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HUMORLESS MEN. Reading The New York Observer's Media Mob column about The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar's little tiff with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter over the Christopher Hitchens piece on how women aren't funny, I couldn't help by be struck by how everyone seems to be misinterpreting Hitchens' argument. He wasn't arguing that women are humorless -- i.e. have no sense of humor or capacity to be entertained and amused -- but that they are less likely to entertain or amuse than are men, because they have less need to. The Observer's Choire Sicha wrote:
Ms. Sklar had inserted herself into the big feminist bear-trap Mr. Hitchens had set. (The game, which dates to at least the mid-70's, is traditionally played like this: You write an article like that, and those who humorlessly complain are then treated as the proof in the pudding of the article. Which doesn't of course make the complainers any less humorless.)But it seems to me that's really not the issue. If men are, as Hitchens asserts, funnier than women because masculine humor develops on account of sexual selection -- i.e. because women want them to be funny, just as peahens prefer their mates to have glorious decorative peacock tails -- then doesn't it follow that negative reactions to an article like Hitchens' is an example not of female humorlessness but of male failure in the psycho-sexual humor realm? If men are funny in order to seduce women, isn't an article that women find enormously irritating and off-putting the very definition of something humorless and lacking? After all, in Hitchens' own terms, we ladies are the ultimate judges here -- the "audience," he says, for the male performance -- since masculine humor's foundational purpose is to "make the lady laugh."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
