Provocation
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

From the John Springer Collection/Corbis.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 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?

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child?

Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she's just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)

C-Money, having collected herself, shook her head at the page as if it were Hitchens himself…"Good God man, push away from the Scotch and pull it together."

Snitchens concocts a comprehensive theory on women’s failure to find him funny


It’s paced like a joke, for sure, and yet seems to be missing that crucial element, what we in the business call Teh Funny. As in, the part that makes you laugh. When writing a joke—and I’m a woman, so not funny, so take this with a grain of salt—I try to imagine what the audience will picture in their heads. My guess is that Hitchens was actually just transcribing dinner.

To sum up Christopher Hitchens' argument in Vanity Fair: Women aren't funny, they don't know how to be funny, they don't need to be funny because being funny is just a way to get attention from the opposite sex and women don't need to work at that because they have breasts and nice rear ends and smell good, they don't know what's funny and don't even like what's funny, because funny, the real funny, is cruel and meant to be used the way men use everything, as a weapon, and women, "bless their hearts," like things tender and nice and sweet and friendly and to them a good joke should be the verbal equivalent of a Care Bear.

Oh, I saw a hilarious blog entry making fun of Hitchens. I was going to post it in the other thread about him, then I decided it was drift and didn't. I'm going to look for that blog entry now.

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Document No. 3 of 149

Women are funny -- but men are a joke


By DOROTHY WOODEND
     

Saturday, December 16, 2006 – Print Edition, Page F2

VANCOUVER -- 'Women are crazy and men are stupid," runs a punch line from Matt Groening's Life in Hell cartoon strip. See for example Christopher Hitchens's column in the January issue of Vanity Fair, in which the British blowhard asserts that not only are women crazy, they're not funny.

The best thing you can do with a contrarian like Mr. Hitchens is pat him on the head (watch out, it may be pointy) and go on your merry way. Do not engage. Let him shriek and stamp his feet until he expires from apoplexy.

And Hitchens -- how old is he now (b 1949)? He has a "beloved," he tells us in his last paras?!? They are thinking of spawning?

Words: 398
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 669
Male Score: 763

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

...By a grotesque ideological sleight of hand, Hitchens would join the West to this great “multi-ethnic democracy” using arguments that are only used in India by parties that would, if they could, create an ethnic, Hindu supremacist state. This convergence is not an accident: by making prejudice respectable, by short-circuiting due process, by presuming collective guilt instead of affirming the presumption of individual innocence, Hitchens and Amis have become what they pretend to pre-empt...

... That quotation from Amis is a real eyebrow-raiser: what a silly twit he has become in late middle age.

Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, and “Koba the Dread”

by Joe Auciello

British writer Martin Amis, best known as a novelist, has just published a short, nonfiction book about Communism, the Russian Revolution, Stalin, and the blindness of British intellectuals (especially his father, Kingsley Amis) to the Gulag, the prison-camp system under Stalin, symbol of massive repression.

Martin Amis’s book is titled Koba the Dread (New York: Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion, 2002, 306 pages, $24.95), and it is absolutely dreadful.

We’ll get soon enough to the whys and wherefores, but let’s assert from the first that this book is shallow, stupefying, and just plain bad. It is an intellectually useless work whose ideas are little more than recycled dreck. The book did not deserve publication but presumably found its way into print because its author is a successful novelist promoting a reactionary agenda dear to the ruling elites.

Let’s also say that my opinion hardly represents a consensus among commentators. The New York Times Book Review, last July 28, featured Koba the Dread on its cover and ran a critical but friendly review by ex-leftist Paul Berman. The September 2002 issue of the Atlantic Monthly includes a meandering review of some ten pages, also critical but friendly, by former socialist Christopher Hitchens. These articles, especially the latter, are part of the story, too, as we shall see later....

...Hitchens concurs with Amis’s hostility to socialism, but habit or instinct or vestigial integrity compels him to raise the opposing argument (“Does anybody believe that had the 1905 Russian Revolution succeeded, it would have led straight to the Gulag, and to forced collectivization? Obviously not…Yet that revolution’s moving spirits were Lenin and Trotsky…”), an argument which, finally, he no longer supports.

In responding to Amis, Hitchens is, at best, contradictory because his ideas are in flux between opposing viewpoints. As he wrote last year inLetters to a Young Contrarian: “But many is the honorable radical and revolutionary who may be found in the camp of the apparent counterrevolution. And the radical conservative is not a contradiction in terms” (p. 100).

This is the rationalization of a believer losing his belief.

Tariq Ali, another former friend of Hitchens but one who remains a socialist opponent of imperialism, had this to say about him: “The only pro-war piece in the paper [an issue of the London Daily Mirror almost entirely devoted to opposing Bush’s war on Iraq], a piece that was hallucinatory on every level and published to give the White House a voice, appeared under the byline of the former Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchens. The man with the Orwell-complex has fallen really low. He will fall further.”

(This was a reference to Hitchens’s writings about George Orwell, in which he poses as the only one who really understands Orwell. He presents himself as a latter-day Orwell, but conveniently forgets Orwell’s opposition to Anglo-American imperialism.)...

all the familiar names of the academic right-wing: Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, and, on the Russian side, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Dmitri Volkogonov

What would the correspondents' dinner be without the after-party? It would be not worth it. This year, there are three big bashes: In addition to the perennially decadent Bloomberg party, Capitol File is hosting a lavish affair at the home of the Colombian ambassador, and Vanity Fair has revived its storied shindig at the home of writer Christopher Hitchens, where a person can be sure to get a proper drink.

Earlier, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked, Blue had said to me, “Once in a while, it seems like he might be drunk. Aside from that, even though he’s obviously an alcoholic, he functions at a really high level and he doesn’t act like a drunk, so the only reason it’s a bad thing is it’s taking out his liver, presumably. It would be a drag for Henry Kissinger to live to a hundred and Christopher to keel over next year.”

Hitchens, too, brought up the subject of alcohol before I did. “You’re going to want to talk about this,” he said, not wrongly, pointing at his glass. (A writer likes a coöperative subject, but it can be dispiriting to make a portrait in the shadow of a gigantic self-portrait.) He was not a “piss artist,” he explained, “someone who can’t get going without a load of beer, who’s a drunk—overconfident and flushed. I can’t bear that.” He went on, “I know what I’m doing with it. And I can time it. It’s a self-medicating thing.” I took his point. Hitchens does drink a very great deal (and said of Mel Gibson’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his recent Malibu arrest—0.12 per cent—“that’s as sober as you’d ever want to be”). But he drinks like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.

...compared with any other book on Paine I can think of, this one is casual, even perfunctory. Long before I reached the end of what is a very long short book, I was at a loss to know why it had been written. Discussing the reasons why Burke, who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks that ‘it is a deformity in some “radicals”’ – he has Marx particularly in mind – ‘to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or “real” one.’ Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as ‘a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay’, should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more original, more accurate, less damaging to his own estimation of himself, less somniferously inert. The press release accompanying the book led me to expect something much livelier; Hitchens, it exclaims, ‘marvels’ at the forethought of Rights of Man, and ‘revels’ in its contentiousness. There is a bit of marvelling and revelling here and there, but it is as routine as everything else in this book, which reads like the work of a tired man.

Too tired, to begin with, to check his facts. Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by the rough treatment he received at the hands of a Parisian crowd following Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead for seven years and Ricardo, not yet 20, had published no views that required endorsing. Paine was charged with seditious libel for publishing Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and according to Hitchens the future prime minister Spencer Perceval ‘opened for the prosecution’; in fact, though Perceval read the indictment to the court, the prosecution was much too important to be left to so relatively junior a barrister, and was opened by the attorney general himself. In 1794 Paine published The Age of Reason, ‘probably’, thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a sermon by Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, though, as Paine himself tells us, he had not heard of the sermon until it was advertised in Watson’s reply to The Age of Reason, An Apology for the Bible.

This is only a selection of the many errors in this book, and they are not trivial; they misrepresent matters of fact that are essential to an understanding of the context of Paine’s writings, and it is in the course of Hitchens’s attempt to describe that context that they occur.

Hitchens’s casual attitude to facts is not compensated for by a corresponding precision with ideas, or any concern for the range, the richness, the complexity of Paine’s thinking. For example, we will not learn from Hitchens anything much about what Paine thought the rights of man actually were. ‘The great achievement of Paine,’ he tells us, ‘was to have introduced the discussion of human rights . . . Prior to this, discussion about “rights” had been limited to “natural” or “civil” rights.’ I have no idea what this means. For Paine, the rights we have by virtue of being human – the rights of man – take the form of ‘natural’ rights, ‘civil’ rights, ‘political’ rights, and he discriminates between them with increasing care; but he would surely have been puzzled by the notion of human rights as something beyond, something different from, not ‘limited’ to, natural, civil or political rights. Hitchens seems similarly at sea in his brief discussion of Paine’s theory of revolution which he understands entirely in terms of ‘the sudden return or restoration’ of a lost golden age, holding Paine responsible (among others) ‘for the “heaven on earth” propaganda . . . that disordered the radical tradition thereafter’. This is entirely to ignore the trajectory in Paine’s thought from a ‘full-circle’ theory of revolution as a return to the founding contract of society, to one in which, as Mark Philp pointed out in his superb short book on Paine (1989), revolution is represented as a new stage of social organisation made necessary by social, economic and intellectual progress.

That quotation from Amis is a real eyebrow-raiser: what a silly twit he has become in late middle age.

I loved a couple of his books, until I didn't. Too much despair.

Viewed as literature, The Second Plane is utterly worthless bombast. It doesn't make any sense, and isn't even really meant to make any sense. It's simply hysterical funeral rhetoric, and there was a lot of it in the aftermath of 9/11. That's understandable. What's not so easy to understand, or forgive, is that the editors of America's leading journals saw fit to publish this trash, and that even now, seven years later, American reviewers are overawed by this grotesque collage of bombast, defeatism, hate-mongering and sadomasochistic pornography.

If you remember "The Big Lebowski," you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn's yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude's hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, "Where's the money, Lebowski? Where's the money, shithead?" See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.

But all that niceness doesn't matter once the torturer's helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch's face. The "metal object," whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he's OK. That's also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who's been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It's not just the pain, it's the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It's like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.

So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer's easy: He's withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it's too late. Karl Rove won't be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we're actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o'-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o'-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.

Do I give Hitchens credit for coming to these conclusions? Hardly. You see, there are those of us who had figured all of this out years ago, and we didn't actually have to undergo the experience to do so. It was enough to understand what the procedure was, to understand its history, to understand its effects, and to imagine oneself in the place of the victim. In other words, it took merely the most elementary historical and ethical sense, one that takes no special training or experience. In shorter words, if you actually have to get tortured to know what torture is and that it's wrong, then you've already left the real world far behind.

arborman, did you read the two[?]-part fictionalized narrative that Amis wrote of Mohammed Atta's last day? The main thought I took away from that exercise was that Amis is intimately acquainted with severe constipation. He can imagine someone's being severely constipated for seven, eight months.