Depends who’s asking
Hitchens makes a very silly opening argument in this conspicuously silly piece, winsomely titled ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’. (Is this part of his Kingsley Amis shtick? KA was brilliant, but the routine misogyny was hardly his funniest or most interesting bit.)
However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make ’em laugh.” Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.
Come on. The fact that men don’t say their latest female love interest is funny doesn’t mean that women aren’t funny. Surely that ought to be obvious enough. Consider – someone tells you about her recent trip to Chicago, and doesn’t mention the Art Institute; that doesn’t mean that she didn’t go to the Art Institute. Someone tells you about her new car and doesn’t describe the back seat; that doesn’t mean her car doesn’t have a back seat. Someone tells you about her hike on Mount Rainier and doesn’t mention seeing an eagle; that doesn’t mean she didn’t see an eagle. The fact (if it is a fact) that men don’t say their newest girlfriends are funny could have nothing to do with the women and everything to do with what men notice and care about and talk about to other men. As long as we’re making sweeping generalizations, here’s one to sit next to Hitch’s: men don’t care whether women are funny or not, they care about other, more practical features. Or here’s a different and even unkinder one: men don’t like women who have senses of humour; men want women to laugh at their jokes, not say funny things themselves. Here’s another: men are threatened by women with senses of humour.
Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.
My wife is hilarious and that is one of the first things I told my friends about her. Also, I have to laugh at loud at stuff I read on Notes and Comment all the time.
It does seem fairly obvious to me that what this alleged trend points to is men’s cares about women and what they care to talk about to other man about women. Hitchens does not seem like the brightest bulb in the tool-shed… :P
A proof of this sweeping gender difference would be the tendency of men wanting to vomit every time we hear a dictation of a personal ad where somebody lists “Loves to laugh” as an interest. Gee, doesn’t everybody? – or is it a fetish? Perhaps the only thing Hitchens has managed to point out is that the stereotypical manly man things loving to laugh is a feminine quality.
Sorry, but I thought it was an interesting well-written piece. Your argument isn’t something that Hitchens, if I understand him correctly, would deny. The point is that a sense of humour in a woman isn’t a turn-on for a man as it is in a man for a woman (broadly speaking, of course). So it’s not something they’d tend to mention or brag about to their male friends when talking about their girlfriends. For men, having a sense of humour has a touch of the peacock’s tail about it.
It well be, as you say, that men feel threatened by women with a sense of humour. Again it’s something that Hitchens would admit. As he puts it “Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.”
If you read what he actually says, he’s not being at all complimentary about men.
My wife set a performance standard – I should make her laugh at least once a day.
She needs a hell of a sense of humour to just to be around me…
When her folio was up for crit (uni art student), I sent her a text for encouragement: “You have interesting ideas.” She told me her classmate was gobsmacked: “You mean your husband CARES what you do here?”
What a load of sentimental toss; I’d expect better from Hitchens. Not necessarily much better, mind.
If women are supposedly so serious about all that life and death stuff, then how is it that nurses are renowned for having a filthy sense of humour? And perhaps it’s that women do joke about child-bearing and -birth all the time but keep it between themselves and don’t go public with it. I speculate.
To second some of the comments above, I would say a] CH does not appear to know many women very well; and b] women are often most hilarious on the subject of things that men find it uncomfortable to find funny — notably, men themselves.
Put this one in the category of ‘pointless sh*te that should never have been written, commissioned by desperate editors from lazy famous writers on a bad day’.
On the subject of men being threatened by funny women, I was in the gents at a comedy club when I overheard two men talking about the female stand-up who had just been on. “You would,” said one,” but she’d only take the piss afterwards.”
My experience of stand-up comedy is that confidence can count for a lot when it comes to audience reaction. Men are encouraged to be assertive, whereas women are encouraged to be self-effacing. Performing to an audience of drunken stags and hens requires a lot of the former to put the hecklers in their place. I think that’s why the most successful funny women on the UK circuit – Jo Brand, Mandy Knight, Donna McPhail, Kitty Flannagan and Julia Morris – are confident and waspish.
Some female stand-ups I’ve spoken to have also felt opposition from the women in the audience: they think the comic is going to steal their partner, so they’re les inclined to laugh.
There’s also sexism in the UK comedy industry. A night with three male comics is a comedy night. If there’s a bill entirely made up of female comics then it’s a women’s comedy special. Some promoters won’t have more than one woman on the bill for fear of making the night too samey, because there’s a perception that women will only talk about men, menstruation and sex-toys. The UK Funny Women contest was promoted as a way of overcoming sexism in comedy, but there are rumours that even people associated with it have nicknamed it the “comedy special olympics”.
It has often been noticed that that when a woman says a man has a good sense of humour, she means that his jokes make her laugh; when a man says a woman has a good sense of humour, it means that she laughs at his jokes.
The fact that men don’t say their latest female love interest is funny doesn’t mean that women aren’t funny.
Chris Hitchens (despite the title of the Vaity Fair article) doesn’t say that women aren’t funny. He says that men are funnier than women, and tries to explain why. Whatever about his explanation, the fact remains that men vastly outnumber women at the top end of the comedy market. Of course, since funniness is subjective, what is funny to one man may be a damp squib to another. I find dyslexia jokes hilarious; I doubt if deslyxics do.
Oops, cuddent resist, sory. Onestly.
At any rate if we take the market as a quasi-objective guide, women really just don’t make it on the comedy front. Chris Hitchens is right about the basic facts of the case.
But why is this so? My own (add-on) explanation for this is that great humour requires great talent, and that as women are more like to be bunched around the mean (fewer superstars, fewer mentally retarded), very few of them are likely to make it to the top.
My own experience in advancing this hypothesis is that some women do not find it at all funny.
At least humourless women ones don’t. Objectively humourless women, that is – from my objective viewpoint.
Sorry, some obvious typos in the above posting.
That’s what you get when you joke about dyslexics
Serves me rite.
I think women are funny. But they seem less inclined to go down the route of making a career out of it.
OB is a funny bugger. She could make a career out of extreme sarcasm.
“It has often been noticed that that when a woman says a man has a good sense of humour, she means that his jokes make her laugh; when a man says a woman has a good sense of humour, it means that she laughs at his jokes.”
Haaaaa! I’ve noticed that meself.
Thenk you JFK and Paul. (A career out of extreme sarcasm does sound like such fun. Anyone hiring for that?)
I must agree with Mick H. though that I think you are a bit too harsh on Hitchens. I don’t think the article (which was a bit silly but probably intended as such) was all that flattering to men.
This said, the kind of funniness Hitchens writes about, I think, applies only to verbal jokes – which is a small part of what humour is about, and I think a culturally specific one at that (Finns are terrible at verbal jokes. But excellent at more dramatic, “pythonesque” humour).
Well now if the article was probably intended as a bit silly, how am I being unfair to him in calling it conspicuously silly? Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?
And that’s the only comment that covers the article as a whole; the main point in the post is about the opening argument, which is indeed a really bad argument. I’d even call it a Bad Move. Saying “You’re not funny, and I can prove it: I’ve never once told any of my friends that you’re funny” is not a clever gambit.
“Chris Hitchens (despite the title of the Vaity Fair article) doesn’t say that women aren’t funny.”
It’s Christopher, not Chris. And yes he does. Second para: “Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.”
“the fact remains that men vastly outnumber women at the top end of the comedy market.”
But that’s not what’s at issue. The subject matter isn’t how women do in the comedy market but the claim that they are not funny. Those are two completely different subjects. Let me explain: not all people who are funny go into ‘the comedy market.’
“The point is that a sense of humour in a woman isn’t a turn-on for a man as it is in a man for a woman (broadly speaking, of course). So it’s not something they’d tend to mention or brag about to their male friends when talking about their girlfriends.”
That gets to another odd aspect of that article, which I didn’t even mention – the way he somehow equates women in general to the love interests of men. He claims to be saying something about women, but the argument is about what is or isn’t a turn-on – as if the only reason women do anything is to be a turn-on for men. As if women have no existence unless men are talking about them or shtupping them.
The subject matter isn’t how women do in the comedy market but the claim that they are not funny.
Come on! Two sentences later, CH writes:
Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?
My interpretations tend to be charitable by default. CH was not being silly – facetious perhaps, but that’s not the same thing.
I do not understand how people in this thread are defending Hitchens so enthusiastically. He does say that women are in fact not funny; he never comes close to saying not as funny. And he attributes it to the fact that men do not look for a sense of humor when choosing a mate. His argument, pieced together, becomes “Men don’t think a sense of humor is a facet of sexiness. Therefore, women aren’t funny at all.”
And he’s full of shit. And you know it.
A perfect example of the difficulty of being funny for a woman is that bit in the Aristocrats involving Sarah Silverman. The whole purpose of the movie was to move the markers – to gild a scatological incest joke until it was truly offensive – but the only joke that really seemed to get an offended response was Silverman’s monologue about a 79 year old comic, the punch line of which was “Joe Franklin raped me” – and Joe Franklin threatened to sue.
That doesn’t surprise me. That monologue was great, but Silverman’s career is all about male touchiness about women’s humor. There’s a good Slate article about her here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2130006/. Apparently, she keeps getting into trouble for her jokes. It quotes some of them. I especially liked this one, that she tried to get into a Saturday Night live skit:
“Quite frankly, I think it’s a good law,” she wrote about a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortions. “I was going to get an abortion the other day. I totally wanted an abortion—and it turns out I was just thirsty.”)
Interesting. I don’t know this Sarah Silverman.
Well…humour is a form of verbal aggression, and it’s not news that aggression in women is not always greeted with universal accolades. In fact it’s more often greeted with the word ‘bitch’.
Mary McCarthy, for instance. She could be a case study in comparative reputations of male and female sharks.
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