“[Unbelievably Beautiful] Women Aren’t Funny”: Progress Through Modifiers?

A few months ago I wrote, “Today, no one who is relevant doubts that women are funny, at least not out loud.” And here we are in 2015 and Important Men are making casual declarations that only certain types of women aren’t funny. In this case, unbelievably beautiful women. Progress?

Michael Eisner, in “honoring” Goldie Hawn last week, said “usually, unbelievably beautiful women, you being an exception, are not funny.” [He at least had the foresight to note, “boy am I going to get in trouble, I know this goes online.” Yes, you are in trouble.] And the media has responded by listing beautiful funny women. We’ve been down this road before.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens’ infamous Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” was published. People forget the first word in that title, which is a shame, because if anything is more objectionable than the assertion that women aren’t funny, it is the reasons Hitchens gave for that assertion. The essay is gone from the internet, so let me summarize (or you can see Hitchens’ own pull quotes in his 2008 follow-up piece):

1. Women don’t need to be funny to convince men to have sex with them, so they never develop the talent.
2. The onus of childbirth makes women too serious to be funny.

These ideas were mostly ignored, a) because they are terrible b) because we were too busy responding by listing all the funny women out there. Listing funny women is a good thing. We should be celebrating all the women in comedy. But the knights of the patriarchy are always going to respond with, at best, “maybe those women are funny, but they’re exceptional.”

Or they’ll shut it down with the nuclear option: “those women are funny, but they aren’t beautiful.” Because a woman who is not beautiful has no other relevant qualities. She might as well not exist.

This was gloriously satirized in the instant classic television episode Twelve Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer, where the jurors debate if Amy Schumer is hot enough to have her own tv show. This episode expands on an earlier sketch where a focus group is asked about the content of the show but will only talk about whether or not they’d do its star. All evaluations of women are eclipsed by one question: “could she get it?”

So it really isn’t all that helpful to say, “but these funny women COULD get it!” I don’t need your list of beautiful funny women. Even if you do an admirable job including women who don’t all look the same. And even if you frame it as “funny is beautiful.” You’re perpetuating the idea that beauty is the be-all end-all decider of a woman’s worth.

Going back to Hitchens’ horrible reasons for his horrible opinions, the idea that beautiful women aren’t funny (which is distinct from the also-pervasive belief that funny women aren’t beautiful, to be examined at another time) suggests that women only develop their qualities to please men. [Forgive me, this whole conversation is incredibly cis- and heteronormative.] The idea is that beautiful women are empty shells, never bothering to become smart or funny or athletic or good at parallel parking because they’ve already achieved the ultimate goal: fuckability. Goldie Hawn responded to Eisner that maybe she’s an exception to his beautiful funny women rule because she was an “ugly duckling.” Basically, in her early years, she had to bother to cook up a personality, which fortunately stuck around after she became unbelievably beautiful.

In this equation, a woman has no worth if she isn’t doable, but if she is too doable, we must also assume she has no “real” worth.

Listen carefully: A woman is not the way she is because of how appealing that makes her to others. A woman is the way she is because that is who she is. We have complex identities. We are made up by qualities outside of and unrelated to our do-ability. We are people.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer and founding member of the unbelievably beautiful all-female comedy troupe Frankly Scarlett.