I Don't Think That's Very Funny

Women aren’t funny – men are constantly telling me so.

I get everything: colds, cockroaches, toothache, prank calls, parking tickets, reduce fats leaflets, rare Mongolian influenzas.. The only things I don’t get are bloke’s jokes. I’m constantly whisking the smile off a room full of male faces with lines like, “Oh, and then what happened?” or “Is that it?” or “Could you explain that a bit about the hunchback Mexican’s homosexual Rottweiler once more?”.Needless to say, the reason I don’t get bloke’s jokes because I’m female. And women ain’t funny. I know because men are constantly telling me so. Of course, there’s been the old flukes – Mae West, Dorothy Parker, Whoopi Goldberg, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Saunders..but as Mother Nature is female – and as we all know, “whim” is the plural of women – there’s always the odd exception to the rule.

Oh, we do tell some jokes: Why are women so bad at maths? Because they’re always being told that three inches equal 10. How do you get rid of cockroaches? Tell them you want a long term relationship. Why “dumb blonde” jokes are are always one-liners? Why do we need female astronauts? So that when the crews get lost in the space, someone will ask for directions. Trouble is, even if we know jokes, we just can’t tell them very well.

I was at a party recently where the men, ignoring the carefully interwoven seating plan, craned around their female companions in a boisterous “Have you heard the one about….?” Elbowing her way into his scrum, one of the female guests finally got up to the nerve to share something that had given her a bad attack of the ha, ha’s – a promo sign hanging outside a health club. Fat and ugly? It read. Want to be just ugly? While the other women present impaled themselves on their swizzle sticks with mirth, their male partners swapped bewildered glances “See?” shrugged her hubby, puncturing our pleasure. “Women aren’t just funny.” A perfect instance for a women not telling a joke – because she’s married to one.

One of the greatest differences between the sexes (and there are many, believe me) is our sense of humour. The men I know don’t seem to tell jokes so much as detonate them; firing off rounds of wisecracks – black-belt masters in the art of tongue-fu. The highlights of a “Girl’s Night Out” is not the pelvic gyrations of some jocks-strapped hunks, but stripped off to our emotional undies; a psychological striptease that reveals all. Of course, one of the reasons men don’t want to admit that women might be funny is because they’re terrified of what we’re being funny about. Boys, to put you at ease, let me just say that on our all-girl gatherings, we don’t just discuss length…we also talk about width. But mostly we just sit around being Humourless Feminists. Speaking of which – how many feminists does it take to tell a joke? Two. One to make the joke and the other to say, “I don’t think that very funny.”

-nur dhiya Abdullah-