Why men are funnier than women
This article began as a guffaw, when I was watching yesterday the sketches of the incomparable American comedian Bob Newhart who, at 94, has recently been made the subject of a film. It proceeds as a question: why are men better comedians than women?
In the dreary, unpopulated desert of funny women, only Carol Burnett and Joan Rivers stand out. Against them, and I direct readers to the golden age of comedy (modern comedians are no longer permitted to be funny) stand Don Rickles, Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, John Cleese, Frankie Howerd and Foster Brooks. I could go on for pages. But why should this be so?
Women can be superlative actors, but comedians are not actors; they are a sort of reductio ad absurdum of them. They bear the same relation to acting as an MP to truth.
I think the answer is both biological and social. The maternal instinct in women has made us instinctive diplomats, while the primeval competitive urge in men produced a race of blowhards. Added to this is society’s oppression of my sex.
Throughout history, with females denied both the vote and power, discreet and inoffensive verbal skills were their only recourse – employed to survive, and, occasionally, to secure a kind of back-room influence.
Discretion does not make for comedy, however, and it is instructive to remember that men have frequently felt threatened by funny women. Cutting badinage, more often than not, earned us reputations as unladylike scolds. Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew begins by using her wit, but then reverts to meek subservience, to hosannas from Tudor audiences. Both Napoleon and Churchill loathed droll women like Madame de Stael and Margot Asquith, as a longshoreman loathes a typhoon.
It is also true that females are the sprinters of conversation and men the long-distance runners. Women remain indifferent orators, and oratory is the essence of stand-up comedy. A female politician could not hold an audience in stitches, unlike, for example, a Boris Johnson. I have often thought that males, particularly the ugly ones, devised comedy as a sexual weapon, believing that if men fall in love through their eyes, women succumb through their ears.
When one sees pictures of female “celebrities” who have risen to fame via the man on their arm, one marvels at how they have captured them with such a shortage of intelligence, until you remember that they are pretty. The baits men swallow are not nourishing ones, but simply bright and gaudy ones. Lost in a sexual maze, they give not the slightest thought to the fact that the idiosyncrasies of the female brain are of vastly more importance than all the physical attributes combined.
The average bloke, if he has a noticeably funny partner, seems almost apologetic about it. This may explain why the genuinely witty Dorothy Parker failed to acquire domestic felicity; likewise Carol Burnett and Joan Rivers. It is a paradox that women can find a sense of humour no joke when it comes to happiness.
