On The Intersection of Hotness and Comedy
How transitioning from hot girl to ??? guy affected (the perception of) my comedy
To write about the intersection of attractiveness and comedy, I must, as Lewis Carroll said, begin at the beginning (was Lewis Carroll hot? Whatever, not the point): before I knew I was a trans man, I did comedy as a cis woman for years. And at the end of the 2010s, I was introduced to Hot Girl Comedy.
I used to say for years pre-transition that I had an essay within me on Hot Girl Comedy. It would have probably been about how the concept has so much potential for building community and confidence, for fighting back against the notion that women can only be hot or funny but not both. It might have been about how “hot” is something some people just ARE, but it’s something ANYONE can learn to perform, and Hot Girl Comedy is just that concept taken to its most literal conclusion.
Hot Girl Comedy can still be these things. But for the time I opted into it, it was mostly about which groupchats I was in and pretending that getting objectified by audiences was fine with me. I’m aware my experience isn’t universal, but it was what it was, some of which was probably (definitely) affected by Gender Stuff™️. I felt off-put, but I wasn’t fully sure why.
As I came to understand, my problem with Hot Girl Comedy wasn’t with comics; it was with audiences. Because fortunately and/or unfortunately, jokes don’t exist in a vacuum— people’s perception of you will always affect how your jokes are received, so hotness and comedy will always be interrelated, regardless of gender.
Pre-transition, being hot was not the center of my jokes, but it was still an undercurrent of my stage persona. It extended beyond what jokes I told. In my cis woman era, I had countless conversations with other women in comedy about how dressing for shows was a minefield— too casual and no one pays attention, too intentionally well-dressed and people see you as an object, not a comedian. I mostly stopped talking about sex onstage years ago, not because I think the topic is hack (I don’t), but because audiences think they can talk to you however you talk about yourself. Lines I said about myself onstage became pickup lines in the hands of weirdos offstage. I once got a man kicked out of a bar in North Carolina after my set for straight-up groping me when I went to get a drink, and his friends said it was crazy that I could joke about sex but not “take a joke” (read: sexual harassment) about it. I know that making jokes about sex wasn’t “asking for it,” but it was still putting me in danger, so I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Even with all this baggage, one of the things that made me nervous to start medically transitioning was… what if people stop giving a shit about my comedy if I’m not a Hot Girl™️ anymore? I knew I would be losing a specific kind of social currency, and I wasn’t sure yet if I would gain anything in its place. By the time I was thinking this, I didn’t even really think I was hot, and I already knew I wasn’t a girl. That thought wasn’t about my own self-perception; it was about spectacle. It was about whether audiences would give a shit about me if I took away the bells and whistles I’d come to— or been encouraged to— rely on.
To my relief and horror, people actually treated me a lot better in comedy when they weren’t considering their attraction to me. Some jokes hit better when I changed nothing at all but my physical presentation. A lot of this is gender-based, but either way, the days of watching peers get complimented on their writing skills while I got complimented on my appearance were finally over. I felt relieved because it was nice to not be part of that objectification machine anymore, but also horrified because what the fuck? Everyone should be treated normally anyway??? Why was anyone treating anyone like that in the first place???
At the risk of sounding like a whiny incel, being hot is not part of my comedy life anymore. I mean that as neutrally as possible, in the same tone as if I were telling you, “I don’t do prop comedy anymore.” This is less of a statement on what I look like and more about how people interact with me— I don’t get thirst follows or flirty comments on comedy clips, and I don’t get hit on after shows. There is a noticeable shift in how people engage with me online and in real life. All that special bonus attention, positive and negative, is long gone. The comics I know who do get that attention come in all variations of gender, so while that aspect certainly factors in, I know it’s not the whole story (but more on that later.)
A lot of this step away from broadcasting attractiveness was intentional, or at least a byproduct of intentional actions. When I went to a Rupaul’s Drag Race finale watch party recently, I had the rare feeling of wanting to dress “hot” and found that I kinda couldn’t, because as part of my transition, I have made every effort to look and dress in a way that blends in. It made me a little sad to realize, but I understand why I did/do it.
As a woman, I didn’t feel hot, but I did feel good at performing hotness when necessary. As a man, I don’t even really know what that would look like for me. The men society at large considers hot are mostly cis. All of them are taller than me, and all of their bodies are shaped in ways I will never be able to achieve unless I can suddenly afford a personal trainer and multiple surgeries. There are, of course, fellow trans men who are considered Hot Comics, but I can tell by the difference in reactions to them vs. me that I am not one of them. I can’t look anything like Hot Men, so I don’t try. Don’t get me wrong, I know the number of people attracted to me isn’t zero, but a) that’s true of everyone, and b) we’re talking about a larger societal convention here.
If you are hot, regardless of gender, you have some version of an advantage in comedy. It’s not as much of an advantage as, say, well-connected rich family members, but it’s not nothing. If you’re pursuing acting on top of comedy, it’s even more of a leg up. At its most simplified, people want to look at you, so they listen to what you’re saying. They think you look good, so they’re more open to your jokes being good. You get a thousand thirst comments, and now you’re being boosted in the algorithm we all hate to feed but must. At hotness’s best, the halo effect is absolutely real.
At its worst, hotness is a double-edged sword that comes with disadvantages ranging from people taking you less seriously to dehumanization to violent harassment, especially for women. It can make your career, but it can also make you wish you’d never been in front of an audience in the first place. Even with the occasional advantage hotness brings, I can’t say anyone wins here.
Despite all this, as fucked up as it feels… I think not being hot made me perceived as funnier? Not funnier, just perceived as funnier. It’s not about level of attractiveness in and of itself, but the audience’s choice to focus on my jokes instead. I can tell the shift doesn’t exclusively come from them seeing me as a man now, because frankly, many cis audiences don’t. I don’t pass most of the time, but it’s precisely because I don’t pass that they don’t see me as hot, which ends up circling back around to an advantage in comedy. I don’t fit into the narrative of what a woman or man should look like, so many audiences don’t see me as fuckable because they don’t think they’re allowed to. According to 90s sitcom rules, anyone who is not beautiful must be funny. So I must be funny. So they laugh more.
I guess that’s the result I wanted all along, though in a perfect world, people who are comfortable being viewed as both hot and funny would be able to do so without being harassed. The problem with Hot Girl Comedy was never comedians embracing their looks. It was— and is— audiences feeling like they have permission to cross boundaries in response.
And of course, this is not me saying comics shouldn’t be hot and funny just because audiences can’t act right. There are plenty of comics who are both, and they lean into it to varying degrees of success— or, for example, if you’re a certain comic whose name rhymes with Schmatt Schmife, you build an audience based off being perceived as hot and then turn on that audience and become a hack misogynist flop. I’m supposed to have a consultation for FMS next month, and I plan to bring a photo of his face and say, “for the love of God, don’t do this shit to me.” But see? Maybe I’m part of the problem for dunking on what his face looks like instead of just leaving it at the misogyny and bad joke writing (if you can even count crowd work as writing… sorry, sorry, I’m done.)
So what’s the solution? I don’t know. There is no level of physical attractiveness or lack thereof that guarantees people will be normal to you about comedy. It sucks in all directions for everyone. I can never untangle my hotness from my transness from my comedy, and anything short of a full societal overhaul on our collective opinions of attractiveness (and gender expectations, for that matter) won’t even begin to touch the issue. Being hot can make you famous, and/or it can make you feel like a caged zoo animal. Maybe we can all write paradigm-shifting jokes about this, or maybe everyone can just be more respectful of each other regardless of appearance. And if anyone would like pitch a solution to this or perhaps pay for my FMS and a personal trainer, you know where to find me.