I think the reason men kept women out of so many occupations over the centuries was the fear that women would do those occupations better than they would. Most men grew up with mothers who were wiser than them, stronger willed than them, more patient than them, harder working than them etc. World War 1 and 2 taught us that women can do every single job in the modern world as good as or better than men. The reason they weren't doing those jobs (riveting, truck driving, etc.) was because men had kept them out. What about the actual fighting of the war itself I hear you ask. Oh sure men having always been good at fighting but again thats only because women haven't been given the chance. What's the #1 box office movie at the moment? American Sniper - the story of Chris Kyle. No woman could surely do that job, right? I guess you haven't heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko who shot 309 Nazis on the Ost Front including 35 enemy snipers trying to kill her. Pavlichenko was one of 2000 female snipers in the Red Army. You really should know about her. She met FDR. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her. ...
If you look at the list of well governed countries where the rule of law prevails, corruption is minimal and people are generally happier it's always the countries where women are most empowered that are the near the top of every table. Denmark, Norway, Finland etc. And if you look at all the nightmare countries in the world it's always the countries where women are treated like shit. Any place where men with guns (or worse men with guns and holy books) are in charge is always going to be a hell hole. We've known for years that the single best way to move a society out of poverty is to educate girls. Educating them at school not run by an absurd patriarchal desert religion that worships an invisible sky god probably works even better.
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Ok so what has this got to do with funny? We've never allowed women to be funny. Nothing scares men like a woman who is funnier and sharper than they are, so funny girls until very very recently in the history of our culture were told to cut it out. Women have had to sneak funny in the back door. Jane Austen still makes us laugh 200 years later, whereas I've never laughed at Dickens, or Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones or any of those supposedly funny books. Jerome K Jerome and Mark Twain are the only nineteenth century novelists who can hold a candle to Austen in the funny department... Men like women to be beautiful or tragic or poetic or sexy but not funny. And men ran the entire world (and still run most of it) until pretty much yesterday. It wasn't until the age of television that we began to allow and even encourage funny women. But they had to fight tooth and nail to have their voices heard. It's tough to make it as a comic but it was always tougher for female comics who got told that they weren't funny by bookers and agents and club owners and - crucially - male comics.
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In 2007 Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay in Vanity Fair called Why Women Aren't Funny. It wasn't the Hitch's best work and the timing was terrible as Tina Fey's 30 Rock had just started. 30 Rock was the first American successful comedy show with a female head-writer and show-runner since Roseanne. 30 Rock was hit and miss with some very annoying characters but when it was good it was very very good. Fey proved week in and week out that she was sharper and funnier and wittier than the men working on TV. I would love to have seen Fey debate Hitch on this topic, it would have been one for the ages, but she wasn't a God botherer so Hitch didn't engage.
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Fey kicked the doors in for other talented women and its obvious now to any fool that women are just as funny as men. I've said for years that women are generally better writers than men (I'm not going to go into all that again now) but the one area men had left to cling to was in comic writing and now that's going too. Kristen Wiig, Rebel Wilson, Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler are just about the funniest people on the planet right now. Some people say that the funniest and best written show on TV at the moment is Lena Dunham's Girls. I have a lot of problems with Girls not least because the cast and the girls on Girls come from very very privileged backgrounds and this rubs me the wrong way. No I say that the funniest show on TV at the moment is Broad City now in its second season. Written and starring Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson its also the only comedy show I've ever seen (apart from the great Louie) that accurately portrays what living in New York is actually like: the heat, the dirt, the poverty, the crazies...Broad City finally allows women to deploy every weapon in the comedy arsenal: it's not just witty and clever, it's also vulgar, crude, broad, sexually risque and downright silly.
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Glazer and Jacobson will kick in a lot more doors for women. And now that TV execs (still mostly men) see that women being funny can make them a lot of money you should expect to see a lot more funny women on TV. When the playing field finally levels off in a few years we'll see how ridiculous and dated Hitch's arguments are.
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If you live in America or have access to a US proxy IP address you can watch Broad City, here.
Ian Rankin
