So Ta-Nehisi Coates started a fairly short post calling bullshit on the notion that women aren't funny.

I haven't finished this Tina Fey piece on Fresh Air yet, but as I've said, my readings of Jane Austen, and now Edith Wharton, have really taken me back to this old claim (most famously aired here and answered here) that women aren't funny. As an adult, probably the first author I found to be truly humorous was Zora Neale Hurston. Better people then me can probably cite a range of other women authors who used humor in their writing, but even in my own small forays it's clear to me that they are there. Leaving aside the desire to say something provocative, if thin, I'm thinking that a large portion of this claim originates in shrinking the range of "funny."

Source: The Atlantic Blog

In comments the conversation eventually turned to Vanity Fair's humorless article "Women Aren't Funny" by Christopher Hitchens. A bit further in DoctorJay said

I just clicked through to Hitchen's piece. I'd never read it.

In his first paragraph he mentions that you don't often hear a man describe his partner/mate as funny. I think this might be a socially accurate observation, within his circle. Or maybe even beyond it.

Reading on, I discovered, to my surprise, that Figleaf's rule number 2 applies. (Many thanks to the commenter here, I think it was K__Bee, who linked that a week or so ago.

If you aren't familiar, rule number 2 is, paraphrased,

Men are not allowed to be the object of desire. [close enough --fl]

In Hitchen's case, he claims that men (at least, straight men) must be funny in order to get laid. If we weren't funny, nobody would fuck us.

Therefore, men have a powerful motivation to be funny.

Of course, to disprove this, all one needs is to think of examples of men who aren't funny, but still got laid. Richard Nixon comes to mind.

At which point the thread becomes more of a discussion of Hitchens and/or of the power of the whole "evolved to be funny to spread our seed" thing.

Sigh!

The whole stupid "pass on your seed" business is so overblown. You know another indisputably evolved behavior that's absolutely critical to "passing on your seed?" Taking a deep breath right after birth. Screw that up and you'll never "get laid" either. Considering some of the other convolutions some people go to to wring sexual selection out of a behavior it's amazing no young cupid has never come forth to explain how men learn to breath after birth because chix think men who breathe are hawt.

So you can buy the whole pitiful-male/gatekeeper-female model, where every action men takes is designed to get her to lower her "barriers" just misses a heck of a lot of, you know, other regular old every day selection you've got to get through to survive long enough to meet, greet, subvert or defeat those gatekeeper-y feeemales.* And Mr. Hitchens joins on the order of millions of otherwise sensible men who fall for it. But doing so means they miss out on a very large group of other possible reasons a trait might develop.

For instance, with all due respect to Hitchens on many other topics I'm... pretty sure men have to be funny, and might even somehow genetically have to be funny,... for the same reason they have to not become objects of desire: to keep from getting beaten up by older and/or bigger boys and men. Or perhaps even more accurately, in order to enter alliances with groups of older, larger boys and men who will either not beat them up or will stand by then when members of other alliances try to beat them up.

Laughing men rarely beat up juveniles and newcomers. Jealous ones do. For that matter men rarely beat up juvenile or newcomer men they perceive as having any non-jealousy-provoking merit or potential. (BTW, say hello to the true, patriarchal source of the whole male worthiness trap.)

Given that in all but the most chaotic, atomized or (possibly) well-ordered societies boys must at some point in their development depend on the tolerance and/or support of older/larger males if they hope to achieve sexual maturity, trying to explain all gendered behavior in terms of male/female sexual selection necessarily overlooks huge swaths of selective pressure (social or biological) on human behavior.

(This latter point, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons Ayn Rand's science-fiction-y novels fall apart. Neither John Galt nor, especially, Howard Roark, can have had human childhoods. Indeed, in The Fountainhead Roark is born full-formed, naked, and to tie it all together, laughing, thigh deep in a stream miles from anyone. As he had to have been. Because otherwise, no matter what a hardass he became, somewhere between the ages of, say, two and sixteen, he'd have had no choice but to compromise, to flex, to joke, to ingratiate, or otherwise fit in -- if not with other boys and men then with parents or their proxies.  But I digress.)

At any rate, whereas at least in patriarchy men tend to be far bigger obstacles to male reproductive success than women, and therefore men might feel like they're under more pressure to be funny, I don't see why it's not obvious that a) women are just as likely to benefit from being funny to men, b) that men benefit from being funny around groups of women, c) that women benefit from being funny around women, etc.

* Quick point: throughout history and literature, virtually all gatekeepers are flunkies, lackies, or at best trusted servants of the lord or master who owns the gate itself. Women are designated "gatekeepers" to their sexualities alright, but by convention, tradition, and often law the gate they're charged to defend with their lives and honors actually belongs to a custodial male. Thus people who label women "gate keepers" are 100% up to their scuppers in patriarchy.