Funny Cow (2018)

Photo Credit: POW Films

Directed by Adrian Shergold

Written by Tony Pitts

Release Date: 20 April 2018

Format reviewed: Video-On-Demand

 The film opens with the titular “Funny Cow” (Maxine Peake) as a full-fledged stand-up comedienne with an audience wrapped around her finger. She tells a few simple jokes and segues into her life story, how she went from a bullied child to a battered housewife to one of the most successful comics in the 1980s Britain scene. 

Funny Cow’s journey is defined by the men in her life, as the movie progresses we see the child become the woman, become The Cow, so to speak. She shreds the men in her life like layers in a cocoon and cherishes the freedom this brings her. Men such as her shithead father (Stephen Graham), her dipshit boyfriend (Paddy Considine) and her piece of shit husband (Tony Pitts). 

Not every man in her life is a shade of shit, however. Her mentor, Lenny (Alun Armstrong) shows her the ropes of stand-up comedy, mostly by complaining about how awful it is. Her only real loving relationship is with her mother (Lindsey Coulson) a woman who shows signs of once wanting to be free but is now an empty shell that intends to drink herself to death.

Maxine Peake’s performance as “Funny Cow”, is so enthralling, it almost makes you forget that we are never told the character’s proper name. She’s referred to as “cow” by the people in her life to taunt her and put her down. She symbolically takes what was used to hurt her and makes it her brand, taking it away from them, like the spoils of war. 

And she is at war with forces beyond her control that expect her to conform to the roles of her gender. Expect her to be subservient to the men in her life, have the kids, tea, and dinner ready, and not draw attention to herself save for singing or stripping. 

It becomes increasingly clear that stand-up comedy is stand in for freedom. She isn’t able to fully commit and succeed until she frees herself from the shackles of her life and finds independence. 

Director Adrian Shergold cleverly communicates this theme through the use of color. The world around her is filled with muted colors that make Funny Cow -a redhead wearing bright colors- stick out. She looks as out of place as she psychologically is. It isn’t until she is on stage when the world becomes as bright as her. Finally, the film tells us, she has found her place in the world. 

The plot jumps forward and backward in time, with tangents that come and go providing immediate context to the main narrative. Similar to what one would expect from someone telling you a series of anecdotes like Funny Cow does with her audience. 

This is an interesting choice, but it comes with out-of-place scenes that take time away from the film’s narrative. They fit well within the framework of someone telling a funny anecdote and it wouldn’t be so bad if not for how the film neglects an important subplot.

While Funny Cow’s relationships with the men in her life are shown in painful detail, her honing her craft with Lenny is given a grand total of three scenes. Her relationship with her mother, meanwhile, is given a total of four.

As far as this movie goes, stand-up is just telling jokes on stage, and they don’t even have to be original jokes. They took so much care in showing us how the men in her life hindered her journey to happiness; they forgot to show us how stand-up made her happy. 

And while we hear of her problematic relationship with her mother, we see little beyond one outburst (partly shown in the trailer), which comes late into the film.  This is important because her mother shows us the alternative route Funny Cow’s life could take, what exactly she is escaping from, and it's never properly explored.  

The result is a scathing critique of society’s expectations of women but an incomplete and unfulfilling movie. 

2.5/5