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.
I think Hitchens was brilliant in some ways and fatally flawed in others. He created this persona for himself as a provocateur, and I think it was a trap in some ways, because if that’s your persona you can’t break character and you have to keep trying to top the last thing you said. He was spot on about Mother Theresa though, and he was really really smart, and a good writer. Shame he could be such a narrow-minded ass sometimes.
I think that’s very true. A case in point: Jennifer Saunders’ sitcom Absolutely Fabulous was a massive peaktime hit on BBC1 (one of the main network channels in Britain), but it’s hard to imagine any US network channel showing it uncut at the same time – the casual swearing, smoking, drinking and sex references would probably be too much anyway, but the fact that they’re uttered (and written!) by women might be even more so.
Talking of British comedians, Julia Davis and Miranda Hart are worth mentioning too, but for very different reasons. Davis’ Nighty Night is, without any exaggeration, one of the blackest and sickest comedies I have ever encountered in any medium, and makes Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ seem… well, modest by comparison. In fact, to stay firmly on topic, I read a very funny interview with her former co-star Rob Brydon who said that he was the one who got sent most of the complaints about their previous, often similarly dark, collaboration Human Remains because they assumed that because he was the male half of the writing team, he was the one who must have come up with all the really sexually deviant material. In fact, Davis generated most of it, as she went on to demonstrate.
Miranda Hart couldn’t be more different: her sunnily upbeat sitcom Miranda deliberately harks back to the 1960s and 70s where you could build a vehicle around a single character that was essentially an exaggerated version of herself. Like Davis, she divides audiences, though she seems to have an unusually large female following, possibly because she’s so good at writing material that triggers hilariously uncomfortable memories of what it’s like growing up female and British. (I’ve seen my wife and her best friend laughing so hard at her that they had trouble breathing).
I guess I have yet to meet a person who wasn’t fatally flawed 😉
B____don would be a terrible comedian (as he’s proved time and time again) because he so clearly thinks he’s flawless.
In fact, some of the least funny people I know are the ones who seem the least capable of self-deprecation, and really lacerating self-criticism (whether overtly autobiographical or underpinning the creative treatment of fictional characters) is at the heart of a vast amount of truly great comedy.
While I don’t believe that there are no funny women in the world ever, I generally don’t find women stand-ups all that funny, mostly because of their material. I find Jo Brand hilarious just being herself on QI or that.
My all time fave comedian is Dara O’ Briain. Not only is he extremely Irish and fantastic at improv., he’s also a great big nerd. There’s something special about a comedian who makes jokes about neutrinos and video games XD
Sarah Millican is a genuinely funny stand-up, and another one who’s also entirely (and alarmingly) relaxed about sex.
But I daresay her Newcastle accent is a fairly major barrier towards Stateside success anyway.
America is oddly prudish about a lot of stuff, really. American prime-time TV is laughably unrealistic in all kinds of ways, but the tendency to make characters almost cartoonishly simple is one of the worst. I can’t imagine a Brookside or an EastEnders working here either – gritty and grimy just doesn’t seem to be something that American TV networks are willing to show. The attitude towards sex is especially wierd though. It’s like you can show vaguely porny performative stuff as much as you like as long as you hide most of the dangly bits and the boobs, but the slightest hint of realism and people start clutching their pearls. You can show as much violence as you want, but no orgasms please! It’s very odd. I’ve had basically the same conversation with friends from all over Europe, Russia, and Japan, in which the underlying question is “why is American TV so scared of boobs but so in love with guns?”, and I’ve never been able to come up with a better response than “it just is”.
I think it’s because the US has always had very puritanical beliefs about sex, mainly due to how Christianity shaped the county. Sex is immoral and must be saved for marriage, blah blah blah. That usual stuff. Not that I’m bashing people who believe in that, it just sucks when those beliefs are forced onto everyone else and become deeply ingrained into the culture.
On the other hand though, women are very sexualized in Hollywood and in the media, and it’s starting to with men as well.
@ katz
‘And man sprang fully-formed from the earth with the innate willingness to laugh more at men.’
Well thats biblical and all, but the points I mentioned were from the QI clip I linked.
‘Every time Ullere posts’ – clips from QI? Being open to the possibility that women laugh less at other women isn’t a radical thought, it’s been addressed on QI with many possible explainations, from women comedians treating themselves as a minority, to women not having a history in silent comedy. ‘I also think that the fact that women aren’t supposed to admit flaws does put some weird constraints on female comedians’ Is also mentioned in the QI video. Your ashamed of me posting a video that makes one of the points that you also made? You must be filled with shame at times.
@Nobby So the one study you sourced shows that women don’t find other women as funny as they do men, though to a small degree. Then you try to equivocate the study by saying it has a small sample size, and the findings of the study are an anomaly. But why does the small degree matter then? If it is but an anomaly. Sourcing studies to prove your point then denying the findings of the study is bizarre.
Now the idea that there are no funny women is ridiculous as you only need find a single woman funny, which is very subjective but pretty easy, see ‘no feminists are funny, except’ earlier in this thread.
But the idea that women find men funnier than they do other women does seem to have some validity, seeing how the only study cited in the thread so far does support this claim (along with the QI clip). The study linked here shows male comedians are 2% funnier, a huge and uncrossable divide of laughter…
I’ve had basically the same conversation with friends from all over Europe, Russia, and Japan, in which the underlying question is “why is American TV so scared of boobs but so in love with guns?”, and I’ve never been able to come up with a better response than “it just is”.
Network television is terrible. That’s why you have to go to cable to watch things like The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Justified, Breaking Bad, etc. Boobs, dicks, and everything else, if that’s your standard of “good.” But it’s known here in the states that the best television series are on cable.
I’m currently watching the UK version of Shameless on Netflix streaming, and I’m sorry, but to me that show is simply being crass for the sake of waving your arms and screaming, “Look how naughty I am.” The main character gets raped by a woman using a giant black dildo in the first episode.
Sorry to get my back up, but I can’t stand sweeping generalizations of how terrible my culture is. Also, if I was trying to eat my dinner and the people in the next table were going on and on about oral sex, I’d think they were assholes who were just trying to get a rise out of everyone.
Sorry, missed the blockquote. The first paragraph is quoted from Cassandra’s post.
It’s interesting that you’d assume that people at a different table (in a very casual place btw, very late at night) were attempting to get a rise out of you by having a conversation with each other, but not very realistic. You’re always welcome to tell your neighbors to pipe down a bit, but to assume the conversation they’re having must be about getting attention from you is really rather silly.
And seriously, while we’re making sweeping generalizations, Japan mocking us for our hangups? The land of tentacle sex, rape comics and a schoolgirl fetish that makes the American fetish pale in comparison? I was watching a recent anime about zombies, and the camera kept zooming up the girl’s skirts to show extreme closeups of their underwear, including the folds of their labia and their asses, while they were running for their lives. I couldn’t even get through one episode. I’d already seen the color of every female character’s underwear.
You expressed shock that someone would tell you that you were being inappropriate and decided that it was illustrative of America’s sexual hangups. That’s quite an assumption all its own.
More amusement than shock, really, especially given that it was after midnight. But hey, feel free to carry on with the defensiveness. I’m just waiting to see if you have anything to say about Russia or the rest of Europe and how crass their media is (and I guess how they therefore have no business having any opinion about American media? not really sure where you’re going with that), since you’ve already covered the UK and Japan.
Every episode of EastEnders ever:
“Good morning.”
“IS IT?”
East Enders may have taken the whole gritty urban thing a bit too far sometimes (maybe the writers wanted to be Ken Loach when they grew up), but I always did like the fact that everyone in it looked so normal and so did the houses they lived in.
I used to get sucked into the marathons of EE that the PBS affiliate in Seattle would show.
I have Downtown Abbey on the instant queue, I’ve heard good things about that.
Brookside OTOT (did that ever make it over here?) was great right up until the point where a perfect good plot about domestic violence and child abuse veered off into stupid soap opera over the top-ness and the abused kid and her mother ended up killing dad and burying him in the back garden, and then paving over him. It’s probably better that the MRM never finds out about that particular set of episodes, or we’ll never hear the end of it and they’ll be putting Anna Friel on their official evil women shitlist for having fictionally murdered her dad.
I don’t think Brookside made it here. Usually the only channels showing British shows are PBS and BBC America.
Have you seen Posh Nosh? They’re all on youtube, and hysterical.
When I read that I thought “I can’t possibly have forgotten something like that’ – and, sure enough, this “first episode” turned out to be the first episode of series eight.
Which is a difference worth stressing, because for the first two or three seasons, Shameless was one of the sharpest, funniest things that British television had seen in a long, long time – but the general consensus was that it lost a huge amount of its spark when James McAvoy and Anne-Marie Duff left, and when original creator Paul Abbott got involved with bigger things like State of Play. I was one of many who gave up watching shortly afterwards, as it was already clear that diminishing returns were rapidly setting in.
A quick check on various Wikipedia pages reveals that Abbott (who wrote the bulk of series 1 and 2) has barely written an episode in years, and since it was originally strongly autobiographical, I suspect that’s a reason for its decline: comically grotesque though the early episodes were, there was a real human pathos there as well.
I didn’t say that. Am I not allowed to respond to your opinions? My point is every culture has sexual hangups, and it’s a little hypocritical to ignore your own when you point at other people. It was amazing, for instance, seeing the reactions in France about the Strauss Kahn case, and the attitude that we were crazy for pursuing a criminal charge (I agreed with them that the media frenzy perp walk stuff is in poor taste). But the attitude that “of course powerful men are sexually voracious and try to grab on everyone” was disturbing to me. Do I think it’s illustrative of French culture as a whole? No.
Regarding television, there’s plenty of crap TV in the UK just as there is lots of crap TV in the States. What does it mean? In general, popular culture is fluffy and not that serious, and you have to dig to find the really good stuff. We have a problem here in the States where vocal minorities are able to force ridiculous things, like all the sponsorship pulling out of that American Muslim show because it “humanizes” Muslims.
Bleh, didn’t finish the last paragraph. Our network television has shown itself to be very vulnerable to those vocal minorities in a way that cable television has not, which is part of why network television seems to be very constrained and tamer than network television.
*tamer than cable television. Need coffee.
@Wetherby, I really like Miranda Hart a lot. I always find it interesting that in Miranda, although it’s a very traditional sitcom, she subverts the whole conventionally unattractive, buffoonish man/hot, sensible woman thing that MRAs often froth at the mouth about. She’s not a conventionally attractive woman and definitely the buffoonish one and her love interest (they’ve got an on-going will they/won’t they plot running through it) is a really hot chef called Gary, who plays the sensible, level-headed character while she’s causing chaos and being silly.
Julia Davis is awesome! That’s really interesting that Rob Bryden got mail assuming he’d written all the dark stuff in Nighty Night- that’s definitely one of my favourite sitcoms!
I think there’s a lot of really good female comedians and I don’t really subscribe to Christopher Hitchen’s views on them. I think The Spearhead are pretty wrong-headed to embrace him as one of their own though – he was definitely anti-misogyny, whatever else you think of any of his other views. I think he just enjoyed being a professional contrarian at times and getting a rise out of people, really. I vehemently disagreed with his Iraq war views, but his atheism stuff was pretty interesting.
Also, CassandraSays speaking about how Americans seem to be a lot more sensitive to bad language than Brits reminds me of this: