I’m splitting my last post up into two sections, because it was too long, and the second half isn’t about the BBC’s horrible “science reporting” anyway. It’s about the related subject of whether women are allowed to be funny.
So what is up with humor being characterized as inherently “aggressive?” Everyone seems to take this for granted, and it’s part of why the “women just aren’t funny” trope gets rehashed over and over again. (Because you know, women just aren’t aggressive either, right?) From the recent slamming of Katharine Heigl for pointing out that Knocked Up unfairly cast its women as humorless non-jokers all the way back to Christopher Hitchens’ infamous essay in in Vanity Fair about why women aren’t funny unless they’re “hefty or dykey or Jewish,” it hasn’t been a good year for women in comedy. Or at least, the idea of women in comedy. Although they’re in a minority, there are plenty of extremely funny female comedians out there doing just fine and proving all this shit wrong.
It’s worth noting that Hitchens relied on some more gender-based “science of humor” reporting for his essay. In fact, I found a study he references covered on the BBC News site. Look, it’s the same stock photo of a man laughing that we saw when they were claiming that humor comes from testosterone! You know, because that laughing man, he’s funny and he gets jokes, unlike women. This study in this case is about how men and women interpret humor differently; women in the study had more brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, and responded more strongly to the punch line in the “reward center” of the brain, suggesting that women might be thinking about whether something’s funny more analytically, and not necessarily expecting a humorous payoff at the end. Wait, let’s see how Christopher “men have got to be funny so we can get you ladies in the sack” Hitchens interpreted this, in yet another stunning example of an author twisting science to suit his argument:
Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?
Maybe I’m just supporting the idea of a link between humor and aggression… but even after ten months, reading Hitchens ragging on female humor and claiming that there are “more terrible female comedians than terrible male comedians” kind of makes me wish a two-ton cartoon safe would fall on his head. There are far fewer terrible female comedians out there because there far, far fewer female comedians out there period. In fact, the BBC uses the smaller number of female comedians as evidence that men are funnier! Hitchens, just like the BBC on testosterone-derived humor, goes on to spout a bunch of speculative, half-baked theories about mating and evolution. Junk science in the form of volutionary sociobiology is de rigeur for this kind of argument, it seems.
The Christian Science Monitor had an interesting rejoinder to Hitchens entitled Are Women Allowed to Be Funny? The CSM points out Sarah Silverman (oh oops, she’s Jewish), and talks about which women (and stereotypes of women) are acceptable in comedy. Gosh, who would have guessed that the “funny gap” could be the result of social prejudice? It’s only the most obvious answer… but that kind of science apparently doesn’t sell papers (or broadcasts). They also offer some wisdom from Drew Carey:
[…] despite the fact that his ABC comedy employed numerous funny women, comic Drew Carey says the prejudices are real. It’s not so much that women aren’t funny, he explains, as that men don’t want them to be funny. “Comedy is about aggression and confrontation and power,” says the stand-up comic. “As a culture we just don’t allow women to do all that stuff.”
Smart guy, that Drew Carey. But is comedy really only ever about aggression and confrontation and power? Jessica at Feministing already posted an incredible clip of the hilarious Wanda Sykes in response to the BBC’s article. Sykes’ routine provides plenty of proof that women can be funny (oh oops, she’s gay) as well as that even if humor somehow originated in aggression, it can “eventually become separated from it as wit, jokes, and other comic forms, which then take on an independent life of their own,” as the dermatologist-turned-unicyclist Dr. Shuster pointed out in his misconstrued paper. (Sykes also provides significant evidence that genitals should be detachable, a position I strongly support.)
I’ll leave you with another example: a straight, WASPy white lady from Duluth, Minnesota, who could only be considered “hefty” by someone insane like MeMe Roth and could only considered “dykey” by someone whose view of reality is based on Extreme Makeover.
(The SuperDeluxe embedded-video applet will only let me embed all the chapters of her show, which is kind of annoying because it’s so wide… but I’d definitely recommend “Ready For Love,” “Mother’s Day,” and “Faith” after you watch the first episode or two.)
What do you think? Is Hitchens right that “angst and self-deprecation” is “almost masculine by definition?” Does Maria Bamford’s weirdo character put her into CSM’s accepted role of the “ditzy klutz?” Is she enough of a weird loser that she’s allowed to be funnier than “attractive” women? Am I “using” too many “pointless quotation marks?”
One of the things I like about Bamford’s style is that her intelligence comes across very clearly regardless of what character she’s playing. Then, her sudden Tracey-Ullman-esque transformations into various characters leave you with a much more… abstract? feeling about what the mastermind behind the whole thing is actually like. Anyway, I think she’s fucking hilarious. Happy Solstice!