Louise Rennison’s spirit lives on through talented female comic writers - Anthony Clavane

In fact, when I saw the news item I actually laughed out loud. Just like I did, so many times, back in the early 1990s when I first came across Louise’s hilarious one-woman show Stevie Wonder Felt My Face at an arts centre in Essex.

I can still remember some of her best lines, especially the ones referring to her love of Leeds United’s great team of the 1970s. It’s not often you get Billy Bremner and the legendary Motown musician immortalised in the same comic monologue.

Afterwards, a few of us joined her for a drink at the pub. We didn’t keep in touch but, some years later, I watched, in awe, as she captivated an audience of adolescent girls during a reading of Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging at the Leeds Waterstones bookshop. She was, as before, totally mesmerising.

Louise, who was one of the funniest teen writers in the world, died aged 64 in 2016. She was far too young to leave us. Her laughter lives on through the pages of her Georgia Nicolson series for teenage girls. Her spirit lives on through the current outstanding crop of terrific female comic writers.

The eponymous award, which aims to showcase the comedy talent of young people, is open to both sexes. But it would be wrong not to highlight the pioneering role she played in the emergence of a new generation of taboo-breaking, boundary-pushing, myth-puncturing comedies penned by women.

This year’s Emmys demonstrated the extent of this emergence, or should I say dominance. Step forward, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the new Queen of Comedy, who is responsible for not only one but two taboo-breaking, boundary-pushing, myth-puncturing shows: Fleabag and Killing Eve. Both these award-winning series might seem a world away from the endless embarrassments, painful humiliations and unfulfilled obsessions of Rennison’s stories – set in a Yorkshire Dales drama school – but they were conceived with the same sensibility.

Recently, I have become a big fan of two Netflix series, Derry Girls and Sex Education. The former is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the latter in a John Hughesian alternative universe of high school halls and lavish houses. They both boast funny, fierce, female leads. As do thirtysomething comedies such as Catastrophe and This Way Up.

And tonight, The Mash Report returns to BBC2 for a fourth season. Interestingly, the satirical news show will be self-isolating – the whole cast are filming themselves at home – and although the talented Nish Kumar is back as anchor I am sure he will, once again, be upstaged by show-stealing correspondents such as Rachel Parris, Ellie Taylor, Catherine Bohart and Desiree Burch.

Astonishingly, there are still those sexist dunderheads who insist that women aren’t funny. That men remain masters of humour. That even the “female” star of the greatest British sitcom this century (if various polls are to be believed) – er, Mrs Brown’s Boys, of course – is a man in drag.

Twitter users continue to post Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 piece for Vanity Fair in which the overrated “public intellectual” provided a sociobiological explanation of the female impediment to humour. “For men,” wrote Hitch, “it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most – women and humour – should be so antithetical.”

This article appeared two years after the former CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, moaned about how hard it was to find beautiful women who were also funny. And hardly a year goes by without an academic study claiming that men, as one psychologist put it, “have higher humour production ability than women”.

And yet the most successful comic creations of recent times have been Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Sharon Horgan’s Sharon, Nicole Coughlan’s Clare, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell’s Michelle, Aimee Lou Wood’s Aimee Gibbs and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle.

And the funniest TV writers of recent times have been Waller-Bridge, Horgan, Aisling Bea, Lisa McGee and Laurie Nunn. Their shows have broken taboos, pushed boundaries and punctured the biggest myth of all: that men are funnier than women.

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