Christopher Hitchens: Why Women Still Aren't Funny
Famous idiot Hitchens explains why women aren't funny, responding to a response to an article in Vanity Fair.
Note that his argument reposes on (oh the familiar refrain!) an evolutionary anecdote: men have to be funny to attract women, but women have the luxury (and inherent inclination) of picking funny men over their more lugubrious competitors. Hence, humour is an evolutionary adaptation in which males display their superiority rather like bulls and moose lock horns.
I'd hate to be accused of cultural relativism, what with it being so much less ridiculous than evolutionary essentialism, but if it is an evolutionary adaptation we're talking about, shouldn't it be observable across history? Somehow I think we'd have trouble bearing out the claim that Ugh quickened Thudmilla's hirsute heart with the roguish rising tone that adorned whatever grunt signified "wheel" - now just imagine how she must have battered her granite eyelids at his next invention, "syntax".
Similarly for all the phallic frankness of Aristophanes, can we completely discount the possibility that the idea for Lysistrata came from some sublimated personal experience? At any rate I'm yet to hear a classicist present documents proving that he were any more studly than Euripides. Speaking of genre, apparently writing in elevated style never struck women as becoming in a man, and Byron never turned a head because his own was too furrowed! And certainly if Hitchens' point held any water, Genghis Khan henceforth can append the title 'funniest man of all time' to his list of honorifics. We're supposed to believe that something culturally specific is a species-trait. That is, it must be admitted, quite funny. But funny strange, not funny ha-ha.
In his original article, Hitchens burbles:
"There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick-know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want-the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition."
I suppose the Madames de Staël, du Deffand and du Châtelet were renowned for being very masculine alongside their ability to keep apace with the likes of Voltaire? Or Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn and Mae West agonised over their commitment to Zionism? What a nitwit. Ultimately the argument is lifted whole cloth from Baudelaire's On the Essence of Laughter, without benefit of acknowledgement (or it should be said, progress). There is, however, a paraphrase of an awesome Nietzsche line, an oasis for those determined to trek over this barren waste.
I expect we'll see Richard Dawkins crashing down upon fellow Horseman Hitchens with ever-so righteous atheist fervour on this particular misuse of evolutionary 'theory'. Sure, sure. Pigs might fly.