In 2007, the late author/journalist Christopher Hitchens, who gravitated towards the verboten—he'd already trashed Mother Teresa— called out the entire female population with his Vanity Fair article, “Why Women Aren't Funny.”
Nearly 27 years later, this one’s still discussed. Hitchens, a bare-knuckled debater, designed the essay to be provocative, and he succeeded. Critics and angry commentators came after him when the article hit the newsstands. They called him a chauvinist, a misogynist, a sexist. Access Hollywood TV host Natalie Morales called the British provocateur an asshole on multiple occasions. In a Washington Post Magazine rebuttal piece, Gene Weingarten quoted a woman to whom he’d shown an advance copy of his work. Her assessment: “A staggeringly pompous, interminable, uninformed, dishonest spasm of intellectual chicken-choking in a major magazine."
While “Hitch” wasn’t immune to pomposity, being “uninformed” and “dishonest” weren’t among his shortcomings. His essay’s title was meant to shock and provoke, but the content was far more nuanced. “Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid.” He wasn't trying to make the case that men are more intelligent—thus wittier—than women. Rather, he used a light-hearted touch to make a Darwinian, evolution-based argument that being funny is a biological imperative for men, but not for women, who don't need humor to attract men: “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.”
That's why, as the author points out, women so often rave to their girlfriends about their man's great sense of humor. Men, who Hitchens claims seek the “sweet surrender of female laughter,” just show a picture of their girlfriend to their buddies to make their point.
In researching his story, Hitchens spoke to two female authors known for their sense of humor—Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz. Leibowitz said, “Humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” With this expert testimony, it's fair to conclude that aggression is a major component of humor. Spending an evening in any comedy club will drive that notion home.
Stand-up comedy, often performed in front of a belligerent audience, is a combative art form. So it's hardly surprising there are many more successful male comics than female comics. But Hitchens didn't confine his argument to that arena. Men’s success on comedy stages is just a manifestation of his core, difficult-to-refute assertion that men have to be funnier than women. The ones who excel have a chance to one day get paid for it, or at least laid. Speaking of female comedians, the author conceded that “there are some impressive ladies out there,” but “most of them are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” Jewish comedy, he wrote, is aggressive—i.e. male.
Going beyond his thesis that being funny is a male mating strategy, Hitchens ties the humor differential to two contrasting worldviews. Male humor, he posited, is often based on “the understanding that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste.” Therefore, humor is part of their “armor-plate” they use to resist the farcicality of life. Women, on the other hand, “prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.” Jokes about the daily calamities of life, or the ways of venting sexual frustration don’t come naturally to them.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter ran Alessandra Stanley’s rebuttal in the April 2008 issue. She cited the history of funny women and named a bunch who were currently working, claiming that the rules for female comedians had fundamentally changed: “It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn't be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.”
Sarah Silverman, one of the pretty female comics, responded by saying that she wasn't offended by Hitchens’ words because she couldn't disagree with his core assertion that women don't have a need to be funny. Years later, in her book, Silverman reacted to the uproar that Hitchens’ piece caused among female comics by saying that publicly talking about being offended was proof that they’re not funny. In other words, comedians don't react to a perceived insult by whining about their feelings. Instead they react to it with wit.
In the Vanity Fair article, Hitchens referenced a Stanford University experiment that he interpreted as demonstrating that women are more critical, analytical judges of humor than creators of humor. And there's other research out there that supports his claim. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Research in Personality found that men have a higher “humor production ability” than women, due to evolutionary and environmental reasons.
Hitchens' rebuttal to Stanley's rebuttal also appeared in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair. As Stanley didn’t even try to refute his core premise, he hardly had to break a sweat. Instead, he talked about his prior, unrequited infatuation with the attractive writer (he called her, among other compliments, molten and tawny), suggesting that her issue might be an indication that she had some feelings for him after all, even though he'd already danced at her wedding to another man.
His main argument was that Stanley had unwittingly reinforced his polemic, which he did by juxtaposing side-by-side quotations from his original essay and Stanley’s piece. Stanley listed successful, funny women in support of her counter-argument, but Hitchens never said that such women weren’t out there.
People will make up their own minds whether or not Christopher Hitchens was right about women's ability to produce humor. In the end, however, the brouhaha that took place in, and outside of, the pages of Vanity Fair stands as a reminder of Hitchens’ love of the performative aspects of a debate. He took Stanley's professional rebuttal and used it as a platform for the showmanship he loved, turning their back-and-forth into a contest of wit, style, and chutzpah. Under those ground rules, Hitchens had already proved for years that he’d be the winner.