As followers go, “Australian stand-up comedian, TV writer and third personal thing” Laura Davis has a relatively humble 3,343 followers. Davis is well known in the Australian comedy industry, but if the sheer brilliance of a recent tweet – which attracted more than 13,000 like and 4,000 retweets – is anything to go by, it won’t be long before she’s also a household name.
Behold the tweet in question…
56 Australian women have been violently killed by men this year. If it were by sharks or strawberries something would have been done by now.
— Laura Davis (@lauradaviscomic) October 23, 2018
Davis, now based in London, is a former writer on Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, and winner of a Swag of comedy awards, including the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Golden Gibbo (in 2015) and the Melbourne Fringe Best Comedy Award (also 2015). You can read more about Davis here, at her personal website.
There’s over 200 comments on the tweet at the time of press, and as Davis herself notes in a follow up tweet once things had gone viral, “I saw my alerts and assumed this thread had turned into a shit-show but there’s really some great discussions going on here. Thank you.”
Discussion does briefly turned to ‘teaching all women self-defence’ as a solution to male violence, which is the rough equivalent to the American gun debate riposte, of ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’. It’s obviously far more productive to sink money into teaching men not to assault women, but the discussion is definitely worth joining in.
Over to readers…. and thanks to reader ‘Andrew K’ for the heads up.