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.
A hilarious feminist making hilarious jokes about rape!
… did the MRA’s heads explode? Did they?
Alright, I’ll give an inch and admit that wanda sykes is funny(even if she is a feminist). Lesbians generally have much better senses of than straight(or even bi) chicks…Inorite? 😛
Monsieur sans nom:
The career of Germaine Greer alone gives the lie to that. I have very fond memories of the double act she formed with the poet Tom Paulin on the BBC’s cultural review show Late Review in the 1990s, which was frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
I believe she has a certain reputation as a feminist.
And I know a lot of feminists, male and female, who don’t think she’s funny. *Shrug* There’s no accounting for taste, I guess.
You could say the same thing about black comics. Why how could a black comic ever possibly find humor in the absurdity of racism even while being “sensitive” to issues would have profoundly effected them? Jesus christ, do you live in some sort of comedy black hole? I feel like I should pity you, but it seems like no one has to live in comedy black hole unless they want to. Cause hey, the internet?
And since you brought it up:
Joan Rivers: seriously, this woman could out-raunch any MRA in her sleep on a bad day. And still be both incredibly hilariously mean and yet perceptive and sensitive enough to know where the boundaries are and when and how to cross them. That’s called talent. Generally speaking, MRAs don’t have it.
And to be equitable: Joss Whedon. His shows are consistently funny as hell and sensitive enough to have left me in laughing and in tears at the same time on more than one occasion. And before you cue the obligatory “females cry at everything” joke, it’s not because I have a vagina. It’s because Joss, the writers, and actors are awesome at what they do.
Note: why does Ray Ramano, or that asshat from that worthless King Of Queens show, or that fucking tooltime jackass have/ever have had a sitcom? Not because they’re funny. Because they’re safe. No one’s ever gonna criticize a show for letting a fat ass schmuck marry a woman 4 levels higher than him on the MRA attractiveness scale because That Is How Things Should Be. Women should marry stupid hairy cavemen and we should all laugh about the hijinks that ensue. And only Real Men are hairy jackasses, etc, har har. Har.
Lame.
PS that wanda video was hilarious XD
You know, one or two King of Queens type shows would be OK, it’s the fact that they sprout like weeds that’s a bit tedious. What TV tells me about men and humor is that they like both jokes and premises to be really predictable and repeated over and over again with very minor variations.
(Not all men, obviously, “men” in the sense that Frenchy et al are using the word.)
Hitchens published a follow-up essay stating that, okay, some women are funny, but only the ones who are ugly, fat, old, gay, or Jewish
Yep, the invisible ones.
@ Monsieur sans Nom: Why do you think that lesbinas/bi women are funnier?
(please note, I think that your assertion is not factually accurate, but I’d like to hear why you think that Kristen Schaal, Samantha Bee, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kelly Kapoor, Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers et al are all not funny)
And also, what that happens to do with the fact that they all prefer to sleep with dudes.
It is interesting pyschologically, this idea that women you might want to fuck CAN’T be funny. It seems more proscriptive than descriptive, you know? Why can’t women who you might want to fuck be funny? What terrible, scary thing might happen if they were? Is it that if they were funny they might make fun of you, and that would sting more if you wanted to fuck them? Or can that sort of guy just not maintain his erection unless he pretends that the woman he wants to fuck is essentially a blank slate?
(Hi, Meller!)
There’s also an idea floating around that comedians aren’t supposed to be hot in general, which is why a lot of people don’t quite know what to make of Russel Brand. He can’t be funny and smart and sexy, that’s not fair!
(Not so much my type, much too hairy, but objectively speaking he is pretty sexy.)
My personal pet theory is that humor, and being able to create humor, is such a fundamentally HUMAN thing. Most misogynists want to pretend that women aren’t people. The unfuckable ones aren’t women, so it’s okay for them to be funny. The fuckable ones, however…
I would actually love to see a female version of Brand, just to see how much it would fuck with people’s heads.
Sub category: most comedians are non normative in some way, which is where their humor comes from (see: jokes about being ugly, fat, awkward, part of a marginalized group). If a mysogynist wants to fuck a woman, he doesn’t want to think about all of the ways that she is flawed, because that would make her human. And the best comedians use their personal insecurities as a platform to build funny.
@Cassandra- does Sarah Silverman qualify? She’s gorgeous and raunchy as fuck. Not nearly as quirky as Brand, and much more polarizing in terms of feminist opinion of her, but I personally find her hilarious.
Hitchens published a follow-up essay stating that, okay, some women are funny, but only the ones who are ugly, fat, old, gay, or Jewish
Yep, the invisible ones.
That does have a hint of truth to it. As a woman, when you can’t rely on looks as much, you need to spend more time perfecting other talents, or personality to get you noticed. Not to say conventionally attractive women don’t have talents or good personalities, it’s just that their looks will get them noticed more in our superficial society :/
I also think that the fact that women aren’t supposed to admit flaws does put some weird constraints on female comedians. Not only is the audience not necessarily comfortable watching a beautiful woman talk about her insecurities in a vulgar, non-cute way, the actual comedians may feel like they’re not supposed to, thus setting up a loop where it just doesn’t happen much. This is why I’d love to see one like Brand – it’s the combination of arrogance and insecurity that makes him fun to watch.
(I wasn’t that into his stand up, he gets tedious after about 10 minutes, but then I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall and as many flaws as that movie has, he absolutely nailed that part. I work around the music industry a lot and seriously, that performance was spot-on, and very funny.)
I find Silverman kind of grating, actually. I tend to find people who’re offensive just to be offensive boring, and her version of raunch seems a bit pandering. I’d like her better if she was much more in your face about sex, but in a slightly different way.
Part of this could be cultural too. Brand is very, very British, and Silverman is very American, and my sense of humor is definitely much more British.
I look funny, does that count?
just out of curiosity, how would you define British humor Cassandra? more sarcasm based?
I gotta admit, I like raunchy, slapstick type humor. But yea, I do get uncomfortable with misogynist or racist jokes. Maybe its because you know there are a lot of people out there who don’t take what the comedian is saying as a joke, but as actual truth.
I don’t actually know how to define it, it just feels very different. Definitely Brits are more sarcastic, and drier. I think we tend to be raunchier too, not just comedians but Brits in general – I know that I often find myself cracking sex jokes over here and getting startled, shocked “omg did she really say that?” responses, whereas in the UK the same thing would have barely raised an eyebrow.
I’ll have to sit down and watch Monty Python one of these days to really get a feel for it.
I also used to watch this British sitcom called My Family. Hilarious.
Actually that is a significant cultural difference – I feel like the prohibition about women talking about sex in a casual way that indicates that they don’t take the whole thing all that seriously is much stronger in the US. I feel like I have to self-censor around Americans a lot more. My bestie and I nearly got thrown out of a restaurant once for making a series of oral sex jokes about a celebrity who I’ve worked with and she’s a fan of. I didn’t think any of it was particularly shocking, but the people next to us did, and even the bestie nearly choked on her drink when I made the first comment that started the whole thing. Maybe it’s the British tendency to be very deadpan when saying arguably shocking things?
I don’t know who this Russel Brand is :/ I feel a you tube search in my future…
Sarah Silverman sometimes grates on me and sometimes slays me. But I think I feel that way about all my favorite comedians.
Eddie Murphy, for example, had so, so many good moments. He also had some really cringe-worthy ones. And Doug Stanhope, who by all rights could be an MRA hero… I saw him have a drunken meltdown live about his girlfriend’s abortion and then pull it together and go outside and utterly disarm some feminist protestors, who ended up laughing with him and hugging him because he really is a funny, likeable guy. Or at least can be.
Hitchins was that same way. He wasn’t awful, or a horrible person. He was human and he failed sometimes. And he succeeded where a lot of us didn’t. And he is one of the few public figures who looked Mother Teresa in the eye and said “Bullshit”.
Sorry, but I don’t think this point can be made loudly enough, even if it’s by a crusty old British bastard who couldn’t have been more wrong about the Iraq war or female comedians.