It’s always seemed pretty obvious to me that men are funnier than women. Not genetically funnier, just funnier, on average, for what I assume are historically and culturally contingent reasons: In America, boys are rewarded and indulged for being funny, for being the class clown; girls are rewarded for being conciliatory, and are condemned as bitches if they mock boys (or girls, for that matter). It’s not perceived, by our patriarchal culture, as being nearly as threatening (castrating) for a man to take the piss out of us and deflate our culture as it is when women do it.
I don’t think there’s a funny gene, or a funny hormone, that men have that women don’t. It just seems to be a social fact. Even today, most of the most successful stand-up comedians, sitcom stars, and comic actors are men.
I got into a big, virtual argument about ten years ago on this issue. My main opponent in the argument was a woman, a writer at the newspaper where I was interning, who’d been in an improv comedy troupe at Yale a few years before (she also, incidentally, would become my girlfriend a few months later). She just disagreed on the empirical evidence. She said that she knew as many, or more, funny women as she did men. I seem to remember, also, that she suggested that women had a different way of being funny than men did, and that there were more men comedians because our culture placed more value on the male style of comedy than on the female style.
It’s impossible to resolve conclusively, but what I’ve been thinking about lately, after reading Jamie’s paean to the shimmering beauty of the Stewart-Colbert rapport, is whether perhaps there’s another reason why men are funnier than women (if we accept, for the sake of argument, that they are). Perhaps it’s because boys and men don’t have many culturally sanctioned ways, other than humor, of expressing affection and love for their male friends.
If you’re a 13-year-old boy, for instance, and you feel warmth and love for your friend Todd, how are you going to express that? Can you hug Todd? Nope. Can you talk about how Todd’s your best friend in the world? Maybe when you were eight you could get away with saying that, but at 13 it would sound way too gay, and if you slipped and said it, Todd would make sure to let you know that he didn’t appreciate it (Todd can be a real dick sometimes). Can you brush Todd’s hair or curl up in bed with Todd for a nap? No. And from what I’ve read about the sexual experimentation that adolescent boys often do with each other, even the boys who are jerking each other off in the church basement tend to have very strict taboos about how they talk (or more often, don’t talk) about what they’re doing.
But we boy-men can share jokes. We can clown around. We can even touch each other affectionately as long as it’s in the context of a joke. We can make clever nicknames for each other, and give each other shit. It wasn’t until college that I was able to, say, enjoy getting a shoulder massage from a male friend (boy, can Tatum give shoulder massages), and even then we tended to joke about it to diffuse the homosocial tension. Over the past few years I’ve slowly, stumblingly found a little bit of language with which to express, more directly, my affection for my male friends, but even so the bulk of our love is communicated through humor.
Men feel the need to say “I love you” to their male friends just as much as women do with their female friends, and joking is one of the ways, probably the primary way, men have found to do it. It would make sense if we were better at joking, on the whole, than women, because we’ve had a lot more practice.
