Remember the dreaded “humor gap” idea about men always being funnier than women? And that bogus pseudo-science Vanity Fair piece on the topic? Oy vey. I wish that was the only case of weird dudes telling the world women aren’t funny, but alas, the shoddily lobbed insults keep coming. If only we had a sweet comedienne to put this shit show to rest.
OH WAIT, WE DO.
It’s Ellie Kemper from Bridesmaids and The Office, hey girl! This week she wrote an article for GQ about the unfunniness of men, and it’s perfect.
Following the structure of the Vanity Fair piece, Ellie uses evolution, science, and logic in the same totally backwards way that the lady-haters do, proving how redonk those arguments are. For example, on male evolution:
“Believe us, between your scalps and your calves, you’ve already got us. Your narrow, decrescendoing hips, and your soft, very hairy thighs leave us breathless. The truth is, there is no evolutionary cause for you to have to be funny. And precisely because your ancestors, and your ancestors’ grandparents, and your ancestors’ grandparents’ grandparents, and so on and so on, had no procreative need to cultivate a sense of humor and performance, you literally do not have it in your DNA.”
She even calls out the misogynistic message underlying the dudes’ arguments (‘men = best’) by mentioning my new favourite acronym, TGFW: Thank God For Women.
Let Ellie illuminate you on why ladies are scientifically superior at being hilarious:
“We women, with our sumptuous breasts and our shapely hips, have to be funny in order literally to survive. Our curves render us useless for just about anything except cracking wise and quip-firing. Sometimes our breasts are so big that we actually can’t move; we have no choice but to sit very still in one place and come up with joke after joke. Sometimes—though rare—our hips are so wide, that we physically cannot fit through the exit door of the comedy club that our office co-workers dragged us to after happy hour. So the only option available to us is to stay inside the comedy club, absorbing comedy act after comedy act, and in so doing, completing the full transformation from comedy student to comedy master.”
So true.
Read the whole thing on GQ‘s website, and add Ellie to your already huge-ass arsenal of comedy superheroines. TGFW.
Thanks to GQ, photo via Wikimedia.
