A couple of years ago, journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece for
Vanity Fair titled "Why Women Aren't Funny". As he no doubt intended, it stirred up a bunch of shit and prompted
lots of rebuttals (just a sample from the first page of Google results), including
one in VF itself. To me it seems like the kind of thing that's hardly worth the time and energy rebutting, since it's 1) clearly meant to provoke ire rather than thought, and B) stupid. I haven't read a whole lot of Hitchens's stuff, but what I have read has led me to think of him as the male Ann Coulter (insert, if you must, your own joke about how Ann Coulter is the male Ann Coulter): a writer who needs massive amounts of attention and has decided that being a humongous asshole is the way to get it
Anyway, he's certainly not the first guy to suggest that women aren't funny, a notion that's always mystified me. Besides the fact that there are lots of famous funny women, I've known plenty of non-famous ones personally. In fact, I dare say the funniest person I've ever known was a chick. But of course,
I'm a chick. Hitchens is not, and it can't be coincidental that the only people I've ever heard claiming chicks aren't funny have been dudes. The real issue is not that women aren't funny, but that a lot of men--the majority of men, perhaps--
think that women aren't funny. Of course, humor is totally subjective anyway, so how many people have to think you're not funny before you can be deemed objectively unfunny? I don't know. How many licks does it take to get to the center of the patriarchal paradigm? How many misogynists can dance on the head of Christopher Hitchens's tiny, flaccid penis? And while we're at it, why does the word "flaccid" only ever seem to be used in reference to penises? These are all unanswerable questions.
Hitchens does admit that "it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals." I believe this is true. I think
most people believe it's true, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, and it's the playing out of that belief that causes the general perception of women as unfunny. (I'm about to speak in rash generalizations here, but since that's the general tenor of discourse on gender relations, let's all just play along.) Men tend to view being funny like they view most things, as a competition. Moreover, it's a competition that every man believes he can win. Something like, say, physical attractiveness is largely a matter of genetics, so there's not a whole lot a man can do to change his place in the hotness hierarchy, but being the funniest person in the room is something every guy can aspire to. (Some of them, in my experience, aspire to an annoying fucking degree.) It's bad enough that they already have to compete against every other dude out there; adding women to the mix doubles the odds against any one dude being the funniest person he knows. The solution is denial and dismissal: women are not funny, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Say it loud enough and long enough, and it becomes the truth. Or, I should say, "the truth".
For their part, women are culturally inculcated with the belief that their value is determined by how much attention men pay to them. They learn that they should never enter into direct competition with a man or men, as this will wound the fragile masculine ego--there is literally nothing worse for most men than to lose to a woman in
any endeavor--and cause male attention to be withdrawn. It never fails to amaze me how even the funniest women tend to eschew humor when in the company of men. This, of course, only strengthens the proposition that "women aren't funny".
I'm thinking about all this in light of a movie I watched this weekend:
The House Bunny. I rented it, even though the critical reaction to it was mostly negative, for one reason:
Anna Faris. Actually, let's make that one and a half reasons: Faris and
Emma Stone. Stone counts as half a reason because the only other thing I'd seen her in was
Superbad, in which she had a minor role but definitely caught my eye as someone to watch. Based on her adorably dorky performance in
THB, I now think she's a pretty good reason to watch a movie in her own right.
Anna Faris came to prominence (if you can call it that) in those Wayans Brothers
Scary Movie movies, of which I have seen nary a one, but she first garnered critical notice in
Lost in Translation, one of my favorite films of the last decade. Her role as a ditzy actress (purportedly based on Cameron Diaz) was small, but her performance was dazzling. Wanting to see more of her, I actually watched--and I know I risk being openly mocked for admitting this--the execrable Rob Schneider vehicle
The Hot Chick not once but twice when it was on FX one weekend. Then, based soley on the fact that Faris was the lead in it, I rented the little-known and even-less-seen stoner comedy
Smiley Face. As stoner comedies go,
Smiley Face is no
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but it was at least as funny as
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and as far as I know it's the only flick in the genre with a female main character (and heaven knows ladies like the wacky weed just as much as gents).
Which brings us to
The House Bunny. As I alluded to above, my expectations for it were pretty low going in, so I was quite surprised to find myself laughing loudly and often throughout. Mind you, I'm not here to claim that it's on a par with
Dr. Strangelove or
Some Like It Hot or [insert other acknowledged comedy classic], but it's one of the funnier films I've seen in the past couple of years, and I watch a lot of comedies, because I like to laugh, and there's not always a lot to laugh about in quotidian life.
This woman is hilarious.
Given my reaction, I thought it would be interesting to do a little comparison between
THB and a few of the more high-profile and better-reviewed comedies of the past few years. I went to
Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates the reviews of major critics and assigns movies a "freshness" rating that represents the percentage of reviewers with a favorable opinion of them. While I was at it, I also looked at each movie's total box office gross. The movies I looked at were the aforementioned Superbad, Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I picked these because I had seen them, and because I thought The House Bunny was funnier than all of them.
The critics, of course, disagree. I already mentioned that THB was largely panned; it has only a 40% freshness rating. And audiences pretty much stayed away: its total gross was $48 million. On the other hand, Tropic Thunder gets 83% and earned $110 million; Sarah Marshall scores 85% and took in $63 million; Superbad comes in at 87% with $121 million; and Knocked Up is the comedy king with a whopping 91% favorable rating and receipts of $148 million. That is one hundred freakin' million dollars more than THB, kids.
So what's up with this? Why did I enjoy the movie everyone hated (or at least was indifferent to) more than the ones everyone loved? Some of it, I'm sure, has to do with the heightened expectations I had for the well-reviewed movies, and the lowered ones for THB. Some of it could be due simply to the fact that humor is, as I said above, subjective. Maybe my sense of humor is just different. But I can't help thinking that the whole "women aren't funny" thing plays a role here. After all, THB focuses on female characters, with men relegated to small roles as potential love interests. The other movies are, as is the norm, just the opposite. (Tropic Thunder is pretty much just dudes, though that's understandable given its milieu.) Did THB flop, critically and commercially, solely on its merits (or lack thereof), or did the fact that it's about women--who you will remember are not funny--color viewers' perceptions, causing some to see the film itself as unfunny and many others not to see it all? I think you can probably guess where I come down on that question. Oh, it's also worth noting that the majority of film critics are dudes, and that one major defender of the film was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek (a chick, if that wasn't clear).
I don't want to belabor my point (and I know my posts are already too long), but just as a side note: when you look at the channel guide on Comcast, the movies that are listed have star ratings, OK? Well, did you know that Drop Dead Gorgeous gets only one star? That ticks me off every time I see it. For those who haven't seen it, DDG is a mockumentary about a Minnesota beauty pageant. Since Christopher Guest is the acknowledged king of mockumentaries, I tend to compare other entries in the genre to his films. DDG is not as funny as Waiting for Guffman, Guest's masterpiece, but it's as funny as Best in Show and funnier than A Mighty Wind. All of those get three stars from Comcast. Their casts are gender-mixed, but skew toward the male (and were written by a male--jeez, I haven't even gotten into the gender of writers. Suffice it to say that the two writers of The House Bunny had probably synched up their cycles by the end of the project), while DDG's cast is populated almost exclusively by women (and it was written by a woman). COINCIDENCE?! I think not. Plus, come on, there is no way a movie that has Denise Richards dancing with a life-size Jesus doll gets only one star.
I don't know, man. Maybe I'm making misoygnist mountains out of innocent molehills here. All I do know is that Knocked Up sucked ass, and that I'm looking forward to watching The House Bunny again.
