By David Futrelle
At this very moment — as you read this very sentence — some dude somewhere who completely lacks a sense of humor is explaining to a woman who does not that women just aren’t funny like men.
I have no evidence to back up that assertion but I feel pretty confident it’s true, and as a dude myself I regularly assume that things that pop into my head are definitely true. And come on, this one probably is.
Yesterday one of these humorless dudes — who happens to share the same first name with me, to the shame of all Davids — decided to inform Twitter that women aren’t funny. Responding to a quote from Tina Fey complaining that in TV comedy “women are treated like expensive cappuccino machines. … Where it’s like, ‘We have one. Why would we have two?!’,” this shitty excuse for a David declared that “as a general rule…women arent as funny….smarter not funnier.”
His comment drew some snarky responses from women funnier than him, including one from Ariel Dumas, a writer for the Colbert Show, who asked him “what show do YOU write for, david?” It also inspired this Tweet from writer Jennifer Wright, whose own personal wit was once described by People Magazine as being “as sharp as a guillotine’s blade,” but you don’t have to take their word for it; just read her Twitter timeline.
If a woman tells a joke and you do not laugh, she'll look away, embarrassed.
If a man tells a joke and you do not laugh, he'll repeat it, louder. If you still do not laugh, he will explain "that was a joke"
Somehow this has lead to men concluding that they're the funny gender
— Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright) April 12, 2018
This tweet served as a sort of batsignal for some of Twitter’s unfunniest men, who began arriving in droves to explain to Wright and all other funny women that, no, they really aren’t funny; it’s biologically impossible. Seriously, I have no idea how all these dudes found out about Wright’s tweet, but they turned the thread that followed into one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I’ve ever read.
Some were outright indignant that a woman would make such gross generalizations about gender and humor.
Wright gently pointed out to Max (as she did to others in the thread) that she was responding to a dude who had done exactly what Max and so many other dudes say that dudes don’t do.
Other dudes in the thread offered accidental rebuttals to Max by making their own truly gross generalizations about gender and humor.
ANDREW DICE CLAY is one of your two examples of funny men? ANDREW DICE CLAY?
One guy appealed to the DIVINE RATIONALITY OF THE MARKET as proof that men were just much funnier.
As one Tweeterer pointed out, this dude made a whole new Twitter account just to Tweet this ONE TWEET.
This guy, meanwhile, took a moment out from what I’m going to assume was a three-day meth binge to post this somewhat puzzling assessment of the issue:
One fellow attempted to prove that men are funnier by repeating what is possibly the laziest and most tiresome joke I’ve heard in years, one that has become something of an alt-right catchphrase.
Unfunny and unoriginal is no way to go through life, son.
(Ok, that response wasn’t original either, so sue me.)
But the most amazing response of the bunch was this one, which somehow worked in Tide Pods and “disposable males” while not actually addressing the question at hand at all.
That final “eminent” kills me every time I reread this one. Angry men, you never disappoint. (I mean, you always disappoint, which is why you never disappoint those like me who enjoy inadvertent humor.)
One woman asked the question I’m sure many were wondering:
![Amanda Jenkins @EaglesExMachina Follow Follow @EaglesExMachina More Replying to @JenAshleyWright Is there a name for the thing where a woman tweets about men being [not funny, stupid, bad, etc] and men show up to prove her right?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tg86790u9po.png?resize=580%2C322&ssl=1)
Go read the whole thread. There’s more of this, as well as countless genuinely funny retorts from the “women actually are funny, you nimrods” side.
Here, just for the hell of it, is Andrew Dice Clay angrily storming off of CNN; it’s the one funny moment in his entire career, and its humor is entirely unintentional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlLslb-Royo
TIL drama and comedy are mutually exclusive?
(This is long because to want to be clear and thorough.)
This seems to be a huge bone of contention with a lot of the older comedians. They like to get together and commiserate on how audiences today are just too sensitive for their jokes, or have no sense of humor.
Dave Chappell and Chris Rock have recently run into this same thing with their standup gigs, too. None of them seem to understand that the jokes they used when they got started in the business twenty years ago, aren’t going to fly with today’s audiences. And that the key here is to find out what audiences they’re going for, what makes that audience laugh, and craft material to get their attention.
Sitting around complaining about how they can’t do the same tired sexist, misogynist, transphobic, and racist jokes they got away with telling twenty years ago, because audiences didn’t know any better, ain’t gonna work to fix their careers.
The audiences they had over twenty years ago (pre-internet) are all grown up now, and the college students they’re trying to hook today,are two different types of people.
Marginalized people speaking up on the internet, and telling the rest of the world what has been harmful to them, has had some effect. People are more aware of when a comedian is just bullying another group of people, just punching down, and they are no longer willing to tolerate it. It’s not their fault if old comedians are out of touch because they weren’t paying attention to the social changes.
This happens to every artist, they simply become less relevant as audiences grow older, change, or become a whole new audience. Some artists are so good they manage to whether such changes and still be lauded because they change too, rather than complaining that their audiences are no good.
Also, these shmucks act like the exact same thing wasn’t true in the 90’s. If you just repeated the same bunch of jokes from 20 years ago then people would be offended and not find it funny.
I mean, look at the comedians whose careers spanned that long. Carlin’s act was constantly being updated and changing with the times, because he wasn’t a lazy hack.
and incidentally, it’s why people like Dennis Miller have seemed to fall off a cliff.