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| What a hideous beast! |
It’s weird the lengths that the dudes of the manosphere will go to try to prove things that simply aren’t true. Like the idea that women aren’t funny. (Seriously, if you can’t immediately reel off the names of ten women who are fucking hilarious, you just might be — to paraphrase one famously hackneyed male comedian — a misogynist. If you get stuck, maybe this will help.)
The standard misogynist line on the alleged unfunniness of women is rooted, as are so many misogynist ideas, in sexual insecurity and resentment: Men are funny, the argument goes, because, unless they’re George Clooney or Ghengis Khan, it’s the only way to get women to have sex with them. Meanwhile, all that most women have to do to get men to have sex with them is to exist.
In an old post on Gucci Little Piggy which I just ran across today, our friend Chuck (who sometimes posts comments here), offers his version of this argument.
Humor and oppression are strongly correlated. Oppression leads to a sense of irony and keen insight about human nature and life in general. … And nobody is less at the bottom of the social heap than women.
Actually, maybe men are inherently more funny than women, because so far Chuck’s explanation is hilarious. His proof for this: there aren’t a ton of gorgeous white women comedians. Listing a a small batch of female comedians — among them Ellen Degeneres, Joan Rivers, Wanda Sykes, and Chelsea Handler — he remarks:
Take a look at the list of famous female comedians and notice that none fit the “prototypical” (average) woman. In other words, they aren’t white, beautiful, and straight. … They weren’t handed a golden ticket, like many of their straight-and-narrow sisters. In the same way that Jerry Seinfeld, Milton Berle, and the Marx Brothers inherited a legacy of humor from their Jewish ancestors, lesbians, fat broads, and ethnic women have used the same tool: humor. … female comedians are almost universally unattractive or lesbian or ethnic.
You may have noticed a few problems with this argument. Aside from the fact that there have been plenty of completely hilarious women who were also utterly gorgeous — uh, Marilyn Fucking Monroe? — that several of the women on his list are actually quite conventionally hot, and that most of them are white, all Chuck has done is to show that many female comedians, like many male comedians, tend to be outcasts and misfits with less than model-quality looks. Not that “women aren’t funny” or even that women are inherently less funny than men.
The fact that Paris Hilton is not what you’d call a brilliant wit — she’s his example of a beautiful unfunny lady — doesn’t mean that “women” collectively are unfunny, any more than the fact of Tom Cruise’s humorlessness means all men, or even all Scientologists, are unfunny. (Well, maybe the bit about the Scientologists.)
But the funniest part of the whole thing comes in the comments section, where one bravely anonymous commenter offers his own — utterly sincere, unintentionally hilarious — explanation of the “women aren’t funny” meme:
Well, you’re speaking of a culture/society that’s been decimated by Cultural Marxism. The comedians you mention are using the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory to criticize and breakdown (criticize/critique) what remains of White Western Civilization. There were plenty of excellent white comedians, both male and female, before the open immigration act of 1965 turned the USA into a third world shit hole. There’s a reason they’re not white.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Joan Rivers is staying up nights reading her dog-eared copies of the treatises of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, perfecting her dialectical critique of ugly Oscar dresses.
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