I know it’s old and the point probably flogged like the dead horse it is, but the query in the Google search “Are Women Funny,” returned a particular hit of Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair January 2007 headline “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” It a long, anthropological treatise that as far as I can tell boils down to men have to be funny to get laid, women don’t because they have inborn…um…desirability.
Anyway, recently the subject has been brought up again in counterpoint in an article entitled “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny” by Alessandra Stanley in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair. It’s a long historical treatise that as far as I can tell boils down to men find funny women threatening, particularly if desirable, but the catch is that these days a woman has to be sexy for men to entertain the thought of them being funny.
Clearly, the point of the party-girl picture of funny women Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Tina Fey accompanying the article (Tina is the funniest head writery one with the vodka bottle between her legs), is that they are monumentally desirable. Personally, I have a hard time judging women’s sexiness, aside from the occasionally funny Angelina Jolie. I’d laugh heartily at every single moderately sub-funny thing she said. But I digress.
Desirability and funny and reasons therefor in either gender are subjective concepts and cannot be argued empirically beyond a reasonable doubt even by big brains like Hitchens and Stanley. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.
Come to think of it, I can empirically argue that a woman can be funny, at least from my point of view (see what I did there?). I give you the timely, and unfortunately out-of-sync, Wanda Sykes. Her desirability is still subjective.
Posted on Attackerman, May 17, 2008
I find Wanda Sykes scary! Her voice alone scares the heck out of me. Tina and Maya, now "dems dames is funnilicious biscuits!"
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