In 2012, TV host and podcaster Adam Carolla gave an interview to the New York Post and said the following:
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.”
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.
Those comments were turned into “women aren’t funny”, and a variety of female comedians you’ve never heard of spent paragraph after paragraph of the Huffington Post slamming Carolla for being sexist, racist, and whatnot.
Never mind the fact that he didn’t say “women aren’t funny”.
In fact, he highlighted some very funny women and some comparatively unfunny women.
on the left: funny woman
on the right: unfunny woman
any questions?
But like I said — never mind that fact, because some female comedians wanted him to come right out and say “women aren’t funny” just so they could criticize him.
There’s more to gain from that than from critically analyzing what was actually said.
Huffington Post also has a comedy section called HuffPost Comedy, and this was their #JokeoftheDay:
And they said women aren’t funny…
But you get it…right?
Doing X is bad because…wait for it…doing X is bad!
Cuz the person doing X is bad!
*hyuk hyuk hyuk*
It was dumb when it was first said on Weekend Update almost two decades ago when Clinton was in office (“Bill Clinton chairing a panel on sexual harassment in the workplace is like having Clinton chair a panel on sexual harassment in the workplace!”) and now it’s even dumber.
It’s like having a comedian say “come on…COME ON!” at the end of a joke to raise the audience reaction from comatose to vegetable.
It doesn’t matter who this is from — a man, a woman, or a 5-year-old.
The premise is that you have to think of Ted Cruz as being evil/incompetent/etc or Bill Clinton as horny/sexually harassing…and that’s it. No misdirect, no punchline, no story, no reaction, no dirty limerick, just “X is bad because X is bad!”
It’s not a joke. It’s a repetitive statement.
Standing on stage and farting has more variety than this.
If you were trapped on a desert island after a plane crash with other similarly-unfortunate passengers and you said “eating shoe leather jerky is as bad as…eating shoe leather jerky!” you’d be the next meal, and rightfully so.
Worst of all, you’re making a joke in an echo chamber.
You’re telling a joke about a Republican politician to an overwhelmingly non-Republican audience (HuffPo).
That’s the opposite of edgy.
That’s a Borscht Belt comedian making a mother-in-law wisecrack at a ski resort in the Poconos.
That’s Larry the Cable Guy saying “GIT R DONE” to a Little Rock audience.
At least those people are playing characters — unless “rejected Press Correspondents Dinner writer” is a character.
P.S. I went through Jen Kirkman’s Twitter to see if she was really funny.
She is not.
Go to Megan Amram’s Twitter instead. Jen Kirkman retweets her. She is *actually* funny.
