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I write about comedy because I believe it tells the truth sideways.

It slips in through laughter. It points at something absurd and says, look at that, without shouting. It creates friction and then lets us sit in it for a second.

Which is why I find it strange that we still ask women to remove the friction.

We are still, in 2026, telling women to smile while they ask serious questions. Smile while discussing abuse. Smile so we look less severe. Smile so the discomfort isn’t visible on our faces.

As if the expression is the problem, not the subject.

That instruction is not about manners. It is about containment.

And if you pay attention, you start to see it everywhere.

Once you see it, it is like an abyss. You glance into it once and think you are overreacting. Then you notice it in the tone of headlines. In who gets called “shrill”. In who is described as “fiery” rather than informed.

The abyss does not shout. It hums.

And comedy, which is supposed to expose absurdity, sometimes ends up reflecting that hum right back at us.

We tell ourselves that women are centred now. And, to a certain extent, we are. We have female leads, female writers, and female creators shaping their own narratives. That matters.

But being centred is not the same as being unfiltered.

Who Gets to Rage?

Think about the men we have canonised in sitcom history.

Fawlty Towers gave us Basil Fawlty. A man who shouts at guests, hits his car with a branch, lies, panics, humiliates himself and everyone around him. He is iconic.

The Office gave us David Brent. Deluded, needy, casually inappropriate. He bulldozes through awkwardness with ego and self-pity. He is studied, quoted, and endlessly dissected.

Seinfeld gave us George Costanza. Petty, selfish, spectacularly incapable of growth. He fails repeatedly, and we applaud the writing, not his moral development.

Their anger is texture. Their unpleasantness is depth. Their refusal to grow is part of the joke.

Now look at women.

Fleabag lets its protagonist be selfish and destructive, but she must narrate her own damage to us. We are kept close. We are reassured she knows what she is doing.

Absolutely Fabulous allows Edina and Patsy to run feral, but the chaos is framed as glamorous excess. We are invited to laugh at them, not sit in discomfort.

The Royle Family gives us Denise, gloriously idle and self-absorbed, but she is cushioned by warmth. We are never asked to sit with her without context.

Even when women are outrageous, their anger is framed. Explained. Softened. Given an emotional anchor.

Male characters have long been allowed to be difficult without redemption arcs.

Female characters often have to grow.

Again, once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

The Smile Economy

The same pattern plays out off-screen.

Algorithms reward smoothness. Youth. Beauty. The kind of face that sits well under a ring light. A carefully measured take delivered with warmth will travel further than a middle-aged woman dissecting a structural problem without apology.

Beauty is frictionless. Anger has edges.

And edges do not always trend.

So women learn to round them off.

I have done it myself. Added a joke to cushion a critique. Smiled while making a point so nobody thinks I am too intense. Prefaced something with “I might be wrong” when I know I am not.

The rules are ambient. Nobody hands you a manual. You absorb it.

Smile.

Soften.

Do not make the room uncomfortable.

Even private decisions somehow invite commentary. As though deviating from an invisible script requires explanation.

Comedy, at its best, exposes scripts like that.

The sharpest sitcoms have always been powered by irritation. By noticing hypocrisy and refusing to let it pass unchallenged.

And yet we still tense when women bring that same irritation without cushioning it.

We say we value honesty.

We say we want bold voices.

We say we want authenticity.

But authenticity from women is still filtered through likeability.

Be bold, but not abrasive.

Be honest, but not hostile.

Be angry, but make it charming.

I am tired of dialling myself down to meet that brief.

Not because I want to be cruel. Not because I want to shout for the sake of it. But because the constant dialling down is exhausting.

Once you see the abyss, it stares back at you. In the smile requests. In the algorithm. Who gets labelled difficult? Who is allowed to rage without explanation?

Comedy was never designed to be comfortable.

It was meant to rub against reality until sparks appeared.

Right now, reality has edges.

So do I.

Comedy was never meant to be frictionless.

And neither was I.

Jacquie J Sarah

Written for International Women's Day, 8th March 2026

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