peterbyrnes:

The formidable @trixieboots has responded to the recent piece by @witstreamdotcom on women in humor. I promised Trix when we started to have a debate/discussion on the piece on Twitter (which was maddening due to the forced brevity) that if she would create a tumblr account to say her piece, I…

I shall attempt to respond here without referencing my extensive experience in Vietnamese guerilla warfare.  But the ‘Nam never leaves you, my friends.

I recognize that the focus of Witstream’s original post was to argue for Twitter’s relevance as a medium for emerging female comic voices.  Embedded in this argument was, as you’ve noted, a list of things women, specifically, are funny about.  Omitted from this list was anything outside the domestic or corporeal (that’s Vietnamese for “body-related”).  I find this a troubling omission, and I chose to address it.  This doesn’t mean I missed the point of the post.  It means I found this a troubling omission, and I chose to address it.

Certainly it’s the case that comedy—like so many facets of culture—has been dominated by elites, and what that has meant in many cases is male, Harvardian (a word I learned in Danang), and white.  That’s not the same as saying it’s gendered.  By gendered, I mean referring to gender or referring to issues that are stereotypically associated with a particular gender.  Politics is male-dominated, yes, and political humor is therefore dominated by a perspective that has historically been male.  This is not what I mean by “gendered,” as my examples of fart, burp, sports, and hardware jokes illustrate pretty clearly.

I disagree emphatically with the claim that this kind of discussion is “sad” because it opens conversation about productive and unproductive avenues for women’s activism.  I know others have made this claim, and I disagree emphatically with them as well.  It’s hard for me to see how civilized discussion of what constitutes activism is inherently anti-activist.  I don’t want to see women’s voices reduced to bodies, particularly given the new, liberatingly disembodied media that are available for us to make those voices heard.

This is not to say that bodies aren’t funny or that there isn’t a place for things like scatological and sexual humor.  My point was that the upper echelons of entertainment power—especially the Conan and Letterman examples originally cited—aren’t dominated by these modes.  If the question is how women break into these arenas, I doubt that mastering the fart joke is going to do the trick.

I have to get back to my day job, so I’ll make one last point.  I don’t disagree with Witstream’s original claim that Twitter opens up new possibilities for women to express their senses of humor.  I do think that it’s also a place where women rehearse many of the same old behaviors—such as exhibitionism—that make it difficult to move forward.  So there are new and exciting things going on there, and there are old and depressing things going on there.  If you’re looking for “a rather sad and profound irony,” there it is.

(via peterbyrnes-deactivated20111211)