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Female Comedy Hour

This is basically the greatest thing I have read in ever. Wendy Molyneux attempts to write a comedy piece, and since women are completely not funny, of course she fails miserably. A sample:

Anyway, twelve hours later after I had cooked, baked, cried, sewn a blanket for my hope chest, called a telephone psychic, had all my favorite Cathy comic strips laminated, and then stayed up all night trying on all my clothes and shoes again, I finally felt ready to write my comedy piece. I decided to start by asking myself, “What’s funny?” That is a tough one for me because I have no sense of humor. I mean, I assume that I have no sense of humor because all of the funny things that are made especially for women like me, such as Sex and the City, 27 Dresses, and yogurt commercials don’t even make me laugh. But I guess my humor deficiency is one of those womanly crosses I have to bear, along with P.M.S., making seventy cents on the dollar, and paying for my own rape kit. You know what they say though, you can’t make the willing pay for their own rape kits! I think they say that. Probably somebody said that. God knows I didn’t say it myself! I only say things like: “What are numbers?”

Oh, there I go again on one of my tangents. I guess it’s time for me to get serious about writing this comedy piece. Emoticon. I mean, I probably shouldn’t even try to write a comedy piece since Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Vanity Fair saying that women just aren’t funny. He’s probably right. And even if he isn’t, I think it’s great that we live in a country where you can say anything you want, like that women aren’t funny or that Christopher Hitchens is a huge douche who runs a successful child pornography business and has an inability to get an erection unless he’s reading Nazi literature.

You do really want to read the whole thing.


14 thoughts on Female Comedy Hour

  1. Ah, Christopher Hitchens. It’s still beyond me how a person who believes that one’s sense of humor lies precisely in one’s genitals should have platforms like Vanity Fair, Slate, and the Atlantic at his disposal.

  2. Hitchens used evpsych, FashionablyEvil–said that men work at humor to get laid, thus become funny through their efforts (not their genitals as such, I guess). Women don’t need to get laid. They are coy, dontcha know. And men have no standards: they’ll fuck anything. So all that work and pain women endure to be attractive to them? Not happening.

  3. I, for one, am effing hilarious.

    And I braved reading the Hitchens article as well, and he’s a twit who seems to think that we won’t find his article offensive just because he says men are stupid and laugh at stupidity for its own sake on occasion, and because he called some women comedians for their opinions and constantly reminds us that there ARE funny women out there – but there’s already something wrong with them, you see, because they are all either fat or dykes or *gasp* Jewish.

    And the real reason for the perceived humor gap sits right there in the middle of his article and he doesn’t even see it.

    “Fran responded: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?””

    Men are socialized to be funny. In the absence of actual hunting and gathering, they are the social hunters, hunting women, men, affirmation and employment. Gladhanding and networking have always been vital skills men needed and were taught by their fathers and mentors. Whereas women have generally been socialized to be more reticent about “putting themselves out there.”

    Poor Christopher, had the real answer in the first page and missed it so he had go go on writing two more pages of drivel.

    Also sadly for him, I know a lot of really funny (and even a few straight) women, but most of them also find this kind of underhanded misogyny really unattractive.

  4. The swipe at Hitchens was hilarious. So good to read stuff like this, women are so funny, any time women get together that I know (and from so many different social groups, mothers, singles, professionals, stay at home, academic types), hilarity and laughter results…

  5. My cats love to be symbols of my loneliness. Sometimes, I have to be like, “Stop signifying so loudly guys, I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy!” Completely cracked me up.

  6. @Jill-Oh we can’t have that! We can only have one token funny woman, one token person of color, one token gay person, ect. We get any more and people might start that these people aren’t freaks of nature!

  7. So I showed this to my friends, and now they’ve decided that the persona in the article is a lot like me. I don’t think this is a good thing….

    I miss Sarah Haskins too. What has she been up to since leaving CurrentTV? anyone know?

  8. Its extra funny how seriously everyone takes the Hitchens piece, he was obviously poking fun at how a patriarchal society fosters male humor, and proving this by showing that most female comedians do a very masculine type of humor (Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey come to mind), it is absolutely hilarious though how this is turned into a Hitchens hate fest which is what the old bloke probably intended from the start. A contrarian is as a contrian does really, you should see his follow up “Why women still arent funny” he addresses how much his “critics” missed the point:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7izJggqCoA

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