The F Words: Feminist Foundations in the Works of Women Humorists

Probably you know about the 2007 piece by the late Christopher Hitchens “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” and the shitstorm it set off after it was published in Vanity Fair. While I may have been sympathetic to Hitchens’ other salvos about such things as religious piety, I was completely baffled by this particular grenade, because the only comedians I had ever liked were female. Joan Rivers, Kathy Griffin, Margaret Cho, Rita Rudner. This may be because, being of LGBTQ persuasion, my sensibilities were more in line with female comics, and there seems to be some anecdotal evidence for that. In the book We Killed, an oral history of women in comedy (post-war) told by the women themselves, I learned that female comedians such as Phyllis Diller discovered early on that gay bars were the place to work because their clientele was the classiest, and the most supportive.

I could make a list ten pages long for you of male comedians I have disliked, and I think there are many reasons why. One is the old saw, possibly outre by now, that female comics look inward for material while male comics look outward. That translates to male comics being more likely to attack, to aim at the most vulnerable for their material, i.e. gays, lesbians, trans, fat people, the neuro-divergent, the handicapped. Jeananne Garofola famously said when she quit SNL mid-season (during the advent of such male comics as Adam Sandler and David Spade) that the show’s writers were clearly obsessed with “fag-bashing.” Now, you might be thinking of dear departed Joan Rivers, and why wouldn’t you — or anyone — not remember her as offensive? I saw Joan several times live and she had an obvious gay following. She made lots of jokes about us, but I always felt like we were in on the joke. It had the added benefit of amusing the outsiders who never realized we were there in the first place.

Anyway, while stand-up performances are seldom safe for anybody, I could relax and enjoy female comics; there was no threat. They were not the [often] white, privileged, moneyed class making a living sneering at the under-class. To me there was a tremendous difference between Rodney Dangerfield making fat jokes about his wife and Erma Bombeck’s obsession with her weight. And she was thin. I think it might also be that women comics can say things that I can laugh about but not say, because I’m not a member of that club.

In his what I believe to be very badly-reasoned piece, Hitchens mentions that he called both Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz for feedback. And he seems to have come away from these calls believing they both supported his theory. I’ve read and reread the article, especially the brief bits about Lebowitz and Ephron, and I don’t see how he came to that conclusion. He quotes Lebowitz as saying, “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” That doesn’t support the contention that women aren’t funny as much as it suggests how base comedy can be. Perhaps he couldn’t believe to be true what one critic wrote of Nora Ephron, that she could “blend the sophisticated witty dialogue and complex characters with the ability to appeal to an enormous mass audience.” The general public’s p reference for men’s humor over women’s — if we accept that as the case — doesn’t take relativism into consideration. Maybe the majority will laugh at a woman getting her top ripped off, but there are those of us from various demographics not laughing along with the crowd.

Hitchens seems to have believed that men are funny because they have to be: They’re basically dumber than women. Women don’t need to be funny because they can win a man over with her looks and intelligence. But anyone who’s ever overheard a raucous man in a bar knows that the effort put into trying to get laughs does not necessarily match the output. And while Hitchens wrote this polemic in 2007, it was still too late for him to presume that the binary of male/female was our culture’s only social construct. Besides, it ignores any real contrary evidence, like the explosion of female comics in the early 1980s. And in a study that I found of undergrads rating the humor of their male and female teachers, “Men make so many joke-attempts, in fact, they are assumed to be funnier — even when they’re not.” The fascinating but somewhat depressing conclusion of the study was that women’s humor is simply not appreciated as cultural currency, especially in the dating scene. But, of course, that doesn’t have anything at all to do with women being funny.

Anyway, Hitchens is dead and what he did for me in his flighty essay was to get me interested in two of the pioneers he claims to have been assisted by, Lebowitz and Ephron. Tina Fey’s name kept popping up in my research, a mediagenic figure and writer, the first female head-writer on SNL. More on these funny women to come…