The late writer Christopher Hitchens once caused controversy by suggesting in an article for Vanity Fair that women weren’t as funny as men because, unlike men, women didn’t have to learn to be funny to impress the opposite sex. Not surprisingly, this caused a stir and led to an angry response from many female comedians. Whatever the veracity of Hitchens’ argument, in recent years, there has been an increase in female-written and female-led sitcoms on our TV screens including Fleabag, Girls and the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls.

Like its fellow Irish sitcom Father Ted, Derry Girls has become one of Channel 4’s most successful comedies and has even fans such as the legendary film director Martin Scorsese. The show depicts the lives of four teenage girls from Derry (or Londonderry) and an English boy during the last years of the ‘Troubles’ in 1990s Northern Ireland. The ‘Derry Girls’ consists of Erin, her eccentric cousin Orla, their friends Claire and Michelle, and Michelle’s English cousin James. The characters attend an All-Girls Catholic School (which James is forced to go to as well) and this school, in addition to Erin’s family home, is where most of the series takes place. The other primary characters include Erin’s parents Mary and Gerry, her Aunt Sarah (Mary’s sister and Orla’s mother), her Grandad Joe (Mary and Sarah’s father) and the headmistress of her school, Sister Michael.

I stumbled upon the show on TV and initially watched it, I’m embarrassed to say, due to fancying the actress who plays Erin, Saoirse-Monica Jackson. This could sound dodgy considering that Erin is a sixteen-year-old girl but in real life Jackson is only three years younger than me. I’ll include a link to a photo of her (obviously helped by make-up and photography techniques) to see if the reader can see any appeal.

https://popularnetworth.com/saoirse-monica-jackson

Although Derry Girls is a female-dominated show (no surprise there) created and written by a woman, Lisa McGee, it is, for me, one of the few recent TV shows/films to have this distinction which can be watched and enjoyed by men, even those who consider themselves, as I do, to be ‘red-pilled’ about feminist dominance and misandry in popular culture. This is largely because the show inverts the standard trope of ‘stupid men/boys, sensible women/girls’ found in a lot of comedy so that most of the female characters are the butt of the joke rather than just the male ones. The show can be compared slightly to another successful Channel 4 sitcom, The Inbetweeners, and is probably the closest there will ever be to a female equivalent. Erin, being the main character, bears some similarity to the character of Will in The Inbetweeners, whilst James is similar to Simon, the sex-obsessed Michelle bearing some similarities to Jay and the simple/childlike Orla being like Neil.

The show is also unusual for having a group of female characters with one token male character again inverting a common trope of a token female character with a group of male characters seen in sitcoms like Seinfeld, 3^rd Rock from the Sun, Black Books, The IT Crowd and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The fact that the token female example is a lot more common (and is also evident in many pop/rock bands) might indicate that it’s easier for a woman to be part of a predominantly male group than the opposite. Whatever the truth of these mixed-sex group dynamics might be a topic for another day, however.

Derry Girls is also different from most contemporary female-driven comedies in its source of humour. Rather than being a soapbox for women’s issues, much of the humour of the show is driven by the main characters’ focus on their humdrum adolescent experiences in contrast to the dramatic backdrop of the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland. The girls live with the occasional threat of bombs and British soldiers patrolling parts of the city but spend most of their time behaving like teenagers and having the same thoughts and desires as other girls/boys their age in other parts of the world. The adults of the show are no different: roads which are closed off due to a potential bomb threat are treated like annoying inconveniences much like a traffic jam might be; in one episode a neighbour shows the girls his new double glazed windows while the Protestant Orange Order can be heard marching outside. In another episode, following a news report on TV about peace talks breaking down, Erin’s mother, Mary, complains:

“I can’t take it anymore. All these false promises. Waiting week after week hoping today might be the day, only to be disappointed.”

It turns out, however, that she’s talking about not getting a wheely bin promised by the council rather than reacting to the news. This, in some ways, reflects how historical events actually occur: a major news story is reported on TV/radio/internet providing the background noise whilst most people deal with their own mundane existences.

This generally nonchalant attitude of the characters to the conflict is not to suggest that the show downgrades or mocks the seriousness of the Troubles as there are moments where the show takes a more somber tone. Lisa McGee, having grown up in Derry, based the series on her own experiences so the behaviour of Erin’s family and others is likely a reflection of how people acted at the time. It could be argued that this depiction is a kind of commentary about how violent and drawn out the conflict had become that people were forced to adapt to it. In this regard, Derry Girls could be labelled a comedy drama rather than a sitcom.

Another source of humour in Derry Girls, and a likely contributor to the show’s popularity, is the idiosyncrasies of Derry and its inhabitants. While I’ve never liked the assertion that ‘X’ location is “another character in the film/TV show”– in this case, “Derry is another character in the show” – as I think it’s the sort of empty platitude critics like to say to sound clever and insightful, the location certainly makes the show distinctive, not least in the characters’ accents and slang words. Outsiders may need subtitles and a glossary to work out what the characters are saying at times. Words like “now” and “car” are pronounced “noy” and “cyah” for example (if that sounds a bit patronising, I’m from Yorkshire so feel free to read this in a mock ‘ee by gum’ voice).

Examples of slang prominent in the show include calling sex or an attractive person a ‘ride’, a stupid person is a ‘dose’, to be sick/throw up is to ‘boke’, an expression similar to ‘pull the other one!’ is “catch yourself on”, a child or young person is a “wain” (i.e. – wee ‘un – wee one – little one – child) and anything good is ‘cracker’. While the accent and slang may alienate some viewers, for many others it makes the show and characters unique and interesting. Without getting too political, the desire and appeal for distinctive places and people as shown here is, I believe, one of the motivations driving the nationalist impulses that led to Brexit and Donald Trump even if many fans of Derry Girls, and the writer Lisa McGee, are in opposition to both these political events.