Unfunny Girls

I really, truly hate misogyny. Especially when it’s peddled by women. Which sadly, it all too often is.

Nothing pisses me off more than a fellow woman - who really ought to know an awful lot better – sucking up to men by simperingly agreeing that women are vicious/boring/manipulative/thick/ spiteful etc etc etc.

(And if you ever hear any woman saying airily ‘women are jealous of me, and I only have male friends’ - you can immediately, and without a momentary flicker of hesitation, file her under H for Hateful Conceited Attention Whoring Skank.

Whose odd affinity with the masculine mind, and alienation from the female race, has something to do with the fact that most men’s hateful-conceited-attention-whoring-skankdar is sadly deficient - while most women can spot a complete and total bitch from fifty-nine paces.)

Female misogyny is an insidious form of Uncle Tom-ism that’s as doomed as such things always are. As tiresomely bash-your-head-on-the-wall irritating and deeply pathetic as poverty-line Americans voting against state healthcare and in favour of tax breaks for billionaires.

Hey, Newsflash. Just because you want to see yourself as one of the ruling elite, it doesn’t mean they’re going to let you in.

Your relentless self-abasement and abject willingness to stab your own kind in the back may earn you a fleeting pat on the head from the powers that be.

But - and make no mistake - you’re not sitting at their table, and don’t think you ever are.

The men who’ll smile approvingly and consider you one of the good girls for parroting their misogynistic bullshit are the exact same men who’ll shove you aside without a second thought to get a better look at the nineteen year old blonde standing behind you.

At which point, it won’t matter a rat’s left tit whether you’ve claimed to support patriarchy, matriarchy or a secret world order run by giant Jewish lizards.

So I both hate and pity women who crawl up men’s arses* by dissing their own sex.

I really hate to use the word ‘sisterhood’(not least because it makes me sound like a sad hairy old dyke), but I definitely have a deep-rooted sense of something like it running through the very fabric of my soul. And female misogyny offends it in a big way.

Which is why it pains me deeply to say I’ve come to a troubling conclusion.

Most female comedians are really, really fucking unfunny.

While I’ve had thoughts on these lines for some time – and have vaguely mentioned them before – I came to this definitive conclusion following The Morgana Show on Channel Four. Which was about half as funny as finding a close relative hanging from a beam in your sitting room.

On Christmas Eve.

Not that there aren’t plenty of crap male comics. Horne and Corden. Morecambe and Wise(controversial I know, but I personally laughed more at The Passion of the Christ). Little Britain, consisting of the two most overrated human beings since Joseph Fritzl walked away with the European Dad Of The Year title in 2009.

But these crap male comics are in a minority. Massively outweighed by the Bill Baileys and the Jimmy Carrs and the Steve Coogans and the Tim Minchins and the Chris Rocks and the Bill Hickses and the Doug Stanhopes and the Ricky Gervaises and the Peter Kays and the Leagues of Gentlemen, in a way that the Morganas of this world just aren’t.

And crap male comics tend to suck in any number of different ways. Whereas the vast majority of crap women comics - and that could be shortened by just saying ‘the vast majority of women comics’ – tend to suck in exactly the same ways. Specifically, the same two ways.

They’re either cosy-unfunny or wacky-unfunny.

And I hate them both equally.

Under cosy-unfunny, I’d put French and Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley, Victoria Wood and dinnerladies.

Under wacky-unfunny, I’d put Smack the Pony, Morgana, Absolutely Fabulous and Sarah Silverman.

And if you draw a circle representing cosy-unfunny and another circle representing wacky-unfunny, you’ll see that the point where these two circles overlap has a single word written inside it, and that word is MIRANDA. Credit where it’s due, I know a lot of people actually like Miranda. I just don’t get it. For me, Miranda represents the seventh circle of comedy hell. I really and truly can’t think of anyone on the face of this earth I find more annoying, less likeable or less funny than Miranda Hart. I’d sooner watch a double act with Kim Jong-Il and Piers Morgan**.

The Catherine Tate Show had its moments, and the first series of Jill Davis’ Nighty Night was funny, and Caroline Aherne is brilliant – Mrs Merton was inspired, and The Royle Family’s one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. But to say these genuinely funny women are a bit thin on the ground is putting it mildly.

Even Jo Brand’s sitcom Getting On, while grimly watchable - if only because it makes you realize how blessed one’s own professional life is by comparison – it can’t hold a proverbial candle to the testosterone-soaked genius of The Thick Of It (its foul-mouthed, unstable and infinitely wittier elder brother.)

So why – when plenty of the women I know are hilarious in private – are men en masse so much funnier in public? I find myself tracing this phenomenon back to a single factor, which is quite simply this – incentivize any behavior and you’ll get a hell of a lot more of it.

Especially when you incentivize it in those all-important formative years, when boys and girls don’t yet know what they’re good or bad at – and are open-minded enough to develop in pretty much any direction at all, given the right encouragement and natural aptitudes.

For example, if you could wave a magic wand and change modern primary schools so all the popular boys were great at ballet and all the popular girls were hardcore weight-lifting champions – I guarantee you’d see far, far more graceful boys and far, far stronger girls within the space of a generation.

And you could be sure that they’d carry these skills into later post-school life, where they’d be likely to develop them further – because it would be in their best social interests to do so. Because what’s cool in the playground is also per se cool (admittedly in a more diluted and civilized form) everywhere else.

And as it is, sadly, only one sex grows up knowing they can become far more popular and far higher up on the status ladder if they can be funny in front of a big watching crowd. And it sure ain’t the girls.

Wit is to little girls as good looks are to little boys. Which is to say that it doesn’t hurt, exactly - but it’s certainly not going to get you anywhere on its own.

Well, that’s my theory anyway – I trace it back to the playground.

What do you think?

J x

*A charming image, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

** In case I haven’t quite managed to get my point across here, I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE MIRANDA HART. Not her personally, obviously, as I don’t know her from Adam. But I hate her on-screen persona and her Godawful sitcom with a depth and an intensity that genuinely disturbs me. She is my female version of Gideon Osborne. And if you think I secretly fancy her and all, you can wind your neck in.