that is annoying. once again we are ALL LUMPED TOGETHER. i do however agree that our sense of humor does tend to be more refined. and i will also agree that it is because we are smarter. this quote from him however, is very true of most mothers i know. (not all however, thank god)

s there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

i cannot tell you how many times i have sat in a salon and overheard mothers talking about what their kid ate for lunch that day, all the while praying that i NEVER end up like that.

I thought the article was itself a big joke up until I got to here:

"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."

He's essentially saying that women have some "higher calling" in life, and that men therefore give themselves over to more frivolous pursuits. This is one of the oldest tricks in the sexism book: give women the short end of the stick, then tell them they're better than you. That'll make them think they got the better deal in the end, since you pretend to respect them.

Problem is, if we're so much better than men, why don't they move over and let us run the world already?

Hitchens' *REAL* point ought to be this:

"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."

Instead, he just throws this out as a "maybe, but not really" so that it suddenly becomes "publishable" by 2006 standards. Pathetic. This article gets a big 'ole eye roll from me.

And, no offense to Ann or the others who like fart jokes, but bathroom humor just isn't funny. That's why we don't laugh at it. I'm perfectly capable of laughing at calamity (and I often do), but unpleasant bodily functions aren't calamities. They're just part of everyday life, and they're gross. Why men seem to find them funny is beyond me -- but it hardly makes me humorless. In large groups, I'm often the one making everyone else laugh... even when there are men around. Go figure. Guess that major turn-off, intelligence, really CAN come in handy.

i'm a fan of poopy jokes myself...but then i've never claimed to be refined.

the point, law fairy, is that many women dont find them funny. but many do, and its precisely bc of this fact that you cannot lump all women together. i am with jessica and ann on this one, i never pretended to be refined either. i do find that this is why i get along with men (and or are considered 'one of the guys') better much of the time, i dont roll my eyes at their attempts at potty humor, i laugh right along with them

"If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further."

Is he discussing laughter or something else with much similar reactions???

ok, so basically he's saying a dick isn't enough of a reason to like a man so he needs humor. a woman, however, has many many amazing attributes (albeit he makes them seem physical when he uses the aside "catch my drift") and thus doesn't need humor.

it's sort of a backhanded compliment. or a full-on insult. depending on which way you look at it.

I'm also a big fan of raunchy humor, but I also like the refined humor. I can even laugh it up with all my guy friends, but that is why you don't make broad assumptions about all of us baby-makers (there too I know a wide variety of women who aren't the least bit concerned with making babies). Plus, I'm not sure if I just didn't read the study the scientists did (becuase we all know they always get it right), but not sure how that study proves we aren't funny or intelligent?

there is nothing - NOTHING - more painful than watching a non-funny person trying to be funny. like hitchens, as it happens.

i also particularly like the "reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing" line. geez.

loathe? absolutely.

Oh look--another "scientific" study in which very small sample sizes are used to "prove" that human beings are the direct product of one specific brain function!

And I also love the old chestnut about how women only need to worry about having sex appeal to get men interested, whereas men must be entertaining to boot. 'Cause guys are merely hormones on legs whereas women have no sex drive at all. Whatever.

I wrote on the subject a few days ago, and, like Hitchens, I more or less operated from the assumption that men are funnier than women (though I wasn't as obnoxious about it as he was, I think).

I don't want to defend the proposition --which I only put forth to get to another, less contentious idea-- as I do the idea that it's plausible that it's true. Why not? Doesn't it make sense that humor, which is instinctual but also cultural, might be expressed differently by groups (men and women) who are treated differently by the culture?

Is it an illusion, for instance, that Jews are, on average, funnier than gentiles? Is it an illusion that black males, on average, are better basketball players than white males? Is it an illusion that gay men dress better than straight men, on average? Is it possible that that has something to do with the cultures of Jews and black men and gay men?

Is it possible that men are funnier than women because American culture rewards men for funniness more than it rewards women, and it penalizes women for being funny more than it penalizes men?

I don't know that men are funnier than women, but the blithe assumption that they simply couldn't be seems absurd to me. Doesn't it make sense that it would make a difference that men and women exist in American culture so differently? Don't we need feminism so badly in part because there are all these destructive and constrictive notions out there of how women should be?

Hitchens was entirely unpersuasive in his argument for the superior funniness of men, and maybe there is something intrinsically sexist about trying to make the argument at all, but that doesn't change the fact that it's entirely plausible that one gender is funnier than the other.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Huh? Oh, sorry. I was reading that article and must've dozed off.
Is this guy supposed to be a comedian? If he is, the poor man must be starving to death.

Blaming women as a whole for the fact that you wouldn't know funny if it bit you on the ass? Now that's just sad.

You know, as a person who has aspired to be a stand up comic, and as someone who prides herself on her sense of humor. I just can't be insulted enough.

I'm funny dammit! Grr. So many things are wrong with this article.

Because of course Lucille Ball wasn't funny. Nor was Gilda Radner. Nor is Amy Pohler. Or any of the other 100s of female comics I have seen perform who made me laugh hyterically.

arrgh.

Hmmmm very very good point Daniel.

katie, I'm not trying to lump all women together. I'm just saying that even for those of us women who *don't* find those jokes funny, doesn't mean we somehow have "less" of a sense of humor than "men." What irritates me about the position that "these jokes are funny" (meaning inherently funny, such that you MUST find them funny if you have a sense of humor, honestly and truly I'm not trying to demean anyone who finds them funny just because I don't) is the clear implication that if you don't see anything particularly clever about someone saying "pull my finger" (to this day, my dad's favorite "joke"), you're somehow a bitchy, stuck-up ice queen. Just because I don't find these jokes funny, does not indicate some inability to see humor on my part. They're not inherently funny to 100 hundred percent of the good-humored population, and I'm just saying that I resent the implication that they are.

I agree, Law Fairy. Humor is subjective and depends on any number of things to make something "funny".

So really I don't see how anyone can actually make this assertion at all since humor is so ambiguous.

erm, I didn't mean to write "hundred" after "100" :0)

It appears that Christopher Hitchens doesn't think that women are funny because he doesn't like women. He actually says that Dorothy Parker wasn't truly funny - a clear indicator that his humometer is badly miscalibrated. I'm one of the godamm funniest people I know, and my husband damn well tells people that I'm funny when he describes me to them. Just because Hitchens refuses to believe that attractive women could have more dimensions to their personality than their looks does not mean that he's not a willfully ignorant jerk.

OH, one other thing:

Apparently it didn't occur to Chris that MAYBE the reason women praise men's senses of humor and laugh at their jokes is not because they're so very funny, but rather because we've been taught that men have fragile egos that need to be coddled -- thus, I must pretend that everything he says is enthralling and delightfully clever, lest his ego deflate and he decide not to marry me (oh horror of horrors!).

In other words: Chris, you and your fellow men, by and large, are not NEARLY as funny as you think you are.

p.s. maybe too, this isn't the best topic for hitchen at the moment seeing that andy dick just got called out for using racial slurs in his comic act.

gibson, richards, and dick (ha) - it ain't funny. i know i'm a woman and maybe that's part of the reason, but i don't think men like that humor either assholes.

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny [...] For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing.

Chris Hitchens is a blithering idiot. Women are funnier to me and when something is funny to me it is really funny.

Daniel, I find what you're saying very interesting. So basically, a sense of humour is a result of socialization, and not something innate? That makes sense to me, especially when little girls are encouraged to behave one way, and little boys another. Maybe the problem is just that men decide what is funny, and things like tepid romantic comedies targeted towards women support the notion.

I don't really find poop jokes funny either, but "The EX" knife set that was posted in another thread was hilarious. I've also noticed that when I am with my friends, we laugh almost constantly, but the majority of it is based on inside jokes and enough comfort with each other to say things that sound offensive to the outside ear. (One of my friends tortures me constantly about brown stereotypes.) Someone listening in wouldn't "get it," and would probably think that we're not funny.

An aside: You know who is really funny, and I never realised it? Vanessa Williams. She's hilarious on Ugly Betty. Does that fit into the "young and beautiful can't be funny" thing mentioned earlier about Candace Bergman, or was she always funny and I never noticed?

I'd also like to know what all of you do find funny.

Gaah.

I was the writing coordinator for my college sketch comedy troupe for two years; even without dealing with the whole "women have no sense of humor" myth (and people who believed said myth were disinvited from my writer's meetings), it was hard to get the women to speak up in meetings. I spent most of my time asking the guys why there were no female characters in their sketches; why the gender neutral character couldn't be a woman when it was insisted it was a male character; why the only female characters in sketches were mothers, whores, or children.

And you know what? The troupe was better, both in terms of writing and acting, when there were varied more female roles, and when there were female writers. Not because either gender is more funny than the other, but because a larger perspective in writing, editing, and acting, makes EVERYONE funnier.

And now I have to read that article, if only out of morbid curiosity...

ahhh law fairy i was talking about how he cant lump all women together. i know you arent! i know what you are saying:)

Christopher Hitchens lost me when he wrote an entire book about how much he hated Mother Teresa, then became a neocon. I mean, talk about burning your candle at both ends.

Cheers,

TH

There’s nothing funnier than feminist deconstruction of an article that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously and is actually pretty funny. But Hitchen’s grave sin was clearly the crime of “lumping.� He has generalized about women. (The horror!) Let us talk about this in a pseudo-intellectual manner until we’ve satisfied our moral outrage and made ourselves feel better. (Ok…I’m good…)

The proof of Hitchen’s thesis is in these comments. He wasn’t making a poopy joke (so that you like fart jokes if great, but neither here nor there); that was high brow humor. Unfortunately, women—excuse me—all the women here—thought the article was still unfunny. Which means that all men (yes, we lump ourselves together all the time) are screwed. Or not (as the case may be and probably is). On the other hand, the irony (an even more subtle form of high brow humor) is that your comments put me in stitches. (I’ve cut and pasted the comments into an email to Hitchen’s so that he would get a good laugh too.) The depressing thing was that despite the wealth of material in the article that cried out for a satirical and comical retort, not one woman was funny enough to even attempt it. Instead, the women of this sight felt unjustifiably lumped together as unfunny baby-makers. Which—judging from all that I’ve read here—is at least half true. Paula, Where have all the funny feminists gone? (Perhaps a bit too much Marxism in the diet. Marxists are even less funny than feminists.)

Great humor is funny because its true. Ladies, you really don’t have a sense of humor. It’s ok though. You have breasts. You’ll never need to make men (generalizing again) laugh. Stay soft, warm and curvy and you’ll never need a sense of humor…at least not with me or any other man I’ve ever met…we’re hooked on the breasts. (Fat chicks, you should try to be a little funny though.)

At some point I will pen a lengthy diatribe against Hitchens on my blog, but for now I will simply say: I almost pity the man. His alcohol-lubricated descent into humorless, conservative stupidity has taken place right out there in public. Ezra Klein has a great post about it.

God, feminists are no fun. They don't think sexism is funny at all!

There’s nothing funnier than feminist deconstruction of an article that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously and is actually pretty funny.

Deconstruction? You think this is deconstruction? That's funny.

Anyway, you are stupid and gross. Go away.

lol, Stone. If I had a dollar for every time a guy's said something stupidly wrong and offensive, and after I called him on it, he backed off and said, "hey, it was a joke! Can't you take a joke?"... well, I would have a lot of dollars. Probably enough to buy a Wii, even.

Stone, I read the article and at first I was cracking up because it was pretty damn funny -- the shit he said was so stupidly and obviously wrong that he could not have been serious. But then I got to the part where he talks ("jokes," even) about women "really" being in power and realized that, even if his intent was partly satirical, he's still making a broader political point that is decidedly unfunny. To suggest that men are funnier because women are the ones who *really* run the world is a tired, derivative old "joke" -- the article is an overwraught play on "the old ball and chain." It's stupid and unfunny. That we don't like the joke, again, doesn't make us humorless. It simply means we have different taste in humor -- high-brow enough to recognize when something is innovative and when it's just plain old-fashioned sexism, all dolled up and repackaged for the 21st century.

Girls, I realize that "Stonecraft"'s post is a little long for the simple female brain to understand, but I've spend some time looking at it and I'll help condense it for us all - he's saying: shut up. I hope that clarifies things for you - we really have no business commenting on /discussing an article in "Vanity Fair". Or anything.
Um, I'm new here; why does a blog aimed at females have the obligatory comment telling us to shut the fuck up?

Dear newcomers,

I'm assuming you all followed a link here, so do this mush-brained girl a favor and satisfy my curiosity. Which of the prepubescent asshats on the girls-have-cootiesphere directed you to this post?

Because, ScyllaCharybdis, some men just can't STAND that there are women discussing things amongst themselves without worrying about pleasing men like them. We call that "trolling."

It's ok though, because I actually do have breasts. The best thing about having them is that men like StoneCraft expect me to act one way, and then they get all confused and upset when it turns out that I'm not in the least bit concerned with impressing such fools.

Welcome to the site! There's lots of fun and funny stuff to discuss mixed in with the serious issues. You can just ignore any trolls hiding under bridges.

Oh, I assumed Stone was JOKING. Silly humor-impaired me.

Huh? That Stanford study he references came out a long time ago, at least a year if I remember right. The implications I saw around it at the time were that women were actually better and more discriminating at humor than men, because they wouldn't go for the stupid joke and held out for something really funny. That stupid idiot.

Just read Hitchens' steaming plate of tripe. I also find his false elevation of women to be particularly irritating.

I do think there is a general impression out there (though not in this rather self-selective group of comments writers) that women aren't as funny as men. I believe that socialization is a big factor, and I appreciate Daniel's post.

But I also wonder if the reason for the impression that women aren't as funny as men is that the litmus test for humor is based on what men find funny! Even supercool women seem to use what "average men" find funny as a standard for their own sense of humor -- I see all these comments about laughing at fart jokes in this context. Standards of all sorts, be they of intelligence, of strength, even of stupid stuff like sleeping-bag size, are based on attributes of men -- men are so often taken as the standards of normalcy. Perhaps humor is no different! I've personally found that the male yuck-fests that I'm guessing Hitchens takes as a hallmark of funny, are parades of machismo and one-upsmanship, where women can join in only if they cover their femaleness with misogynistic jokes and act like "one of the guys." If this is the standard, then of course women come out looking abnormal.

About this Stanford study -- I'm going to speculate that the participants in this study were shown cartoons that were created by men and reflective of men's experience and subculture, as are most media we encounter. Women are measured against a man's mold. To put it another way, can you imagine a world in which we understand a man's sense of humor in terms of his reaction to comedy generated by women and reflective of women's broad range of experience? Imagine the outrage! Perhaps (more speculation here) female participants in the Stanford study didn't expect to find the joke funny, and were pleasantly surprised when they did, because they've learned from experience that they're outsiders in this world of so-called humor, a world that's defined by what men find funny.

Can you imagine a world in which we understand a man's sense of humor in terms of his reaction to comedy generated by women and reflective of women's broad range of experience?

The result would be

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny

I'm reminded of an ex-boyfriend who thought it was hilarious to wave meat in front of me (vegetarian). One day he just came out and told me that I had no sense of humour.
It was an enlightening moment for me, because I'd been thinking the same thing about him, because he totally didn't get Blackadder or any of the stuff I found funny.
Until that moment, I'd thought that something was either funny or it wasn't, and anyone who didn't think it was funny was just stupid.
I was 20 when this happened, but Hitchens obviously still doesn't get it.

I agree that Hitchens made an awful, obnoxious, unconvincing case for why men are funnier. I'm not, however, finding myself very persuaded by the counter-arguments being made in this comments thread, which seem to amount to, "Well, I'm funnier than Hitchens is, and I've known lots of unfunny men who also believe they're hilarious, -- case closed."

It seems to me that men are socialized to care more about being funny, and therefore, on average, they're more practiced at being funny. Not only that, but women, particularly girls, are often penalized by men (and boys) for being too funny. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm happy to be proved wrong. But we can't even have a meaningful argument/conversation about it unless it's accepted that it's possible that men are funnier than women, or women are funnier than men, or Jews are funnier than gentiles, or the Irish are funnier than the Scottish, or Trinidadians are funnier than Tobagoans.

Maybe it's an argument we shouldn't be having at all, because it too easily becomes an opportunity for men to assert claims for their superiority under the guide of having a discussion (i.e. the Hitchens method), but I don't believe that has to be the case.

But Daniel, what about pugbug's point, which is excellent? Not only are we socialized not to be "funny," but what counts as "funny" is decided by men. Why don't women define "funny"? Hitchens would probably say it's because we're too busy being God or something. What an idiot. It has much more to do with the fact that men run the world, than that women secretly run it but like to pretend we don't. What a bunch of shite.

One wonders how Hitchens accounts for the ubiquitous presence of giggling, laughing groups of teenage girls, or indeed, the fact that women in groups spend a great deal of their time laughing.

Oh, wait, one doesn't wonder that at all. Because Hitchens hasn't had an interesting or original thought for ten years.

Did anyone read Ellen Willis's great piece on women and humor in her first collection of essays? One of its great lines was something like "Not laughing at jokes about big boobs means that you don't have a sense of humor. But laughing at jokes about castration means you're a bitch." Indeed, let's think about who gets to decide about what's funny. If women have no sense of humor, why is men's number one fear about women the fear of being laughed at? It seems to me that men have to tell themselves that women have no sense of humor in order to defend themselves against the threat of women's laughter.

But really, what does one expect from Hitchens? He's always been an anti-feminist--even when writing for The Nation, he was anti-choice. All he had to do then, by the way, if wanted an example of women's wit, was to turn a couple pages and read Pollitt. I guess her dry humor, which cracks me up regularly, just went right over his head. Men have no sense of humor...

EG writes:
If women have no sense of humor, why is men's number one fear about women the fear of being laughed at? It seems to me that men have to tell themselves that women have no sense of humor in order to defend themselves against the threat of women's laughter.

Not to mention women's pointing. I mean, I'm pretty confident that it all does boil down to castration anxiety for boys like Hitchens. I'm not with Freud on a lot of things, but when it came to the penis and masculine identity, he had it nailed.

Cheers,

TH

Not laughing at jokes about big boobs means that you don't have a sense of humor. But laughing at jokes about castration means you're a bitch.

Exactly. So men who don't laugh at castration jokes have no sense of humor. Got that, men? Pug and TLF were exactly right:

The researchers say their findings suggest women place a greater emphasis on the language of humour, possibly employing a more analytical approach. They also believe that the women in the study were less likely to expect the cartoons to be funny - so when they were, their pleasure centre lit up with greater intensity than their male counterparts. "Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." The researchers also found that the funnier the cartoon, the more the reward centre was activated in women. That was not the case in men who seemed to "expect" the cartoons to be funny from the start.

I am reminded of a night, long ago, when a boyfriend walked in to find me watching "7th Heaven" and laughing until I cried. I watched it a LOT because it often made me laugh. He told me it wasn't SUPPOSED to be funny. Gee...

What Daniel writes would make an interesting thesis (coming soon to where, Daniel?) but what pugbug says is dead on and should also be included.

I have also had that meat in face thing that triffid describes. Heh. Back when people used to do that to me, I found biting the PEOPLE to be a very funny response...

HA HA HA HA HA HA

I'm sorry, I got as far as this:

"If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, 'Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.'"

And then I realized I'm not going to bother reading something like this if the person writing it has a sense of humour about as astute as that of a Family Circus cartoon.

Hey Hitchens, the 1930s called, they want their joke back.

Family Circus pisses me off.

okay, donna, THAT made me laugh :)

See, women are funnier. The BBC article said women's sense of humor is subtle and analytical. If the study had 10 average men and women look at Echidne of the Snake's subtle, analytical humor instead of cartoons, the results would have been reversed.

What a drunken cockbag.

It's still hard to believe (given "The Trials Of Henry Kissinger") that he was once a rational journalist.

Someone ought to tell him that just because Winston Churchill managed to get out decent if misogynistic one-liners while plastered, it doesn't mean wit's to be found at the bottom of the brandy bottle.

Lolz. Frabjabulous, I think we need to go back another few decades. I had to stop reading when he started quoting Rudyard "empire-building laugh riot" Kipling.

Angel of the house!
Wombs suck out the funny!

I think women are funner (sans i), mostly because I'm, like, totally biased towards those who'll include me in their activities in the first place.

The caveat: I'm a total sucker for ego-stroking males who laugh at MY jokes. It's actually somewhat of a problem, because it's hard to tell if they're...seriously amused.

:)

Lolz. Late to the party, but if I grab a drink I should be fine!

Frabjabulous, I think we need to go back another few decades. I had to stop reading when he started quoting Rudyard "empire-building laugh riot" Kipling.

Angel of the house!
Wombs suck out the funny!

I think women are funner (sans i), mostly because I'm, like, totally biased towards those who'll include me in their activities in the first place.

The caveat: I'm a total sucker for ego-stroking males who laugh at MY jokes. It's actually somewhat of a problem, because it's hard to tell if they're...seriously amused.

:)