主播大秀

It was terribly painful to watch Ruby Wax descending into vulgarity. Does she have to appear on Newsnight, or any other TV programme for that matter?

Oh dear, Christopher Hitchen's attempts to link female humour to labour in childbirth are more reminiscent of men trapped by constipation. He reminds of the dominant old uncle of yesteryear whose jokes go down like a lead balloon over the turkey and he spends the time over the christmas pudding and the mince pies trying to retrieve and resurrect the joke. Thank God we could all sneak off to the parlour to listen to Beryl Reid, Irene Handel and June Whitfields and laff our socks off!

I posted my comments last night, in a rage, immediately after seeing this for real. About three other people also posted. Are our comments going to be transferred into this blog? As Connected Eric said in yesterday's blog, why this fragmentation? In any case, four comments in 17 hours doesn't look like massive interest.

Oh dear - poor Christopher Hitchens did indeed come across like an embarrassing uncle at Christmas. Only one slightly the worse for wear after dinner. He couldn't even remember half of his claims and kept qualifying statements with "Oh, no perhaps I should have said this at the beginning" and worst of all actually contradicted himself and relied on Jeremy - who was happily watching him dig a hole - to help him get his words in order. It takes a lot to make Ruby Wax look good...

Women just aren't natural born comics.They go into long and rambling digressions and always make a mess of the punchline.Men always love to feel they are the life and soul of the party.Jokes are often a disguised form of aggression-wasn't it Freud who said something like "there is no such thing as a joke"?
Actually there's nothing more of a turn off than a man who thinks he's funny,but isn't.Thats not so much embarrassing as cringe-making.

Why on earth you dragged Ruby Wax into the programme none of us will
ever know. She could not make a decent living in the U.S.A so she came over. I don't think she is funny
and has no idea what a sense of humour
is. A sense of humour depends on age
circumstances & other extraneous
factors. We what we laugh at when we
ten is quite different we what we
laught at 70 years later.

Maurice Nadin

Chris was just provoking women (and men) for a bit of fun...and it makes us all think about these things for a few minutes before we go back to our boring lives. Of course men try to be as funny as possible to attract women, just as they try to do lots of things - explore rainforests, win Olympic medals, land on the moon. That's why there are more male comedians, explorers, athletes, dictators, etc. We're all driven to achieve in good or misguided ways to impress the girls and sow our seed. Then the woman we are trying to attract just yawn and laugh at us and burst our bubble. It's the old dance of life that makes the world go round. Don't take it so seriously.

Dear Christopher,

Fortunate for those dying in the Middle East that your energies have been drawn away from the mental gymnastics involved in attempting to justify support for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

David Lebor

If Lesley in Comment 3 wants to create a bit of continuity in these somewhat chaotic threads she could cut and paste her comments into different threads, if she has time. It seems as though we are only being monitored by a robot. ALTHOUGH, it was good to read the comments of an author scattered amongst the punters in the Ethical Man thread. Come on Newsnight, what about about a bit of interaction from your celebrity stars?
I can't wait all day to kiss the hem. I'm only here because my old Mac over the other side of the room is so slow at producing the groundwork for this year's christmas cards, for my other half to do the creative work. If only we had had blogging when I worked in a cardboard box factory 40 years ago watching a machine spewing out British Lion Egg cartons at the same rate that my Mac does christmas cards. Life would have been joyful and I needn't have joined the union.
Seriously though, ( as David Frost said on TW3 ) I think it is a wonderful service.

Perhaps you should have asked George Galloway's opinion on this ?

I'm afraid this was a just a massive expose of Hitchin's own prejudices.He obviously doesn't think women are intelligent enough to be funny.

Hitchins just wrote a rather insulting wind-up-piece for the British edition of what in the US is an intelligent magazine mostly aimed at women. British publishers currently seem to think women have no intelligence and are interested solely in gossip, despite more of us being graduates, and our being increasingly the majority of members of respected professions, so their magazines are closing down.

Ruby Wax just threw away another opportunity other, British women would have made more of. She just took the chance to make a sexual pass and reinforce her lewd reputation.

Comedy deserves better consideration [1]. Women have to be very careful in using it, in case they make enemies, unless they have some protection, such as being professionally obliged to use it. But comedy is an immensely valuable tool in lubricating social adjustments, both personal and wider. When we share laughter we join in a common peer group. When we laugh together at contradictions or incongruities we jointly share the experience of them and defuse them. Obviously those who have a special need to be accepted may try more to use humour, but to suggest, as Hitchins apparently did, that others lack the ability, is foolish.

Women, tending to be much more skilled with language, are capable of being at least as humourous as men. But we mostly reserve it for between friends, and hope the vast social changes going on around us will happen despite the lack of the lubrication that our humour might provide.

There was an interesting 主播大秀 Four series recently [2] in which Dawn French spoke with various women humourists, and noted that there has been no second wave of British female professional stand-ups to follow her's, despite once great expectations. That has been a sad loss, but the fashion for television to instead use "comedy of embarrassment" ('The Office', 'League of Gentlemen', 'Little Britain', 'Green Wing', 'Nighty Night', 'The Mighty Boosh', 'Tittytittybangbang', 'Scrubs', 'Desperate Housewives', etc.) offers a more than adequate explanation. Most women don't want to be embarrassed, or to witness embarrassment or similar pain. We empathise more [3], and feel embarrassment too intensely to enjoy such performances. I would guess many men feel the same, so one would then have to ask if, because audiences are restricted, if "comedy of embarrassment" fulfills society's need for the assistive lubrication that humour can provide. Perhaps the anaethetic effect of alcohol is being used instead, and the increasingly angry non-lubricated "voices" of social conflict are the result?

[1]
[2] /comedy/dawnfrench/
[3]

Somebody send Christopher a DVD of Nighty Night.

I wish I could meet some of these witty Englishmen that Mr.Hitchins describes.Since I came to UK from Italy I have heard always the schoolboy humour and the double entendres.Also I have found that there are many things you cannot make jokes about with Englishman-his car football(especially during world cup).Pub is OK for jokes,but not if you say he has drunk too much beer.You can make jokes about his clothes but not shoes,especially if endorsed by David Beckham or similar.Also some subjects like mother in law are good for jokes,but only if made by him.
I cannot wait to get back to Trieste.

that the best funny woman the bbc could apparently find to debate hitchens was the godawful ruby wax just (wrongly) reinforces hitchens' nonsensical and quite unintentionally hilarious argument. way to go, bbc! thanks!

amazingly however she still managed to make hitchens look even worse than he usually does. hitchens could have been debating a bag of sand strapped with a pair of fake breasts and still looked like a complete fool. he was actually quite reminiscent of boris johnson at various points in this debate, for god's sake

all the best cooks in the world are men,and so are all the comedians,
as a poll on channel 4 will prove eventually any way. but i could be wrong men are funny in the company of woman its a courtship thing.

Lesley Boatwright: "I posted my comments last night, in a rage...."

....which just goes to add to Hitchens' claim, don't you think?

"Women are into astrology and thats funny". well I believe most of the Astrologers are men. What I do find funny is that people are usually referring to "Western Astrology" when they say astrology. One of the funniest incidents I remember was when an American woman who was living in Bangalore said that Indian Astrology is superstitions and western astrology is more scientific. On being asked which western scientists endorse this view she didn't have an answer. There is defenitely a sense of hidden insult when it comes to humour. Humour is alsways at the cost of something. Women make jokes about men forgetting to do the simplest of things, men make fun of women because they remember birthdays. Westerners make fun of Indians because things are not organized and Indians make fun of westerners that they need an instruction manual to close the lid of a water bottle.

This entire debate is absolute rubbish,
Being funny is not gender specific, in my opinion women are funnier, because as a woman I identify more with other women. Perhaps a man would say the opposite. Rubbish!