NOW COMES THE TRICKY PART, because by this point you probably want to argue with me. Frankly I expect nothing less: one of the things that consistently fascinates me about this topic is how difficult people find it to accept even the relatively anodyne suggestion that men aren’t funnier than women. Drop something that’s really controversial into the mix—like the claim that women have a fundamentally different aesthetic when it comes to humor—and men tend to get riled up.
That’s because we’re so used to thinking about our sense of humor as, natch, a sense—as measuring some quality in the external world with as much fidelity as our eyes or ears— that we protest whenever it’s subjected to any scrutiny. According to the conventional wisdom, humor can’t be the focus of serious analysis because “funniness” is just something we feel. And the corollary of that sort of thinking is that if we don’t laugh at a joke, or a TV show, or whatever, then it must not be funny to begin with, right?
Actually, no. If you think about it, you’ll realize the somewhat counterintuitive truth that “funniness” can’t be a fixed property that our sense of humor perceives in a particular joke or even a particular person. Just ask any stand-up comic. Hell, ask anyone who’s ever told the same joke more than once: sometimes it kills and sometimes it bombs, and it has less to do with the gag itself or the person making it, and more to do with the social context in which it’s being told.
That’s why, for instance, your ribald limerick about a young woman named Bunt might go over swimmingly with your college buddies, but why, if you tell it to your future father-in-law the first time you meet, he likely won’t crack a smile. It’s also the reason why everybody laughs when the boss tells a joke in the boardroom, and nobody laughs when the coffee boy does: high-status people are allowed to make jokes; low-status people aren’t.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t argue with me, but we can argue more fruitfully if we can at least agree that humor comes down to more than whether certain things—or people—“are” or “aren’t” funny.
If you accept that, then it logically follows that it’s possible for things to become more or less funny over time. That’s why Shakespeare’s comedies don’t always strike modern audiences as all that hilarious, and why even something as recent as The Smothers Brothers seems quaint today rather than gutbusting.
Like Greer says, we learn our sense of humor, so it stands to reason that different generations—and people from different countries, and people with different religious backgrounds, and people of different genders—learn to laugh at different things. And so my suggestion that there’s a distinct “female” humor is actually quite modest: there is a whole body of material out there that women somehow learned to find funny, and that men didn’t—and because men, by and large, continue to control what gets called “humor” in the mainstream, “female humor” often doesn’t get noticed.
The other logical consequence, if you accept that humor is ever-evolving, is that it’s possible to “re-learn” what to laugh at. This might sound absurd, or at least like not very much fun, but it’s really only making explicit what we all assume about our senses of humor anyway. I doubt anyone would insist that they find the same things funny at 30 than they did at 12, and the very existence of a category called “sophomoric humor” demonstrates that humorous taste is shifting and evolving.
But I believe it’s possible for us to consciously re-learn what we find funny, and moreover that men should do precisely that in order to create a space in our culture for so-called “female humor.” Again, I appreciate that this makes humor sound like a chore, but the end result is that you’ll have more choices when it comes to being entertained— which is more than can be said for doing the dishes.
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Don’t believe that you can “re-learn” humor? I present myself as evidence, and my relationship to Reba.
Reba was a series that ran from 2001 to 2007 on the WB (and later the CW). It was regularly the most-watched sitcom on its network, and more often than not placed in the top ten (occasionally the top five) most-watched shows, period—beating out Everybody Hates Chris and even, in the women 18–49 category, Dawson’s Creek.
It was created by a woman, Allison Gibson—who wrote and executive produced the show’s earlier seasons—and also had a female lead with relatively few major male characters. It was, in other words, “female” humor: written by women, starring women, and watched by women.
In its early years it was also, in its own way, pretty hilarious. If you’d told me that back then, I wouldn’t have believed you, partly because I was a college freshman at the time, and I didn’t find much hilarious that wasn’t directly related to poop or semen. But it’s also because Reba so clearly is female humor, and ten years ago—even five years ago—I would have done the typical male/Hitchens thing and said, “Pfft. Not funny.”
But then I ended up writing my undergraduate sociology thesis on gender in sitcoms, and my advisor told me I had to watch Reba. So I dutifully borrowed the DVDs of season one from a friend (a girl, of course) and sat through the six episodes I’d been instructed to watch. They were really funny, so I watched all the other episodes I could get my hands on.
Don’t misunderstand: I wouldn’t put Reba in the same category as powerhouses like Seinfeld or Friends or even Everybody Loves Raymond, and in some ways Reba was pretty lame as a sitcom—but that’s sort of the point. It didn’t get its laughs from standard sitcom devices like quirky one-off characters (the Soup Nazi), or quirky plot devices (Ray gets sexually harassed by another parent), or quirky celebrity guest spots (Kathleen Turner as Chandler’s father).
It didn’t follow the common sitcom pattern of dividing the yuks into “laughing with” the male characters and their witty punchlines, and “laughing at” the female characters and their quirky personality traits (e.g. Monica’s OCD; Elaine’s gaucheness; Ray’s mother’s insufferable kvetching).
As I came to admire, Reba hardly relied on quirkiness at all. Instead, it built up its humor in much more clever, subtler ways. It left its central characters relatively untouched by one-off outsiders, in favor of more thoroughly exploring their relationships, so that the laughs came as much from seeing those relationships change over time as from anything that happened in any particular episode.
Rather than relying on the bombardment of external stimuli the way many sitcoms do (dates with new people, trouble at work, chance encounters with strangers), it dwelled on the multiple layers of “ordinariness” in its characters’ lives, contentedly mining their humorous potential for months on end. The entire first season of Reba revolves around the finalizing of her divorce and her teenage daughter’s pregnancy, and by sitcom standards not a whole lot else happens.
If you’re unconvinced this has anything to do with “femaleness,” here’s the smoking gun: once men wrenched creative control from Gibson, the show became a lot more formulaic and mostly unwatchable, and its ratings tanked.
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The features I’m picking out as key to Reba’s appeal are not actually all that unusual: “humorologists,” to coin an ugly term, call it “anecdotal humor”—humor that arises from real-life stories and situations—and in psychological studies it’s the one type of humor that women are consistently more likely than men to appreciate.
It’s also a type of humor that plays exceptionally poorly in traditional comedy settings: you can’t focus on subtle tweaks in a character’s status in a five-minute sketch; you can’t draw out the humor in a long, meandering story about everyday life in a lightbulb joke; and you can’t do anything except rattle off fast-paced punchlines in a comedy club full of drunken hecklers. (Stand-ups do sometimes “tell stories,” of course, but almost always as a vehicle to get them between incidental gags, rather than as stories as stories.)
And though anecdotal humor can sometimes be translated successfully to sitcoms and film comedies, these genres also require a few conventional gags or some slapstick or even a bit of racist humor (see Tropic Thunder), or else they’ll flop because men won’t watch them.
A great recent example of this is In The Motherhood, a short-lived show from ABC’s spring 2009 schedule. Although it was a sitcom (sort of), it was based entirely on anecdotes submitted by real women about the funny things that happened in their everyday lives—I couldn’t have invented a better example if I’d tried—and it flopped horrifically and was pulled after only seven episodes.
Of course, it’s tempting to argue that the show simply wasn’t funny. But it seems unlikely to have been that bad—it already had a devoted following as a web series, and the network version added a cast of proven comics: Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines, Will and Grace’s Megan Mullally, and SNL’s Horatio Sanz.
No, I think what really happened with In The Motherhood is that anecdotal humor simply doesn’t fit with what audiences have become used to in primetime television. It’s too sophisticated; it has fewer clear punchlines and so requires more thoughtful engagement with the material in order to get the “joke.”
That too, is probably why Tina Fey’s 30 Rock gets such acclaim from critics—as well it should, because it’s fucking hilarious—but still suffers from relatively low ratings: it doesn’t quite fit the “normal” mold that TV audiences are used to.
That’s because, on the flip side of “female humor” is “male humor”: to wit, formulaic gags—meaning clear punchlines and the sorts of jokes you find printed in Maxim and Playboy—as well as slapstick and racist jokes. Again, according to psychological studies, these are the types of humor that men consistently appreciate more than women, but tellingly (because men started the professional comedy business long before the women’s movement) these have come to be known simply as humor.
Indeed, “jokes” as a category, though putatively descriptive, secretly harbors this male bias—because women don’t laugh at “jokes” as often, even though they laugh at lots of other things.
This suggests another reason why women have tended to be unsuccessful in professional comedy: because they tend not to laugh at formulaic jokes, they don’t bother to tell many, either. In fact, there are a lot of things about “humor” that are not particularly appealing if you’re a woman.
Consider even an innocuous-seeming series like The Daily Show: its correspondents often file reports requiring them to be aggressive, annoying, sexually suggestive, completely naked, or most often some combination of the four. (Hey, that’s comedy, right?) But while doing those things is fine and dandy if you’re a guy, for women it’s a different story. These behaviors are commonly seen as deviant for women (who, according to the stereotype, are supposed to be conciliatory and more interested in relationships than in sex), so when a woman acts like this we almost instantly label her a bitch or a skank.
And while bitchiness and skankiness can be funny to watch (indeed it forms a healthy portion of Samantha Bee’s work on The Daily Show), when women decide to get laughs that way, the negative label often overwhelms the “comedian” one. Take Roseanne Barr, Janeane Garofalo, or Chelsea Handler… It’s rare to see people describe them as comedians without also mentioning their bitchiness, while in the meantime Rob Corrdry and John Oliver and Stephen Colbert (and all the other male Daily Show correspondents) are simply comedians—even though they mostly make a living by being that stalwart male equivalent to the bitch: the dick.
So if we look at the issue as male humor (allegedly “normal” humor) versus female humor, we can see two reasons why women have traditionally had not as much luck in professional comedy: in order to get a foot in the door, women either have to tell jokes they don’t find funny, or suffer under the label of being a bitch or a skank. (The funniest characters in Sex and the City, for example, are skank Samantha and bitch Miranda.)
Plus they have to contend with the assumption, before they’ve even opened their mouths, that they probably won’t be very good at their job—and what self-respecting person would want to go any profession that gives them a reception like that?
The other benefit of looking at the issue as male humor versus female humor is that it also explains why women in general, even outside of professional comedy, have historically been seen as not funny: when it comes to “being funny” for ordinary people, a big part of the benchmark is how many riotous punchlines that person can muster—either through formulaic jokes or spontaneously—and because women don’t tell that many jokes, they will inevitably fall behind men in that respect. (A caveat: these are only trends, and even if you know a woman who loves formulaic jokes, it doesn’t mean the pattern isn’t accurate overall.)
Women have tended to be seen as not that funny, because for a very long time now we’ve been holding them to biased standards: it would be like Canada calling the U.S. an un-athletic country because we don’t play as much curling down here. It would be, in short, ridiculous.
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None of this is meant to malign male humor, and I have to admit a certain lingering affection for poop and semen gags, along with an appreciation, every now and then, of a good barroom joke.
Certainly I’m not suggesting that we get rid of any of the male forms of humor I’ve discussed here—for the record, I love The Daily Show—nor am I suggesting that stand-up clubs and sitcoms and Maxim’s joke pages should suddenly be filled with (or replaced by) “female” anecdotal humor.
But I do tire of the constant claim that men are the funnier sex and that the way we do humor now (the male way) is the best and only one—because the consequence of that seems to be fewer good comedians of either sex so that there’s more room in the schedule for Larry the Cable Guy specials.
What I am suggesting, then, are two changes to the way we go about making jokes. The first is that, given the considerable overlap between what men and women find equally funny—self-deprecating humor, sexual humor, cartoons/comics, and wordplay, for example—we ought to put more effort into finding material that appeals to everyone and not just to one sex or the other. By the fairly unremarkable standard that the best joke is one that makes the most people laugh, anyone who considers themselves funny ought to want to do this.
The second is that, even if we don’t get rid of any current forms of humor, we still ought to supplement those with new, more “female” ones. If Comedy Central had an “Anecdotal Humor Hour” alongside its usual nightly line-up, then women wouldn’t have to get their asses out on the The Daily Show or play bimbos in SNL skits or tell hecklers (à la Roseanne Barr) to “suck my dick!” in order to “be funny”—and then there would probably be a lot more women who wanted to give it a try. (Okay, so “Anecdotal Humor Hour” sounds awful, but all that proves is that I shouldn’t be a television producer.)
More importantly, having more “female” humor in the mainstream would help begin to re-teach everyone, in particular men, what humor really is—or at least, what it can be. My experience with Reba shows that men just need to experience enough female humor to start finding it funny, and that conclusion seems borne out, too, by a few more general examples.
30 Rock, for instance—written by a woman—has been steadily improving its meager audience numbers every year; and in a recent interview, a former (male) Late Show producer told the New York Times that Chelsea Handler will almost certainly host a network show one day. With exposure comes acceptance and appreciation.
I believe that if we start to give “female” humor more of a chance, we’ll find that we actually kind of like it. My hope is that one day it will simply just be seen as “humor,” and we can do away with this silly myth that women aren’t funny.
That doesn’t mean there won’t still be bad comedy out there, and as much of it by women as by men. But it does mean, at the very least, that there will be more spectacular Betty White SNLs and fewer lacklustre Jude Law ones—and that seems like as good a reason to give it a try as any.
Thank you. I’m glad there is an article like this to counter the Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens which was probably the most absurd thing I have ever read. Women can’t be funny because all we can think about is serious things like making babies? Please. I’ve been considered a funny woman, by both men and women, and I get the “bitch” label often. I also get discredited often, that is, I make a comment in jest that goes unheard because I am soft spoken, by nature (low-talker) and sometimes to avoid the bitch label. Usually one man hears… Read more »
Don’t forget Lisa Lampanelli!
How can this not mention Margaret Cho… who makes me laugh so hard milk comes out of my nose… regardless if I was drinking it or not.
Excellent article. I’d never really thought about it… and probably won’t again.
Andrew,
Very interesting analysis.
I noticed as a female in corporate America (years ago before leaving for entrepreneurial journey) that if I said something funny or ironic, the group of male colleagues (99 percent were male) would “not hear it.” But I could always count on one male to repeat my comment in a louder voice to great applause and laughter. So I think your point about “higher status” is critical–the higher status male gets more respect for his comments than the lower status female.
Andrew, thank you for your thoughtful, well-written analysis of an important topic. I have been reading, thinking, and talking about women and humor for a number years–an you gave me new ideas to consider. I hope you will continue to explore the topic.
Ace article! I really enjoyed reading this Andrew.
It’s such an interesting topic and one that raises so many questions and debates in relation to female presence and power on different media platforms.
You’re right about Betty White too. What a lady…
An excellent and interesting article. I’d prefer “feminine humor” to “female humor.” “Female” seems to suggest Michelle Pfeiffer in her Cat Woman costume and other Hollywood “female” images.
I remember how coldly received were jokes made by girls when I was in high school. The boys did Monty Python skits for the Talent Shows, and we all know there was no room for funny women there (only funny men dressed like women, or pretty girls playing the straight man or worse)
Wry, arch, bon mots are the preferred form for many women I can think of (from Jane Austen to Mae West to Dorothy Parker and beyond) because they can be delivered quietly and can stand on their own, appreciated or not.
I heard long ago that women are generally funnier than men, but as in cooking, the best comedians are generally men.
Nice work, Andrew.
Andrew great piece. As a huge Chelsea Lately fan I am with you 100%….