I don’t have a Tumblr.  Usually.  But I found Witstream’s recent post on women’s humor provocative enough to break this rule, and I admire and appreciate its thoughtfulness.  Here are my two cents on the matter:

I agree with the author’s assessment of why more women don’t cultivate funniness: indeed, it’s historically been a trait dangerously contiguous to shrewishness and mannishness, those twin hobgoblins of the monstrous feminine.  However, I’m bothered by the boundaries of “women’s humor” that the Witstream post maps out.  It’s true that “women’s humor isn’t just ‘my thighs are fat and I can’t get a date.’”  But I’m not sure that extending the limits of the category to include menstruation, child-rearing, and financial dependence on men—used here to illustrate what women’s humor can do—gets us much further.  In fact, I would argue that mapping the domain of what female humorists have to offer according to subject territory that is so explicitly, narrowly, and conventionally gendered undermines rather than supports the assertion that women are a funny force to be reckoned with.

While it may be the case that an “executive producer with an all-male writing staff” is concerned that his frat-party of a writers’ room will be negatively affected by the encroachment of the feminine, this doesn’t describe a problem that’s specific to comedy.  As UncleDynamite points out in his clever spin on the issue, this weak protest has been lodged and discredited in domains like the military that have historically been far more rigidly masculine than comedy.  Perhaps Letterman’s writing team do sit around making an endless stream of fart and burp jokes; their product, however, is neither that kind of material nor otherwise explicitly gendered.  Letterman is not a show ridden with such content nor dominated by subjects that might stereotypically be called “masculine” such as sports or quips about the hardware store.  To make it as professional humorists, these writers have to be able to reflect on the broader world outside a fraternity dynamic.  In other words, effective humor that’s relevant to a broad audience isn’t gendered.

This is why it’s problematic to define or imagine “women’s humor” in terms that are explicitly gendered.  Women have periods, yes, and women feel things about that.  Women raise children and feel things about that.  But women are also citizens of the world who can and do reflect on that world, a world that isn’t bound by the limits of the domestic or the corporeal.  To describe what we bring to humor through the circumscribed domains of domesticity and embodied femininity is to rehearse exactly the terms by which women have for centuries been marginalized.  I would go so far as to argue that to do so actively re-fortifies the boundaries that have excluded women from the broader-reaching discourses to which men have always had access.  These are not restrictions enforced by male entertainment executives.  Often, they’re limitations enacted by women themselves.  As I’ve suggested, one version of this self-impediment is women’s perception that their ken extends only so far as the edge of stereotypically feminine territory.  Another is the use of humor as a means of exhibitionism or sexual provocation—a mode that’s depressingly pervasive on Twitter.  Neither of these modes extends the reach of women’s influence.  On the contrary, each is merely a means by which women put themselves back in the well-worn box, where they once again find themselves limited by the age-old female subject positions of mother, wife, or object of sexual desire.  

Our voices aren’t worth hearing because we have funny things to say about menstrual cramps or because we can jest about masturbation and then bask in the prurient, marginalizing male attention we’ve provoked.  Our voices are worth hearing because many of us are people who read, think, work, love, hurt, vote, earn, create, and reflect with equal authority alongside men.  And many of those men are more than happy to have thinking women in the writers’ room.