This research examines the function mitigation has in stand-up comedy performed by contemporary Spanish female comedians. Our first hypothesis is that mitigation is one of the discursive strategies used by female comedians to represent a subversive type of humour, since the use of mitigation in a humorous context enables the speaker to deal more easily with topics or issues that could be controversial or troublesome to start with. In order to verify this assumption, this study reflects a corpus of 15 comedy monologues performed in different Spanish auditoriums and theatres during the years 2017 and 2018. By transcribing and segmenting these samples, we have been able to find how frequently the different tactics and linguistic procedures are used for attenuating subversive comedy discourse, as well as to examine the roles mitigation plays as a pragmatic strategy. The results obtained confirm that the Spanish female comedians under review use mitigation and therefore, distance themselves linguistically from their message, in order to become closer to the audience–or to not distance themselves too far from it–.