2fer: New Yorker on DOBBS. HITCHENS: "Why Women Aren't Funny"

[UTUSN]

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061204fa_fact1


MAD AS HELL
Lou Dobbs’s populist crusade.
by KEN AULETTA
Issue of 2006-12-04
Posted 2006-11-27

.... ...conservative supply-sider, Glassman said of Dobbs, “How did he transform from a business sycophant to a raving populist?” Glassman’s answer was that Dobbs had begun to “demagogue these issues.” (In questioning Glassman’s economic theories on his program, Dobbs accused him of talking “like a cult member.”) ....

In many ways, Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled “Who’s Looking Out for You?,” are kindred spirits. Dobbs, who lives on a three-hundred-acre farm in a prosperous part of New Jersey, admires his own capacity for compassion and self-effacement. His audience, he writes, knows that he cares “more about them and their lives than about being invited to the White House or playing golf with C.E.O.s and celebrities.” ....

Dobbs met his volatile match in Rick Kaplan, who became CNN’s U.S. president in 1997, and by 1999 the two were barely speaking. Dobbs was leery of Kaplan, who had been a news producer at CBS and the executive producer of both “World News Tonight” and “Nightline,” at ABC, but who also happened to be a friend of President Clinton’s. “I didn’t agree with the journalism he was doing,” Dobbs said. “In my judgment, he was clearly partisan. He was pushing Clinton stories.” Kaplan responded by saying that most of CNN’s Clinton stories were negative. He thought that Dobbs was a prima donna—“just a very difficult person to deal with.” He added, “Lou doesn’t think he’s opinionated. He just thinks he’s stating the truth.” ....

The left, to which Vonnegut belongs, can embrace Dobbs for his opposition to big corporations and his support for a higher minimum wage, national health insurance, and abortion rights. The right likes him for his views on immigration, political correctness, gun control, the United Nations, and all efforts to limit American sovereignty. Dobbs believes that the middle class, which he has described as being composed of two hundred and fifty million Americans, is taken for granted, an argument that could be challenged by those who point to the growth of middle-class entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, or to the unwillingness of elected officials to offend this constituency by curbing entitlements. ....



http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701 :popcorn:

Provocation
Why Women Aren't Funny
What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.
by Christopher Hitchens January 2007

.... Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it? ....

In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition. ....

For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because "women get funnier as they get older."

Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn't that rather a long time to have to wait?

********UNQUOTE*******

[Marie26]

1. Hitchens, though, is a knee-slapper.

We're laughing at you, not with you.

[Warpy]

10. Yeah, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it?

I've always known women who had funnier material and better comedic timing than any male standup, but that's mostly because women laugh at different things. For far too many years, women couldn't get near the stage in a comedy club unless they were groupies because male club owners just didn't get the jokes.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Men's greatest fear is being laughed at. Women making jokes about them amplifies this. nt

[donsu]

7. too true - many a woman has been murdered or beaten up for laughing

at a man

[Captain Hilts]

8. Don't be ignorant. Women's greatest fear is physical violence...

rape and murder.

Surveys asking men their greatest fear have shown that being laughed at is their top fear.

No kidding. I was in polling for 8 years.

[donsu]

12. get a grip - that's what I said

nt

[Lautremont]

3. Is this the weekly Non Sequitur Club dispatch?

Squirrels climb up trees very quickly.

[htuttle]

4. Once again, Hitchens is confusing the dark shadows on the inside of his skull...

...with reality.

[Captain Hilts]

5. Has he noticed that a lot of male comedians are "hefty, dykey or Jewish" also? nt

[Missy M]

6. Maybe because at some point we grow up....

and in my opinion there are equally as many terrible male comedians out there as female comedians.

[Chomp]

9. Hitchens defence time:

I always get completely fucking pummelled on DU for defending Hitchens, but I'm gonna do it again. Happily.


Firstly, he is way ahead of you all in para 2:

"Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about."

Pretending not to know what he's talking about will no doubt be the reaction of many a DUer. And don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. (Indeed, how many responders to this thread even read the article? Dunno, but at least 1, for sure.)


Secondly, the column is part of a regular series called "Provocation". Geddit?


Third, he invokes Mother Nature:

"The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further."

Is he 100% wrong?

I know many on DU dislike these biological perspectives and would rather explain all human behaviour in a way that calls to mind a turgid, self-sastisfied Sociology lecture (we see this reapeatedly in DU discussions of sexual assault for example, where every reason under the sun is given an explanation for this atavistic behaviour EXCEPT for the biological imperative for the male to sow their seed. Ho-hum.) But I for one am not prepared to dismiss thousands of years of evolution so quickly. It is a perversity to suggest that the testosterone coarsing through men has nothing to do with the way men bahave.


Fourth, if anyone thinks women are the ones being desparaged in the Hitchens piece, the they have not read it:

"If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. 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. This is the unspoken compromise. H. L. Mencken described as "the greatest single discovery ever made by man" the realization "that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother's bodies by the gods."


Fifth, and finally, and for what it's worth, I disagree with Hitchens' thesis. The truth is of course women are funny, but just in a different way to men. What Hitchens is talking about is a very narrow definition of "funny".

But to me that's not important. What's important is the intellectual "provocation" Hitchens is trying to stir. Bravo.




--------------------------------

Finally for all the Hitchens haters, here are two of his recent pieces, both of which are wonderful:

On Michael Richards and "the N word":

http://www.slate.com/id/2154854/

And a review of Ann Coulter's book:

http://www.theliberal.co.uk/hitchens.htm

His Coulter review is absolutely hilarious and utterly eviscerating.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. But bear in mind that Hitchens lies about a central point of the study he quotes

Lying is a good way to provoke, but not very defensible:

Hitchens refers to a Stanford University School of Medicine Study he read about in Biotech Week that used brain-imaging to argue for gender differences in humour. He summarises its findings thus:

"Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?"

“Slower to get it”? Where did Hitchens get that from? The study in question, to which Hitchens refers as though it was news (”we now have all the joy of a scientific study”), was the subject of a Stanford press release more than a year ago, in November 2005. All the material from Biotech Week that Hitchens cites appears in identical form in the original press release. We may suppose, indeed, that the Biotech Week article was simply the same press release. Yet nothing in what Hitchens cites implies that women are “slower to get” a joke. In fact, something perhaps quietly elided expressly says the opposite. Hitchens quotes only the concluding finding, that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny”, from a paragraph that, in the original press release, states:

"In other findings, men and women showed no significant difference in the number of stimuli they rated as funny, nor how funny they found the humorous stimuli. Response time for both funny and unfunny cartoons was also similar, although women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny."

Hang on. “Response time for both funny and unfunny cartoons was also similar.” Passing silently over this, unless it was mysteriously omitted from the Biotech Week version, Hitchens assures us that the study concluded that women are “slower to get it”. Let us be charitable and put this down to mere befuddled incomprehension.

http://unspeak.net/slower-to-get-it/

Or let's be realistic, and acknowledge that Hitchens made that up to try and make a case to give himself something to talk about. There's an excellent comment on that blog as well, which completely takes Hitchens apart. Also see this blog, where it is revealed Hitchens has to get other people to write bits of his articles about comedy, becuase he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

[Shakespeare]

13. May I get you a shovel?

It appears you require one, given the sizeable load of bullshit you're attempting to move in that post.

[Skittles]

17. we just don't get it, Shakespeare!!!

we are CUNNING MINXES !!!

[Shakespeare]

20. Isn't that a hoot? It's so utterly Victorian. n/t

[gratuitous]

18. But the pygmies are a cunning bunch of runts!

The gin-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay, badly in need of a drink, will always have his defenders, it seems. And they are doomed to make even less sense than their hero.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

14. Mother Theresa

The only writing of Hitchens' that I think is true is his expose of Mother Teresa. He said she did not spend the millions of dollars she raked in on any kind of medical care for the people suffering in her so called hospitals. And that is because he had a whistleblower to interview, a lady who was a bookkeeper who told him they were not even allowed to take out small amounts of money for their personal needs.

Depending on his own resources, I would agree with George Galloway that he is a pitiful apologetic alcoholic shill. I don't remember the exact words used.

[ComerPerro]

15. Can we please drop this "Dobbs the populist" bullshit? Its all lies

[librechik]

16. Hitchens wishes he were a woman

too bad he would make as shitty a female as he is a male.

Let people who understand humor --and women--write about it, not you. You wouldn't know a joke if it jumped up on your belly button and tried to give you a teeny weeny circumcision.

Fuck off, pig!

[UTUSN]

21. Kick. Too bad I can't "recommend" n/t

[atommom]

19. I'm sure that women don't laugh at *Hitch's* jokes,

but that doesn't make us as a gender "slower to get the joke", or unappreciative of a good one. His argument is very flimsy, and not based on a good reading of the evidence. But then, he's not trying to write a scholarly thesis, just trying to piss people off.

If women really tend to be less amused by comedy than men are, it might have more to do with the nature of the comedy itself. Much of the jokes I hear sound as if they were written by men, for men, and some of them really do leave me cold. But I do have a sense of humor. And I can't give any credit to an argument that would make Hitch funnier than me. :eyes:

[TahitiNut]

22. Nora Ephron (a goddess!!) responds ...

Take My Secretary of State, Please

I met Condoleezza Rice last weekend. She was much prettier than I thought she was going to be. This was at the State Department dinner the night before the Kennedy Center Honors. She was wearing a beautiful green evening dress, and she looked great. That gap between her front teeth is not as bad in person as it is on television.

I've always wanted to talk to Condi about that gap because it's very easy to fix and I know a good celebrity dentist who can do the job in less than twenty-four hours. He's expensive but Condi makes a decent salary, and let's face it, she hasn't picked up a check for the last six years, so she can afford it.

Anyway, Condi was the hostess of the dinner, and she stood up to speak about each of the honorees. She was completely competent. She was, however, not at all funny. She tried to be, but she wasn't. She was what I call not just "not funny" but NF, which is far worse -- it's truly, deeply, tragically not funny. I mention this because it may help explain why Christopher Hitchens has written a piece called "Why Women Aren't Funny," in this month's Vanity Fair. I can only assume that it's because he's spent too much time living in the same city with Condoleezza Rice.

Hitchens' thesis (let's be honest about it) has a germ of truth. There are plenty of funny women, way more than there used to be, but as a rule women are not as funny as men. The reasons are simple, and fairly boring. Hitchens quotes at length from a Stanford University study that proves conclusively that women don't respond to punch lines as enthusiastically as men do; I can't imagine why he even brings up the study unless he has a word count he's trying to meet. Why not just get right down to it? Men love jokes, women don't. Men tell jokes, women can't. Men have cocks, women don't. End of story.

By the way, I should confess I love Christopher Hitchens, but the man once wrote that Bob Hope was not funny. That is not true. Bob Hope is empirically funny.

But my subject is Condi, not Bob Hope. Condoleezza Rice was once a Provost, and if there's ever been a job description that doesn't require humor, it's Provost. She was an expert on the Soviet Union. I mean, what would that be like? You spend your academic life becoming an expert on something that one day just ceases to exist. Everything you once knew turns out to be outdated, irrelevant and wrong. That alone could cause you to lose your gift for humor, if you ever had one.

<more>

[nam78_two]

23. Nice-now how about an article on why Hitchens isn't relevant?nt

[scarletwoman]

24. Oh, you HAVE to read this smackdown of Hitchens piece of misogynist crap!

You Can't Spell "Funny" Without "Penis"

"For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy."

Yes, it would be tragic if those we het-males desire didn't also make us laugh. But in the real world, that simply isn't the case. In fact, a brief perusal of American comedy history gives us: Mae West, Bebe Daniels, Colleen Moore, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Gracie Allen, Judy Holliday, Madelyn Pugh (seen above with) Lucille Ball, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Imogene Coca, Tallulah Bankhead, Elaine May, Carol Burnett, LaWanda Page, Lily Tomlin, Anne Beatts, Rosie Shuster, Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Gilda Radner, Elaine Pope, Catherine O'Hara, Whoopi Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard, Merrill Markoe, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Carol Leifer, Tracey Ullman, Jan Hooks, Lisa Kudrow, Molly Shannon, Ellen DeGeneres, Roseanne, Margaret Cho, Janeane Garofalo, Amy Sedaris, Susie Essman, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes . . . and those are only the women I can think of off the top of my head.

There are many others, some of whom are currently children, teens, or have yet to be conceived. In short, and to beat this point even more bluntly, women are funny, some devastatingly so, and there will always be funny women.

Christopher Hitchens disagrees, making his case at length in the recent Vanity Fair. He's uttered and written plenty of uninformed opinions over the past few years, but this piece is simply riddled with them. As awful an imperial apologist as he is, Hitchens is even worse when attempting to analyze humor. No James Agee or Walter Kerr, he. The ironic thing about his theorizing is that it makes one laugh, the same way one would laugh at a fat man trying to pull on a pair of too-small pants, or at a village idiot walking down the middle of a busy road, empty smile on his face. It's the laughter of embarrassment and of casual cruelty, of watching someone stubbornly and stupidly go against immediate reality. But as with so much else that Hitchens produces, there is no joy, no warmth, in this performance.

Please go read the whole thing. (and add another great blog to your reading list while you're at it -- Red State Son is one of my favorites)

sw

[Warren DeMontague]

25. Leave it to a rambling, shambling, smelly drunk to call OTHER PEOPLE "not funny".

Glass Houses.

[lukasahero]

26. Thanks but I prefer to get my op ed from Molly Ivins

And this idiot Hitchens thinks women aren't funny. BWA!