You’re totally wrong if you think women aren’t funny
By WIll Colvin
The late Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant writer and wit, and arguably one of the greatest minds of our generation.
On the page he was incredibly eloquent, but to meet him in person, as I once did, and to see him argue in person, was an entirely different thing.
No one else I can think of today comes even close to his ability to craft incredibly detailed and well-reasoned arguments in astonishingly full and eloquent sentences from the top of his head in the middle of heated debate.
But I don’t think he was infallible, and there’s one argument that he made that has always really bothered me.
Hitchens made an argument in a 2007 Vanity Fair article called “Why Women Aren’t Funny” which essentially follows this logic:
All instinctive human behaviour is based around the prime directive of finding a mate and reproducing.
Making a woman laugh is a strong way of making her attracted to you regardless of your outward physical genetics, but making a man laugh does little increase to increase his attraction towards a female.
Therefore, there is no evolutionary reason for funny women.
WHY AM I REBUTTING THIS NOW – eight years after the original article was published and four years after Hitchens’ death?
There was a backlash at the time: a swathe of female comedians and writers, including Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig and Alessandra Stanley sang out saying “Hey, we’re funny! We’re the proof that you’re wrong!”
But it was hardly a refutation – Hitchens had already argued in his original piece that while there are talented female comedians, they are essentially evolutionary outliers who are copying male humour, and he also implied that this may be because they are lesbians and, like men, need humour to impress potential mating partners.
“There is only a dispute about what the answer is,” replied Hitchens in this video, “there is no question that for women the need or ability to be funny is tremendously less than it is among men. Nobody has been found to deny that, Alessandra doesn’t even try to deny that.”
No one seemed to challenge this, and that’s what’s always frustrated me – because it’s utterly absurd and has no real grounding in anthropology, evolutionary theory or human behavioural science.
AT THE CORE OF THIS IDEA IS THE THEORY that all human behaviour is based around finding a suitable mate and reproducing with them – and it’s completely wrong.
Humans are not like fish. We’re not like wolves. We’re not like elephants or even like the monogamous penguins that the Christian right argue are nature’s proof that we’re supposed to get married.
Humans in the wild don’t find a partner, fuck them and run off. Women don’t shit out a baby in the woods and walk away, ready to make another one when a suitably funny man turns up.
Pre-agricultural humans lived in bonded, co-operative communities.
They banded together for safety, and for the massive benefits of co-operation. Co-operation is incredibly important to human beings – and it’s as prime a directive to us as the need to reproduce.
What does Hitchens think women do when men aren’t around? Sit there, mute, knitting in silence and awaiting the return of the male hunters?
Comedy, for women and men is not about mating – it’s about social cohesion. It’s about bonding and community. Looking at tribal cultures, women have strong roles as social custodians, as mothers, teachers, carers – roles in which comedy is clearly vitally important.
Hitchens argued that women don’t need comedy to impress men because men don’t find it attractive, or even that they find it intimidating when women are funny.
Even if that were true, it ignores the very important fact that a woman in a pre-agricultural tribe has a very, very strong evolutionary reason to impress other women: they need their co-operation in raising their children.
They also need men’s co-operation in raising their children; humans aren’t like elephants, men aren’t ejected from the group once their reproductive role is complete.
Comedy may not play a strong role for women in the initial phases of attraction between the sexes, but it certainly plays a strong role in social cohesion between sexes in the long run.
Anyone in a long term relationship knows it’s made a hell of lot easier by the shared in-jokes, characters, silly voices and comedic shorthands between partners.
Hitchens also argued that women who perform comedy exist, but they’re playing a men’s game by men’s rules. This may be true of some women; Sarah Silverman, Rosie O’Donnell, and Amy Schumer are all admittedly often more aggresively male in their humour.
But two American women immediately spring to mind: Kristen Wiig and Jenna Marbles.
Both are both examples of comedians who are playing a women’s game by women’s rules.
They have huge female audiences and their humour is decidely female. It’s about relationships, male idiocy, social interaction, the foibles and embarrassments of sexual intercourse.
This is the fabric of female comedy – men may not get it, but that’s because they’re not its direct audience. It’s not about impressing men.
Despite the obvious misogyny of Hitchens’ argument, there’s also a touch of misandry to it. He simultaneously argues that men’s comedy is all about impressing women, and then says that much of it is too scatological and base for women to enjoy. That doesn’t quite make sense – if it’s for them, why isn’t it for them?
Could it be that male comedy is not all about attracting a mate? Could it be that just like women, men need comedy to bond and cohere with other men (and arguably with women too), to form the co-operative friendships that are, in the wild, the basis of their immediate survival?
And events since Hitchens’ original argument are starting to undermine him even further in the real world.
There’s been a rise of young female comedians both in Britain, like Sarah Pascoe, Josie Long, Kerry Godliman, and in Australia, comedians like Sarah Kendall and Felicity Ward, who are smart, clever and funny, and aren’t playing a man’s game by a man’s rules.
This may be due in part to the disintegration of the male domination of the industry; and the BBC’s commitmentto heavily increasing female representation in comedy on it’s programming.
One of the best and most underrated comedy series of all time, Pulling, is a perfect example of this.
Written by and starring Sharon Horgan in the lead role, Pulling is an excellent illustration both of female comedy’s integral role in female relationships, and that women’s humour can be just as vicious, dark and scatological as men’s, while remaining decidely different.
Lena Dunham’s first series of Girls illustrates this point too – although subsequent series were arguably utterly unwatchable.
Perhaps this is an argument that we’ll very soon look back on as utterly ridiculous. There are now plenty of examples of female and male approaches to comedy, existing in the same space.
Graham Lineham’s The IT Crowd is almost universally loved by both sexes and is a brilliant example of a very male approach to comedy contrasting perfectly with a very female approach to comedy: Katherine Parksinon holds her own perfectly well against Richard Ayoade and Chris O’Dowd and does it without playing their game – the contrast of performances is precisely what makes it so great.
Hitchens isn’t the only one putting forward the theory that women aren’t funny; it’s a common perception amongst the wider community that humour is the sole domain of frustrated, ugly, white men.
But it’s not – and if you think it is, you’re as stupid as one of the smartest men who’s ever lived.