Onstage couplings: Making beautiful music with the male/ female comic duo

This paper explores the contemporary male/ female live musical comedy duo via an exegesis of practice-led research, drawing on key theories in comedy, gender and performance studies to better understand this seemingly rare iteration of comic performance. The live performance that constitutes this research project is the comedy duo Warmwaters: a (straight, cis-gendered female/male) pair of performance personae that present as a dysfunctional folk duo, whose songs all seem to be about sex and other bodily functions. The only people that do not seem to understand this musical double entendre are the Warmwaters. The study examines the comic functionality of three critical incidents in the live performance of Warmwaters, evaluating and reframing them to better understand the exigencies of the contemporary male/female musical comedy duo. We propose that contemporary shifts in the way gender is understood pose challenges to the classic comic proposal of the double act, making the heterosexual male/ female duo a surprisingly scarce and difficult pairing in live comic performance.