Funny, Wot?
I wasn't going to buy the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair because I had an argument over "The Holidays" which reminded me of Vanity Fair's unforgivegetable (TM) glamour photo shoot of Bush the Junior et al in the Oval Office not long after 9/11, which I'd forgotten about - BUT - Christopher Hitchens has a piece in it entitled: "Why Women Aren't Funny". It's advertised provocatively on the cover. You can't miss it. Well, maybe YOU can. I couldn't. That's because I'm a woman. And we all know how women are about letting anything go - unremarked. Or ever.
Sadly, the article didn't raise my dander. I'd expected something funnier from a Pundit whose own bombast launched him full sail from a leafy perch on the Civil Libertarian Left all the way over and down to a rotting stump on the Authoritarian Patriotic Right. Alas, the funniest line is delivered by Fran Leibowitz: "Men obviously like gross stuff. Why? Because it's childish."
Well. *I* thought it was funny. But Frank Leibowitz could say, "Dinner's ready", in that deadpan way of hers and I'd probably be laughing so hard my pancreas would shoot out my nose. Then she'd make a retort so funny the rest of my guts would splatter all over the table.
Luckily, Fran Leibowitz eats out. On the tab of the rich. And then makes a living by making fun of people: "Being offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house".
The rest of the piece just says everything you already knew about Conservative Pundits of a certain determined Britishness - you know, that they are pretty much all latently homosexual and for some bizarre reason think that if they supply us with a generous smattering of Rudyard Kipling quotes, we'll think it's Rudy being the ridiculous prig claiming that women can't be funny because they give birth and not simply that women shouldn't be accorded human rights because they aren't human. I mean, it's not like Rudyard Kipling had any idea that in putting Motherhood versus Male Birthright to rhyme:
"So it comes that Man, the coward,
when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council,
dare not leave a place for her."
Christopher Hitchens would one day come along and slap parts of his poem into an essay called, "Why Women Aren't Funny."
Or did he?
But Kipling stanzas aside, there are other glaring flaws in the piece that - as a woman - I can't let go - unremarked. Or perhaps - ever. For instance, his claim that female comedians are hefty, dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three (and he cleverly mentions in the previous paragraph, Fran Leibowitz, Nora Ephron and Ellen DeGeneres) would cause us all to nod along, "So true" - instead of thinking, "Yabbut, Dennis Miller isn't hefty, dykey or Jewish and he's not funny, either".
And there's the rub. Who, among men, does Christopher Hitchens think is funny? Because if it's Rudyard Kipling, then why am I writing this entry? On the other hand, if it's that hysterically funny stand-up guy from Hamilton, I think he's probably gay, which means that if he was a woman, he'd be dykey. And although he did say Sandra Bernhard was the funny one in the "King of Comedy" and not Jerry Lewis - Jerry Lewis wasn't really cast in the funny role in that movie. And he seemed to say that it was the only Jerry Lewis movie he'd seen. So, I have to wonder - what if he saw "The Nutty Professor"? Meanwhile, the funniest comedien I ever caught on late night stand-up was some chick who did a routine on taking the bus that had me on the floor laughing my ass off. And I'm pretty sure she was straight. In any case, she was good-lookin'. Not hefty. And Canadian. From up north somewhere. So probably not Jewish.
Of course, whether or not she was a mother off-stage, I don't know. She would seem to have disappeared from the circuit. Maybe she got pregnant after the show and lost her sense of humour. Or her baby. Because as Hitchens says in the piece, "...one pathetically small coffin , and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer."
Why, "What a coincidence", I thought, after reading that paragraph - "Christopher Hitchens is twice a father, too." After thinking, of course, "So, dude - What was the joke? Cmon - it's a fictional baby, afterall. And Oscar Wilde is dead. He died because the wallpaper wasn't going anywhere."
Not to mention - way to diss Oscar Wilde. Queer AND dead-baby-jokester. Lucky for him - he's dead, too. Deader'n that fictional baby he made fun of on account of he was queer. Bastard.
Not that I don't agree with Christopher Hitchens, as opposed to Oscar Wilde, I guess, that the death of a child is a hard-sell - joke-wise. And that it'd be quite a humour handicap for a lady comedian to have to take the stage and make jokes about having kids - after just burying them all. But, like, not to be cold-hearted or anything - WHAT ARE THE ODDS?! Cripes, right up there with a guy comedian having to take the stage and make jokes about his parents always bickering during dinner after his dad just plunged his steak knife through his mom's eye over "The Holidays".
No. Wait a minute. That could actually be kind of funny in the right hands. I mean, Ellen DeGeneres could probably deliver one heck of a funny routine wrapped around that scenario. Picture her up on stage, with that stuttering, ingenuous delivery, telling the audience about the massacre that took place at her parents' home over "The Holidays". Imagine how hilarious that would be.
Aw crap, she's a lesian, isn't she.
Say... how does being hefty, dykey or Jewish discount being a woman, anyway? Or is he just saying pretty women can't be funny? Or more precisely, that pretty women he is attracted to can't be funny. Until they're old, I guess, because as his beloved assures him: "Women get funnier as they get older."
Heheh - yeah, sure they do.
Because they're widows.
