08:36 – We’ve been married almost 30 years, but I can still get her. Every Saturday, I do four or five loads of laundry: Barbara’s special load (work clothes and other stuff that has to be washed in cold water on gentle); regular darks; regular whites; towels; and often bedding. Sometimes I have extra loads, such as lab towels or dog towels.
Barbara worked only three days this week, so her special load was pretty small. When she noticed it was missing, she said I needn’t have done it this week since there was so little in there. Not to worry, I told her. I filled out that load with lab towels. I received the patented female steely-eyed stare and “you’d better be kidding” in response.
We’ll be working today and tomorrow on filling, capping, and labeling bottles. In addition to 60 sets for the first batch of biology kits, we’ll also make up 30 more sets of those chemicals that are in both the biology and chemistry kits. We’d do 60 more sets for the chemistry kits, but I’m afraid we’d run short of bottles and end up with 60 sets of some of the chemicals for the chemistry kits and zero sets of others.
My brother has been married about 25 years. He claims that in all that time he has never said anything serious, and in all that time his wife and step-daughter have always treated everything he says as serious.
Women are very literal-minded, and almost none of them have any discernible sense of humor. (Try saying that to just about any woman and you’ll get evidence of that claim…)
That’s one reason I’m enjoying watching Sarah Chalke on Scrubs. She’s one of a very small percentage of women who not only don’t mind making fun of themselves but actually revel in it. Insecurity? She’s heard of it.
I have wondered about that for many years now, and noticed the tiny handful of female comics were simply not funny in the least. And I get more evidence daily here; blank stares when I make a jest, a sally, a bon mot. I can probably count the times that women laughed at anything I said on, at most, two hands, and I remember them to this day, decades later. Now either what Robert and I believe is true, or maybe I just suck at humor.
Is there a scientific explanation for this?
Hand waving scientific explanation: Men need to attract and win over women for sex. Therefore evolution has favored males who can put on the best courtship presentation. This may be everything from showing off food gathering skills, to demonstrating combat victories, to simply looking good, to being able to say clever words. So comedy skills help men get sex.
A funny woman is a bonus side effect from the genetics, but there’s no evolutionary pressure for it. Males don’t mind sex from an unfunny female.
Alternatively, we men are simple creatures, with a vulgar sense of humor. When I and my two teenage sons are laughing ourselves sick, my wife just shakes her head in disgust.
I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy hearing the reasons beer is better than women?
Well then riddle me this: if they ain’t laughing at my comedy routines, how would I get sex?
Plus I just spent the past hour sort of semi-wracking my brain for any possible funny female comics and for the life of me just couldn’t do it.
Only one decent female chef, too, God bless her, mainly because of the PBS series that put her all over the country, but she taught us that we didn’t have to fret and make ourselves sick with worry over butterfat, salt and sloshing down the vin while we cook. Dropped the chicken on the floor? No one looking? Pick it up, wipe it off, and carry on.
Female poets? Dickinson, and even then, only a handful of poems.
Temps in the fotties and fifties around here today and sunny, snow melting off the roof but still up past my knees in the meadows and woods. Mud Season pending, maybe after a few more blasts from Old Man Winter.
A winter piece by the late E. Pound:
Winter is icumen in
Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
— Ezra Pound, ca. 1915
Steve’s explanation probably holds. Christopher Hitchens wrote something similar a couple of years ago. I can think of a few female comedians: Josie Long is a good one over here, and I hear Tina Fey is successful (no idea about good) in the US. Dorothy Parker was renowned for her wit. And, on a personal note, my younger sister’s absurd humour makes her one of the funniest people I know.
I don’t know the first thing about poetry, but I remember we studied some contemporary poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke at school. Women, both, and their poetry was good.
Like Hitchens implied, Dorothy Parker could raise a sardonic grin, and had the wit, but WAS she side-splitting funny?
But I recall many, many times Don Rickles, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Chris Rock, and countless others had me on the floor crying I was laughing so hard and so painfully, even the early (of course, and he ribs himself about this) Woody Allen flicks.
As for cooking, I love some of Julia’s recipes, but my go-to guys are the late Jim Beard, Jacques Pepin, and the Christopher Kimball Empire.
For poetry, I have pretty much written off this century so far, the 20th-C except for a handful of pieces by the modernists like Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Frost, the 19th-C except for the “Fireside Poets,” who all the smartypants elitist critics hated, and even the 18th-C except for, again, a handful of poems by Swift, Pope and Johnson. Where English poetry really shines is the period from 1500-1700. Just sayin.’
There are plenty of funny women around — both past and present (some funnier in the past than the present, like Joan Rivers), but the problem is that very few do stand-up. Rita Rudner may be the funniest woman on Earth. Her routine about how she starts a shopping spree with a certain amount of money, and by going to sales and using coupons while somehow mixing the amount spent with the amount saved, she then actually ends up with more money than she started with, is some of the greatest sexist humor on the planet. The radio station I am involved with, is one of the few in the nation that plays comedy. I get to edit out all the swear words, but the women doing stand-up don’t swear, so I never get those to work on. Thus I cannot think of all the female comics we air, but older Ellen DeGeneres material, Elizabeth Madigan, Rachel Feinstein, and Sara Schaefer are a few.
“Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.”— Rita Rudner
As I remember it, Ruth Buzzi does or did some hilarious stand-up routines.
If you want the full deal – female British comic poet who does VERY funny one-woman shows – I can’t recommend Pam Ayres too highly. Buy her books, buy any videos you can find, find her on U-Tube, whatever you can do, do it.
RBT wrote:
“Not to worry, I told her. I filled out that load with lab towels. I received the patented female steely-eyed stare and “you’d better be kidding” in response.”
I was expecting you to say you’d washed her stuff with the dog towels. I’m surprised you’re even allowed in the laundry, given that you’ve admitted in the past that you can’t tell her knickers from her sports bras.
Sorry, dudes; none of the women mentioned, and I have seen and/or heard them all, pass the OFD Laugh Test. An occasional brief chuckle or grin, and that’s about it.
I guess I am closer to the Stooges than the semi-bitter and angry wit meted out by women comics primarily concerned with issues of gender and power, blah, blah, blah, like their hordes of lovely and brilliant sisters in academe. Or it could well be that it’s just me who’s bitter after experiencing the hallowed groves of matriarchal academe in the 80s and 90s. Another test: the Stooges and like stuff will make people laugh across most cultures, even Third World regions, but our pissed-off privileged amazons won’t.
Well, if your comedy is rooted to the Stooges, then there is no help for you. I stopped thinking the Stooges were funny when I was about 12.
I must admit, my favorite was Dave Allen. Not somebody who prompted roars of laughter, but an incredible storyteller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cT-BQLX6nU
Why is it I smell smoke after watching that?
Oh, yeah. My lunch is burning.
One of the many different stories Allen told about losing his finger.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeNDkxnz2V0
I haven’t watched the Stooges in many decades, so no, my funny bone is not”rooted” to them, and there is, in fact, hope for me if I never have to listen to or see another supposedly funny woman comic.
And now that Julia’s gone, no women chefs, either.
And no women poets.
Yeah, I may be a cranky old bastard, but I’ve earned it.
A woman just came to the stockroom window. “We’re almost out of Pasteur pipets in the organic lab.” (I run the stockroom at a large community college.)
Me: “Do you need the ones that are this long, or the ones that are this long?” —Indicating with my fingers the lengths of the two common sizes of Pasteur pipettes—5 3/4 in and 9 in.
“I’ll take that size.”
She comes back a few minutes later. “I need the other size.” She indicates with her fingers the length of the 5 3/4 in pipettes. “My husband has been telling me for years that this is nine inches.”
There’s always a counterexample!
lol
If dat woman don’t know what nine inches is, send her my way. (I have a tape measure and a ruler.)
…to show her on the ruler or the tape measure, you bastards with filthy minds!