Christopher Hitchens, who’s both a hero and a fallen hero to me, has an awful new essay in this month’s Vanity Fair. It’s titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” and as you might have deduced from the title, it’s about why he believes men are funnier than women. Many of his arguments are silly, and although a few of them are plausible, even the plausible ones are undermined by the sneering, condescending tone of the piece, which is basically daring its women readers to take offense, thereby demonstrating (the logic goes) that they’re precisely the humorless harridans he’s positing they are. He writes:
for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. ? Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.
Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)
Pretty obnoxious, ay? And also, if you’re interested in the subject of gender and humor, as I happen to be, it’s very counterproductive. There’s nothing really to do, and no intelligent disputation to be had, in response to Hitchens–just call him an asshole and be done with it. So Echidne writes:
It’s pretty awe-inspiring to think that someone like Christopher Hitchens can get up one morning (or whenever he gets up) and write something like this and then feel smug about it because he has explained Everything! Except that when I was a child I read a book my father had, called something like Speeches For Every Occasion, and it had a speech to Honor Women which said all the same things Hitchens said here, and this book was published in the 1920s. Pretty awe-inspiring, and pretty arrogant and also pretty stupid.
Hitchens’ intentional, wink wink nudge nudge provocation is also a very English tactic. At least, the one guy I’ve known who did it to me was English. He’d say these incredibly provocative things, draw me into long, heated arguments, and then, just when I was in the middle of an extended, impassioned soliliquy on truth, justice and the American way, he’d say, “Hey man, relax. I’m just takin’ the piss.” (“takin’ the piss,” for those of you who don’t know, is short for “taking the piss out of you,” which is the British way of saying that they’re putting you on, deflating your pretensions, etc.).
I fucking hated it, and I pretty much hated the guy who did it to me, who was one of my roommates during the semester I spent in Scotland (to be fair, I don’t think he liked me very much either). It’s a very aggressive, and at the same time very defensive, strategy, because it allows the person who’s deploying it to vent all of his hostility and then, when the “just kidding” bomb is finally dropped, to disavow that hostility, leaving the other party unable even to take solace in mutual hostility, which is also mutual vulnerability.
