Can somebody remind me to stop being so funny? It’s beginning to seem like “Women aren’t that funny” is the new “Women are second-class citizens”, and I do hate being out of style.

Christopher Hitchens was the first to tip us off to this phenomenon in his stirring article for Vanity Fair, Why Women Aren’t Funny. He reminds us that men have to be funny in order to win over chicks, because men are inherently unattractive, and that women don’t have to be funny, because they’re pretty. You have to infer for yourself that ugly women have to be funny, or else nobody would love them. Then he backs it up with cold, hard science, by referencing a study by the Stanford University of Medicine:

“The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

“[...]Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said the report’s author, Dr. Allan Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.” The report also found that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.”

Hitchens breaks it down for you: “Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?” To me this means: women are smarter than men, thanks to biology, and they don’t expect very much… say, from dumb. dumb men. Which conclusion I find just as dangerous as arguing that men are funnier. But I’m notoriously open-minded.

Also open-minded, far as I can tell, is my favourite blogger, Penelope Trunk, who had this to say about Mr. Hitchens’ article:

“But my gut tells me it’s right. My gut tells me that most funny women are gay. First of all, Brassler’s research found that men do not think women who are funny are more attractive. Also, Christopher Hitchins has a great piece in Vanity Fair, Why Women Aren’t Funny, where he points out that Jewish women are funny, but only because they have male qualities of humor -angst and self-deprecation.”

Now I am not one to let a cultural or racial generalization pass me by. It’s true that kikes and dykes are often very funny people. If they weren’t so appealingly quick-witted, we would probably never let them have such high-powered media jobs or teach our children gymnastics.

But I am also funny. And I have a vagina. For example, in order to imply that all lesbians are gym teachers (see above), I actually had to Google “Lesbian stereotypes” because I couldn’t think of any. Pretty funny, right? Like, dumb, but also funny. As I am neither gay, nor Jewish, based on this new science, I can only logically conclude that I am ugly. By the way, here’s a picture of me at sixteen that was recently uploaded to Facebook by an old friend:

But seriously now… As you can see, I went through a wicked “awkward phase” in my youth. I’m the first to admit that my personality got the spa treatment my personal image might have benefited more from. But laughter and comedy has been the primary joy in my life since - as far as my records indicate - age two, when I used to provoke my mother to exasperation by eating plant dirt, and then scream with delight when she’d finally lose her temper. I still think it’s funny when she gets flustered like that, and like to provoke her now, having lost the taste for actual dirt, by making inappropriate jokes that embarrass her, such as the “Stop coming on to me, I don’t think of you that way, Mom” joke… among others.

I was doomed from the start, I guess. Gay-ish and Jew-ish, I have forfeited my femininity for the greater joy of comedy, depending on what your definition of feminity is. Would I be more desirable with, say, Paris Hilton’s face and her uproarious-as-a-hairbrush personality?

I mean, seriously. Who are these unfunny, personality-less women? And what are they accomplishing from being that way?

I Googled “Women are funny” to find a nice counter-link for this post, and got about a trillion results debating whether or not women are actually funny. I mean, for real. Forget it. It’s not even worth debating.