Remembering Christopher Hitchens

He said women weren't funny. Was he making a feminist point?

Christopher Hitchens, who died December 15, 2011 at 62

Today marks 12 years since the death of Christopher Hitchens, O.G. of DGAF* commentary, dazzling orator, and Johnnie Walker Black Label’s influencer-in-chief. Hitchens called himself a contrarian, and I suppose he was, but that term is now used so reflexively and applied so indiscriminately that I think it’s no longer deserving of him. He was better than that.

He was also better than “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” his 2007 Vanity Fair essay about the ostensible talent gap between male and female comedians. It was, shall we say, a lesser effort. Nonetheless, I always thought it held the kernel of an important and unspoken truth, so I wrote a column about it in the days after Hitchens’ death in 2011.

You can read it in the L.A. Times archive, but since you’ll probably hit a paywall I thought I’d give it to you here.

In the years I wrote this column, I think we’ve achieved some parity in the comedy world. Most men aren’t funny either.

*That’s Original Gangster of Don’t Give A Fuck, for all you rubes.

Christopher Hitchens Gets The Last Laugh

Los Angeles Times Opinion, December 22, 2011

As fans of the late Christopher Hitchens cycle through the five stages of grief, it’s interesting to see which of his opinions can still inspire the kind of anger that is unlikely to ever fade into acceptance. There are, of course, the obvious candidates: his characterization of Bill Clinton as “a rapist” or his vilification of Mother Teresa as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.” There is also his oh-so-chivalrous shout-out to the Dixie Chicks, whom he called “fat slugs” (or “slags” or “sluts” depending on your source) despite later admitting “having not the least idea of what any of them looked like.”

But perhaps no Hitchens screed has taken more heat over the years than his 2007 Vanity Fair essay “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Working with the premise that humor exists primarily as a male mating call, he posited that women, being objects of desire by default, essentially have no use for it. “The chief task in life that a man has to perform,” Hitchens wrote, “is that of impressing the opposite sex.... An average man has just one, outside chance: He had better be able to make the lady laugh.”

Hitchens took great pains to emphasize that there were plenty of exceptions to his rule. He also gave the female of the species credit for, generally speaking, having a sense of humor, which he rightly saw as distinct from actually being funny. “If they did not operate on the humor wavelength,” he wrote, “there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously.)”

But Hitchens’ central thesis, that humor is rooted most firmly in the soil of self-deprecation, cruelty and scatology (male modes, one and all) was put forth as an unassailable proposition. “There are some impressive [funny] ladies out there,” he allowed. “Most of them ... are hefty or dykey or Jewish” (way to stay classy, Hitch). When the inevitable blowback listed countless examples of comediennes quite a bit sexier than those Hitchens seemed to be imagining, he held his ground without flinching. “The achievement of my essay [was] to make sexier women try harder to amuse me,” he said in a video counter rebuttal. “Well, that was my whole plan to start with.”

That’s cute (actually, I found it hilarious). But was it really necessary? No, because — sorry, sisters — Hitchens was right. While there are a great many women in the world who are side-splittingly droll, I’m afraid that in the aggregate we’re just not as funny as men. Not that we can’t be, but we aren’t. I make this point not as some contrarian gesture meant to pay homage to the Hitchens’ contrarian legacy but as someone who’s been in enough classrooms and offices, gone to enough dinner parties and improv shows and watched enough “Saturday Night Live” and Comedy Central to have noticed that for every woman who actually makes people laugh out loud there are probably 10 men.

Believe me, I wish ribald knee-slappers were as likely to be heard in a Pilates studio as in a cigar bar. I also wish Hitchens hadn’t had quite such a lead foot in this article because beneath all the knuckle dragging are some important ideas (he may not have meant to make them, but they’re there nonetheless) about the ways humor erases culturally sanctioned notions of femininity. Women avoid funny because they’re afraid of what they’ll have to give up in exchange, for instance the coy mysteriousness that men supposedly prize above all else. A funny woman, no matter how conventionally lovely, generally has to accept that she’ll also be perceived as a little bit funny looking. When she gets a laugh, she risks subliminally conveying the message that she’s making up for some hidden deficiency, that she’s sad or irreparably broken. Why else, as Hitchens would ask, would she need the humor?

Well, maybe because humor is power. Maybe it’s pretty much the most useful tool we humans have for getting through the day. Maybe because to be deprived of this power, even by dint of one’s own vanity, is a form of oppression. And maybe women should have been thanking Hitchens even as we castigated him. As infuriating as he was, he forced us to recognize our own complicity in that oppression. It’s common, after all, for women to value personality over looks when it comes to men. But being a funny woman means valuing personality over looks when it comes to oneself. And that takes balls.

We’re not done!

Unsurprisingly, my own column made a lot of people angry, including comedian Sarah Silverman, who was upset that she appeared in the accompanying photo and that the caption suggested that she had objected to Hitchens’ article. (In retrospect, it’s interesting that she didn’t want to be on record as objecting to it.) I wrote about that here, which is probably also paywalled, so here it is.

Christopher Hitchens, Sarah Silverman and the Twitter Wars

Los Angeles Times Opinion Blog, December 23, 2011

On Thursday, I logged on to my Twitter account and noticed I’d been the subject of a sudden flurry of activity. It seemed that the comedian Sarah Silverman had fired off five angry tweets about me over the course of what looked like a few minutes, a move that caused many of her nearly 2.5 million followers to immediately follow suit.

Silverman had taken offense to my Thursday column about Christopher Hitchens’ infamous 2007 Vanity Fair essay ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny,’ in which, while recognizing the generally boorish tone of Hitchens’ essay, I suggested that he was right that women are not, in the aggregate (i.e., there are many, many exceptions, among them Silverman, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Wendy Liebman -- a personal fave -- and more, which is why I qualified the statement) as funny as men. I said this not to be sexist but in fact to shed light on the sexism at the root of the very phenomenon.

In the minds of many (not all) men and women, humor tends to defy culturally approved notions of femininity. Speaking from my own experience as a woman who is often (not always) perceived as funny, I can say that the moment of eliciting laughter is nearly always accompanied by a momentary sense of androgyny. And guess what? For me, and presumably for the legions of funny women out there who know what I’m talking about, it’s exhilarating. But presumably there are also women who censor their humor out of a fear of that androgyny. As I wrote in the column, humor is power. And ‘to be deprived of this power, even by dint of one’s own vanity, is a form of oppression.’

Based on her initial tweet, Silverman actually seemed most upset about something else. A photo of her had accompanied the column, and the caption erroneously stated that she had objected to Hitchens’ article. Her distress was understandable (fyi: Writers have nothing to do with headlines, photos and captions), and The Times quickly corrected the error.

But in subsequent tweets, Silverman attacked the column itself, suggesting it lacked a point of view and saying that ‘today you have distinguished yourself as another great example of who ‘the man’ really is: women like you.’ Within seconds, scores of her followers were accusing me of everything from sexism to anti-Semitism to being a hack, an idiot, a disgrace, and so on. Several seemed eager to watch a catfight between Silverman and me, while another (my favorite so far) posited that ‘this dialogue would benefit if we added an inflatable pool of lube.’ Indeed.

As a regular on the Opinion page for more than six years, I know that columns, like jokes, aren’t going to resonate with everyone or even most people; in fact, if they do, that’s a pretty good indication of their mediocrity (in other words, if you please all the people all the time, it’s probably because you’ve helped them fall asleep). Silverman, a brilliant, brave and original comic whom I’ve admired for years, surely knows that better than anyone.

That’s not to say she doesn’t genuinely hate my column -- she well may, which is fair enough -- but I do think there’s something ironic about the fact that her fans, in attacking me out of loyalty to her, are also attacking my attack on the double standard faced by women comics and funny women in general.

Needless to say, this has added a new dimension to my holiday fun -- not to mention confirming my suspicion that Twitter is an excellent and productive use of everyone’s time. Now where’s that pool of lube?

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