Chris Hitchens Jumps the Shark, and Jordan Green’s Got His Eyes on “Jaws”

Love it. Thanks. :)

Susan, that was amazing. Beautiful, even. I loved it.

BWC scored bigtime bringing you aboard. You rock, lady.

"If religion is the enemy of all humor, and men are the figureheads of religion, then men are the enemy of humor. And girls win."

I couldn't have said it any better myself -- if funny women win, then that means that I win. I thank God often for Tina Fey & Amy Poehler (and even Rachel Drastch (sp?) on occasion).

But Sarah Silverman & Lisa Lampanelli? I'll pass....

Thanks Susan!

Thank you. Great argument and funny, too!

First of all, teeheehee, hahaha and *Smirk.*

Secondly, I was thinking a little about the sexual "revolution" recently as well. It's nice and coincidental that you wrote a bit, I thought about it and then read your little ditty here. I don't really believe that the sexual revolution did anything to elevate the status of women in any sort of lasting regard. To a certain extent, we have just given sex more freely to men. Many would concur that men are driven to look for/work for/do whatever it takes to receive that. And now they don't have to. Being a Jesus-loving and Bible-honoring, I feel as though I have gotten the short end of the stick because of the "revolution."

But, you, my dear Susan Isaacs, make a very good point that a cycle has been created because of the mid-twentieth century. Because respect has been exchanged for sex, or so it seems to me, we, as women also give men the short end of the stick by using sex as leverage. We just want something that's for us - money, power by association or whatever. We give it up, so they gotta give it up, too. Sadly, I have caught myself thinking that way. Can I blame the bling?

No wonder men, or in this case, Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Green and the various other BWC readers, feel threatened.

Nice insight.

I'm sure it's not just that men and women find different things funny. That couldn't be it. Too simple. Nobody to accuse of being the enemy of humor that way.

cheers, susan! brilliantly and beautifully stated.

Bravo. Green's article haunted me for a few days - so glad to see a response. I couldn't have said it better.

In my defense, I think Susan is agreeing with most of my points, albeit with far better writing and communication.

Am I missing something here? Can you ladies explain to me why you're applauding Susan (deservedly so) and "haunted" by my article?

Glad you took up the standard for all us female comedy writers! Don't forget about Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and the best new comedy on TV, Tina Fey's "30 Rock". There are no fewer funny women than men, not to mention the fact that the average woman looks better in a thong than the average guy anyway. If you want to read amazingly funny female writing, drop by www.happywomanmagazine.com, a great woman's magazine parody.

VERY well put! I got lucky finding a very handsome man who was more attracted to my wit than my body. Why, yes, I did marry him!

So often in the past, funny women wind up coming out of the closet, which makes them that much harder for hetero women to relate to. If Jordana Spiro on "My Boys" ever comes out, I quit! Now, there's a show that (so far) breaks the stereotype. Change the sports addiction to sci-fi, and she is SO me!

Hitchins obviously has never watched a broadcast of Lakewood Church. Joel Osteen stars every sermon off with a joke that someone emailed him (often poking innocent fun at Christians). They're not always knee-slappers, but they are always good for a grin. And then sometimes he even inserts a good pun or cliche in the sermon itself that sends the audience roaring! Anyone who grew up going to church in the South will attest to the fact that Christians can be VERY funny, indeed!

Beautifuly written.

Women are funny, and most of us do have a great sense of humor. How else could we put up with men?

I find that funny women writers through the ages (from Dorothy Parker, to Erma Bombeck, to Molly Ivans, to more than a few women bloggers that I adore) are more poingnant and hilarious than most male humorists that I've read, in my humble opinion.

great read...very honest and as always, beautifully written. keep up the good work Suz!

I think Chris Hitchens and Jordan Green erred whenever they left us with the blanket statement 'Why Women Aren't Funny.' Stereotypes are similar to sarcasm: when using them, we never know if we'll hit our intended audience. Yes, the Hollywood comedy scene appears to be male-dominant, but it doesn't represent the population as a whole. Female comedians might strike out on stage, but many of us laugh histerically at funny women in our small spheres of influence.

This whole discussion has been a great examination of gender tension in our culture. I think the 'sex' factor influencing who we find funny affects males, too. Looking at the list of People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive honorees since 1985, none of those men are regarded for their comedy. Even when comedic men try to be romantic in movies, it just looks awkward (see Steve Carrell in '40 Year Old Virgin' as an example).

As a whole, women tend to be 'sexier' than men. In our culture, even women appreciate their own gender for their sex appeal more easily than men do. So, it would seem that if we consider sex and humor to be in slight contradiction, our culture would flock to men more than women.

Besides, funny is only relative. It's an aesthetic, subjective response. If a woman says, "Damn it! I'm funny!" but no one laughs, she's just in the wrong audience.

What i'm not getting here is that Susan is basically supporting the idea that women aren't, in general, as funny as men. She is, in effect, agreeing with Hitchens (and myself) by trying to figure out why that's the case.

Now, it's easy to say we're intimidated by funny women, but I'd say I'm far more intimidated by beauty than humor. I WISH there were more funny women. I've dated or remained friends with every funny woman I've ever known. I've never thought to myself, "Well, you're funny enough, but you don't have a penis, so screw you."

Hi Susan, great work and I figured it would just be a matter of time before you'd get on people's radar as a great - and very funny - writer! To me, giving something like humor to one sex or the other is really weird thinking, almost like deciding that one sex or the other is most oriented towards oxygen or sleep requirements - they're part of being human, not part of being a man or a woman.

That being said, I will say that people are good at what they practice and maybe it's the Tom Sawyer doing handstands to win Becky Thatcher kind of thing, but it may well be true that men have had to use humor to attract women more than the reverse. Still, to think that a man is born more able to be funny than a woman because he's a man is.....a funny idea, and not in a good way - I didn't read this guys article, hopefully he didn't mean that.

I've said for many years now (especially since I became single again 7 years ago) that Hugh Hefner didn't do either sexes any favors with the Playboy thing, so I really agree whith what you said and some of the women that commented here (where are the other guys?) The sad thing is the Hugh said once in an intereview that all he had ever wanted was for love to be like it was in the pop songs, so maybe we can go back to the tin pan alley composers to lay all the blame at.

No matter what the real problem is, I don't think that there is an area of life that Christians especially are more screwed up in than sex, and it has been encouraging to hear that finally the church is starting to look at all of this honestly. As far as Christians not being funny......wow, come on, if we're honest we have to admit that we've all sat through some of the most embarrassing garbage videos and pathetic jokes we've ever heard when we're in church, so it's really hard to dissagree to heartily on that issue, but just like women are not un-funny because they're women, Christians are not boring and unfunny because they're Christians. Hopefully, as it becomes more and more OK to be honest in general about who we are and we finally drop the "we're perfect now that we're saved" crap, people will learn to lighten up and take the chance to say something in public that someone's blue haired grandmother's grandmother might find slightly offensive. Wouldn't THAT be funny?

I'm glad this has sparked a robust discussion! Jordan, I was not agreeing with you and Hitchens ("women are less funny than men.") I am saying that women are less appreciated for our humor than men are. And if you're a girl and you want to get a guy, you work on the things he finds desirable.

Men may indeed value humor, but as our culture devolved into an increasingly sex obsessed ID, its needs become infantile. The more subtle charms fall by the wayside, and a woman is reduced to her ability to give a man a woody. Pardon mon francais.

Biologically the male courts the female, and perhaps humor is a tool the man uses to charm and disarm the female. But a man doesn't want to be disarmed by humor. He needs all the armament and bravado he can get. He is, in effect, invading the female and her neat little world. Okay I'm getting way too Psychology Today on you. This is an issue our psych majors should take up.

I stand corrected.

Are we sure there isn't more here, though? Is it really just the insecurity of men? Or is it that our brains work differently, that males are more apt to make fun of themselves, or toss away social constructs to get a laugh?

Could testosterone, which would cause higher competitiveness and less empathy, be a catalyst for humor?

I realized I haven't provided much concrete evidence for believing women are less funny (in general) than men, so I thought I'd take the funniest comedies of the past two decades and look at the demographics of their writers over the span of the series. For the purposes of my experiment, I will be using "Seinfeld", "Friends", "Cheers", "Scrubs", "30 Rock", "Arrested Development" and "The Office". Since writers are predominantly behind-the-scenes, how they look in a thong should be irrelevant.

Seinfeld: 4 women out of 31 writers
Cheers: 7 out of 36
Friends: 15 out of 43
Scrubs: 4 out of 16
30 Rock: 1 out of 3*
Arrested Development: 3 out of 13
The Office: 2 out of 10**

Overall, 36 out of the 152 writers were women, a full 23%. Remove "Friends" (which I think is the least funny show on here) from the equation, and the numbers become 19%.

I realize there are a myriad of reasons for this, but I don't think sexism and intimidation are the biggest factors in this discrepancy.

*The one woman is Tina Fey, who created the show and stars in it. Tina Fey is awesome.
**One of the two women is Mindy Kaling, who plays Kelly on the show. She wrote one episode, the Indian holiday episode, which was one of the least funny episodes of the American "Office".

Additionally, of Comedy Central's 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all-time, only 11 were women.

Yes it's true there are far fewer women than men comedy writers on TV. But there are also fewer women in TV drama as well. Last week's Neilsen ratings: Four of the top shows were football. Doubt many women were writing for the pre- and post- game shows. No women coaches, no women players.

Of the remaining six shows, one was a "comedy," Desperate Housewives. How funny you think it is, is another question. The head writer is openly gay. Does that make him a girly man? Anyway, the other TV shows were dramas: CSI, Law and Order SVU, Shark, Without a Trace, Cold Case.

CSI: 5 of 14 are women or 35%
Law & Order L&O 17/78 women, or 21%
Without A Trace 7/20 women, or 35%
Cold Case is a shocker. 9 out of 15 are women, or 60%. Maybe because the lead actress is a woman, and the show runner is a lesbian. Which makes her a manly girl.

Since you brought up Cheers, let's go back to TV drama 20 years ago, Hill Street Blues. Two women writers out of 56 total. 3%.

So it's partly an historical thing that is changing, but my guess is there will always be more men writers than women, in TV and movies. This is in part due to sexism in industry, but sexism is everywhere.

Historically the ONLY job for a woman on a studio lot was the Script Girl or the publicist.

Secondly, the film and TV industry is grueling work, long hours, high stress. If you want to start a family, the women usually stay home with the kids. It's also also highly competitive. And where there is money, power and competition, there is war. And men are waymobetta at war.

Film is a visual medium. Film scripts are sparse in words. "Write only what you see and what you hear," my first writing teacher taught me. That has changed. But women are much more gifted at interior writing: descriptions, thoughts, interior ideas, the kinds of things that there is no time for in a script. There is a much higher percentage of successful funny women writers doing novels or creative nonfiction (than in TV and film).

Still, yes there are more men in comedy. Standup comedy is a very dark world, very competitive, and very lonely. I used to go to open mike nights at the Comedy Store, and man that place is dark, emotionally spiritually and physically dark. Women are better at group comedy, like in improvisation, rather than standup. And Hollywood has historically mined the comedy clubs for writers and standup stars. Or the Harvard nerd squad.

Ummmmm.....if I remember at least a tiny bit of math from high school, when you're trying to solve an algebra equation, the first thing that you do is get the things your comparing to be the same, I can't remmember the term for it but you needed to make sure you weren't dividing apples to figure out how many oranges you had.

Given that, the number of women that have succeeded in humor as a profession is not relavant when the issue is the quality level the women that have succeeded have achieved. Jordan's agruments should be talking about a human's capacity to be funny due to their sex, the answer they he should be lookig for is one that gives an answer in quality, not in quantity.

I'm a musician, so it's easier for me to illustrate this in musical terms: if I measured musicians by who became millionaires in their lives, I would be writing to tell you that Charile Parker was one of the worst musicians that ever lived.....if you're not sure who I'm talking about, add the word "Bird" in with that name when you do a Goggle search and read a little music history, you might see the point I'm trying to make ;-)

The only reason I love Jordan is because he is sexy. He is way less funny than me. I actually feel a little sad for him. But, what can you expect from a man?

Amen sister!

Susan - I think funny woman are mad hot. Are you by chance single?

I give props to Doug?s observation that the quality is more important than the quantity. Especially when talking about the subject of humor, which is very subjective.

We all find different things funny. I don?t believe that men have a greater capacity for humor. (balls or boobs do not make a difference in comedic talent, although they allow for unique perspectives and diversity in material).

But here we are concentrating on "wit" is seems. As we all know, our society places certain values on behaviors and wit is a far more valued behavior in men than women, so you have more men trying to hone there wit because it is a way to gain more valued position in society. A lot of it boils down to the desire for acceptance. That explains the ratio. More men trying to be accepted through wit and humor affords them more oppertunity to use that wit as a profession. If women can easily earn affirmation by "looking good in a thong", the need for developing wit is reduced.

Of course (thank God), that is changing and humorous women, like Susan, have more oppertunities to flex thier wit than ever before. This may be threatening to men like Hitchen?s, as well as threatening to the "way things work" in society.

As for me...I am not threatened by funny women, rather they turn me on. By humor, friendships can be more rewarding, and I believe firmly that friendship is required before any meaningful relationship stuff can happen. I couldn?t imagine living with a trophy wife, how boring. Give me a sassy gal that can laugh at herself and isn?t afraid to lay into me when I need to have my chops busted. That?s hot.

susan, excellently written article and i must say that i'm realizing that you looked mega familiar from reading your blog and now i know that you will always have a special place in my heart as you were marie - john candy's 'pictoral' wife in 'planes, trains and automobiles' - one of my favourite films of all time. with that awkward fan moment aside, i'd have to agree. women are painted in an all-too-familiar and negative light in hollywood and funny gals are a breath of fresh air in the industry. i also think that humour can make someone who may not be a cover girl become more attractive. so i say 'word sister' - keep on keepin' on and fight the good fight. i'll be writing on BWC more often, in the music section, so feel free to stop by sometime. i can also concur with another commenter in saying that BWC has scored HUGE by acquiring your services!
cheers
matt mckechnie

Just wanted to say that Dan sort of put in all the stuff that I left out on the quality issue I discussed - and to let him know that he's too late, Susan married my best friend Larry last August - he's another great writer and it will be interesting to see what comes out of that literary pairing.

Matt, you might have also seen Susan as the wife of Bill Murray's Scrooge character's brother in "Scrooged" in the scene where they are talking about why he never comes to Christmas dinner - yes, she gets around.

One of my least favorite scenes of any movie ever made, is Diane Keaton's crying/whining/making me very agitated montage in "Something's Gotta Give." It is not funny. Tina Fey is brilliant. Ellen DeGeneres has amazing timing. Anna Faris is funny in a ridiculous sort of way. The "Diane Keatons" of Hollywood (a type interchangeable with the hosts of "The View") give me that same feeling as the one you get when you are watching a really terrible open mic and everyone is trying to smile and not look uncomfortable as "Jim" croons his own interpretation of "Free Bird."

Maybe there is a secret joke out there that one can tell in any language or culture and it will make anyone within earshot laugh so hard that they asphyxiate on the spot. If I find this joke, I will sell it to Diane Keaton. Or North Korea.