I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright , it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny.
They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit.
Certainly, the rewards of wit are not nearly as ample for women as for men, and sometimes funny women are actually penalized. Not everything has changed since , when educator Kate Sanborn tried to refute the conventional male wisdom in her book The Wit of Women. Sanborn pointed out that women have good reason to keep their one-liners to themselves. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing.
Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. The humor of women has been a sensitive topic ever since the first one cracked a joke. I rest my case. By the way, Jewish humor seems to me to have been improving since the time of the mythical but obviously fall-about and general thigh-slapper Sarah, whose son was to be offered for sacrifice by her somewhat unsmiling husband.
There would have been an angry and resentful silence for a few millennia, followed by a chorus of triumphant accusations. Mort Sahl? Lenny Bruce?
Woody Allen? Probably not. Letters to the Editor: Is Kamala Harris simply not a good vice president? Second Opinion: Can universities defy rising nationalism around the world? All Sections.
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By Meghan Daum. Hitchens begins with the notion that women like a man with a sense of humor. To be funny is, first and foremost, to be a man wanting to have sex with a woman. It never strikes Hitchens that a man might sometimes be funny for reasons unrelated to sex, or that women might want to be funny for someone other than a man.
Humor is power. If you can shout longer and louder than your opponent, you can drown her out — particularly if even your critics find themselves drawn to your routines like moths to a marquee. As the piece goes on, his swagger swells and his bravado reaches new, absurd heights.
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