At the very first, this post is going to seem a little contradictory. The answer is, “women ARE funny” and thinking off the top of your head, I’m sure people can come up with dozens of examples (Roseanne Barr is one of my all-time favorites, but I’m also a fan of the classics- Lucy Ball and Carol Burnett). I know I’m a huge fan of a great many female writers, and I find nothing funnier than a good ole snarking a la Marcotte.
Some will continue a little further, and say things like “There aren’t as many women in comedy because no one writes parts for them in movies or there’s still a lot of entrenched sexism in stand-up”. They’d be right about that, as well*.
But, instead, I’m asking why, if we’re in a group of men and women, it’s going to be the men who are telling the jokes, and the women laughing (normally). Why if a women says “something funny happened to me” she’s going to tell a story, and a guy is going to do an impression or a one-liner.
My friend PE does great impressions. I’m particularly fond of his Christopher Walken. He also can create a bicycle horn noise that is more realistic sounding than an actual bike horn. Hubby can do the Spock one-eyebrow raise (which I find funny as heck). But the thing is, all of those things took TIME. PE discovered the bicycle horn noise by accident, but worked on all of his impressions for a long time, and he had his dad help him out. It took Hubby a whole semester’s worth of practice in order to get the Spock-brow right, with his friends encouraging him the whole way.** Heck, even my friend T (who is decidedly NOT as funny as he thinks he is) still gets his girlfriend to laugh at his dumb jokes.
When I was a kid, I did a Woody Woodpecker impression. It had all the kids in the daycare my mom ran in giggles. *** That was, until the day JT Larson came into the daycare. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I knew it ran to the “Girls aren’t funny, and you’re stupid” line of thought. Not the most intelligent riposte, but the older, more mature 7 year-old boy dashed my 5-year-old dreams of being a comedian (for that moment in time). As years went on, I kept trying to do jokes, and sometimes people laughed…but more likely, people would stare blankly at me, and some guy would say THE EXACT SAME JOKE and get a huge laugh.****
So now, I’ve quit trying to be funny, with the exception of some wry commentary and sarcastic quips, and those are mainly to amuse myself, instead of other people. And I wonder how common this experience is: guys get the encouragement, women get the discouragement. And I wonder how this sets it up that there aren’t as many funny females, or females are considered to be not as funny. It could be that I’m just not funny; but it could be that I might have been if I wouldn’t have been told off it so many times. And I feel bad, because the world is a sadder place because maybe we’ve lost a lot of Lucy Balls and Roseanne Barrs to make fun of it.
*I know that I’d probably have some fears about going up on stage after a male comedian has told everyone how stupid women are, and the audience is laughing their ass off.
** Glad to see public education is entirely worthless.
*** And my mom as well, but that probably doesn’t count.
****This happens to me in class as well when it came to giving answers. I talk really loudly to this day because I thought people just couldn’t hear me. But no, they can hear me just fine; for whatever reason, I’m ignored.
“people would stare blankly at me, and some guy would say THE EXACT SAME JOKE and get a huge laugh”
Weird, huh? I often have a similar experience, except instead of the opposite gender getting the laugh, it would be someone of either gender making the same joke, except pulling a TV or other pop culture reference into it. Nobody gets it if I said it, but if Homer Simpson said it the other day, it’s hilarious.
As for the humor gap between women and men, I think it does exist but I don’t have a theory about it, except to note that a lot of people do seem to think female comedians (like my sister-in-law, who I’d bet some money will be on TV a year or two from now) are really out there, so maybe it’s a cultural thing. I do remember someone — possibly Camille Paglia — writing plaintively about how men are easygoing, adventurous and funny while many women just aren’t. She didn’t have a theory to explain it either (which makes me think it might not have been Paglia — Paglia without a theory to explain something??)
I think the encouragement/discouragement thing is huge. I came from a background where women cracking each other up was just the custom, and so I think I avoided some of the “girls aren’t funny” crap that you get at a young age.
Another part of it is that cracking jokes means that you will inevitably say shit that falls flat, and I’ve noticed when women make jokes that fall flat, people react more viciously, not giving said woman the benefit of the doubt that men often get, which is that they’ll save face down the road. The way to work through this is to pull a Johnny Carson, and make a joke about how that one was a real stinker.
You also have the Kathy Griffin problem, which is people rein women in more. Humor relies on transgression, and men are given more social space to transgress. I doubt the world would be as horrified at a man who could handle a heckler as well as Griffin does.
Ellen Willis, who could be hilariously funny herself, once wrote that “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” But that’s a specific area of humor, I think.
I once read an interview where Camille Paglia said that she saw herself as being a lot like Ayn Rand, except that Paglia had a sense of humor. I’d already noticed the similiarity, and made the comparison, but I remember thinking: Why does Paglia think that she has a sense of humor?
I see this happen in a lot of stuff; math, music, engineering, aviation. It is REMEMBERED when a woman screws up. It is remembered when a guy takes the big risk and wins. And then women get hit with the whammy of being too timid or not aggressive enough because we’re always trying to be perfect.
“As years went on, I kept trying to do jokes, and sometimes people laughed…but more likely, people would stare blankly at me, and some guy would say THE EXACT SAME JOKE and get a huge laugh.****”
Another thing–people tend to try to get approval from whomever in their little group is the kewlest, and one common tactic to achieve this is to laugh at their jokes. So whether or not the joke’s even funny loses any relevance, too.
I see this happen in a lot of stuff; math, music, engineering, aviation. It is REMEMBERED when a woman screws up.
I have that problem at work – I broke a machine 18 months ago that took about 10 minutes to repair, and I’m the person who always fucks stuff up. The guy who breaks everything he touches and manages, in less then a minute, to lose the part that will fix it is not given any crap for this at all.
I am also loud, coming from a loud family anyway and having been in environments where no one listens to the girls since I was 18. To my credit, I have gotten everyone around me to admit that I am funny, but at the expense of being ‘mean.’ And the guy I share an office with occasionally tries to shame me into ladylike behavior, which I find hilarious but everyone else seems to think is acceptable.
I think women are freer to be funny in all-female groups. I can have an all-female group in stitches easily, but as soon as I am in a mixed group, it seems as though my attempts at humor are simply not recognized — unless I can pull off a real quick zinger just out of the blue that startles everyone into laughter by the sheer unexpectedness of it. But if I tell a joke or a funny story in mixed company, it is far more likely to fall flat than if I am with only other women.
At the risk of seeming humorless, I actually find this really disturbing. It is as if an entire facet of my personality (and of women’s humanity) is simply invisible to men, including men I am really close to.
I remember reading (it might have been one of Deborah Tannen’s books, but I’m struggling to remember the reference exactly) that, when they said that they liked people of the opposite sex who had a good sense of humor, women defined a man with a good sense of humor as someone who made them laugh, whereas men mostly meant someone who laughed at their jokes. Perhaps it’s yet another one of the performances we’re meant to put on to impress/hook the opposite sex?
The comment about the transgressive element of humor as being a male privilege also rings true to me. I find I can make people laugh, but I also find that they’re afraid of me. The two might be unrelated, but given that I’m not particularly scary looking, I wonder if that has to do with the general wariness people have around people who don’t conform to their gender’s script.