As you may have heard, Christopher Hitchens – writer, drinker, atheist, shit-stirrer – died the other day. He’s gotten tributes from people all over the political spectrum. Over on The Spearhead, the fellows are paying tribute to his life. Well, not so much his life as to his opinion that women just aren’t funny – apparently their vaginas get in the way, or something.
Here a fellow named Rocco offers his fond remembrances of the man:
I applaud him and wish him to be considered by the big man upstairs to have done the world a service by publically opposing the political machine that is feminism by telling a simple truth.
Woman aren’t funny and men do alot of the great stuff they do like music, art and war to impress women.
Maybe this is why women will never invent anything, why bother.
Twenty upvotes and one downvote for that. Presumably that one downvote is from God, who’s probably spent the last couple of days just going around downvoting anything positive said about Hitchens.
Keyster elaborated further:
His point being that not only do women not need to be funny to attract men, they don’t need to do anything else but simply be women; dress nicely, wear a little make up and perfume – – pleasant personality or the ability to engage in substantive conversation is completely optional.
Everything men strive for is to attract more women.
Everything women strive for is to be more like men.
See the conflict?
Attila added this:
This Cuntry has become so PC- that it couldn’t produce someone like Hitchens- as much as I may disagree with some of his views. He had a functioning mind- and an evidently rigorous education. Can anyone name anybody like him in the public arena? The fact he could throw words like “dyke” around with ease in the middle of his perorations shows a great deal of confidence (he wouldn’t let himself be bullied).
Hitch, this part of your legacy lives on!
But it’s a little-noticed comment from Nutz that highlights Hitch’s most impressive accomplishment:
Well, he was drunk in a lot of his interviews. Personally I thought he was great and one of the things that made him remarkable–he’d be drunk in an interview or debate and still soundly spank the other person with his wit.
Whether you loved him or hated him, agreed with him or disagreed with him, you’ve got to admit: he somehow managed to accomplish more while staggeringly drunk than most of us accomplish stone-cold sober. And that’s something, I guess.
ithiliana: Carol Burnett is fucking brilliant. Although my favorite sketch from her show didn’t have her in it: the dentist (although the ‘Gone With the Wind’ parody is hilarious, too).
Like smart women, funny women are threatening to these guys. I sent some of the posts from Dalrock and reddit to a psychologist who runs a relationship forum. He said that these “men” are psychotically threatened by women. The very thought that women can be funny, smart, independent, still attractive to men after a certain age, can support themselves, etc., puts these guys into a complete tailspin. I just took a peek at Dalrock and these guys are still making nasty comments about a post someone put on there weeks ago about her 79 year old aunt who is still attractive and has a boyfriend. Why would something like that bother anyone?! And why are they still making nasty comments about this weeks later?
It doesn’t take much to put these guys’ tighty whities in a wad. And they accuse women of being catty bitches! I have never seen people so easily threatened in my life.
I hope that the irony of someone as unfunny as Brandon making this judgement has not been lost on anyone.
Cassandra, it has not. He’s one of our most humor-impaired trolls. Actually, none of them are funny, except Arks. He makes me laugh.
Meller is frequently very funny, it’s just not intentional.
Hitchens stand on Iraq/Islam, and his apparent love of being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole are why I didn’t like him.
His willingness (as it seems everyone else who’s tried it) to admit waterboarding is torture showed some intellectual honesty, but one bit of decency doesn’t make up for the rest.
I had no idea who Christopher Hitchens was until I read this post.
I don’t feel I’ve been missing out.
You’d think a comedian would be able to come up with something better than the trite old “women aren’t funny.”
Or nothing to do with men, maybe women find women less funny than they do men.
Audiences generally laugh more at men, women generally laugh more than men, women generally laugh less at women.
Or you know, misogyny etc.
I expect better out of public speaking atheists, who actually understand the very intricate and detailed nuance to how evolution actually works, to be able to spot pseudo science when they see it. Instead Hitchens fell right into that trap and made a public ass of himself. Being an atheist does not give you a free pass to be a sexist asswipe.
I absolutely loathed Hitchens. I think he was wrong about everything and his attitude of grating intellectual superiority would have made him intolerable regardless of what he thought. Atheists can do better.
*sigh* So, first of all, obviously it’s a complete myth that women aren’t funny. So, seriously, no one should put that forward, it’s just too stupid. However, it’s not even true that men are much funnier in general. A study was just published this year showing that, while there may be a difference, it’s extremely small:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/b32121v25xm28w4l/
“Raters on average did show a preference for male writers, t(79) = 7.85, p < .001, allocating 0.11 more points to them (SD = 0.46, d = 0.24). Both female and male raters showed this preference for male writers, although the preference was significantly greater among male raters, t(79) = 3.63, p < .001. Female raters allocated male writers on average 0.06 more points [t(46) = 3.22, p < .01, d = 0.13]; male raters allocated them on average 0.16 more points [t(33) = 7.66, p < .001, d = 0.35]."
That's .11 out of ten. Incredibly small. And that's also on a very small group, 32 students. Larger studies tend to see such variations diminish. And, the study found that there tends to be serious misattribution errors, in that men are more often wrongly credited with funny things:
"participants preferentially attributed the funny captions, but not the unfunny ones, to males. The interaction was significant, F(1, 210) = 9.29, p = .003. Follow-up t tests indicated that the nonfunny captions were more often attributed to females (M = .68, SD = .14) than to males (M = .63, SD = .17), t(210) = 2.44, p = .016, and that there was a trend in attributing the funny captions to males (M = .70, SD = .14) as compared to females (M = .66, SD = .14), (210) = 1.87, p = .063."
So, yeah, STFU on the 'women are unfunny' stupidness. They're not, by any real margin. And stereotypes about it make the situation worse, because they are most likely a major cause of said misattribution errors.
Oh, and bonus anti-evo psyche:
"The data are not entirely consistent with a view of male humor being favored evolutionarily as impressing women (Miller, 2000), because male humor (perhaps like the male
sports car) appeals most especially to other men. Nor are the data consistent with humor being gender specific, because we found that, while men prefer male humor, women (albeit very slightly) also prefer it. "
Audiences generally laugh more at men, women generally laugh more than men, women generally laugh less at women.
And man sprang fully-formed from the earth with the innate willingness to laugh more at men.
Other people that Scotland has given the world that may help to make up for Ullere – Ian Banks, Robert Burns. Jo Rowling started writing Harry Potter in Scotland.
Every time Ullere posts I feel like that bit in Slapshot where the guy is talking about being sent to the penalty box. “You feel shame”.
Oh, quick correction, it was tested on 81 students, not 32. 32 students wrote the captions. Also, women also were considerably less confident in their own abilities, which could very much bias their ability to be funny:
“The participants were in broad agreement with the stereotype that men are funnier, with (aggregating across writers and raters) 89% of the woman so indicating, and 94% of the men (1 female and 2 males did not respond to the question). This rate of endorsing the stereotype is not significantly different by gender, χ 2 (1, N = 110) = 0.58, p >.45. The caption writers also indicated that this would apply to them, with the male writers predicting an average funniness for their own creations of 2.3 (on a 1–5 scale), while the female writers predicted a significantly more modest 1.5, t(30) = 3.50, p = .001.“
Oh, sorry, one last correction. That’s .11 out of 5,m not 10 (which they make it really hard to figure out. Damn bad science writing). So, that’s an average difference in funniness, on a small scale (again, these effects tend to diminish on larger scales) of men being 2.2% funnier. Yeah…
Women are funny, but only when put the “few” quantifier before the subject! *LOL*
Yes, cho is funny, and yes I do know funny women. The thing is, you will never find a humorous feminist! In order to be funny, you can’t talk yourself or pretty much anything too seriously. EVEN things that are painful or politically incorrect. Humor and sensitivity just don’t mix. 😉
Okay, ignore the study i just put up saying that that’s a ridiculous myth, and throw out the standard claim of “humorless feminist”, but, um, I know i may just make your head explode, but Cho is a feminist. Just for a single example you, yourself, provided. Good one there.
I’m funny! 😀
I know you’re gonna claim I’m not before you even know me XD But I’m hilarious 😀 Everybody (incl MRAs) thinks so! 😀 You can ask Zeta Male, he has my magyc cards on his site! 😀
Ami Angelwings: So Awesome She’s Endorsed by MRAs :3
You can read either Escher Girls or my blog, which I know you’re gonna say arent’ funny b/c you have no sense of humour xD But that’s ok 😀
(Actually EVERY feminist here is pretty hilarious xD )
You can’t even go “FEMINISTS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOUR CUZ THEY CAN’T MAKE FUN OF RAPE” and stuffs, since me, Zhinxy and Trish mock a rape prevention list for 2 posts (so far) on my blog xD And we make plenty of jokes about how everything and anything will rape you >_>
I dun think it’s POSSIBLE to prove to him that feminists are funny cuz it’s kinda like a self defined thing XD “people I find funny can’t be feminists therefore feminists can’t be funny” XD Plus, y’know, trolling xD He wouldn’t ever admit nething :3
Like that I’m awesome 😀
There’s lots and lots of feminists who are funny, but obv we can’t prove it to him cuz well he’s trolling and he’s trying to claim his own ideological opposition to feminists being funny as some kind of objective truth XD So we shouldn’t chase his tail…
except me… cuz I’m awesome :3 And I’m one of the few objectively awesome (and funny! 😀 ) things in the world 😀
That and Holly and Ozy :3 We are the 3 spirits of feminist awesome >_>
Or the 3 spirits of XY-mas
I am the ghost of XY-mas future! 😀
Yes, cho is funny, and yes I do know funny women. The thing is, you will never find a humorous feminist!
Because Margaret Cho isn’t a feminist or anything.
I read Hitchens’ “God is Not Great” when I was in . . . ninth grade? I remember liking it, but half of it probably went over my head at the time, anyway. I’unno what I’d think of it now.
I’m terrible at following popular people, so I can’t say much about his other opinions (misogyny, Islam, war, etc.) except that it makes me sad to hear he thought that way. :T But I tend to pick things to enjoy about people I don’t know personally and ignore the rest for the sake of being able to continue enjoying things I like. (For example, Notch acted like a butt after Minecon. I still play Minecraft anyway.)
Oh weeellll. ‘Least the dude could accomplish things while sloshed.
Also, feminists can totally be funny. They can even be funny while being feminist. That’s why I loved Sarah Haskins so much.
No fair. I wanted to be the Ghost of XY-mas Future! I can be quiet and creepy! Look at me, being quiet and creepy!
(enthusiastically jumps up and down in a very quiet and creepy way)
Using Frenchy as an example, along with Lian Li, I think we can officially declare that trolls are not funny, with a few qualifiers. (Meller is funny, because of the doll thing and the tendency to talk like Lovecraft on meth.) Not because they’re offensive, just because their jokes are dull and their delivery sucks.
It’s always a bit awkward when you can tell that someone is trying really hard to be funny and they’re not.