Women vs. Men in Comedy

Kylie Gillette

Professor Melissa Santos

ENGL 199-003: Women In Pop Culture

27 April, 2015

Women vs. Men in Comedy

While watching the documentary, Why We Laugh: Funny Women, I started to think about how men are often intimidated by funny women. We women have all had to deal with men who claim that there are no funny women, and I find this to be very interesting. As the documentary pointed out, you don’t hear women saying the same about men. If a man fails at comedy, that man failed at comedy. However, if a woman fails at comedy, women fail at comedy. (When you think about it, this happens with nearly everything: Math, science, sports, medicine… you name it!)

Why, exactly, is it that men have such an intense hatred for female comedians? I believe it’s because having a good sense of humor is an excellent indicator of intelligence. Countless scientific and psychological studies have proven that having a good sense of humor is directly correlated with mental fitness and intellectual ability. Men are intimidated by smart women. It’s the same reason women have been blockaded from the top of the workplace totem pole. I believe that men are afraid of losing their positions of power in the workplace to smarter, and more competent females. Males are terrified of being replaced by women, because society states that women are the weaker sex. So, if a woman is funny, she is immediately more threatening to a man than an unfunny woman simply because, a lot of the time, humor is equivalent to intelligence.

Another thing that I thought about while watching this documentary, was just how boring male comics really are. Almost every male comic out there has the same routine: Sexist joke; racist joke; dick joke; rape joke; joke that justifies raping a woman; sexist joke; Cue credits! Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part, men are incredibly predictably in their stand up routines. I find that, more often than not, male comics are overly crude/vulgar and it really takes away from their comedic routine. (If I have to hear another crude joke where the male comedian is screwing some nameless woman, I’m going to take a sledgehammer to my TV.) It’s predictable and disgusting, plain and simple, and you never hear these types of jokes from woman. This is exactly why I prefer funny women over “funny” men because funny women often have a more intellectual property to their routine.

I definitely encourage women to support other women comedians! In a male dominated field, these women face a lot of hate for doing what they do, and I think it’s important that they are supported by fellow women. In a world that claims women can’t be funny, it is more important now than ever that we bring these women to fame, and make them the face of comedy.