These Tired Jokes About Women Have Never Been Funny, So Why Does Every Single Male Comedian Make Them?
Male stand-up comedians: these jokes about women aren't funny today and they weren't 20 years ago, either.
Kathy Hutchins | Shutterstock, IOFOTO | Canva Behold the spotlight, the microphone. The audience, hushed in anticipation. The music as he (usually he, sometimes she) walks to the empty stage.
Then, the opening joke. Funny, we hope, but like a child beholding a mound of Christmas presents, we know there is so much more to come. We don’t mind unwrapping them one by one. Savoring the set-up, the slow reveal.
I love me some good stand-up comedy. Because let’s face it — the world is horrible these days. Stand-up won’t save us, but at least it can make us laugh. Except when it’s not that funny.
There are an increasing number of male stand-up comedians who go around peddling the same old tired jokes about women that weren’t all that funny 20 years ago and are even less funny now.
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When I watch stand-up comedy, I want to laugh. I am primed to laugh, I am there to laugh. I’m either buying two drinks and paying a cover for the explicit purpose of laughing, or I’ve bypassed whatever drama series everyone is talking about because I need a break from the travails of messed-up rich people who take themselves too seriously, and I want to — yep, you guessed it — laugh.
Sometimes, jokes don’t land, and that’s okay. Sometimes I don’t connect with a comedian’s sense of humor, and that’s okay, too. Sometimes I cringe right up to a punchline, then explode into laughter because the joke went somewhere wholly unexpected. That’s not only okay — that’s brilliant.
Other times, I cringe right up to a punchline and don’t laugh at all. Usually, this is when a male comedian builds a whole bit out of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” premise. Usually, he is making one of the following points:
Women care a lot about silly things
Aaah, the tried and true comedic bit — the overbearing female partner who is engaged in some silly project, like planning a wedding or redecorating the house.
She wants her male partner’s input and then gets mad when he says he doesn’t care. And why should he care about the paper stock of the wedding invitations or the color of the kitchen sink backsplash? After all, he’s busy doing Important Man Things.
I guess I don’t understand why it’s funny when a woman tries to involve her partner in a few of the hundreds of thousands of decisions she must make while running a household.
Seth Meyers thought it was funny in Lobby Baby, a stand-up special that purports to pay tribute to his wife and even includes some perceptive and self-deprecating stories about mansplaining. But it also includes a whole bit about… yep, wedding invitations. The takeaway is: Isn’t it funny that she cares about something so trivial, and even more funny that she wants to engage me in the conversation, and even more funny that she gets mad when I don’t care? My Man Brain cannot compute.
Ha ha ha?
In his mostly very funny special, Crazy Good, Neal Brennan purports to be making fun of himself and his inability to emotionally connect, but in the process, he sure makes all his girlfriends seem superficial and annoying! Like that, we have silly fears and prattle on about things that sound to him like, “Yawk, yawk, yawk, yawk.”
And while we’re on the topic, can I ask why men always feel the need to imitate women in ways that make us sound like total bimbos? I get that we tend to have higher voices, but that doesn’t mean we’re all valley girls who speak in sing-songy falsetto.
Women are emotional and difficult
I’ve watched a total of about 10 TikTok videos in my life, and that’s more or less enough for me. But one video by thatnickpowersguy (which I tragically can no longer find to embed here directly), made me hate the platform just a little bit less. That’s because it combined three of my favorite things: stand-up comedy, the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” song (my karaoke go-to), and a man calling another man out for saying boneheaded things about women.
I don’t know who the stand-up comedian in question is, and I’m not particularly motivated to see more of his work. In the clip, he does a bit based on the hilarious premise that men have a hard time understanding what women want because women themselves don’t know what they want.
“And here’s how much women do that,” he says. “There’s a song by the Spice Girls where the entire time it’s just someone asking a woman what she wants … and she never answers.”
To which thatnickpowersguy fires back:
If he had just listened to that very next lyric, he would have known that the Spice Girls literally say what they want in the song. It’s the chorus of the song.
And the bar is low here. They don’t ask for much. ‘If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends… If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give.’ Like, that’s literally the chorus of that song. So all told, this comedy bit tries to use that song to prove that women don’t say what they want, but it ends up proving that women do say what they want, and it’s the cishet men who can’t listen to it.
Touché, thatnickpowersguy, touché.
The flip side of the oh-so-tired “women are difficult” trope is the punchline that revolves around the premise, “I’m a clueless dude, and isn’t that funny?” Many of the guys who build bits around this premise do seem to possess enough self-awareness to understand that they are engaging in behaviors that are not particularly helpful and sometimes downright stupid.
Sometimes, I’ve even laughed quite hard at some of these bits — like this one, in which Jim Breuer gets wasted the night before he’s supposed to “babysit” his children in the morning. The physical comedy he engages in to show what it’s like to be hungover and woken up at the crack of dawn by three young children is indeed quite hilarious.
But, there is a but. The comedic tension here hinges on Breuer’s portrayal of his wife as naggy and annoying, but also right.
Which is funny… until you stop to think about it. Because if I were counting on my spouse to watch the kids in the morning and he stumbled in at 3 a.m. drunk, I wouldn’t be laughing at all. And if I were subsequently reduced to a nag onstage so that the audience could laugh at my spouse’s oh-so-cute and childish antics, I really wouldn’t be laughing.
It’s funny to use bad words as synonyms for “woman”
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I don’t want to be rude or anything, but… can hetero dudes please stop referring to women as these things? It’s a word that male entertainers still feel completely entitled to use, and a word that the mainstream media continues to label as “okay” for prime time.
Of course, there are different ways to use the word. It can serve as a synonym for “complain.” It can be used as an expletive, sometimes preceded by another curse word to describe someone (usually a woman) who’s acting mean. It can be repurposed by women as a term of endearment, or even empowerment, particularly when preceded by “bad.” Very rarely, it is used to describe a female who is also a literal dog.
But far more often, it’s used by males as a synonym for a female who is a literal human. Sometimes, in this latter case, it’s preceded by a possessive pronoun, which is even worse.
And in case you don’t want to hear a middle-aged white lady lecture you on why this is offensive, take it from one of my all-time favorite stand-up comedians W. Kamau Bell. In his book, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell, he talks about a female friend who asks him why he referred to a girl in a joke as a “little one.” He responds, “Because it’s funny.”
Bell continues to defend his use of the word, even after his friend points out that “every time you say ‘that word,’ you are linked to every other man and specifically every other Black man who uses that word as a way to refer to all women, no matter who they are and what they do.”
And though Bell is still convinced that his use of the word is funny, he decides to do something radical — to listen to his female friend and take another approach. And guess what? He ends up getting the same laugh. Maybe even a bigger laugh, he says.
Some might point to this as an example of Bell caving to his critics, for not standing up for what he believes in. I beg to differ. It’s an example of Bell listening to a woman whom he both respects and considers a part of his core audience.
It’s an example of him doing some difficult self-reflection, getting over his defensiveness, and trying something new. Stand-up comedians are trying new things all the time based on how their audiences react. That doesn’t mean they’re caving to their audiences. They’re listening and gathering feedback, trying to figure out what gets the biggest laugh. It’s part of the art.
If only Chris Rock had run any of the material in his last special by a female friend with whom he had a relationship based on mutual respect. Maybe his mother or daughters?
Casual references to women, as these are bad enough, but freely interchanging “woman” with her intimate parts, is just … gross. It not only reduces a woman to a single body part but also reveals Rock’s shamelessly outdated take on male-female power dynamics.
He insists that women have all the power, but this so-called “power” has no basis in our merit. It’s only because we possess a hole that he wants to stick himself into. Rock eloquently sums up his fraught relationships with women this way:
And every dime I have ever made I have spent it on women. Every cent! Every dime. Getting their hair done, getting the taxes done, getting the son into camp, getting the tooth fixed, getting the driveway done, getting their mama some life insurance, getting them bunion surgery.
Like I said… gross. Even just copying and pasting that bit made me vomit just a little in my mouth.
That so many male stand-up comedians still think it’s funny to objectify, trivialize, and ridicule women is not the only problem. In an industry that is 89% male, women also aren’t getting a chance to share their side of the story.
And for all the charmingly clueless, hungover dads up there on stage — who routinely receive thunderous applause when they mention they have children — there are even fewer moms. Being a female stand-up comedian is hard enough, but being a female stand-up comedian and a working mom?
Ali Wong aside, most of the female stand-up comedians I can name with kids don’t have male partners (or exes) to ridicule because their partners aren’t… well, male. What I adore about, say, Wanda Sykes’ and Tig Notaro’s takes on partnership and parenthood is that they can find humor in the specific dynamics of their specific relationships. Since they don’t have the option of falling back on tired “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” clichés, they end up crafting stories that are both funnier and more true.
As Seth Meyers acknowledges, his partner never has a chance to share her perspective. “One of the things my wife loves about the law,” he says, “is each side gets to make their case. And we were talking about how that’s so different from my job, where I get to come out here and just give my side of the case.”
He’s right. It’s what men have been doing throughout centuries — giving their side of the case. That means that they have the opportunity to continue perpetuating notions of women as superficial, difficult, emotional, one-dimensional, and impossible to understand.
They also have the opportunity to perpetuate notions of women as multi-dimensional human beings who have a lot to say if and when anyone cares to listen. Some, like Kamau Bell, are taking full advantage of this opportunity.
Some, like Seth Meyers, are trying but still missing the mark. And some, like Chris Rock, are stubbornly doubling down.
I’m not calling on those in the latter groups to get heckled or (gasp!) canceled. I am calling on them to talk less and listen more, to be curious, to sit down and have some real conversations with the women in their lives. I bet they would walk away with some food for thought and some genuinely original material for their next special.
As I said, the world is bad right now. I want to laugh. I need to laugh. So please, I beg of you, go forth and make me.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.