I only have a handful of devoted readers every day (thank you, whoever you are, you lovely people out there in the dahk), so I know none of you are going to go running over to the folks at Vanity Fair, where I work and tell them I’m talkin’ bout my colleague Christopher Hitchens. I think Hitchens is a very fine writer, and I often talk about his stories on this blog, but I must say I am puzzled by his whole “women are not funny” thing, which he continues to insist on even now, in a new video at www.vanityfair.com (where you can see his splendid new make-over up close. Also check out the video of the photo shoot of the comediennes on this month's cover; it's hilarious and glamorous).

Hitchens’ basic premise is deterministic: women don’t need to try to “get laid,” as he puts it, they are lay-able purely by virtue of having um, the parts. Men, on the other hand, must make women laugh in order to get them in the sack. Hence, the entire evolution of humor in men’s balls, er, court.

Oh, and all funny women are either "dykes or Jews," Hitch sez.

Hmmm. Anecdotal evidence is purely anecdotal, and Hitchens dismisses it very quickly, pooh-poohing all those many letters from the VF mailbag he received insisting that “my first cousin Lucy in Sheboygan is funny as shit!” And what about Lucille Ball.

So I’m not going to argue this on anecdotal grounds, although I can’t help thinking of the many times I looked across a crowded room at some delectable slice o’ mancake (hello!) and felt my knees go all wishy washy waaay before I ever knew if he could make me laugh. Sex, when it feels imminent, and urgent, is usually no laughing matter.

No. What strikes me as most flawed in Hitchens' argument is his limited sense of the human need for humor. He claims that he is Jewish (didn't he say that once?), but he obviously can’t be all that Jewish if he thinks humor is only for the singles bars. No, it’s for the concentration camp. And that goes for women, too.

For women, humor is a means of survival. As John and Yoko said, woman is the nigger of the world. And how do we get through? We make each other laugh. Somehow we wind up living longer than men, which I guess you could call the last laugh.

(p.s. If Hitchens is just kidding—I'm still not sure—oh, ok, I get it; sort of.)
(p.p.s. Man walks into a bar. Says “Women aren’t funny.” All the other men take him seriously. Ha, ha…)