Adam Carolla was interviewed by Larry Getlen of the NY Post for his new book, “Not Taco Bell Material”. The interview has drawn fire for the claim that “women aren’t funny”—a claim Adam Carolla never made.
Q: The lesson you learned from a sexual harassment seminar was “Don’t hire chicks.” Do you hate working with women?
A: No. But they make you hire a certain number of chicks, and they’re always the least funny on the writing staff. The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”
First of all, the question is stupid. Obviously Carolla doesn’t hate working with women—one-half of his podcast team is Alison Rosen, who he hired to be his co-host on his broadcast on his network (therefore under no pressure from outside or above).
Carolla makes a fine point about how far political correctness has gone with hiring based on quota instead of hiring based on talent. When you’re hiring talent, and you’re hamstrung on the talent you can hire—quality will decrease.
Q: The “are women funny” debate has grown very contentious. You’re not worried about reactions to this?
A: I don’t care. When you’re picking a basketball team, you’ll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you’re playing the odds. When it comes to comedy, of course there’s Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re playing the odds? No.
If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they’d be off TV. They’re not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we’d know who she was? Honestly.
The backlash has been nil over saying how you’re more likely to find a talented black basketball star than a talented Jewish one—because it’s a simple observation.
Carolla never said “women aren’t funny”. He said that there are more funny men than women, here are some very funny women, I hate having to be told who to hire due to political correctness.
However, bloggers like Jeb Lund of Gawker (formerly “Mobutu Sese Seko”) have responded the following way:
Then Carolla dropped the worn-out observation that “women aren’t funny,” a gimme quote so stupid that thrashing it should have been idiotproof. Instead, columnists framed the issue as “unfunny comedian says dumb thing,” as if his comic bona fides had some bearing on the fact that he’s a dickhead.
A “gimme quote”…that Carolla never said. A “worn-out observation”…that Carolla never made.
Carolla made a bozo misogynist statement, and the worst thing it does is reframe the discussion as a referendum on his career.
Except that he never made that statement.
[Carolla is] a podcaster who used to mock people via puppets and talk to strangers about dick diseases. Not only does this compare apples to oranges, it might as well have been designed to obscure the fact that Carolla made a self-evident universally shit-for-brains remark. That’s the only referendum you need.
Except that he never made that remark.
With luck, maybe that will spill over into an acknowledgement that—despite the considerable way left to go—we’re living in a phenomenal time for women comedy writers. In the 1990s, nobody outside a writers’ room knew who Jennifer Crittenden was, even as she wrote episodes for the golden age of The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Today, Megan Ganz is a “household” name for Community fans online, while Tina Fey and Amy Poehler approach beatification.
Carolla cites women who he thinks are funny, gets slammed as saying “women aren’t funny”. Lund cites one of the same women he thinks is funny, but couches it in an article describing Carolla as having “wiry hair that kinda looks like a plumber’s snake, because at least having his head up his ass can fix his being full of shit”, and gets backpats for it.
Hell, with a little more luck, we might stumble into a discussion about how women are funny, and women are also unfunny.
Hell, Carolla already had that discussion, and you slammed him as saying “women aren’t funny” when he never said that.
To anyone observant, they’re pretty obvious. That’s what’s ultimately so damning about Carolla’s sexist condemnation. His job is observation, and his career is built on trading in the obvious. When you’re a master of the obvious, you don’t have an excuse for failing to grasp it.
Unless you’re just throwing 50 percent of the world under the bus to boost book sales. In which case you are fucking garbage.
What’s so damning is that Lund fails to grasp the obvious—down to not even quoting Carolla correctly and therefore missing his entire point.
Let’s see here—Carolla responds to a question by saying he thinks women are funny, cites women he thinks are funny, cites women he thinks aren’t funny, and then criticizes politically-correct, affirmative-action hiring systems for talent that should be replaced by talent-based hiring systems.
How that is “throwing 50 percent of the world under the bus to boost book sales” is beyond me.
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Carolla could say the word “women” and the word “funny” and get criticized, whether he talks about women who are funny or women who are not. Any statement he makes is couched as “anti-woman!” which is simple hysterics and reveals a simple bias: that there are people out there who are just brainwashed to be anti-Carolla, the truth be damned.
