Are men funnier than women? In Hitchens’ Why Women Aren’t Funny, a number of opinionated remarks are expressed through drawing a line between men and women in terms of humor. Hitchens claims that “the chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.” On the other hand, he states that “women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. What is his standard of such baseless generalizing this? This brings in the concept of sexism, because he’s saying that men appeal to women by making them laugh, but women don’t need to put such effort in humor because they themselves already provide pleasure, which in this case, is highly likely meaning their body figure and sex. He then establishes his credibility to the readers by backing up his blunt argument with his own personal experience, Hitchens writes men “had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life.” As he continues to expose his odd and biased thoughts, he attempts to logically appeal and therefore references a scientific study that highlights the distinction of men and women’s reactions towards humor.

In the middle of his argument, Fran Lebowitz asserts, “for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty.” This is definitely not true. Someone being judged as pretty, handsome, or cute does not need any sort of ability whereas making someone laugh takes great amount of effort. Furthermore, he contends that his “argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians” and that he’s not saying “women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians.” However, he has already made claims that males are dominant in comedy and even looked down on one of the female poet and satirist Dorothy Parker by questioning “ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?” Moreover, it is said in the writing that “humor is a sign of intelligence.” This is somewhat true, but again, his generalization is ridiculous– if women aren’t funny, then are we all fools?