New Women’s Comedy Site Launches: A woman’s version of male-slanted humor sites like Funny or Die and CollegeHumor has arrived! In the midst of the debate over why women represent such a small population of the comedy world comes Comediva, hoping to cater to the different sense of humor that women have compared to men. Erika Cervantes, founder of Comediva, writes in her opening post:
“What makes up a girl’s sense of humor is complex and varies from lady to lady, so it deserves to be explored further in a future column. However, at the risk of making sweeping generalizations, I did learn a few reasons why girls are just different from boys when it comes to funny:
- Boys use humor to one-up each other. Girls use humor to bond with each other.
- Despite our abuse of the phrase LOL, it’s harder to make girls laugh out loud than boys.
- Girls enjoy irony, wordplay, and subtlety, and favor storytelling over joke-telling.”
Oh, it’s not that, “women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is”, as Christopher Hitchens claimed in his then old-fashioned, now antiquated (but still widely referenced) argument that women aren’t funny? Or because, “For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it,” even though Lucille Ball, though extremely funny on camera, didn’t actually write her own stuff? Not sure who Hitchens was referring to in that first statement, or why he was excluding the many contemporary female comedians who “find their own physical decay and absurdity” amusing (see: here and here) but it’s not as though that’s the only place where humor exists. [Read more...]
Female Comedy Writers…Show Yourselves! It’s Women in Comedy Week over at Splitsider, and Sarah Schneider of CollegeHumor 