>an essay by Christopher Hitchens about why women are not funny.<

Any number of women who wrote in about this lousy essay could do a good SHOUTS AND MURMURS.

I think women have to have some inherent sense of humor in order to undergo birth. I mean, women have their respective most-private-areas spread open for some 24 year-old acne-scarred intern to observe for eight hours, while passing a bowling ball through the straw that is the birth canal and most likely shitting themselves at least twice (they never tell them they're going to). How can women not have a sense of humor about such an experience?

Nothing gets me riled up like an (invariably unfunny) man trying to tell his (invariably unfunny, sycophantic) readership why women are not funny. I started performing stand-up comedy six months ago, and in a city of more than 100 aspiring comedians, there are less than ten women taking the stage on a regular basis. While there may be many more men performing in this city, I can tell you that the percentage of truly funny people is the same in both genders (very small.)

The question of funniness bears exploration, but not in the context of gender. Asserting that women are somehow unfunny based on their possession of wombs reminds me mostly of the kind of biological racism that used to be considered scientifically sound when people needed to prove that white people were somehow smarter than black people.

If you want to know why just 12% of Shouts and Murmurs writers are women, though, don't blame it entirely on the magazine editors. Blame it on a society that hasn't encouraged women to be funny, resulting in untold numbers of funny women who therefore don't think sending something into Shouts and Murmurs is an option.

Do we know the percentage of submitted and non-printed Shouts & Murmurs pieces submitted by women? If so, how does it compare to the 12.x% of pieces printed?

...They're just more motivated to try to be funny. Women like funny men. Men like funny women. But, in general, women prioritize humor in men a lot more than men prioritize humor in women...

"'...That's 12.782%.' To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women. "

No, they're not. 1/8 of the articles are by women. Men are represented in the section at slightly less than SEVEN times women (1-.1272=.8728, .8728/.1272=6.86).

how neither one of us has _ever_ dated a guy funnier than ourselves. And we _want_ to. We look for this everywhere... and still, nothing.

I think the reason men think women aren't funny is 'cuz they can't hear us? Wasn't there a study 'bout men interpreting women's voices as music, unless their musicians(?) Tho, that doesn't cover _reading_ funny things that women write.

Anyways... whenever I want to get a good laugh I usually do a search in google images for "X Y Chromosome" to see the electron microscope images of the two gender defining genes, as well as some graphs showing the (non)evolution of the Y chromosome over the years. Here's a hint, the Y reproduces asexually, so it doesn't evolve.. it just gets passed down father to son, from pre-history to now. Doesn't that explain, well, just about eVerYThinG about human behavior?

But, the picture tells the story. Trust me. Google it. It's hysterical.

I know that Jerry Lewis, of all people, declared women to be "not funny," but this is a new one. Then again, CH doesn't seem to find much joy in anything in life, so what's the surprise?

Humorlessness is endemic to both genders. In fact, I'm glad when someone I meet doesn't respond to my humor--or smile much or make jokes on their own. That invariably means they are cold, uptight, snotty, or some combination of the three that I don't need to deal with on a regular basis.

Two women are eating lunch at a Catskills resort. The first one says, "The food here is so bad!" And the other replies, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"

That's what I think of when I read a entry complaining that women are not sufficiently represented in Shouts and Murmors:

"This New Yorker humor column is never any good."

"Yes, and there are hardly any women writing unfunny stuff for it!"

There actually IS someone who writes funny stuff about fishing (and camping, and hunting, and married life).

It's Patrick McManus - not a woman, but I've yet to meet a woman who didn't nearly pee herself when forced to listen to his short stories in my car.

As for childbirth not being funny . . . well, men just need to stop being so squeamish. What mother doesn't have a funny (and often gross) story about birth and kids??

Because they start and fight wars. Nothing funny about war; therefore, nothing funny about men.

Not that I'd generalize or anything...

I decided that the only way to read "Shouts and Murmurs" was to so ironically.

"Oho! So clever. He could have been really funny here, but he went for the obvious stupid joke instead to subvert my expectations. Oh my God, I am splitting a gut now. On so many levels."

The whole debate about whether women are funny or not is maddening. There is no way to really argue it. There is nothing especially funny about saying, "We are funny! Really, we are!" Yet, the stereotype about women not being funny has gotta discourage a lot of women from exploring endeavors like stand-up comedy or humor writing.

My personal observation is that women are often hysterically funny, but we are less likely to tell jokes with a punch line and we are also less likely to hold the floor with a funny story in a mixed-sex group. My mother almost makes me wet myself because she is so hilarious, but her humor is in the details as she tells the story rather than in a sudden punch line. And I have never seen her tell one of her thigh slapping anecdotes to a mixed sex group. I think women's hilarity is a well kept secret that men often don't really know about. I laugh the most in informal all-female settings when funny women hold forth for each other's appreciation.