In his infamous Vanity Fair piece titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny“, Christopher Hitchens argued, essentially, that men are funnier than women because they have to be in order to remain sexually competitive. Adam Carolla has now drawn flak for touching on the same topic. I off-handedly tweeted at Louis CK, and he responded in a manner that makes me believe that he disagrees with Carolla. Also, he punked me pretty good.
But the heart of the argument made by Hitchens which serves as the framework for Carolla’s point was handled by Louis CK himself in his famous “Hot Girls at the Bar” bit. Louis CK ridicules the hot girl at the bar who doesn’t have to do anything at all to get attention from men. When the hot bar girl is asked what she does she responds “people want to fuck me”.
CK segues into a bit about Bar Dudes. His characterization is perfect. Whereas Bar Girls just show up and get attention by default, Bar Dudes essentially go hunting in a giant pack. They are trying.
But the statement “women aren’t funny” is not precise enough. That statement is also a stand-in for “women aren’t as funny as men”. What is truly meant by this statement is “the amount of humor held by the average man is greater than the amount of humor held by the average women”. Statistical probability takes over from there, and we’re dealing in the extreme right tail of the distribution when we’re talking about stand-up comedians or television writers.
It’s not that a female from birth can’t be funny or even that she can’t be the funniest person to ever walk the earth. It is possible for women to be really funny, as both Hitchens and Carolla have pointed out. But there just aren’t the sheer number of women who see comedy or gregarious humor as being necessary for them to get attention. The average female gains less marginal attention by being funny than the average male. This also holds across the attractiveness spectrum. Whitney Cummings gets attention for being funny. But she gets the most attention for being attractive. Margaret Cho (not that she’s actually funny) gets a lot more attention from being “funny” and almost no positive attention for her looks.
In his focus on the evolutionary advantage provided by hilarity, Hitchens only touched on the advantage men gain vis a vis women. But most people – men and women – spend most of their time with members of their own sex. Funny men become funny by interacting with other funny men. The schoolyard dozens is a good example. There, humor is used either to shine above schoolmates or to diffuse potential threats. It’s all an intrasexual competition for status, and there is not a female analogue to this. Females don’t try to one-up each other like men do. They don’t compete on these ground, and this creates observable group differences.
Perhaps the discussion of which group is funnier should focus on an actual group (say, of six guys versus six girls) and gauge their level of hilarity. Take 100 or 1,000 such groups and see what you see. And then intersperse a lone man in the group of girls and vice versa. We can make predictions about all of this. There’s a case to be made that a group of 5 men and one woman might be funnier than a group of six men. But is there any doubt that the six women, zero men group would not be as funny as any of the other group scenarios? What does this tell us?
How did Louie punk you? By calling you a douche bag? What a creative genius. Where did he ever come up with such a line? He annoys me as you can probably tell. Anyone that’s called a comedian’s comedian is by definition annoying.
Louis CK is funny, but I can’t stand him because he has such a pathetic beta male attitude about women.
One episode of his new show involved him getting bullied by a teenage kid while he was on a date. He was such a pussy about it that I even wanted to punch him. What is if about obsequious beta behavior that’s so repellent?
http://t.co/84SlAXis – “Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males” from Intelligence.
Louis CK just says offensive things to people on Twitter. It’s hard to tell from that if he agrees or not. But I agree with TFG he does have a bit of a beta male attitude about women. And it’s not just beta – it’s condescendingly beta. Beta who thinks he’s an enlightened liberal. Actually he has some hippy-dippy NYC liberal views on a few things.
However on the O&A show he was a little less this way and I remember him once saying his favorite Patrice Oneal bit was about feeling sorry for women because they’re just innately pathetic, weak creatures.
Louis CK seems reflexively liberal on some issues and he has daughters. That combo likely makes it difficult for him to agree with Carolla. Even if he agrees, doing so would be a public declaration that his progeny is unable to follow in his footsteps.
I’m kind of interested in standup and I’m struggling to come with even *one* example of a good female comedian. Imo the humor gender gap is as large as the gender gap in athletic ability, if not larger.
Lous CK is actually funny, albeit obscenely, but lately he has ruined that somewhat by being political. Politics in America might be the anti-humor. Although, if the Republicans managed to find someone normal who actually made fun of Obama (and by extension, the ruling class consensus) rather than taking him seriously, it might resonate with a lot of people.
Hitchens wrote his piece in response to the constant feminist drum-beating about how women were just as funny as men. IMO that’s where the problem is. Once you start telling people what they need to find funny, it ceases to be funny. There have been some very funny women in the history of comedy (Lucille Ball, Rita Rudner, Carol Burnette, Elayne Boosler, Julia Louis Dreyfus) but they made us laugh for real, not because we felt politically pressured to do so. Not I rarely find female comedians funny because it seems like I’m being forced to “support” them instead of naturally laugh at them.
So once again, feminism created a backlash and hurt the very people it purported to support. You can’t tell people who they should find attractive, funny, or whatever. Feminism seeks to control our instincts, which it can never do.
Dorothy Parker has a lot of good quotes, as do Mae West. But those are culled from a lifetime’s worth of production, and it’s not so clear funny either would be in a similiar setting as the best male comedians.
That men may be funnier than women is not something I really care about, and anyone who obsesses over it is probably a boring douchebag. I realize this nonchalant attitude towards group differences can be applied to those who harp on Blacks having a lower IQ than Whites – but there’s an important difference. IQ below a certain threshold is incompatible with modern civilization, and the behaviors of a low IQ group negatively impact society at large. This is doubly true when the ruling ideology is to ignore the difference or advocate stealing more money from the productive to “even” the differences out. These consequences don’t apply to who is funnier – so until the government creates a Laughter Gender Equality czar or forces the Comedy Shack to feature 51% females on stage, who cares.
I’m hardly up on all the manosphere terms and memes, but even I could see from that clip that he was a beta. And while I half-smiled a few times during that monologue, nothing he said made me laugh. Of course, the whole bit about a bald, unattractive guy mocking a stereotypically pretty blonde at a bar is essentially beta and not particularly humorous.
It’s not that a female from birth can’t be funny or even that she can’t be the funniest person to ever walk the earth. It is possible for women to be really funny, as both Hitchens and Carolla have pointed out. But there just aren’t the sheer number of women who see comedy or gregarious humor as being necessary for them to get attention.
Given that I don’t see anything at all historically recent about being good at being funny being much more of an advantage to men than women, I think it would be remarkable if part of the difference in frequency between men and women in being good comedians wasn’t genetic. There’s been plenty of time for natural selection to favor funnier men. Of course it also continues to be culturally determined as well as guys grow up.
“if the Republicans managed to find someone normal who actually made fun of Obama (and by extension, the ruling class consensus) rather than taking him seriously, it might resonate with a lot of people.”
Two comedians come to mind: Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Miller.
The Diceman attacked feminism and diversity brilliantly with low-brow humor. The PTB were not amused. See the infamous 1992 ban from MTV and what looks like a subsequent blacklist.
Miller was was too timid about attacking the ruling class consensus. He poked fun at some extreme examples of PC “silliness” and leaned neocon-hawk after 911, but otherwise fully validated the liberal consensus.
Damn, and all this time – when I saw the ratio of funny males to girls was, like 100 : 1, I thought it was just oppression. I’m gonna take this factoid and RUN with it. Look out, blogworld!
Margaret Cho, could never get her. There are good women comedians. If you like comedy check that movie I am Comic, there are some funny women in there. Silverman can be funny but she goes for the obnoxious gross out stuff too often. Louis CK, he looks like a loser. His observations were alright though. Saying “vagina” (perhaps writing it as well), gotta be careful with that. Ramzpaul does it ok, but Louis CK is not rebel enough in his soul. His talking about the scene down Bar Street was good, I was just there last night. Who the fuck are those people. It is such a sad scene. As a loner, I avoid trouble, but everyone is in packs, the guys are cologned up, there are these slutty women some of whom are attractive but they have this tone to their whole being that is (such an old cliche word but) conceited. Louis CK mocks this pretty well, give him some credit there. But with these chicks, their fundamental problem is the positive attention they get so much goes against their self-opinion, which is low. That is the tension in their person. And it is not a driven internalized masculine tension; it is externalized demanding shit-testing unpleasant.
Louis CK is funny. This is subjective, but more people believe that Louis CK is funny than probably any other comedian out there today. Not only do casual comic fans like Louis CK, but comedians also seem to like his work. His level of funniness is robust.
That being said, he’s on the downward slope. His show is overrated – it’s a lot of filler. He’s got 3 more decent years left – maybe another special and probably a movie or two. He will probably have a strong run a la George Carlin at some point.
Another thing I noticed was on Twitter he sent a tweet to Lena Dunham of Girls. While her show was being trashed CK sent her a sincere tweet of encouragement. I find Girls funny enough, but CK’s tweet seemed to be a bit protective. Like he was trying to shield Dunham from harsh criticism. He’s probably softened a bit on the funny women issue since he’s entered the TV world.
Humor is like math, like there is a pattern there that you did not see, but now makes sense of things. It has been written about before, Sailer writes a lot about it.
The response to that observation though, is that humor is more like irony, or quality, than math. It contains irony, expresses quality, and like those things, in its essence it can not be defined. Any definition is a reduction, placing it within a limiting structure. Also, anyone struggling for a definition is (obviously) missing the point. Which is to laugh, which is to enjoy life, somewhat at least for awhile.
Does it matter that men seem to be (to all appearances are) better at humor. It is like Title 9 or whatever. As with sports, men probably probably care more for humor, and appreciate it more. People do what they are good at. I have always wondered, let women and men compete on the same field in high school sports. Have sub-Junior Varsity teams then. That would be a better reading of equal access. Unless we are going to chain up Harrison Bergeron. That is such an obvious response to Title 9 bs that no one is willing to make it.
It is also true that bitching about all this stuff is fundamentally, and that is fun-da-mental, beta. Where is my axe? Kidding, of course, … that was all taken from me. It was scaring the children. True story, they said I looked like Raskalnikov.
PA
“if the Republicans managed to find someone normal who actually made fun of Obama (and by extension, the ruling class consensus) rather than taking him seriously, it might resonate with a lot of people.”
Two comedians come to mind: Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Miller.
PA, you MUST be a liberal – to set up not one, but TWO straw men who haven’t been “hip” since 1989.
You really think the msm is going to allow jokes at obama’s expense? Really? Do you think they should get Jack Benny?
women are funny, asking to be taught and learning the mannerisms of the same people who oppressed them for 1000000s of years and calling it as independence/emancipation…
clay’s recent interview, the divorce and child support bits. (didn’t realize that he was that irritating guy with a irritating drum-playing son on entourage)
If you think “boring douche bag” was a punk from God, I see why you’re an atheist.
Whitney Cummings is attractive — for a comedienne — but not as a regular woman with no special talents. She’s thin, which erroneously gives women 2-3 extra rating points, in today’s fat marketplace.
I think the reason women are less funny than men (on average) is because their brains are wired differently: the same wiring that yields a disparity in the M/F ratio in engineering, computer science, and hard science fields. There is a certain logic flow to comedy, that requires proper neural paths in the brain to create, or even comprehend, great jokes. This can be shown by the large proportion of successful jewish comedy writers and performers, which corresponds to their higher average IQ. One could argue that the jooz control Hollywood, and thus keep the good jobs “in the family”, but not without sounding paranoid.
One could argue that the jooz control Hollywood, and thus keep the good jobs “in the family”, but not without sounding paranoid.
Allow me to sound paranoid then. I think it sounds absolutely batshit insane to think that Jews are over represented in entertainment because of high IQ, or even that Jews as a people are disproportionately funny. I’ve always lived in areas with an over representation of Jews and I’ve always had Jewish friends and co-workers and they strike me as a very serious minded people not prone to humor. In public schools with such a high percentage of Jews to warrant closing school on Jewish holidays, I’ve never known a Jewish class clown, or even a Jew that was ‘the funny one’ of the group.
Jewish comedians are often no different than the repulsive Seth Rogens and Jonah Hills thrust into our line of sight in an industry that runs on beauty (in America). Jewish comedians are sometimes legitimately funny, but then again most funny people with the desire and drive will never become successful. I’m willing to bet that Jews are under-represented in the failed entertainers column despite being over-represented in the aspirants column though. That you repeatedly see Jewish ‘comedians’ like Jon Stewart that aren’t funny (without a team of writers) continuously get jobs despite fizzling over and over again just goes to show you what it takes to actually wash out.
“Failure” for a Jewish entertainer seems to mean a regular stream of work in less than stellar productions, which is an odd definition of ‘failure’.
No, I think it is completely implausible that Jews are over represented in an industry run on the back-end by Jews because they have a high IQ.
That you’re still a boring douchebag?
No, agreed. All but the most myopic can see this immediately.
How did Louie punk you? By calling you a douche bag? What a creative genius. Where did he ever come up with such a line? He annoys me as you can probably tell. Anyone that’s called a comedian’s comedian is by definition annoying.
Dan in DC
Louis CK is funny, but I can’t stand him because he has such a pathetic beta male attitude about women.
One episode of his new show involved him getting bullied by a teenage kid while he was on a date. He was such a pussy about it that I even wanted to punch him. What is if about obsequious beta behavior that’s so repellent?
http://t.co/84SlAXis – “Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males” from Intelligence.
Louis CK just says offensive things to people on Twitter. It’s hard to tell from that if he agrees or not. But I agree with TFG he does have a bit of a beta male attitude about women. And it’s not just beta – it’s condescendingly beta. Beta who thinks he’s an enlightened liberal. Actually he has some hippy-dippy NYC liberal views on a few things.
However on the O&A show he was a little less this way and I remember him once saying his favorite Patrice Oneal bit was about feeling sorry for women because they’re just innately pathetic, weak creatures.
Louis CK seems reflexively liberal on some issues and he has daughters. That combo likely makes it difficult for him to agree with Carolla. Even if he agrees, doing so would be a public declaration that his progeny is unable to follow in his footsteps.
What is truly meant by this statement is “the amount of humor held by the average man is greater than the amount of humor held by the average women”.
This simply cannot be true. You touch on the real reason in the next statement: There is more variance among males.
“pathetic beta male attitude about women.”
I don’t pick up on that. From my perspective, he’s probably pretty spoiled and expects a woman to cater to him.
A sense of humor is the human way to deal with a hard sexual marketplace or just the random shittyness of life.
I think that someone said “All the female comedians that you see are either fat, lesbian or jewish”.
I’m kind of interested in standup and I’m struggling to come with even *one* example of a good female comedian. Imo the humor gender gap is as large as the gender gap in athletic ability, if not larger.
Lous CK is actually funny, albeit obscenely, but lately he has ruined that somewhat by being political. Politics in America might be the anti-humor. Although, if the Republicans managed to find someone normal who actually made fun of Obama (and by extension, the ruling class consensus) rather than taking him seriously, it might resonate with a lot of people.
Hitchens wrote his piece in response to the constant feminist drum-beating about how women were just as funny as men. IMO that’s where the problem is. Once you start telling people what they need to find funny, it ceases to be funny. There have been some very funny women in the history of comedy (Lucille Ball, Rita Rudner, Carol Burnette, Elayne Boosler, Julia Louis Dreyfus) but they made us laugh for real, not because we felt politically pressured to do so. Not I rarely find female comedians funny because it seems like I’m being forced to “support” them instead of naturally laugh at them.
So once again, feminism created a backlash and hurt the very people it purported to support. You can’t tell people who they should find attractive, funny, or whatever. Feminism seeks to control our instincts, which it can never do.
Dorothy Parker has a lot of good quotes, as do Mae West. But those are culled from a lifetime’s worth of production, and it’s not so clear funny either would be in a similiar setting as the best male comedians.
That men may be funnier than women is not something I really care about, and anyone who obsesses over it is probably a boring douchebag. I realize this nonchalant attitude towards group differences can be applied to those who harp on Blacks having a lower IQ than Whites – but there’s an important difference. IQ below a certain threshold is incompatible with modern civilization, and the behaviors of a low IQ group negatively impact society at large. This is doubly true when the ruling ideology is to ignore the difference or advocate stealing more money from the productive to “even” the differences out. These consequences don’t apply to who is funnier – so until the government creates a Laughter Gender Equality czar or forces the Comedy Shack to feature 51% females on stage, who cares.
I’m hardly up on all the manosphere terms and memes, but even I could see from that clip that he was a beta. And while I half-smiled a few times during that monologue, nothing he said made me laugh. Of course, the whole bit about a bald, unattractive guy mocking a stereotypically pretty blonde at a bar is essentially beta and not particularly humorous.
Given that I don’t see anything at all historically recent about being good at being funny being much more of an advantage to men than women, I think it would be remarkable if part of the difference in frequency between men and women in being good comedians wasn’t genetic. There’s been plenty of time for natural selection to favor funnier men. Of course it also continues to be culturally determined as well as guys grow up.
“if the Republicans managed to find someone normal who actually made fun of Obama (and by extension, the ruling class consensus) rather than taking him seriously, it might resonate with a lot of people.”
Two comedians come to mind: Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Miller.
The Diceman attacked feminism and diversity brilliantly with low-brow humor. The PTB were not amused. See the infamous 1992 ban from MTV and what looks like a subsequent blacklist.
Miller was was too timid about attacking the ruling class consensus. He poked fun at some extreme examples of PC “silliness” and leaned neocon-hawk after 911, but otherwise fully validated the liberal consensus.
This bit of big woop is what got ADC banned from MTV in 1989.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80978394/
Damn, and all this time – when I saw the ratio of funny males to girls was, like 100 : 1, I thought it was just oppression. I’m gonna take this factoid and RUN with it. Look out, blogworld!
Guys may be better at stand up comedy, but you can’t say women don’t have a sense of humor. After all, we sleep with guys.
Right – humor production but perhaps not humor appreciation.
Margaret Cho, could never get her. There are good women comedians. If you like comedy check that movie I am Comic, there are some funny women in there. Silverman can be funny but she goes for the obnoxious gross out stuff too often. Louis CK, he looks like a loser. His observations were alright though. Saying “vagina” (perhaps writing it as well), gotta be careful with that. Ramzpaul does it ok, but Louis CK is not rebel enough in his soul. His talking about the scene down Bar Street was good, I was just there last night. Who the fuck are those people. It is such a sad scene. As a loner, I avoid trouble, but everyone is in packs, the guys are cologned up, there are these slutty women some of whom are attractive but they have this tone to their whole being that is (such an old cliche word but) conceited. Louis CK mocks this pretty well, give him some credit there. But with these chicks, their fundamental problem is the positive attention they get so much goes against their self-opinion, which is low. That is the tension in their person. And it is not a driven internalized masculine tension; it is externalized demanding shit-testing unpleasant.
Louis CK is funny. This is subjective, but more people believe that Louis CK is funny than probably any other comedian out there today. Not only do casual comic fans like Louis CK, but comedians also seem to like his work. His level of funniness is robust.
That being said, he’s on the downward slope. His show is overrated – it’s a lot of filler. He’s got 3 more decent years left – maybe another special and probably a movie or two. He will probably have a strong run a la George Carlin at some point.
Another thing I noticed was on Twitter he sent a tweet to Lena Dunham of Girls. While her show was being trashed CK sent her a sincere tweet of encouragement. I find Girls funny enough, but CK’s tweet seemed to be a bit protective. Like he was trying to shield Dunham from harsh criticism. He’s probably softened a bit on the funny women issue since he’s entered the TV world.
Humor is like math, like there is a pattern there that you did not see, but now makes sense of things. It has been written about before, Sailer writes a lot about it.
The response to that observation though, is that humor is more like irony, or quality, than math. It contains irony, expresses quality, and like those things, in its essence it can not be defined. Any definition is a reduction, placing it within a limiting structure. Also, anyone struggling for a definition is (obviously) missing the point. Which is to laugh, which is to enjoy life, somewhat at least for awhile.
Does it matter that men seem to be (to all appearances are) better at humor. It is like Title 9 or whatever. As with sports, men probably probably care more for humor, and appreciate it more. People do what they are good at. I have always wondered, let women and men compete on the same field in high school sports. Have sub-Junior Varsity teams then. That would be a better reading of equal access. Unless we are going to chain up Harrison Bergeron. That is such an obvious response to Title 9 bs that no one is willing to make it.
It is also true that bitching about all this stuff is fundamentally, and that is fun-da-mental, beta. Where is my axe? Kidding, of course, … that was all taken from me. It was scaring the children. True story, they said I looked like Raskalnikov.
All jokes aside, this is a serious subject.
PA, you MUST be a liberal – to set up not one, but TWO straw men who haven’t been “hip” since 1989.
You really think the msm is going to allow jokes at obama’s expense? Really? Do you think they should get Jack Benny?
women are funny, asking to be taught and learning the mannerisms of the same people who oppressed them for 1000000s of years and calling it as independence/emancipation…
clay’s recent interview, the divorce and child support bits. (didn’t realize that he was that irritating guy with a irritating drum-playing son on entourage)
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/17/entertainment/la-ca-conversation-20110717
He’s got 3 more decent years left
Comedians oftentimes don’t expire like other artists though.
If you think “boring douche bag” was a punk from God, I see why you’re an atheist.
Whitney Cummings is attractive — for a comedienne — but not as a regular woman with no special talents. She’s thin, which erroneously gives women 2-3 extra rating points, in today’s fat marketplace.
I think the reason women are less funny than men (on average) is because their brains are wired differently: the same wiring that yields a disparity in the M/F ratio in engineering, computer science, and hard science fields. There is a certain logic flow to comedy, that requires proper neural paths in the brain to create, or even comprehend, great jokes. This can be shown by the large proportion of successful jewish comedy writers and performers, which corresponds to their higher average IQ. One could argue that the jooz control Hollywood, and thus keep the good jobs “in the family”, but not without sounding paranoid.
Allow me to sound paranoid then. I think it sounds absolutely batshit insane to think that Jews are over represented in entertainment because of high IQ, or even that Jews as a people are disproportionately funny. I’ve always lived in areas with an over representation of Jews and I’ve always had Jewish friends and co-workers and they strike me as a very serious minded people not prone to humor. In public schools with such a high percentage of Jews to warrant closing school on Jewish holidays, I’ve never known a Jewish class clown, or even a Jew that was ‘the funny one’ of the group.
Jewish comedians are often no different than the repulsive Seth Rogens and Jonah Hills thrust into our line of sight in an industry that runs on beauty (in America). Jewish comedians are sometimes legitimately funny, but then again most funny people with the desire and drive will never become successful. I’m willing to bet that Jews are under-represented in the failed entertainers column despite being over-represented in the aspirants column though. That you repeatedly see Jewish ‘comedians’ like Jon Stewart that aren’t funny (without a team of writers) continuously get jobs despite fizzling over and over again just goes to show you what it takes to actually wash out.
“Failure” for a Jewish entertainer seems to mean a regular stream of work in less than stellar productions, which is an odd definition of ‘failure’.
No, I think it is completely implausible that Jews are over represented in an industry run on the back-end by Jews because they have a high IQ.
Louie’s great in his beta thinker way. The heavy influence of catholic guilt says all that needs to be said about his “alpha” status. Regardless, I wouldn’t take that tweet seriously. I think he’s going through a phase. http://m.funnyordie.com/slideshows/17055cea1c/louis-c-k-goes-on-hilarious-twitter-insult-rant
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“When the hot bar girl is asked what she does she responds “people want to fuck me”.”
How many girls actually walk around with this attitude though?