Out on the town, Daniel once again throws down the contrarian gauntlet (sometimes he does this in his best Zizek voice): 'perhaps Hitchens is right. Perhaps women aren't funny, but maybe this is for similar reasons that they can't be friends under capitalism.'

Hitchens' 'provocative' piece has been dealt with already over at Lenin's Tomb, but in all the criticisms of Hitchens' blatant idiocy, I can't find anyone who points to the real claims of his argument. One limited (if correct) response to Hitchens' claim would be to point to real, empirical women who are genuinely funny (this is what Dennis Perrin, for example, does extremely well). But the basis for Hitchens' argument is far stranger. He essentially claims that:

1. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing women. (Women, conversely, don't need to impress men because they are somehow always already 'appealing').

And most confusedly, that

2. Men suffer nature most severely: 'Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch'.

But also that

3. Women suffer nature most severely: 'Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous'.

So childbirth, or at least its hypothetical possibility, is the major reason for women's supposed humourlessness, the 'agony and death' that women flirt with in the quest for motherhood (as put most coldly in the article, 'one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin'). Apart from the fact that it seems rather unlikely that the majority of women (childless or otherwise) spend their entire existence (or even a large part of it) ruminating about their wombs, Hitchens gives no reason, or argument (or joke even), to try to explain the necessary connection between the capacity to reproduce - which is certainly not the defining characteristic of pre-pubescent, post-menopausal, infertile, women of which there are many - and one's capacity to laugh or to, you know, amuse.



The closest we get is the claim that: 'women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing' as men. Again the temptation would here be to give empirical counterexamples - as if it wasn't understood that it is completely absurd that one must bleed like a harpooned whale for several days every month, or that women's arses stick out so in-itself-ishly and that breasts jiggle up and down when you run. These things are just hilarious goes without saying. As does the fact that nuns have much higher rates of breast cancer because they don't have children (although much lower rates of cervical cancer because they don't have sex) - just another cute example of the non-stop riot-o-rama that is female biology.

Even the Bible, for fuck's sake, makes a kind of joke about the relative shittiness of femme-biology. When Adam and Eve go all Enlightenment and eat the knowledge-apple (pre-Newtonian!), God says 'Unto the woman...I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children' (Genesis 3:16). Adam, on the other hand, merely has to eat some thistles. Go God!



The Greeks are, as usual, a bit more subtle. Tiresias (in post-female incarnation) betrays Hera by telling Zeus that women enjoy some nine-tenths of the pleasure, for which she rather unkindly blinds him. Whether this is 'true' or not (and see antigram for some discussion of this, and the idiocy of wanting to found a politics on female orgasm; also Glueboot a while back put it as: 'I like being a woman, and not only because we have better orgasms. Men are crap'), it tells us nothing about comedy, or of any link between the biological and the humorous.

Comedy, as Bergson will never ever tell us ('We regard it, above all, as a living thing'), has nothing to do with bodies, even in its physical modalities (slapstick, penis-puppetry, whatever). Laughter does not have a primarily social function, as Bergson claims, but rather a intra-linguistic one. Comedy is language laughing at itself through the medium of words. If women are 'less funny' than men, it's because language is stupid.