Why aren't women as comical as men?

Why aren’t women as (deliberately) comical as men? This is how you tell this quick Joke about Women (definitely one of those that are all in the acting). Ask, “Why does a woman with PMT take so much longer to bath and get dressed in the morning?” Answer question by yelling at the top of your lungs, eyes bulging, mouth wide open and banging on the table: “Because it just DOES, okayyy?!?”

Down-to-earth men usually find that funny, usually told on boys’ night, or in our home of seven here in New Zealand, when the girls are out (Chook and Chook junior). Only some women do. They are always ones I become friends with. Jokes can be a good entrance test, come to think of it.

Watching the foretastes of the New Zealand Comedy Festival 2010 got me to realise something that had actually eluded me most of my life. Most of the comedians in the festival are men. One of the few women on stage had weak jokes and seemed to rely too much on apologising for being a woman comedian. I thought that was cringeworthy, then remarked to the other blokes in the house (girls’ night out), “you hardly ever see female comedians actually”. This turned into a scholarly and leisurely debate. The consensus among us men was that men are the ones who are the most deliberately funny by far. Women seem to look for a deeper meaning. Or something.

Yeah, think about it: how many cartoonists do you know in SA or elsewhere that are women? Comedians? There’s Zapiro, the creators of Madam & Eve, the late, great Derek Bauer. There’s columnists like David Bullard and Jeremy Gordin. Would Malema be Malema if he were a woman? On Thought Leader I can’t think of any bloggers for the last two years who are female and really funny. But we have Ndumiso Ngcobo and Koos Kombuis. Llewellyn Kriel (for example,here), Michael Trapido and David J Smith can be hilarious when they put their minds to it. And Traps has done even more witty ones than this one. The overwhelming majority of British cartoonists are blokes. I spotted just one woman in that link; I could do more exhaustive research but the evidence is already overwhelming. Spend a week or more taking down stats on which sex joshes the most in all your circles. Or reflect back on who comes up with the most quips or other funny stuff like pranks. See what objective figures you come up with. I am not saying there aren’t female comics. But the overpowering, perhaps devastating fact seems to be, women don’t do the funnies as a rule. Why? What does that mean?

Hell, I don’t know. I asked the Chook; she doesn’t know either. Or care. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: women don’t need to be understood, they just need to be loved. Man, I upset ladies sometimes without having the faintest clue why. One girlfriend once buzzed me on my cluster main gate intercom in Jo’burg to come to a party I was throwing and I chirped, “We are not buying brooms today, sorry!” as she knew well our townhouse cluster was being plagued by all sorts of bloody salespeople. She drove off, mad as a hornet, and I had to explain to the rest of the party her absence. All the blokes just gave it back when I said we weren’t buying brooms, strongly suggesting, for example, which part of my anatomy they would shove aforementioned sweeping utensil once purchased. Heck, it was just a gag. A clear example of Wilde’s maxim.

Or the classic thing about the toilet seat. So we men are expected to put it back down after we take a leak. Courtesy. Respect. Reverence. Whatever. But that works either way. What is the effort involved in lifting the seat up (boys) or down (girls)? And, ah, men and the toothpaste tube. Don’t squeeze the front end. Sheez, can’t you see that is just subconscious ex-masturbation compensation?

Now I have been around for nearly half a century and by now in this blog I would imagine I have got some women’s backs up. I have done that inadvertently before. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt torn off. Grrrr. And this blog is more advertent than inadvertent. Ladies, I am not trying to be patronising. I can smell them rotten tomatoes coming. I am just looking at this interesting phenomenon.

However. At long last the however. Note the little joke at the beginning of the blog. The woman who would shout “because it just DOES okay?” (because she is stressed and inexplicable and best avoided right then and there) just does not find the situation funny. The viewers do. You see, women can actually be funny when they are not deliberately trying to be.

One of my best was when a group of us were standing outside the office, swapping jokes, and some bloke wanted to tell a blonde joke. There was a blonde in our group called Anne and he most chivalrously asked her if that was okay. She gave assent and he told the gag. We all laughed but Anne said, in all seriousness, “When was the punch line?”. So we laughed more, including the other women in the group. Well now, did young Anne get angry, let me tell you. She went red in the face and almost took flight with hand gestures of frustration at us all, asking for the joke to be repeated. Without trying to be cruel, that helplessly made us laugh even more, and because my laugh resembles the bray of a donkey or a bull who just got his nuts squeezed, I stood out. Anne now completely boiled over about me in particular. Which in itself, dammit, was so funny. She almost hit me. I later apologised with a note and a small gift, shaking my head about her obvious insecurity about herself. Laugh at yourself and get over yourself.

Let me make some corrections to soothe some of the female feathers out there. Of course, both men and women can be funny or stupid when they are not trying to be. I remember once kicking my suitcase along through a sweltering subway in China. All the handles had broken. I was cursing the suitcase and the Chook was walking ahead, resolutely ignoring my abuse of the luggage. All the Chinese were laughing. I screamed at them in their own language, “You got a problem?” They laughed even more. I got angrier. Oh yeah, years later, I now find it funny.

And both men and women are not comical when they try too hard to be comical. There is a new ad campaign for Libra Tampons going on in New Zealand. A young man is on his own in the bedroom he shares with his girlfriend. He takes out her Libra tampon pack. He sticks two on his arms and pretends he is some kind of kung fu fighter. He tries out different costumes with more and more tampons and eventually looks like a cross between Snow White and the DC comic book hero, Flash, showing off in front of the mirror. At that point his lovely girlfriend arrives home with her parents, because she wants to introduce them to him. Her last words are, “I’ve got my parents … [dramatic pause while parents and sweetheart take in the ridiculous male sight, a young man who now looks like he has been rolled in glue and white feathers] … and you’ve got my Libra invisible pads”. Good grief. At first I found it more incredulous as an ad concept than funny, and it is an ad that bores quickly with repetition. The bloke does look ridiculous. Because he and/or his ad writers tried too hard to be funny. In all adverts the product should be the hero so the consumer remembers it. But in this ad the product fails to be the hero; the dickhead is. (Don’t believe me? Here’s the video of the ad.)