The Feminist Equivalent of the Poop Joke is Still the Poop Joke

It may sound sexist, but I think most women, and certainly every honest woman, would agree with me when I say that the phallus is funny and the vagina less so.  

The penis protrudes bizarrely from an otherwise harmonious silhouette. A penis flops around.  It swells unpredictably or splurges prematurely. It has a little personality of its own. Even things that resemble phalluses are funny by association: trombones, sausages, pointy hats, the Washington Monument, oversized cigars, normal cigars. And History can attest, too: In Aristophanes’ The Clouds, the characters chase each other with a big, fake penis and bop each other on the heads with it. Priapus, the ancient Greek’s version of a scarecrow, was a demi-god with a hilariously swollen phallus that would sodomize crop thieves. Penis humor has a richly obscene tradition stretching back thousands of years. 

In his recent Vanity Fair essay, Christopher Hitchens, our generation’s jolliest provocateur, investigates reasons for what he labels “the humor gap” between men and women.  Children, he argues, are the crux of the issue: men are childish, women have children, and the latter is definitely UNfunny. For most of human history, women have been important because they can get pregnant, and pregnancy has meant pain, suffering, blood, screaming, and a close shave with death. What is not painful about pregnancy is still not funny: life-creating power, strength, beauty, and for most cultures, mystery and the supernatural. 

Okay. Maybe.

But what seems most likely to me, and something Hitchens just touches on, is that humor for men is like a defense mechanism.  They know their penises are silly, so they need to make fun of them constantly and ruthlessly before women do in order to diffuse the situation. That means that the woman can be funny, but if she’s too funny, she’s a threat. A race to self-deprecate always needs to stay ahead of the one who can just straight up deprecate, so to speak. 

A laugher gives power to the laughee.

Anecdotally: do you notice, as I do, that men who seem genuinely secure in themselves, as in, not needing to prove their masculinity to you, are also the men that you feel most comfortable making jokes around? They are far more likely to guffaw–I mean really guffaw–at your jokes. For these men, granting a woman funny status isn’t threatening. Consider: when’s the last time you didn’t make a gay man laugh? 

Men have a vested interest in making each other feel like an eleven on the funny scale, even if they’re just a four or five. I have lately been in the situation to observe all-male 20-something acquaintances grouped together in conversation.  They belong to that emerging demographic of man-boys: lacking the traditional rites of passage like marriage, war, or an important job, they are stuck in perpetual adolescence. From an objective point of view, almost nothing they say to each other is funny, but they constantly affirm each other’s talk by forcing a laugh, or, more often than not, simply stating, “That is f*cking hilarious,” or the more pared-down, “That is funny.” Mostly, it is not funny. It seems that men have signed a social contract, something to the tune of “I’ll make you feel funny if you make me feel funny.” 

True laughter is a spontaneous and involuntary reaction, and it also involves a shift of power. If I make someone laugh, male or female, that person just validated me and my personality.  In essence, every time someone laughs because I cause them to, I get a little bit of power. But there’s more! I can physically incapacitate them, well, to varying degrees–anywhere from the slight distraction to blinding tears, knee-slapping to pants-peeing. Making someone laugh is socially empowering for me, in addition to being physically de-powering for the other.  That may be useful in the short-term if the goal is to make the person keel over with laughter and then deliver a swift right-hook, but the effects of endorphins are likely to give the laugher a long-term advantage.  Something to think about.

I’m not suggesting we use humor is to advance a feminist agenda; that would be sad and unfunny.  But I am suggesting (and this is where writing about being funny gets really unfunny) that humor is power, socially and even sometimes physically.  To be funny is to cause a spontaneous, involuntary acknowledgment of equality or even superiority. 

Now will someone write a post about the unequivocal awesomeness of Tina Fey?