Yes, women are funny, you douche

There’s nothing I violently hate more than when people say, “Women aren’t funny.” Except maybe the Black Eyed Peas. They’re total shit. So are the people who think all women are unfunny and that men are better than them, but it’s a different kind of shit.

Anyway, Adam Carolla — you might remember him from comedically vacuous The Man Show, the irony of which will kick in fully in a few sentences — has a new book out and decided to hype it up by saying that women are unfunny. Because really, what better way to make people buy your book than to say something that will alienate you from most of the general public and paint you as someone who really has no sense of humour beyond “Drink this and then pull my finger”? His comment from the New York Post:

No. But they make you hire a certain number of chicks, and they’re always the least funny on the writing staff. The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”

Here’s the thing: men and women do have slightly varying takes on humour, because humour is based on what you’ve experienced and how that’s shaped your perspective. There are certain things that men experience that women haven’t, and vice versa. That being said, whether someone is funny or not depends less on these experiences and more on how they’re able to cleverly poke fun at them in a fresh, subversive way.

I’m a total meritocracy proponent, so I’m not about to say that ALL women are funny. I’ve seen women with the comedic sensibilities of non-Hodgkin lymphoma; that being said, they’re not unfunny because they’re women. They’re unfunny because they’re not witty or original. And believe me, I’ve worked with enough men to know that guys are just as capable of being toxically uncreative hacks to know that having a penis doesn’t make you a comedian.