Retrospectacle – The Sarah Silverman Of Skepticism

Because recently an article was published in Salon – “Women aren’t funny, redux” in response to an article that Germaine Greer wrote – well, I already summed up my views and the research behind women being funny last year. Here’s a post you might have missed that I wrote way back, in reflection of a Vanity Fair article. I might do this again over the coming weeks with a few fave posts, due to taking a break to work. Enjoy the retrospectacle – K.

“You’re the Sarah Silverman of skepticism, Sturgess. You don’t drink alcohol and you make jokes that people don’t get.” – P.

Hmmph. I think he’s just a grumpy-pants because I had baby octopus for dinner last night… took a photo of it with my phone and sent it to him, with the header “I’M EATING PZ’S BABIES!!!”

I blame Vanity Fair. They challenge the January 2007 essay (check out the video, here) by author and Amaz!ng Meeting presenter several years running, Christopher Hitchens. As you can see in the picture, by beautifully devoting the cover story of the April 2008 edition to investigating the claim – ‘Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?‘. In fact, it wasn’t until recently that recognition of women HAVING a sense of humor was recorded at all (Wickberg, 1998)!

Funnily enough (see, I did warn you… not amused are you?), whilst on holiday, I took some reading with me – an unauthorized biography of Dawn French. It did address one point that the VF article claims: “By and large, however, stand-up comedy is tougher and meaner, and the women who do it play by men’s rules.”

Yes, there has been a regression to a mean (ha… sorry…), but the example of French and Saunders, who started off their comedy careers in clubs, somewhat begs to differ. They were doing skits rather than stand-up, preparing duologues and performing them rather than ‘breaking the fourth wall’:

The Comedy Store opened its doors for the first time on May 19th, 1979. Alexi Sayle, a little-known Liverpudlian comedian with an off-the-wall sense of humor, was hired to be the club’s compère. …[French and Saunders's] act comprised characters in conversation: mother and daughter, lecturer and student, two psychologists discussing sex, Country and Western singers and teenaged girls at a disco…. ‘because French and Saunders’s material was quite strong they didn’t get a lot of heckling. Their stuff was more theatrical, and if you go to see a play you don’t heckle, do you? The audience was quite well behaved with them, but they weren’t with everyone. It was a rough audience.’ (Dawn French: The Unauthorised Biography by Alison Bowyer, pages 78 – 80).

In Australia, many years ago during the ‘Melbourne Comedy boom’, Wendy Harmer the host of the popular ABC show ‘The Big Gig’, wrote ‘It’s A Joke Joyce: Australia’s Funny Women’. The book chronicles the numerous contributions by female comedians from early days of Australian theatre to the current era (up to the late 1980s). Their collective history reflects a range of approaches ranging from direct and internal monologues, skits, ensemble, comedy debates (which are still very popular) and avant garde performances – many comedians like Harmer, Lynda Gibson and Rachel Berger have continued to have highly successful careers well past their performances in the Big Gig days. Wendy Harmer is hitting the screens of the ABC again this month with her new show, ‘Stuff’, which mixes in psychology and social commentary about the funny habits of hoarding.

I was particularly inspired by the statement in the introduction of one of the research papers I looked at -”Laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism.” (Butler, 2000). Is female empowerment through comedy encouraged?

Here in Australia, the third-largest comedy festival in the world, the Melbourne Comedy Festival has just concluded. One festival feature, ‘Upfront’, has exclusively showcased women since 1994 (Upfront 14); there’s a tradition of workshops and specialist talks designed to encourage female comedians (Jeez Louise) and every time I try to count just HOW MANY women were performing out of the three-hundred or so listed, I kept finding more… feel free to figure it out yourself here! I don’t think Australia has really that much of a guilt-trip in regards to not encouraging women comedians, so I hope that a feature in a similar glossy to VF showcases it soon!

Oh – since I mentioned Dawn French – you should check out the series “Girls Who Do Comedy” – which includes Sandra Bernhardt, Jo Brand, Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Rivers, Rita Rudner, Jennifer Saunders, Sarah Silverman, Catherine Tate, Ruby Wax… and more! Here’s the first in a series of nine that’s on YouTube (with much admiration for the blog that showcases them, Women In Comedy):

Back to the VF article though – it seems that Nora Ephron agrees with me in regards to the boom in women becoming comedians: “There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be,” says Nora Ephron, the writer and film director. “But everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Yet after seeing only one Australian comedy on the screens this year so far that features women in prime roles (Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger) - what about comparisons of the ‘big and little’ screen?

… Today’s movie comedies—think of Ellen Pompeo playing sweet and bland in Old School, or Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers—often shortchange women’s roles. “Female parts are underwritten as it is,” says Poehler. “You don’t need to be that funny, so you might as well be good-looking.” It’s oddly cultural but not really much of a mystery: ticket sales are driven by young men (18–24), whereas television, especially network television, is more of a woman’s world. (Female viewers outnumber men by approximately 30 percent during prime time.)

Recent investigations of gender issues involving popular viewing include ‘Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in The Office‘ by Melissa Tyler and Laurie Cohen, who conclude that:

[we agree with ] …Czarniawska’s (2006) claim that ‘there are many reasons to take … popular culture … seriously when studying gender as a social practice’, particularly in terms of its capacity to shape and reflect organizational practices, and to contribute to our understanding of the formation and potential for subversion of those practices, not least (in the example we have considered here) because of its ability simply to unsettle established ways of reading and enacting the gendered organization of doing and being.

I always thought that subversion was a big part of making comedy socially relevant and raising questions about the way the world is run. Certainly it was of interest to the makers of The Aristocrats (who, as revealed by Tim Minchin, are currently creating a documentary on the relationship between skepticism and comedy) when they looked at how and when we cross the line with the ‘world’s dirtiest joke’… as Sarah Silverman herself demonstrates here… open with ladylike care as you may find it’s quite NSFW…

Most of the research I looked at that used comedy as stimuli involved studying the brain’s involvement in emotion. The voluntary facial movements when you make a fake smile, for example. It’s controlled by the pyramidal motor system, which includes the motor cortex. But an involuntary smile, one that is associated with genuine happiness, is governed by the extrapyramidial motor system, which comes from areas beneath the cortex. An example of brain damage, as in these cases of damage in the motor cortex, demonstrates how the subject cannot smile convincingly on command but can smile with happiness (Fig 16.7).

One of the best books I found which investigated gender differences: ‘The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach‘, by Rod A. Martin – a great round-up in this review of the book. The author conducted a study of situations that caused both genders to laugh in every day experiences for a three-day period – no difference in overall frequency but women were more likely to report spontaneously humorous circumstances in social situations (Martin & Kuiper, 1999). Another interpretation by Tannen (1986, 1990) was that ‘women use humor to enhance group solidarity’ whilst men are more into ‘appearing funny’ – leading to reflect upon the different goals regarding social roles (Martin, 2006).

I was then led to wonder whether comedy featuring women was used in experiments when testing responses to humor – mostly skits involving men it seems:

Participants were seated comfortably in a chair and asked to make ratings on a series of film clips varying in emotional content. Each participant then independently viewed a neutral film clip (showing a train moving down a track), followed by a comedy clip, and then followed by five other clips that are not included in this study. The comedy clip was of the contemporary comedian Chris Rock, entitled “Chris Rock: Bring the Pain,” selected on the basis of criteria outlined by Gross and Levenson (1995) to reliably elicit positive emotion. In this segment, Rock discusses a range of topics such as food and relationships. We used the first 11 s of this 4-min clip, which builds up to a clear, initial punch line. This resulted in a stimulus that is well suited for assessing responses, as participants generally are in a neutral state at the start of the 11-s segment (Dress, Kreuz, Link & Caucci, 2008).

There’s studies that look at Eddie Izzard (”Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization” by Glick, 2007 – no, cross dressing doesn’t equal girl), a Monty Python skit (all male, natch – Hubert et al., 1993), and one which I’ve seen used in studies of memory – Mr Bean (Zweyer, Velker and Ruch, 2004).

I kind of liked the fact that research into comedy considers different cultures – the 2006 book “Understanding Humor in Japan”, edited by Jessica Milner Davis which covers many different aspects of humor in Japan, including Osaka’s culture of laughter, Japanese laughter festivals, humor in Japanese newspapers, Japanese comic poetry, Japanese stand up comedy, Japanese sit-down comedy (wouldn’t you love to know?), Japanese wordplay, as well as haiku, waka, kyogen, kyoka, hanashi, and kusuguri. It was one thing I regretted not being ‘fast’ enough to understand during my time in Japan – the intricacy of puns and wordplay where performers would seemingly scattergun phrases at each other at a pace Oscar Wilde would have given his green carnations for!

What about male and female differences regarding sarcasm? The VF article quotes educator Kate Sanborn – “What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws the merry dart or engages in a little sharp-shooting. No, no, it’s dangerous—if not fatal.” Do we avoid wordplay or are we less successful at it than men?

Having briefly discussed the power of irony and sarcasm in an episode of the Reason Driven Podcast, I found one research paper that looked at differences between the Northern and Southern states of the US (Dress, M., Kruez, R., Link, K & Caucci, G., 2008):

The male participants in our study reported using sarcasm more often than the females (according to the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale), a finding consistent with that of Ivanko et al. (2004). However, the male participants were no more likely to provide sarcastic completions than females in the free response task, and they did not choose ironic completions more often in the forced choice task. These results differ somewhat from what would have been expected, based on results of Colston and Lee (2004) and Gibbs (2000).

However, the present study is the only one of these to actually elicit spontaneous sarcasm in a laboratory setting and thus it may provide a more accurate measure of actual use. In addition, it is clear that participants’ self-reports of sarcasm use do not correlate very highly with their actual use of sarcasm. This modest degree of metapragmatic awareness suggests that self-report data may be of limited use in determining the actual rate of sarcasm use and echoes larger concerns about self-report data (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

So – perhaps guys just think they’re funnier than girls? Particularly the criticism that ‘you have to be pretty as well’ that the article raises – just how true is that claim?

“… now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh. At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.”

Although I’ve never had much problem noticing how people can be funny in a labratory setting – which brings me to how Dr Richard Wiseman in 2001, in conjunction with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, created Laugh Lab.

I presented the BAAS with my plans for an international Internet-based project called LaughLab. I would set up a website that had two sections. In one part, people could input their favorite joke and submit it to an archive. In the second section, people could answer a few simple question about themselves (such as age, sex and nationality), and then rate how funny they found various jokes randomly selected from the archive. During the course of the year, we would slowly build a huge collection of jokes and ratings from all around the globe, and be able to discover scientifically what makes different groups of people laugh, and which joke made the whole world smile. – p.175, “The Scientific Search for the World’s Funniest Joke” in Quirkology.

Quite frankly, I can see a lot of potential for future Vanity Fair articles that get into the psychological underpinnings of ‘what’s so funny, Jack and Joyce?’

But then, I’m kind of funny about humor myself – I mean, I thought the following was an outright ridiculous riot… Demi Moore’s new comedic turn as a health advisor… she endorses LEECH therapy… 3.40 min in or so, thanks to AngryNight:

“The highly trained medical leeches…They have a little enzyme that when they are biting down in you, it gets released in your blood and generally you bleed for quite a bit – and your health is optimized… It detoxifies your blood – I’m feeling very detoxified right now.”

Heh.

References:

Butler, J. (2000). Gender Trouble. 10th Anniversary ed. London: Routledge.

Campbell, W. (ed). (2005) Dejong’s The Neurologic Examination, 6th ed., Wolters Kluver Health, Philadelphia, PA.

Dress, M., Kruez, R., Link, K & Caucci, G. (2008 ) Regional variation in the use of sarcasm. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 27(1), 71-85.

Glick, Douglas J. (2007). Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization. Language & Communication, 27(3), 291-306.

Hubert, W., Moeller, M & deJong-Meyer, Pr. (1993). Film-induced amusement changes in saliva cortisol levels. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 18(4), 265-272.

Reed, L.I., Sayette, M. A., and Cohn, J. F. (2007) Impact of depression on response to comedy: A dynamic facial coding analysis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116(4) Nov 2007, 804-809.

Tyler, M & Cohen, L. (2008). Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in ‘The Office’. Gender, Work and Organization, Volume 15, Number 2, pp. 113-132.

Wickberg, D. (1998). The senses of humor: Self and laughter in modern America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Zweyer, K., Velker, B., & Ruch, W. (2004). Do cheerfulness, exhilaration and humour production moderate pain tolerance? A FACS study. In R.A. Martin (Ed.), Sense of Humor and Health [special issue]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 17, 67-84

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