WXHY MEN ARE FUNNIER
In a Vanity Fair article (January 2007) ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ the journalist Christopher Hitchens explains that women are not funny because they don’t need to be. Why? because men are helplessly attracted to them anyway.
Additionally, women are preoccupied with the deeper mysteries of life.
‘Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire’.
Men on the other hand need to be funny in order to impress women and to break down their defences. Apparently, women are most vulnerable to seduction when provoked into an irresistible belly laugh. Though whether this is the preferred strategy of the conventionally attractive male, or only of those more challenged is not clear. On the evidence of his photographs, Hitchens is challenged.
Humour is also a sign of intelligence: a dangerous thing in a woman.
Women, who have been trained from infancy to avoid revealing that they are brainy, are not going to risk all by being funny.
Serious students of humour agree that what is defined as funny is determined by ‘the dominant group’… also known as ‘men’. What men laugh at is regarded as normal. If women laugh at different things then they clearly have no sense of humour.
Research has shown that women are funnier in all-female company and jokes targeting men contribute greatly to sisterly solidarity. Of course the content of all ‘against-the- opposite-sex’ jokes is essentially the same. Women describe men as arrogant sexual animals, and men describe women as stupid cows with only one thing on their minds.
Men however do not hold back from telling anti-women jokes in mixed company, whereas women tend to reserve their ‘zingers’ for when they are all together. Women often have to decide in mixed company whether or not to laugh along with a sexist joke against women, or to demonstrate their obvious stupidity by refusing to find it funny.
Joke-telling also reflects the powerful/powerless styles associated with men and women respectively. Clubbable men tend to relate well-rehearsed narratives. One man holds the floor regaling the audience (same or mixed-sex) with a story that ends in a punch line. The audience obligingly falls about, until the next male competitor takes the floor. For men humour is a form of preening and display that presents them in their best light.
Non-professional funny women rarely have a repertoire of set-piece jokes. Women’s humour tends to be more opportunistic and context-based and often takes the form of the deadly one-liner. A common mode is self- deprecation; the speaker’s failure of some social or sexual test.
What do these gender differences in styles of humour mean for the increasingly numerous female stand-up comedians? According to Hitchens this increase in numbers does not affect his basic thesis that (real) women are not funny since most female comedians ‘ are hefty, or dykey or Jewish or some combo of the three’ i.e. not attractive to males such as Hitchens and therefore not real women.
Many women comics have spoken of the hostility they have faced from both women and men in the audience. Men want women as audience, not as rivals in the humour stakes. Women may not respond well to another woman being the centre of attention. Neither men nor women want a woman in charge of the mike and making them laugh.
“Making a joke is like making a pass – you take control, you take a risk & try to bring the house down. Good girls wait” Rebecca Barecca<
Female comedians also felt that they were always judged on their appearance…. Are they too good-looking or not good-looking enough?
It is hard to imagine this criterion being applied to some of our famous funny men. Ricky Gervais? Jay Leno?
Female comedians have reacted in various ways to this challenge….some have become drop-dead botoxed glamorous…like Joan Rivers.....and others deliberately emphasize the wacky and unconventional aspects of their appearance…..Roseanne Barr, Dawn French, Jo Brand…
I start off by saying – “I’m an anorexic. I must be anorexic because I look in the mirror and see a fat person” Jo Brand (large funny woman) Dressing in an androgynous way can result in the label ‘lesbian’ which is perceived as a distraction to the main business of telling jokes. However, being ‘queer’ ‘gay’ or ‘camp’ does not seem to be a disadvantage to male comedians like Julian Clary, or Eddie Izzard.
It is to be hoped that as more and more women are ‘in charge’ of different aspects of daily life audiences will also find it more and more normal to see female comics in charge of making them laugh, and that self-deprecation or putting themselves down will become less of a staple.
Shazia Mirza a young British Muslim woman of Pakistani origin who sometimes appears in the hijab challenges all stereotypes at once, and may be a bright sign of things to come.
Shortly after September 11, 2001 she opened her stand-up routine with the following statement:
“My name is Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license”. This is not powerless humour.