Funny Women
If only.
I didn’t even know that Adam Corolla said what he did until
days after the fact, when I got clued into it by all the Adam Corolla jokes
coming from the female comedians in my Twitter feed. At first I couldn’t
believe that I’d missed something so big, but then I remembered that it was
Adam Corolla who said it, and since I watch lots of popular TV shows , look at
funny internet videos, and listen to hilarious comedians, I obviously have no
way of knowing what that guy is doing.
I mean, shit, what is Adam Corolla doing?
My last memory of him was when a stoner in my 11th grade math class
said that his three month long talk show was ‘totally groundbreaking.’ What was
he doing in the seven year gap between then and him telling the New
York Post that women aren’t funny? For some reason I’m picturing him
working at an Outback Steakhouse in Bloomington, Indiana – although the
Bloomington part might just be because I’m thinking of a Bloomin’ Onion.
Are women funny? Of course they are, you fucking idiot.*
Anybody who says that women aren’t funny obviously hasn’t met my mother.
*Critical responses like this don’t carry the same weight
when you’re answering a rhetorical question you just asked yourself.
This is my mother wearing a Viking hat.
My Mom is arguably the funniest person I’ve ever met. She’s
witty, irreverent, cerebral, and totally unafraid to be completely vulgar and
make dildo jokes if the situation calls for it (which it often does in the
Capps household). If not for my mother, this blog would be about fiscal policy
analysis and black and white historical photographs of bridges instead of dick
jokes and profanity. You can decide for yourself which one is a better use of
my time.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily disprove Carolla’s
argument – as he puts it, in his 50’s greaser lingo*, “When it comes to comedy, of course there’s
Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re
playing the odds? No… The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny
chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks.”
*I realize
that I use the term ‘chicks’ occasionally to refer to women, but after seeing
Adam Carolla’s heavy use of it I’m going to quit. That douchewaffle ruined the
word for all of us.
Now, I
believe that Adam Carolla’s observation – that there are more men who are
successful comedians or just ‘funny’ in general than there are women – is, in a
way, correct. Unlike Adam Carolla, I don’t believe that it has anything to do
with some sort of hardwired genetic predisposition, probably because, unlike
Adam Carolla, I’m at least reasonably intelligent.
The fact
remains, though – when I list off friends of mine who crack me up on a regular
basis, I find myself listing more men than women. What this comes down to isn’t
the fact that with a vagina comes the inability to tell jokes; it’s that on a
cultural level I don’t think young girls get as much encouragement to be funny
as young boys do.
A sense of
humor isn’t something you just decide to have – it’s developed over the course
of a lifetime, starting when you’re a kid. With little boys, it starts out with
talking about forbidden topics, like farts and wieners, to make other kids
laugh, because farts and wieners are and always will be funny.
Those are
really the only things little kids can make jokes about – for one, vulgarity is
the easiest comic territory, and two, with relatively little life experience,
understanding of social norms, or mastery of language, about the only way you
can make other kids laugh is by talking about the stuff that
comes out of your butt.
For the most
part, parents accept and tolerate some amount of this under the ‘boys will be
boys’ clause, but girls aren’t so lucky. Even in the 21st century,
the majority of girls are taught from an early age to be proper and ladylike,
qualities that explicitly forbid rewording nursery rhymes to talk about Disney
characters drinking pee.
Things like this have longstanding ramifications: Boys grow up encouraged, or at least allowed, to crack jokes and hone a sense of humor, while girls are steered away from it. Even girls with progressively minded feminist parents still have to go through the shark tank of being a teenaged girl trying to be popular in high school – and adolescent female social cliques don’t really value humor unless it’s being used to make fun of somebody else. (I would know – I was usually the one being made fun of.)
Things like this have longstanding ramifications: Boys grow up encouraged, or at least allowed, to crack jokes and hone a sense of humor, while girls are steered away from it. Even girls with progressively minded feminist parents still have to go through the shark tank of being a teenaged girl trying to be popular in high school – and adolescent female social cliques don’t really value humor unless it’s being used to make fun of somebody else. (I would know – I was usually the one being made fun of.)
So it’s not
that women aren’t funny, it’s that society has been telling
them that they shouldn’t be funny since pretty much day one.
How can you fucking blame them? You go out and overcome a lifetime of social
conditioning and then hone a skill that the other half of the planet has been
encouraged to have since birth and tell me how easy it is!
Women like
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin, Rachel Bloom, Aubrey
Plaza, Ellen DeGeneres, my mother, my friends Kristin, Holly, Amelia, Lizzie,
Allison, other Lizzie, Katie, Molly, Kristen, other Holly, Sarah, Bri, Chloe,
Sonia, Emily, Danielle, Shelly, and the tens of millions of other funny women
in this country aren’t mutants who won the genetic lottery and magically gained
the ability to have tits and be funny at the same time – they’re funny people
who gave a hearty ‘fuck you’ to social norms dictating that jokes aren’t okay
for girls.
And to any of
you who are raising daughters, let me say this: For Christ’s sake, encourage
them to funny. Force them to tell you jokes at the dinner table – even bad
ones. If they want to keep the funny on the DL during high school, that’s
alright, but you let them know that in the real world there isn’t a single guy
who’s ever said, “I was talking to this awesome girl the other night, but then
she made me laugh. Huge turn off.”
Hell, it’s a
source of constant frustration to me that Louis C.K.’s oldest daughter is still
something like 11 years younger than I am. Because I guarantee you, both of his
daughters are going to grow up to be the funniest, most well adjusted women in
history, and if by some wild luck I were to start dating one of them once she
was of legal age, Louis C.K. would devote the rest of his career to talking
about the poofy haired old creep who was fucking his hilarious daughter.
Truman
Capps acknowledges that this whole fracas was obviously Adam Carolla
desperately clutching at publicity.