Humor & Life Quote by Jo Brand

Jo Brand’s praise lands with the casual authority of someone who’s spent decades watching comedy’s gatekeepers pretend the door was never locked. By calling herself “a big fan” of French and Saunders, she isn’t just listing influences; she’s locating her own career inside a lineage of British women who made mainstream sketch comedy feel less like a boys’ club with better lighting.

The little zigzag in the sentence - “not that they are particularly stand-up” - matters. It’s Brand acknowledging how comedy fandom often gets policed by format, as if stand-up is the purer, more masculine proving ground and sketch is somehow secondary. She names the hierarchy, then shrugs at it. The subtext: funny is the credential, not the stage setup.

Then she pulls the sharpest move: “they have been great for women” immediately followed by “incredibly funny whether they are male or female.” That’s Brand’s trademark double-bind, laid bare. Women comics are asked to represent a gender and transcend it at the same time. She offers both compliments because the culture demands both: be important as women, but don’t make us think about women. The phrase “whether they are male or female” is deliberately blunt, almost absurd - a way of mocking the reflex to gender-tag humor like it’s a niche product.

Contextually, it’s a nod to French and Saunders as proof of concept: women can be silly, brutal, mainstream, and enduring. Brand isn’t pleading the case; she’s filing the paperwork that should’ve been processed years ago.