Men Are Funnier Than Women. Discuss

Why are men funnier than women? Christopher Hitchens wants to know.

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.

He means, no doubt, im-pressing that into the opposite sex. And the most effective way of dissolving the natural reticence and modesty of women into passionate acceptance is by making them laugh, with

that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth

which is so rewarding to the eyes and ears of a man cherchant la femme.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

The fact is that women are more serious than men. A study of TV commercials has found that commercials aimed at women are much more serious than commercials aimed at men. And we know why women are more serious. Rudyard Kipling put it to rhyme in “The Female of the Species”:

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,

And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

Stirring stuff, eh? It all leads to the central fact of the War between the Sexes:

Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.

The trouble is that some gullible people actually believe all this pretence, women like Simone de Beauvoir who wrote in The Second Sex that the “female is the victim of the species.” She meant that females had to be birthing and suckling, an imperative that really cuts into the opportunity to create orginal works of intellect like The Second Sex.

But Beauvoir should have understood, as the student of Hegel she was, that there is always a question in the relationship between Master and Slave as to who really is the Master and who is the Slave.

Still, there is a nagging question about all this. Men may be funnier than women, but it is a fact that women laugh more than men. Is this because they are provoked to laugh by the funny men in their lives, or because, deadlier than the male, they are laughing at the men in their lives?