I don’t normally post articles without comment, but this one doesn’t leave much to say. The author, Christopher Hitchens, may not be of Olympian stature, but anyone who’s seen him television knows he’s an agressive son of a bitch. Case and point: Hitchens flips off Maher's morons - YouTube
Starting at the end, Hitchens laments in his conclusion that the two things men value the most, women and humor, are antithetical. For me this has always been a great source of frustration. I will go to agnozing lengths to make women laugh, and when a well-crafted joke is lost upon its target, or worse, completely ignored by the flake - well, the psychic stress can be very acute.
There’s an amoral part of me constantly reminding that making women laugh isn’t nearly as hard as I’m making it out to be. A rapid succession of cheap gags at the expense of an unpopular, preferably fat celebrity will tickle the female funny bone. I could be like my father and stock up on ammunition; Star, the Inquirer, and the like, but the jokes are inauthentic and the humor still isn’t shared.
Perhaps it’s because I value humor so much that I actively seek those rare beauties who are in tune with it. Two of the four women with whom I’ve had relationships have been Jewish, and Hitchens prudently excludes them from this otherwise justifiably broad generalization. The other two were both of Scandinavian ancestry, and while they didn’t see the humor in all of my jokes, they were quirky enough that they at least made me laugh.
Well, it looks like there was something to say after all, even if it was only my personal experience. Without further adieu, the article:
Why Women Aren’t Funny
What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.
by Christopher Hitchens January 2007
Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He’s really quite cute, and he’s kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he’s so funny … " (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.”) However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh.”
Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.
All right - try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. 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.
Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a “funniness scale.” To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:
The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.
This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully’s attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows … " But have no fear-it gets worse:
“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said the report’s author, Dr. Allan Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.” The report also found that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.”
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?
Read the whole thing: