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Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Matt Yglesias cozies up to the National Review in the name of male solidarity
Posted by Jill | 1:12 PM

What on earth flavor of Republican Kool-Aid was Big Media Matt drinking this week? Or did they slip an elephantine rufie into his drink?

Warren Bell in The National Review Online offers an observation I can get behind: Women aren't as funny as men. Or, at least, most funny people are men, which lets us avoid trying to calculate average humorousness across large populations. Phoebe Maltz protests that she's funny so Bell is full of shit. But one counterexample does not a statistical irregularity prove. Lisa Leslie is a better basketball player than most men (obviously I could take her, but most...) , but that doesn't change the fact that men are better at basketball on the whole. I can't tell what causal mechanism Bell is trying to argue for here. My friend Dave thinks it's because women are too nice. I think the culprit is, pretty clearly, the tendency of magazines to print photographs of attracted women accompanied by commentary from the women in question asserting that she's looking to meet someone funny. This creates incentives all out of proportion to reality for men to try and funnify themselves.

Speaking as someone who considers himself to be pretty funny (people who know me from real life can weigh in on the accuracy of this assertion), a good sense of humor seems to me to be an irrationally overvalued personality trait. Thanks to television, The Onion, etc., a small number of professionally funny people can meet the entire world's humor demand. Something like kindness or personal warmth you need to know actual people to get. Nevertheless, nobody (myself included) actually sees it that way.


Note to Matt: Ever heard of Wanda Sykes? She may be the funniest person on the face of the earth. For that matter, ever heard of ME? I'm pretty damn funny. In fact, I've spent my whole life as "the funny one", which doesn't just mean that I was short, overweight, and resembled Janeane Garofalo a lot more than I resembled Uma Thurman. Maybe it's just that when you're 4'10" tall and smarter than your average bear, and you live in latter-stage America, you've got to cultivate a finely-honed sense of irony just to get through the day.

Don't give me this bullshit that women can't be funny because they're too nice. Obviously young Matt hasn't spent much time around women. This is just the sort of thing you'd expect someone trying to make himself feel better about his own talents to say. Move over on this bench, kiddo. There's plenty of room for all of us. And I'm funnier than you on my worst day.

And stay away from that National Review, kid. It'll rot yer brain.

Rox Populi similarly farts in Matt's general direction.
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