The Students’ Union sparked a storm on social media after announcing this year’s Christmas Comedy Night line-up.
Friday Night Project host Rob Rouse, Russell Howard’s Good News presenter Tom Deacon and the star of BBC Three’s Impractical Jokers Joel Dommett will take to Central Hall for the special evening on November 30.
Reacting to the announcement, students and members of the public took to Twitter to slam the event for the fact it features no women in the line-up.
One wrote: “This will be the third @yorkunisu comedy night (sic) in a row with exclusively male acts #hohoho.”
Another said: “Tell them there are LOADS of comics! And ones that aren’t a million pounds.”
A third questioned which provider YUSU were using: “Why are you just going through one agency?”
“Go to someone who books comedy from lots of agents.”
Sam Maguire, the YUSU President, said he understood and agreed with the criticism.
In a statement, he told York Vision: “Although the comedy industry is dominated by male comedians this is something that we as a progressive union should try and influence.
“We book our acts through an agency who provide us with the best comedians who are available within our price range, as shown on social media we can and should do more to ensure we have quality acts who are more representative and we will do so for our final comedy night of the year next term.”
It is the second time in two months that YUSU has been criticised for failing to provide more diversity to the things it hosts.
Last month, social media users slammed the union for a University Challenge panel which consisted of four white males.
Angry users on Twitter branded the move “shameful”.
A spokesman for the university said it encouraged YUSU to select the best range of talent no matter who they are.
University Challenge recently held its first stage round for next year’s team selection.
York Vision’s journalism is rapidly becoming a student version of the Daily Mail’s outrage mongering hyperbole; its getting boring. The amount of casual racism and sexism being directed at white males in the student press (at York anyway) is just astounding and that it isn’t called out is a shameful reflection on the massively disproportional influence of ideologically driven Arts/Humanities ‘social justice’ warriors on student culture in the 21st century. White male students have absolutely nothing to apologize for and should take exception to having their mere presence shamed, simply because with a very fake a totalitarian conception of ‘equality’ that reduces other to interchangeable non-whites, women, LGBT with little consideration to what they are there for; namely to be funny and provide an enjoyable evening; something that is completely individual specific and down to individual talent.
If the acts chosen are great acts and within budget then so what; people are attending to be entertained at the end of a long term, it is really no-one else’s business and this persistent attempts by some politically fanatical students to politicize and hi-jack as much of what goes on in society as possible and automatically (and irrationally) infer discrimination needs to be opposed and stopped.