King\u2019s Inn had a problem. Staring down the female college students before him, brandishing under-21 ID\u2019s, the strip club doorman shook his head and began to deny entry. Cherith Fuller, 19, felt immediate relief. Only a few months into her comedy career, Cherith had excitedly traveled … Continue reading Profile<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2037,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[58,57,59],"class_list":["post-1243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-module-6","tag-module-6","tag-profile","tag-updated-profile"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s7Ndkv-profile","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2037"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}