Everyone knows women are funnier than men. It’s just science, guys, something having to do with chromosomes and sh*t. Heck, is it even possible for men to be funny? That’s the question The Office star Ellie Kemper asked in a piece for GQ‘s Comedy Issue entitled, well, “Ellie Kemper Asks: Can Men Be Funny?”
Reading a chapter from Warren Buffett’s Tap Dancing to Work the other day, I was surprised to find myself chuckling out loud. Now this guy is kind of funny, I thought to myself as I turned the page and grabbed another Danish. This guy is kind of making me laugh. And those thoughts that I had quietly, in my head, to myself, made me realize just how rarely I do have those thoughts in my head. And that thought led me to another thought, which was: why is that? Why, on the whole, are men just not that funny? (Via)
Kemper goes on to list some of her comedy icons — Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, the little lady in Three Men and a Little Lady, and David Bowie in Labyrinth, all ladies — and even begrudgingly throws her support behind a couple of “insightful and amusing…[but not] exactly funny” males, such as Abraham Lincoln and the man who played Phil Spector in HBO’s Phil Spector. But here’s the money graf:
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.
That explains why Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire is my all-time favorite comedic performance. Read the rest here.
(Via GQ)
