Women Aren't Funny, Part Wev in Another Ongoing Series

Shaker Lynsey forwarded me this journalistic turd from the BBC, which had me certain for a moment that they had Christopher "Minister of Funny" Hitchens writing their health section now.

Apparently, some genius from that world-renowned bastion of gender studies, Norwich University Hospital, has concluded that men are naturally funnier than women because of testosterone—and he came to this amazing conclusion via a rather amazing experiment: Observing how women and men reacted to his unicycling hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Forget for a moment the complete absurdity of drawing allegedly scientific conclusions from this experiment for a moment and just contemplate: 1. What a coincidence it is that its findings closely mirror the conventional wisdom about men (funny) and women (unfunny); and 2. That the conclusion was testosterone makes men funny, not that a lack of testosterone makes women polite.

Which, given that Professor Smartypants was just minding his own business engaging in a rather unusual hobby, not doing something specifically for laughs, is frankly the more logical conclusion, since laughing and jeering at someone riding a unicycle for his own pleasure isn't technically "humor." It's bullying.

Often the men's comments were mocking and intended as a put-down. Young men in cars were particularly aggressive - they lowered their windows and shouted abusively.

Um, yep. That sounds like bullying, not humor. But that it is nonetheless construed as humor when men are doing it certainly explains why there are men who think holding down a woman and slicing off her panties with a knife is a "joke."

This type of behaviour decreased among older men however, who tended to offer more admiring comments, much like the women.

"The idea that unicycling is intrinsically funny does not explain the findings," said Professor Shuster.

The simplest explanation, he says, is the effect of male hormones such as testosterone.

Yeah. But rarely is the simplest explanation in such things the right one. In fact, upon scrutiny, rarely is the simplest explanation actually the simplest explanation in any way except that it is already conventional wisdom. Never mind that to arrive at this daft conclusion, Professor Smartypants had to ignore that not every single testosterone-bearing creature who laid eyes upon him proceeded to laugh and jeer at him, and that many of them offered compliments, "much like the women." Never mind that men don't share a common sense of humor, nor do women, and that humor varies across cultures, making it exceedingly unlikely that our biology has much to do with our humor, aside from creating our capacity for its appreciation in the first place.

It's ever so much easier to say "Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones," so that proves it's testosterone!—especially when there's always public reward for reinforcing sexist rubbish like that and very little for challenging it.

Since we're always reduced to the sum of our parts, anyway, I'll let my vagina have the final word on whether women can be funny. Take it away, Cunty.

Carol Burnett, Kathy Griffin, Wanda Sykes, Tina Fey, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Amy Sedaris, Maria Bamford, Samantha Bee, Margaret Cho, Mo'Nique, Caroline Rhea, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Janeane Garofalo, Sandra Bernhard, Roseanne, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrea Martin, Rita Rudner, Nora Dunn, Jan Hooks, Jo Brand, Kathy Najimy, Lily Tomlin, Catherine O’Hara, Bette Midler, Joan Cusack, Diane Keaton, Tracy Ullman, Susie Essman, Paula Poundstone, Joan Rivers, Elayne Boosler, Judy Gold, Victoria Jackson, Jann Karam, Wendy Liebman, Sarah Silverman, Kathleen Madigan, Etta May, Judy Tenuta, Aisha Tyler, Phyllis Diller, Nia Vardalos, Rachel Dratch, Bonnie Hunt, Gilda Radner, Goldie Hawn, Jane Curtain, Cheryl Hines. Those are the first 50 who came to mind. If you’ll allow me to include women who don't (sometimes or always) write their own material, but are simply comedic actresses, I’ll make you another list of 50. And if you'll allow me to include women who are dead, that will be another 50. And if you’ll allow me to include funny women I happen to know, that will be another 50. And so on and so on. I could be here all night, bitchez.

And, not to blow my own clit or anything, but I'm a rather witty raconteur myself—especially for a vagina. For Maude's sake, I totally wrote this post, but all I ever get is the shaft!

Tip your waiters.

UPDATE: Evidently, this piece was intended to be satirical, despite not being marked so on the website of the British Medical Journal, in which it was originally published. MizDarwin makes the case for why it's still a bad idea:

One, EVERY scientist knows that science reporting is for shite. You do not deliberately do studies that are going to trip up the reporters.

I don't know how they'd have known it was satirical, frankly. In addition to the failure of the BMJ to identify it thusly, studies exactly this stupid and sexist are published all the time. It wasn't just the BBC who failed to recognize the satire—all sources I consulted before I published this post who similarly mistook it for a legit study.

MizDarwin also notes that, satire or not, "he was still promoting a stupid, harmful, incorrect stereotype." While I would like to believe he was merely attempting to do a send-up of studies that promote those stereotypes, I have this distinct impression that his/the BMJ's enjoyment at having tricked a bunch of science reporters has gotten the better of them. No updates to these articles have been made; no glaring clarification has been included at the BMJ site. They're fully content, evidently, to allow people to believe it's a legitimate study. (And lest anyone argue it's past midnight in Blighty, Lesley sent me this link yesterday.

So I'm letting my post stand. Some dude will Google "Sam Shuster Unicycle" one day, remembering a great study they read once that TOTALLY PROVES testosterone and humor are linked, and I hope they'll find this post.