The days when anyone could claim women aren’t funny are long gone. From those plucky Derry Girls to Hannah Gadsby’s tour-de-force stand-up show Nanette, funny women are killing it on stage, on TV, and in movies at the moment. Here are some more to add to your radar…

Demi Lardner

In the years since her arrival on the Aussie comedy scene, Demi Lardner has evolved, starting with award-winning but relatively straightforward routines before developing her current highly experimental style. Her accolades stretch from early awards at RAW Comedy in 2013 to Directors’ Choice at the 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Lardner’s current style of comedy is bizarre, surreal, and, at its best, hilarious. When watching her one gets the sense that she delights in seeing just how much she can get away with. She’s not afraid to get physical, contorting across the stage with a mixture of weaponised awkwardness and brazen mischief. She flips from one scene to the next, eliciting laughs in the offbeat and mastering the element of surprise. She frequently interacts with her own recorded voiceovers and musical cues. In one routine, she even clambers bodily over audience members.

In many of her performances, she rocks variations on a uniform of sorts: school sports day socks, short shorts, unisex sweatshirts and pearly dyed quiffs. “They’ve let a small urchin boy on the stage,” she says, imitating the audience’s outrage in the opening gambit of her appearance at Upfront, an all-female Australian comedy event. “This is a lady gig!”

If Tumblr and Vine had a stand-up comedian for a baby, it would look a little something like Demi Lardner. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but this is brilliantly subversive stand-up.

Rose Matafeo

This talented Kiwi comedian combines a brightly-patterned, thick-knit 1970s aesthetic with high-energy comedic flair. She embraces big hair, big glasses and big expression, and, with an ability to get audiences onside quickly, earns big laughs in return. The person who appears onstage is the hyper-realised, manic Matafeo, sometimes swinging wildly from high to low in the space of a sentence. She jokes about dressing “like a very highly strung auntie”, period tracking apps as wartime journals (“Day Five: still bleeding”) and, with no small level of knowing irony, being an “introverted extrovert” (“on the one hand, I hate direct eye contact; on the other, I love attention”). Her longform material delves into complicated, messy stories about sex, relationships, misogyny, growing up, and other personal disasters.

It’s only a matter of time before Matafeo’s accomplished, refreshing comedy is all over your screens. Matafeo recently won the coveted Best Comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for her show Horndog. She is the first woman of colour – Matafeo is half-Samoan – to do so. For just a glimpse of the standing this puts her in – and of what the success past winners have gone on to – it’s worth remembering that last year, the same award was taken by Hannah Gadsby’s towering Nanette.

Aditi Mittal

Aditi Mittal’s effortlessly bilingual Netflix special Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say is a great introduction to one of India’s leading female stand-ups. It’s accessible, incorporating topics familiar to fans of stand-up comedy – everything from being single and catcalling to travel and children – but also forthright, tackling taboos and social issues like street harassment.

Mittal is particularly quick on the intricacies of ethnicity (“Any Sindhis in the house, raise your hands? Look at that. The hairiest arms in the country”). She spins humour out of stereotypes and realities. “You’d be a mess in politics,” she quips to a half-Bengali half-Maharashtrian woman in the audience. “Should I write a poem, or burn a bus?”

Her interlude into character comedy as grandmotherly sex therapist “Dr. Mrs. Luthchuke” may be a bit off-putting to the veteran of straight-laced stand-up, but it’s an otherwise solid performance. Most of her cultural touchstones are tied to India – from contemporary Bollywood to Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, the pair behind the Taj Mahal. Nonetheless, the  show can absolutely be enjoyed by international audiences.

Njambi McGrath

Trilingual comedian Njambi McGrath deploys a triad of experiences in her comedy. She grew up on a farm in Kenya, went to college in upstate New York, and lives with her husband in the UK. She has appeared five times at the Edinburgh Fringe and has appeared on the BBC, including on its 2018 New Year Comedy Celebration. Her delivery can be occasionally stiff, but she mines humour from serious topics like racism, Africa’s portrayal in Western media, and charity tourism (“I don’t know what it is about a diamond-rich continent that makes white people want to come and dig wells”). She is at her sharpest when it comes to colonialism and empire. One of her recent shows, Breaking Black, tackled the scarred relationship between Britain and Africa head-on as she quipped, “Your leaders are telling you that immigrants are coming here to change the British way of life. Who do you think we are, colonialists?”

Lauren Pattison

This working class girl from Newcastle is going places. Lauren Pattison has taken a route not unknown to successful British comedians: a Chortle Student Comedy Awards finalist in 2015, BBC New Comedy Award finalist in 2016, and an Edinburgh Best Newcomer nominee in 2017, she has already played packed-out London theatres and performed in the southern hemisphere. And all before the age of twenty-three.

Amidst all of Pattison’s acclaim is a belly-laughing sense of wit. Having written two full-length shows, Lady Muck and Peachy, she’s clearly learned how to build a story (“I heard the door go, I heard her giggle, I heard her heels on the laminate flooring…”). Her fun, filthy material is full of the calamity of the young twenty-something, from finding oneself to living with her ex to doing a drama course and failing to find Prince Charming (“Every man on that course was also looking for Prince Charming”).

Pattison has mentioned the aid of Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan – for whom she has regularly appeared as a support act since 2015 – as vital in an industry notorious for gruelling years on the circuit and systemic barriers to women’s success. A brassy and confident performer (when a recent show was interrupted by a fire alarm, she finished her set out on the street to the evacuated audience), Pattison is one to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAx4a31yh5k

So whether it’s subversive stand-up or another Netflix special that you’re looking for, just look to these women for your fill of funny.