Pack some Midol and get out the fire hoses. Yes, dear Readers, prepare thyself for a rant.

While doing my daily poking around over at Smart Bitches I found a bit about Christopher Hitchens’s January Vanity Fair article, thoughtfully titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.”

I’ll just take a little nugget to give thee a taste, dear Reader.

For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle….

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, “Madam, I cannot conceive.”) It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called “the glory of slaves.” So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss….

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates….

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this…. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them…. (Vanity Fair)

Oh, you can already sense my blood pressure rising. (You can check out Ann Althouse, Melinda, and JenIsFamous for other responses to Hitchens. The discussion thread over at Jen’s is fantastic.)

Mine is below the fold.

The only three male comedians I think are even remotely funny are Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, and Chris Rock. I like all three because they’re smart and they don’t have to rely on poop or dick jokes or infantile high-school crap to wring laughs out of an unsuspecting audience. Most male comics are stuck in tenth grade, and that’s okay. You work with what you’ve got. (I would add Dennis Leary to my win list, but there’s only so much masochism disguised as sardonic rage I can take.)

Some of the guys I know in Real Life are even funny. The DHM has his moments, with bad puns and the occasional zinger. The Selkie’s Boy Scout has a moustache whose smirking is very amusing.

But by and large, I find men too infantile to be funny.

To me, real humor belongs to women. Living in a misogynistic society where you make seventy cents to the dollar a man makes while raising kids and having the number one danger to your life be the sweethearts you live with, with domestic violence and violent stalking against you at epidemic proportions–well, you’d have to have a sense of humor, or go mad.

Hitchens claims there are fewer “decent” female comedians than male. Leaving aside the subjective nature of humor (always leaving that aside) does it occur to this f!ckwit that most of the clubs and venues are owned by men who are going to find fart jokes, poop jokes, beer jokes, misogyny jokes, and someone else getting hit in the balls hilarious, and so are more likely to hire more men, giving the citizens-swinging-meat a bigger slice of the business? Does it ever cross his tiny little brain that with women earning far less than men, maybe female comics can’t afford to take the stage and practice/hone their craft, or go for weeks/months without a gig?

Does it ever occur to him that comedy clubs cater to the male interest, so are going to of course bring in more male comedians? With more poop jokes, jackoff jokes, “my girlfriend is so crazy” jokes–you get the idea.

Men and women certainly don’t find the same things funny. I’m sure some of my hilarious conversations with the Selkie or with Candy would scare the pants off men with their sharp edges, speed, and breaking of taboos; because for women humor isn’t a choice. It’s a necessity for dealing with the world. It’s also a social coin–a lot of issues within your group of female friends get hashed out with humor over the top. If you think of long ago in the dim ages when men were off hunting mammoth and women were at the camp bringing in seventy percent of the food (nuts and berries and herbs, oh my!) and raising kids and getting along, who do you think is more likely to be using humor to defuse everyday social tension? In that evolutionary strategy, killing a mammoth brings men together. Getting along keeps women able to share childraising with less friction.

Hitchens’s assertion that the huge almighty womb scares men so much they have to be funnier is so bloody Victorian I barely know where to begin. Does he still think hysteria is a real condition where the womb “moves around” the body? Does the female orgasm frighten him so much he advocates excising clitorises? What about property rights for women? Is that funny to him?

The double standard here is entrenched and it’s not funny at all. The idea that women are terrifying powerful and need to be guarded against is accompanied in this dynamic by the idea that they are fragile and stupid and need to be guarded against themselves. It’s the same old story–women aren’t smart, but they’re cunning as all get-out, so they’ll try and try and try to get their own checkbooks and jobs and freedoms. We can’t let that happen–after all, they’re the Weaker Sex, and they’ll only hurt their widdle selves with all that power. So let’s pat them on the head and watch them for signs of independence/”hysteria,” which we’ll excise with drugs/economic sanctions/cutting their naughty bits.

The idea that women aren’t funny is laughable, except I’m not laughing. Because here it’s being used in a way that does Victorian repression proud. I half expect Hitchens to start recommending The Fulfilled Woman next.

Saying that women aren’t funny because of their wombs is like saying men are smart because of their penises, or that poor people are poor because God loves them and is fitting them for heaven through suffering. It’s a pile of poo, and when a pile of poo is advanced as an Immortal Truth you can be sure the person advancing it is seeking to benefit in some way. Female comics represent a direct threat to the boy’s club the stand-up community is, and there’s paychecks involved, which means it gets nasty. Tripe-laden pieces of misogynistic fantasy like Hitchens’s article are just a symptom, not the disease.

I mentioned taboo as a part of women’s humor above, and I’m going to return to that for a second. When I get together with Candy, for example, no subject is off-limits. We’ve gone from vampires drinking used-tampon tea to sounding to polyamory to–well, you get the idea. Humor isn’t just funny, it’s a means of striking directly at the heart of cultural pressure on women to be “nice” and not “rock the boat,” to let people take advantage. I spoke before (in a throwaway passage here) about a prime mechanism of the existing gender inequality–training women not to enforce their own boundaries. Taking on taboo subjects with your girlfriends by using the razor edge of humor is a means of subverting that training at its root. (And you thought we were just having a good time, Candy. Heh.)

Humor is a powerful tool in the hands of the downtrodden. It is a huge leveler of inequality. Men using humor to get laid is in no way the same as the female use of humor every day to get through living in a misogynistic culture. You don’t need to look any further than Hitchens’s piece of Victorian-era Freudian mumblings about reproduction for proof.

So I started off talking about humor and ended up talking feminism, however thinly veiled. A lot of women are saying we don’t need feminism anymore, that we’re postfeminist, that feminism is like the Republican talking-point about affirmative action; that it just cements the inequality by asking for special treatment.

To which I’d answer, wake the f!ck up. The day we don’t need feminism or affirmative action will be a glorious day, full of parades and ice cream and ponies. In a perfect world, inequality wouldn’t exist. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and inequality is everywhere. Fighting against it is a right we won by chaining ourselves to the wheels of carriages; it is a duty to those less fortunate as well as to ourselves.

And Mr. Hitchens? Women are funny. Boys just don’t often understand, because we refuse to dumb the humor down with dick jokes. So there. *sticks out tongue*

/rant

There. Needless to say, I found Hitchens’s assertions breathtakingly wrongheaded as well as just plain insulting. If he meant the article to be sardonic or ironic he failed miserably. If he truly, honestly believes the tripe he’s spouting…well, he can have male humor and he’s welcome to it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Real Life, Rant Rant Rave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.