Women Aren’t Funny

The lesson you learned from a sexual harassment seminar was “Don’t hire chicks.” Do you hate working with women?

Adam Corolla: 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.”

The “are women funny” debate has grown very contentious. You’re not worried about reactions to this?

Adam Corolla: 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. -NY Post Interview. June 16, 2012

Women just aren’t funny and that’s why it’s hilarious when a man makes a joke about unfunny women. Funny because it’s true, amiright? Or it’s not funny, never intended to be, and is just another piece of meaningless drivel designed to drive up Google hits for a comedian who performs like an asshole named, “punch hole.”

At least Adam didn’t try to the evolutionary social science angle that Christopher Hitchens descended into in 2007 as means to increase his street reputation as a schmarmy asshole. I have a great deal of love for the late Hitchens but it was nowhere to be found when I watched his smug sexism collide with his reputation as being a known “rationalist” into a piece of work desperately beneath his cognitive ability.

We’ve all kind of known that the “women aren’t funny” trope is designed to further a dude’s career through contrived controversy.What kills me about Adam Carolla is the fact that his schtick has not changed over the years and he keeps at it because it works somehow. He got his break on Dr. Drew where sex advice meant belittling and bullying virtually every woman, queer, and non-normative individual who called in asking a question by either Drew’s misinformed and horribly biased medical gaze or by Adam’s school yard humiliation monologues.

Then he went on to The Man Show with Jimmy Kimmel. Unlike his former co-host who has taken on a much more mellow and less misogynistic and more mature persona, Carolla is dedicated to being that guy at the party who was a weeping twat sore long before he got drunk on the shitty beer. It makes the idea that “women just aren’t funny” even more insulting because it’s clear just how little Carolla can sail on by virtue of being a dude. It’s obvious just how little work he has ever put into comedy and how content he is to keep partying like those frat boy years he’s always envied.

Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe a fraternity should deem Adam Carolla an honorary member so he can party with his peer group year after year watching the pledges get younger and younger. They can store him with the panties in the trophy closet and depend on him to get the kegs. The older alums can come back and laugh awkwardly at their memories and even more awkwardly at the dude in the panty closet who still thinks it’s hilarious to draw a penis in Sharpie on people who are sleeping, regardless of whether they’re just sleeping, drunk, or even dead. LULZ!

That’s the punchline of privilege: being able to say some insipid tripe of the very worst kind and sell a bunch of airport copies of a crappy book that’s going to occupy shelves of Goodwill book sections for decades. Women just aren’t funny and that’s why men get paid to buzz in people’s ears.