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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   26011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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Shane Gillis and the Limits of Credentialism
Comedy and the Limits of IQ Essentialism

Shane Gillis is being criticized for an SNL monologue joke about women wearing unseemly attire at the gym — this alone is totally uninteresting cw fodder — but the question of credentials got my attention. A number of the women offended at his joke have invoked their credentials to explain why Shane Gillis is obviously not a good comedian. A uniquely qualified student of comedy invokes her prestigious internship with a smirk to inform you that she knows about comedy. A graduate of comedy writing believes that her classes permit her to speak with haughty authority on comedy. A former working comic explains from a “craft perspective” why Shane Gillis’ joke didn’t work. Of course, none of these people have even vaguely approached the level of popularity of the critiqued comedian. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the foremost credentialed comedy expert in the world has made such a criticism: Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies, highly published in the highest-impact comedy studies journal. How seriously should we weigh the view of the credentialed against the comedian?

I am tempted to say that the credentialed should have zero weight added to their opinion due to their credentials alone. The only credential in comedy is whether you know how to make people laugh. It would be epistemically arrogant to think that “comedic authority” could ever be bestowed upon a person by way of credential when we barely know the origin and social purpose of comedy to begin with. I recently came across a cool study and overview of one set of theories on humor published last month (the intriguing bits in bold so you can skip through):

The Contents and Function of Humor Among Hunter-Gatherers

Adopting a view of humor as an evolved response to benign violations, I argue that four comic themes characterize most humor across cultures: pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred. I propose that each of these themes are ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into. I review 745 descriptions of humor in the ethnographic record of the ten hunter-gatherer societies in the Probability Sample Files (PSF) within the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) World Cultures database, finding support for my account. I discuss the relevance of these findings for our understanding of the evolution and function of humor, arguing that humor evolved to signal and reinforce interpersonal trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations of socially charged norms and boundaries.

the benign violation theory stipulates that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence, hence mild physical mishaps like slipping on a banana peel are considered humorous while purely positive incongruities (e.g., strokes of luck like winning the lottery) are not. For something to be humorous, it must be incongruous not with our expectations of how things usually are but rather with our normative sense of how they “ought” to be. In other words, it must be appraised as wrong, bad, or threatening.

Secondly, the benign violation theory stipulates that for such violations to elicit humor as opposed to purely negative emotions, they must ultimately be appraised as benignly non-worrisome (i.e., normal, harmless, or okay). This explains why mild physical mishaps are funny while serious violations like being diagnosed with cancer are not. For something to be humorous according to the benign violation theory, two appraisals must then co-exist: a benign appraisal and a violation appraisal. By specifying that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence and including the condition of benignity, the benign violation theory builds on the incongruity theory to more accurately differentiate what is humorous from what is not

While humor is often posited as uniquely human, social play is an activity engaged in by most mammals, with an evolutionary antecedent of human laughter manifested in the laughlike panting that accompanies the “play face” of many other great apes (van Hooff, 1972; Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Winkler & Bryant, 2021). In play, animals typically benignly violate each other’s physical boundaries through play fighting, wrestling, chasing, and the like (Aldis, 1975). Play signals like the play face here ensure that violations are understood as benign, preventing misunderstandings from escalating the play fighting into actual violence (Pellis & Pellis, 1996).

testing function, allowing individuals to assess the quality of their social relationships (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026). By imposing a mild cost on a target in the form of a benign provocation while closely monitoring the target’s response, the teasing great ape can glean information about how much the target values the relationship. Reciprocal teasing banter in humans has been proposed to fulfill a similar, elaborated function: By benignly provoking each other without either party taking offense, the participants are in effect saying, “We are close enough that we can say anything about each other” (Terrion & Ashforth, 2002:72). Starting with small provocations and gradually ratcheting up the offensiveness of teases can thus be a way to build a bond of trust.

The fact that teasing, the variety of humor that is not unique to humans, is the most common subtheme among hunter-gatherers, accounting for a majority of humor descriptions, suggests that it may have been the original form of humor. It is also the variety of humor that most resembles the rough-and-tumble play from which humor likely evolved, with the physical violations of play giving way to the more abstract interpersonal violations of teasing. Just as teasing may serve a bond-testing function in other great apes (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026), reciprocal teasing in humans can take on a more elaborate, ritualized form of the same function, with two parties teasing each other as a mutually recognized signal of the strength of their relationship (Haugh & Bousfield, 2012). Not taking offence to a teasing provocation (i.e., appreciating it as benign) requires and thereby signals interpersonal trust.

Attempting humor by violating any norm ascribed social weight, not just interpersonal ones, requires and thereby signals trust that the recipient will interpret it as benign instead of malign. If the recipient responds by appraising it as benign and laughing, that signals reciprocal trust. For instance, Gusinde notes that Ona men, when by themselves away from women and children, engage in “coarse jokes and offensive remarks about women” that they never otherwise permit themselves (1931:1652). A bond is thereby forged through mutual complicity in transgression. Relatedly, Wiessner (2014) found that the vast majority of humor among Ju/‘Hoansi occurs at times of day when people are segregated by gender and age, allowing people to joke freely without overstepping the rules of respect organized along these lines.

Jokes reinforcing ingroup bonds at the expense of outgroups are not restricted to gender but also extend to foreigners, invoking the theme of the foreign. Such outgroups include other local bands or tribes with differing norms, such as the Blackfoot mocking the custom of eating dogs among the Cree (McClintock, 1968:238), or surrounding societies, such as the Mbuti mocking the rituals and institutions of their surrounding Bantu villagers (Turnbull, 1965a:294). Foreign ethnographers studying the surveyed societies commonly describe themselves becoming the butt of humor on account of their “naïvete and ineptitude” in native affairs (Dunning, 1959:ix) or their awkward grasp of the native language (Gusinde, 1931:104). The ethnographer may turn this to their advantage by playing along, becoming a participant in the humor rather than merely a subject of it, thereby engaging the natives in an unofficial reciprocal joking relationship (e.g., Cipriani, 1966:21).

humor may also be used to get away with deviating from otherwise reigning standards of behavior by couching one’s violations in humor. Most commonly, ethnographers describe humor being used as a non-comital way of violating social mores or interpersonal boundaries to indicate or fulfill sexual desire. The risk of rejection is minimized if an advance is coated in benign humorousness since it can always be brushed aside as just a joke, capitalizing on the affiliative signal of humor. Landes (1937), for instance, notes that Ojibwa men teasingly refer to their female joking relatives as “my debtor,” implying that they have sexual rights to them (p. 45). Among the Ona, “tender teasing” is similarly said to be the beginning of any love affair (Gusinde, 1931:445). Multiple observers report being bashfully taken aback when finding themselves on the receiving end of raunchy overtures from natives couched in humor, including Pryde (1972:89) among the Copper Inuit and Turnbull (1962) among the Mbuti. Turnbull, for instance, recounts how a woman marks her interest in him through a double entendre based on his nickname “the long one” (p. 141). (lol)

There are many branches of discourse to swing off from here. Did Shane’s norm violation go too far in the eyes of some women, thereby evoking their ire? Did some women misinterpret of Shane’s monologue, though filled with abundantly placating self-deprecation? Or perhaps it was clipped and they didn’t see the full monologue? Is there reduced social trust and affiliation between the genders? Has the dating crisis gotten so bad that a woman wearing lingerie underwear at the gym approaches the untouchably sacred? Was Shane’s humor better off in the company of only other dudes? Are women just not very funny (this is no laughing matter)?

There’s something else worth exploring here. If the above theories are true, then comedy seems tied to social intelligence, at least within the “competitive” comedy circuit. Humor is an accurate signal of a person’s ability to “socially read the room”, to know where others stand on trust / affiliation / values / sensitivities. This is interesting because comedic skill seems to be unattached to IQ. The most popular comedians are not at all the smartest, in fact many do poorly in school, like Gillis / Louis CK / Theo Von. There is no actual “Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies” comedian, and I don’t think this is from a lack of trying as it’s the perfect job for a trustfund kid and provides an extremely glamorous social life. I wonder if this is evidence for a social intelligence not adequately predicted by g factor?

And maybe one more thing worth considering. If comedy is the measure of affiliation and trust, then the oft-criticized KillTony (I mean criticized by left media) is actually a wonderful vehicle for national unity. Having men, women, foreigners etc all criticizing each other in offensive ways to laughter is the exact utility of humor you’d want if your interest was to increase affiliation and trust between citizens of different backgrounds.

I finally gave in and watched his SNL monologue. It was ok, decently funny. Pretty mild by general comedian standards but I assume significantly cruder than most current year SNL openers. The two real laughs he got from me were “you look like a gas station egg” and “you’re either gay or you’re Hitler, that’s where we’re at as a country.” And the bit with him plodding down the hiking trail and trying not to scare the woman he ran into was a funny mental image.

He also didn’t bomb or anything (which I’ve occasionally seen claimed by some of the online rageposts), he was getting consistent laughs from the audience. And, this was clearly a success for SNL, I haven’t heard them talked about so much in ages (and I heard that this was their most-viewed monologue ever, not sure if that’s true but it clearly was highly viewed). I suspect they chose to bring him on as essentially ragebait for their main audience, while also trying to do a little bit of “we can still be edgy” signaling to the masses.

I think there are three elements for why the “women dress like whores in the gym” bit sparked so much anger. The first is, obviously, lipstick-feminist internet-rage-machine types who would’ve lost their shit about any version of this joke, not very interesting.

The second, I think, is the word “whore” itself. It’s unexpectedly harsh (which is why it was funny at all, that part of the joke was really just “I said whore on SNL lol”) but may have set off women viewers more than just saying something like “skimpy” or “sexy” or whatever and then continuing to the rest of the joke. I think this affected my wife’s perception of it, for example: she’s pretty feminist in her views but not easily offended, and the joke clearly bugged her more than she wanted to admit (this is why I watched it, I got curious). She doesn’t even dislike Shane Gillis or that style of humor; e.g. she loved Tires and likes Dave Chapelle. She argued that this one was unfunny because there’s really no joke beyond “I just said whore lol” and he should’ve either worked it in better (maybe more of a lead up about him feeling out of place around the hot gym women, or something, she suggested, so there’d be an additional punchline that kept him as part of the joke) or just dropped the shock-humor. I don’t really agree, it didn’t bother me after all, but I do agree that it’s nothing but shock humor and thus not really that funny anyway, so maybe there’s something there? Curious what any female motteposters might think.

The third part, which I think is a little more interesting, is that he’s actually making fun of a very specific type of woman: gym-fluencers who are basically filming softcore porn on the gym equipment. If you’re a boomer-lib who doesn’t get those videos in your targeted social media, or if you don’t regularly go to the gym, or even if you just don’t see these types at your gym, you might genuinely not know these girls exist! I go to a pretty normie gym (neither expensive nor dirt-cheap, mostly-young clientele, blue city) and while there are plenty of hot women, the actual “gym whore outfits” are extremely rare and I’ve never seen someone filming Content — I’m mostly only aware of the type from the internet. So a lot of the enraged audience may have sincerely thought the butt of the joke was supposed to be merely “women wearing sports bras and leggings while working out” which in fact is not what he was going for. I can imagine that if you pictured that kind of outfit and behavior, which gets attention of course but is really no sluttier than the jacked dudes wearing dolphin shorts and muscle tees while ego-lifting, the joke would seem a lot more bizarre and mean-spirited.

I'm about as anti-feminist as they come but I would say using the word "whore" detracts from the humor. Using the word "whore" would be appropriate for a conservative commentator who wants to criticize the practice (which criticism is justified IMO) as opposed to poking fun at it and getting a laugh out of people.

I largely agree, no strong feelings like I said but if pushed, I think that’s where I land as well. If you take out the word “whore” you only lose the shock humor of saying it at all (which is technically less humor, I guess, but a minor impact), and the punchline of the joke is really the following part about the shorts that focus your eyes straight at the asscrack, “but you’re not allowed to look!” So arguably it keeps the focus of the joke on the real punchline anyway.

If you want an example of an edgy (no, legitimately shocking) SNL monologue, Louis CK has got you covered. From a comment posted two days ago:

Whenever there’s outrage over an SNL monologue, I come back to this one. Riskiest bit I think I’ve ever seen

Yeah, that was quite a bit edgier than I’d expect from SNL, appreciate the link. But it was also in 2015, just barely at the dawn of “the Current Year”… I’d be surprised if they’ve booked anyone close to that level since then.

You cannot talk about Shane Gillis and women's gym attire without a link to "Scrunch Short" on a gym wear retail site https://thegymking.com/products/gym-king-365-scrunch-short-bubblegum-pink claiming "V-scrunch shaping to the back waistband to enhance and define the glutes"

The culture war aspect is that the this helps you understand moralists who want to ban things. When you operate in the paradigm that they are asking for bans on organic human stupidity, bans seems authoritarian, and (since human stupidity is infinite) rather futile. But many of them are operating within the paradigm that late capitalism turbo-charges human stupidity. The concern with cannabis is not that 1% of teenagers will drop out of college to become stoners; the concern is that big business will advertise cannabis into mainstream coolness, and money-politics will lead to cannabis smoking being expressly permitted by law, and your teenager will dorp out of college to become a stoner. The concern with prostitution is not what is available to sailors down at the docks. The concern is that Big Brothel will mainstream sex work. Your daughter will apply for Unemployment Benefit and be told that there are jobs available at McFuck and General Sex. She will be ineligible for welfare because she turned down sex work.

One notices an instance of this on the Gym King website. Women dress for attention in the gymnasium. And capitalism steps up to provide the tools with bubblegum pink enhancement of the glutes with "Squat proof" performance properties.

I tried writing a sentence to sum this up: "Law makers need to be aware that whatever is permitted will be turbo-charged by late capitalism.", but that isn't quite right. We live in an era of intrusive law making. If a gymnasium owner tries to open a "men only" gym, he may fall foul of sex discrimination law. If a teacher tries to run a school with strict discipline, expelling unruly pupils, he may fall foul of disparate impact jurisprudence. Any law has loopholes and unintended consequences. Late capitalism will turbo-charge the exploitation of loopholes and amplify the unintended consequences.

I really wish we had a public ideology that things can be legal but heavily stigmatized and discouraged. It feels like the second something is legal, certain left-wing characters start screeching for it to be de-stigmatized. Once it's de-stigmatized it starts getting actively promoted, especially if someone can make money off it.

But many of them are operating within the paradigm that late capitalism turbo-charges human stupidity

No we are not, we are operating under the paradigm that people are not really independent actors and social norms need to be shaped to lead people to make good decisions.

Perhaps I'm guilty of skipping steps in my argument. I agree that "people are not really independent actors and social norms need to be shaped to lead people to make good decisions."

The idea that social norms need to be shaped to lead people to make good decisions is worrying. Could social norms be misshapen? The worries branches off in three different directions.

First, the leaders might be lazy. Social norms don't get shaped. People make bad decisions.

Second, greed. People might seek leadership intending to sell out. Social norms get shaped at the behest of business. People make decision that are profitable for the businesses buying norm-shaping, but not so good for the people

Third, structural. Social norms get shaped by advertising and product placement. Who has the money for this? Governments spend some money on Public Service Announcements. Charities promote awareness, and sometime get government grants. But the lions share of money comes from profitable businesses aiming to become even richer. The purest example of this is that you haven't heard of the society for barefoot living. Since they wear nothing on their feet, they have nothing to sell and make no money and buy no publicity. But you have heard of barefoot shoes. Where there is a product there is a revenue stream, and some of that money gets diverted to buy publicity.

I'm using the phrase "late Capitalism" because others use it and I'm trying to communicate. I would much rather say ConFinCap, as in Fragpowmop versus Confincap. Whatever. I mean the economic system we currently live under. My core claim is that late Capitalism is much the largest force shaping social norms, and shapes them according to its own internal logic, with no human malevolence require to bring about bad outcomes.

I may be claiming too much. What are the other forces hammering social norms in and out of shape? In the UK, Christianity used to be a big deal, but has pretty much gone. In the UK in 1900, intellectuals were socialist, but that was a labour-centric creed and has also pretty much gone. Tony Blair was a Labour Prime minister, but he was about management and procedure. His mantra was "Education, education, eduction" but with no vision of what to teach.

As I've said before, when this came up- 'women in comedy' is the wrong framing. Ellen was a very popular and successful comedian a while back. But elite class proper ladies do not make good comics because comedy is inherently transgressive, and 'being transgressive' is not what elite proper ladies do. That's what this is about- these women are performing the social role of elite proper ladies, and they're rather unhappy about being excluded from comedy.

But elite class proper ladies do not make good comics because comedy is inherently transgressive, and 'being transgressive' is not what elite proper ladies do.

They are perfectly willing to be transgressive against the white outgroup though.

That is not transgressive, and they don’t think it is either.

In other words, they're only willing to "transgress" against soft socially-sanctioned targets, which is the opposite of transgression. "Safe edgy" is no such thing.

In their own minds it's surely transgressive, stunning, and brave.

The main problem with the joke is that it wasn't really that funny. Not in a "that's offensive" way, just like Dave Chapelle did it better a decade ago. You can call women whores you just need to actually have it be funny or pay off. I used to go to small time standup shows all the time and that's just a tired stepped on bit.

comedy is like the dream job because you get paid to tell jokes. there are no responsibilities. it scales well: you can go on the road and use the same material for years, with extra income from specials, albums and various residuals . The downside is misreading the audience. this is called bombing. Some might blame it on political correctness or an overly sensitive audience, but this is cope, imho. Your job is description is literally to make people laugh, not to rescue people from burning buildings or stuff like that . the onus is on the comedian to connect with the audience, and failing that, you no longer have a comedy career and someone who does make that connection will take your spot.

Isn't Gillis a "working man" comedian? His comedy isn't targeted at elites or intellectuals who favor wry and clever observations. His comedy is "What normal people think is weird." If he made guys at the bar laugh, or had guys at the construction crew talking about his joke on the jobsite, he was a success. To me, it was hack comedy, but I'm not his audience. That so many "credentialed" women took offense is only natural, as they would never deign to hang around such low company as Gillis' audience.

Disagree, I laughed. It's funny precisely because it was on SNL and transgresses the norms of that subculture.

The only credential in comedy is whether you know how to make people laugh.

All of these words you post and you don't even tell us if you actually found his monologue/joke funny.

As someone who finds him usually quite funny, I found his monologue to be noticably half-assed and unfunny. I'm more amused by the fallout than the actual jokes.

His tries at hosting have really demonstrated how much of a favor SNL did Gillis by firing him. He's a really great standup and comedic writer, but live sketch comedy, particularly under primetime broadcast restrictions, is not his strong suit. It doesn't help that the SNL studio audience is infamously terrible (or at least the studio itself with accoustics geared for tv tends to eat the sound of the laughter and make the audience seem dead. I've read conflicting accounts) and mostly not his typical demo in the first place.

I do wonder if he could have gotten away with minimal backlash if the joke had been better. My gut tells me the same people would be upset regardless, but there'd potentially be more people vocally defending him. The conversation would probably look pretty similar.

I didn’t find it that funny, no. He seemed nervous, off tempo. I thought it was funny when he said that the spandex was the color of bait, though.

A number of the women offended at his joke have invoked their credentials to explain why Shane Gillis is obviously not a good comedian. A uniquely qualified student of comedy invokes her prestigious internship with a smirk to inform you that she knows about comedy. A graduate of comedy writing believes that her classes permit her to speak with haughty authority on comedy.

As with ludology (the study of games), the study of comedy should be considered an experimental discipline. It's reasonable for an expert in these fields to not be able to make a fun game or a funny monologue, but they should be able to predict which games are fun and which monologues are funny, and to explain why they are with principles that reliably generalize to other games or monologues. If they cannot, they are not demonstrating that the hiliarious comedy is actually Not Funny or the bomb is Funny, (nor equivalently for games); they are instead demonstrating they are bad in their field or their field is without basis. In other words, being an expert in the study of comedy absolutely does not qualify you to contradict the success of practical comedians, and more than being an expert in the study of aerodynamics allows you to contradict the flight of bumblebees.

In the Beginning, there was the Feminist Light Bulb Joke. It was thus

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!

One of the few constants through all waves and subwaves of feminism is that this joke is relevant throughout all of them.

Surely the point is that the joke remains funny, not that it remains relevant?

The only feminist comedy that is funny involves non-gender-conforming women mocking their own inability to gender-conform.

Surely the point is that the joke remains funny, not that it remains relevant?

It's only funny if the feminists haven't taken over completely. But yes, it's funny (a least to the bitter-chuckle level) to any remaining non-feminists, and that's important too.

The only feminist comedy that is funny involves non-gender-conforming women mocking their own inability to gender-conform.

There used to be a lot of reasonably funny female comedy about the foibles of men. Problem is it's pretty much all stale in the sense that we've heard it all before, much of it is simply false so it doesn't resonate, and that which would otherwise still be funny is delivered as a serious complaint instead of a joke.

There are many branches of discourse to swing off from here. Did Shane’s norm violation go too far in the eyes of some women, thereby evoking their ire? Did some women misinterpret of Shane’s monologue, though filled with abundantly placating self-deprecation? Or perhaps it was clipped and they didn’t see the full monologue? Is there reduced social trust and affiliation between the genders? Has the dating crisis gotten so bad that a woman wearing lingerie underwear at the gym approaches the untouchably sacred? Was Shane’s humor better off in the company of only other dudes? Are women just not very funny (this is no laughing matter)?

I think you're overthinking it. It was his use of the slur "whore" that pissed people off. had he just said "going to the gym is like Instagram or OnlyFans in real life" no one would have cared. It would have still been funny.

It’s not really a slur, though. A slur is an unflattering term for a large class of people- for example, ‘bitch’ is a slur for women. Whore is a term for prostitutes, a smaller and mostly voluntary class, and it isn’t usually taken as offensive when applied to actual prostitutes. The offensive part was saying these women, who presumably have never had sex for money, were acting like whores. ‘Sailor’ is not an offensive term, but ‘so and so talks like a sailor’ might be taken that way.

I look it as, if I walked up to a woman on the street and called her that can I reasonably expect she would take offense? In this case yes.

If you were wrong about the determination, yes, just as if you called her a sex worker. On the other hand actual streetwalkers would probably respond with a pricelist.

slur

one of those situational slurs that the ingroup is allowed to use and the outgroup is not.

I disagree. Women don’t call each other whores except as an extremely harsh insult. To my knowledge there was never a sex-positive-feminist push to “reclaim” it like there was for “slut” either.

it wasn't reclaimed to nearly the same extent as slut, i agree, but there are some subcultures where it's more acceptable, like Aella et al or The Misbehavin' Maidens using it in lyrics where it's at most playfully offensive (since they're singing about each other or at least each other's personas).

To be fair, this is because 'whore' unpacks to 'sells [your gender's fundamental value, dictated by the other gender's instinct] for money or other benefits as if it was an incidental'. Not unique to sex or women, either; compare 'corporate whore' or 'mercenary' (because for men, their gender's fundamental value is their capacity for violence).

'Slut' means 'enjoys the process of buying and selling so much they fail to care about optimizing the value extracted from that fundamental exchange'.

The difference between a whore and a slut is that the slut would still seek the sex (or the violence) if the mating dance was completely free and doesn't need to be paid to go away afterwards- sex-positive feminists are basically just an overgrown version of that one girl in middle/high school. The whore knows what they have and would prefer money up front.

I didn't know women just dress like whores now.

Yes. It's Desdemona Women asking "Am I that name, Iago Shane?" Desdemona at least was innocent of the charges, women at the gym seem to have the uniform to do from hour to hour we ripe and ripe now.

"I didn't know women just dress like Winchester geese now. Look it up. Actually don't."

"I didn't know the gym had a dress code, and I didn't know it was Southwark, 1598." I like this one but I suspect the hobby-horses of 1598 Southwark dressed more modestly.

I live south of the river. Down here them's fighting words. Get your ponce arse back to Hatfield and the North or I'll set the Bushwhackers on you.

Aha! The misuse of the play face might be why evil clowns are terrifying: a betraying and malicious violation of the group safety mechanism. (And that mechanism misfiring or being overly precise might be why even the most benign clowns are creepy to some people.)

One day I will drop my massive schizo-post on the 70 year long government psy-op to discredit clowns.

Be sure to include Stephen King since supposedly the original filmed version of IT devastated the American clown industry.

Also see: scary little ghost girls

I recognized the humor without finding it funny. Like the first chapters of Moby Dick, I can recognize that this was probably uproariously funny to the right person with the right background. It's ok for a joke not to land. I don't think Gillis' joke lands with women. That's fine for a joke, that's less great for a joke told for SNL.

SNL is supposed to feature humor that lands with a broadly upper-middle class American public of both genders. Perhaps Gillis is trying to expand the appeal to more than just the upper-middle class, but I don't think the joke lands with lower-middle class women either.

A comedian tried something new, it had mixed results, more news at 11.

(I think having a PHD in humor is among the most humorless things you can do. And like most people here, I weigh Logos over Ethos or Pathos when evaluating arguments.)

Perhaps Gillis is trying to expand the appeal to more than just the upper-middle class, but I don't think the joke lands with lower-middle class women either.

I don't think Gillis gives two hoots about expanding the appeal of SNL. I think he thought it was funny. He probably also thought it was thumbing his nose at the SNL audience who got him fired, which makes it even funnier.

Yeah, women who aren't selected for priding themselves on their modesty are in general not ok with commentary on modesty. Why? Because it's one of those things where it's a rat race that you can never be comfortably ahead on, and women are real sensitive about it.

As a generally modest woman who is sometimes disturbed by the nakedness of other women, I just found it sad rather than transgressively funny. Just another reminder that our civilization is wobbling off course.

Disclaimer that I didn’t watch it and he may have been saying things you and I already know, just with a pottymouth instead of ‘jokes’.

'women who aren't selected for priding themselves on their modesty'? What does that refer to?

That's fine for a joke, that's less great for a joke told for SNL.

I don't know, a joke not landing is pretty much the defining theme of SNL for what, like, thirty years.

A comedian tried something new, it had mixed results, more news at 11.

pretty much. SNL achieved its goal of getting people to talk about it.

KillTony (I mean criticized by left media)

I sm bot familiar with it. It is a Podcast/YT show? Why is it criticized?

It’s a live podcast + popular YouTube channel. Amateur comedians do one minute of standup and Tony Hinchcliffe critiques them afterward. The critique afterward is often the funniest part. I’ve seen it criticized for jokes on race / gender, but also for being aligned with the Joe Roganverse.

There is no actual “Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies” comedian

Well, yes, I don't think there are any successful standup comedians who received formal university training in comedy. But it isn't remotely difficult to find examples of intelligent, university-educated comedians (whether comic actors or standups):

  • Monty Python: Three members of the troupe studied at Cambridge (variously studying medicine, law and English literature), two studied at Oxford (studying English literature and history), and the sixth had a degree in political science from Occidental College.
  • Fry and Laurie: Stephen Fry was offered a scholarship at Cambridge and studied English lit, where he met Hugh Laurie, who was studying archaeology and anthropology.
  • Conan O'Brien graduated Harvard magna cum laude with a degree in history and literature.
  • John Mulaney earned a BA in English lit from Georgetown.
  • Mitchell and Webb: Like Fry and Laurie, they met at Cambridge, where Mitchell studied history and Webb studied English.

Comedians are in general smart, so it's unsurprising that lots of them have college degrees. But how many of those are degrees in things like theater, or communications? Generally these seem to be irrelevant degrees to being a comedian.

Monty Python: Three members of the troupe studied at Cambridge (variously studying medicine, law and English literature), two studied at Oxford (studying English literature and history), and the sixth had a degree in political science from Occidental College. Fry and Laurie: Stephen Fry was offered a scholarship at Cambridge and studied English lit, where he met Hugh Laurie, who was studying archaeology and anthropology.

That means mostly - we are members of the British upper or upper-middle class and we are a bunch of smart chaps.

Smart people generally speaking do well in universities. This by no means that the university helped them in their careers (except by socializing and connections) or that the people that do well in universities are smart.

In the case of the Cambridge folks, presumably having a dedicated and distinguished comedy troupe helped them learn and refine their humour. I would say that probably goes beyond merely "socializing and connections".

Yes but that's doing comedy, not studying comedy.

This by no means that the university helped them in their careers

Did I claim they had successful careers because they attended university?

(except by socializing and connections)

This seems a very apt time to use this clip. "Alright, but apart from networking opportunities, socialising and jump-starting our entertainment careers... what has Oxbridge ever done for us?!" Surely that's half the reason people study humanities in the first place?

Fair point. I will rephrase - I don't think the credentials helped them in their career.

To be maximally pedantic, Terry Jones's education in medieval history proved invaluable when they were writing Holy Grail, to the point that it's sometimes been called one of the most historically accurate films with a medieval setting.

But in general, yes, I don't think having a piece of paper with a 2:1 on it helped any of them in their careers. I took @coffee_enjoyer's point to be that talented comedians tend not to be "book-smart", and hence that comedic talent is orthogonal to g. And I think it's trivial to demonstrate that that isn't true: there have been plenty of talented comedians who were at least book-smart enough to complete a humanities degree.

Terry Jones's education into medieval history proved invaluable when they were writing Holy Grail, to the point that it's sometimes been called one of the most historically accurate films with a medieval setting.

I would very much like to know more.

TV Tropes has more information. See "Aluminium Christmas Trees" on the YMMV page.

TV Trops? Shit I'll be back in a few months.

As someone with a white bunny at home, I can confirm that they really are like that. Well, I can't confirm whether medieval bunnies had the acrobatic skills to do the stunts required of The Beast of Caerbannog, but the murderous intent is still here.

*EDIT: But actually, it's really part of the "strangely accurate" stuff that a student of medieval history would appreciate. Killer rabbits are a weirdly recurrent motif in medieval art and decoration.

These are the details I crave!

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Wait, but it’s trivially easy to demonstrate that it is true that comedy is orthogonal to both g and the academic accreditation filter process. If comedy tracked with either one, then we should expect virtually all the best comedians to be from elite institutions, because there are many hundreds of people graduating from elite institutions with a high IQ who are interested in comedy every year. The best mathematicians and the best lawyers nigh universally come from the best elite institutions. That’s what we should expect: the top 10 come from top institutions. But right now, and for decades, seldom do the best comedians come from such institutions. You had to go all the way back to look at Monty Python and this is complicated by the British class system. American comedy is more meritocratic, so where are all the Ivy-educated high IQ comedians? The high IQ and the Ivy graduate would both outperform Shane Gillis on a verbal iq test. So why is Shane the comedian du jour and not those ranked above him in either g or accreditation? Harvard Lampoon alone poops out 120 super-elites per decade, who are ahead of Shane in IQ, accreditation, training, and support. So… where are they?

I’d actually go further than “orthogonal”. Per the available evidence, comedy is negatively associated with possessing high g or strong academic success.

American comedy is more meritocratic, so where are all the Ivy-educated high IQ comedians? The high IQ and the Ivy graduate would both outperform Shane Gillis on a verbal iq test. So why is Shane the comedian du jour and not those ranked above him in either g or accreditation? Harvard Lampoon alone poops out 120 super-elites per decade, who are ahead of Shane in IQ, accreditation, training, and support. So… where are they?

high IQ people with strong verbal skills and ivy league degrees would choose the safer and more profitable bet of lawyer or consultant

Maybe, but no shortage enter journalism or an academic track, which are not very profitable at all. Being a good standup comic earns more social rewards than being a consultant: no shortage of women or parties, meeting famous people, being locally renowned.

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I’d actually go further than “orthogonal”. Per the available evidence, comedy is negatively associated with possessing high g or strong academic success.

You made a mistake somewhere.

Where did this paper come from? Is it something you made? It lists accessing Wikipedia on October 15, 2026 in the sources, so that means it was written right in time for your comment.

Edited to add: I strongly suspect AI prompting generated this science-mimicking paper to attempt to conjure undue authority.

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the “6% rate of top comedians come from Ivys” is way smaller than should be expected were you to control for the selection effect of the Ivy’s (eg family wealth, health, drive) and the incidental benefits of an Ivy education (vastly enhanced social connections and opportunities). You should probably also exclude the bottom 20% in intelligence; of course the dumbest people can’t be comedians, so the negative correlation with g would only be found after a certain threshold; it’s rather a negative correlation with high g. Then you’d have to check if any of these comedians were legacy admits, which is an exclusionary criteria case. Maybe a more important argument against this data: we have to look at comedians born after, say, 1980, as it’s the Internet that has made comedy meritocratic. Your wikidata dataset premising your argument includes comedians born in 1940. But surely the world of comedy was not as meritocratic in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when your connections with wealthy producers you went to school with had an outsize impact. In the internet age we can actually see who is funniest, they rise to the top of algorithms that are more difficult to game then 1 or 2 late night talk shows dictating the entiret of prominence.

The pօpսlatiօո is peօple with a giveո օccսpatiօո, US citizeոship, aոd birth years 1940–1995. Prօmiոeոce is measսred by the ոսmber օf Wikipedia laոgսage editiօոs

Is this an accurate measure of prominence?

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This suggests Ivy League is primarily selecting on g. They also are strongly selecting for conformity which kills comedy.

stand-up comedy, yes, but written comedy selects for strong verbal IQ

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You had to go all the way back to look at Monty Python

I didn't, actually. Mitchell and Webb's careers started in the 2000s, as did John Mulaney's. Monty Python was the first example that popped into my head, but I cited several others from both sides of the pond.

so where are all the Ivy-educated high IQ comedians?

Here's a few. Also, per his Wikipedia page, Gillis holds a history degree from Westchester University. I'm not American so I don't know how prestigious that is, but he seems to be a lot more book-smart than you're giving him credit for.

John Mulaney is double legacy Georgetown University alum, so we can’t really measure his IQ / credential. Westchester is one of the lowest ranking universities in America. Your link mentions Seinfeld, one of the all-time greats, and he went to a CUNY ranked #158 of us college. Our version of Mitchell and Webb is Key & Peele and they both went to pretty middling schools.

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Gillis holds a history degree from Westchester University. I'm not American so I don't know how prestigious that is

Slightly below 50th percentile as a national university. Knowing nothing else besides his degree, best guess would be that he's smarter than average, but ironically "becoming nationally successful in stand-up comedy" is by itself probably better evidence of above-average IQ than the degree is!

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John Mulaney earned a BA in English lit from Georgetown.

Doesn't he have a bit where he specifically cracks jokes about how he didn't do the work?

"I spent $400,000 to have someone tell me to go read Jane Austen and I didn't."

Generally the relevant signal of University education has a lot more to do with clearing entrance hurdles than actual benefits of the coursework

No idea, I only know him for that dig he made about Madame Web.

Clip.

Excellent. I also forgot he had that one bit about Back to the Future.

Conan was also the first two-tiime editor of the Harvard Lampoon

actually legit smart comedian

This reminded me of something, and I realised that I once got a scolding here about how a joke that I told literally didn't qualify as a joke, per five criteria the commenter meticulously outlined in detail. Not just that my joke wasn't funny, or was offensive, or didn't make him laugh (which would be fine): that it literally didn't meet the prerequisite criteria to be considered a joke. So as not to embarrass him, I won't tag the user in question.

I'm also reminded of a commenter I saw on the /r/ireland subreddit who was complaining about other users criticising TV shows they didn't like, and saying their opinions didn't mean anything because they weren't qualified. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Are you seriously suggesting you need a BA in television studies before you're allowed to say "I didn't enjoy this show"?

That guy deserves some sort of Redditor Award.

At least one person thought he was doing a bit, performing an elaborate parody of a Reddit wokescold. But it seems he was quite serious.

Hilarious read.

This reminded me of something, and I realised that I once got a scolding here about how a joke that I told literally didn't qualify as a joke, per five criteria the commenter meticulously outlined in detail. Not just that my joke wasn't funny, or was offensive, or didn't make him laugh (which would be fine): that it literally didn't meet the prerequisite criteria to be considered a joke.

The mods just recently did that too. Boner jokes not allowed on the Fun thread because they're too serious, they don't qualify as fun, or a joke, so you have to keep in in the CW thread ... you can debate theology in the «small question» thread though.

Anyway, some jokes.

A man walks into a forum and asks for a small question. The forum responds, «does God exist, and if so does He love us, and if so, did He die on the cross, or did He speak to that Arab?»

Another man goes to the forum on joke night and asks for a joke. A user says, «What bulges when a 17 year old boy gets to dance with with a hot coed in gym class? His eyes, of course!», but the mods throw the user out the door and comedy night became tragedy night.

Bub.

This is getting obnoxious. And yes, this is a mod warning, even though you will add it to your ledger of "The mods are persecuting me because I'm just too clever and edgy for them."

There is a certain category of user who continually wants to push boundaries, talk about things in a smarmy, antagonistic way, bring up topics in an edgy, circumlocutory fashion with plausible deniability, and then screech like a chimp kicked in the balls (not sure if being kicked in the balls actually affects chimps the same way, but I like the image so I'm going with it) when called on it and told to give it a rest, or at least tone it down. And they proceed to bring it up over and over, "calling out" the mods (or a mod) in every thread where they can possibly wedge it in because maybe if they keep grinding their axe often enough, everyone will take their side and throw rotten fruit at the mods and tell us to let them post as they please or something?

You are here.

There is also a category of user who is too autistic to realize that talking about their weird gooner fetishes isn't funny or fun and doesn't understand why we'd say "Not here."

It is not because the mods are prudes, or humorless (well, I am, but not all the mods are), or trying to BAN MY VIEWS THE MODS CAN'T HANDLE.

It's because we want people to be reasonable and civilized and not shit up the place, particularly by trying to see exactly where the line is between "I can get away with this" and "Too much."

You are here.

Now, FWIW, I kind of disagree with@netstack's original formulation: I would not say categorically that all "sex and sexuality" topics are inherently CW. I can imagine sexuality-related content that would be funny and light-hearted enough to be Friday Fun Thread material. The problem is that what was posted in that thread was not. (And this is not an invitation to test what you can get away with.)

As myself, @netstack, and @naraburns have explained to you and others repeatedly, a lot of modding comes down to "I know it when I see it," along with community sentiment, when it comes to deciding what does and doesn't fly. This means that yes, it's subjective, sometimes what passes one mod will not pass another, and we are not going to give you a long TOS contract spelling out what you can and cannot get away with and then gnash our teeth and say "Curses, foiled by your brilliant legalism!" when you figure out a way to post something that we did not explicitly prohibit.

So no, "boner jokes" are not prohibited in the Friday Fun Thread, but it is context-dependent (a boner joke that winds up being CW-bait or "joking about boners with minors," for example, would definitely not be appropriate material).

I'm not going to ban you, even though you have multiple "Ban this guy next time" warnings, because banning people for complaining about the moderation is a bad look and people without familiarity with your oeuvre (and past history under other alts) might think we're just being sensitive to criticism. But I am telling you that open and reasonable discussions about moderation are 100% allowed, even if accompanied by harsh criticism. You can take it up with us in public or private when offered in good faith. We do our best to clarify our thinking and our moderation decisions, and if you really want to know if a given post will be okay or not, you can ask us. But every CW thread is not an opportunity for you to complain about that one time a mod did something you're still chafing about.

You can take it up with us in public or private when offered in good faith

This is good faith.

But every CW thread

It fit the occasion. I am not doing it in anywhere near every CW thread.

one time a mod did something you're still chafing about.

It was recent, basically the last mod decision that I remember. It's not like I necro'd it.

give you a long TOS contract spelling out what you can and cannot get away with and then gnash our teeth and say "Curses, foiled by your brilliant legalism!"

I have said in multiple places when arguing against rules lawyer people that the actual rules are what mods do and not what is written on the sidebar.

This is getting obnoxious. And yes, this is a mod warning, even though you will add it to your ledger of "The mods are persecuting me because I'm just too clever and edgy for them."

Honestly I was just trying to be funny. The mods said the bulge jokes can go into the CW thread because they're definitely not fully censored, so I saw an opportunity to make one.

I think you're putting words in the mods' mouths. From the linked comment, I can't see anything even resembling the sentiment "jokes about erections literally do not qualify as jokes".

He said

First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread.

Therefore jokes about sex and sexuality are not fun, therefore not funny, therefore do not count as jokes.

If you want to shut down your reasoning faculties and be obnoxiously literal, 2 can play at that, @EverythingIsFine did not say your joke was not a joke. He said it was a joke lacking the qualities to be funny.

Scott Adam had a proposal I subscribe to that a joke needs to contain at least one but ideally two or more of the following [to be funny]: Unexpectedness, Exaggeration, Incongruity, Relatability, Absurdity, Reversal.

at least to me your joke doesn't contain any of these in any meaningful sense.

I think you're putting words in @EverythingIsFine 's mouth. From the linked comment, I can't see anything even resembling the sentiment «jokes about beauty sleep literally do not qualify as jokes.» He said you joke was not funny (a sentiment I endorse. What did it even mean?)

I really do not understand what I've done to earn this kind of hostility. Relax.

I was not being hostile, I was simply responding to gaslighting in a reasonable way. You are now poisoning the well with the loaded command of telling me to « relax ». Obviously, one can respond to logical fallacies in a very relaxed way, which is what I did.

Therefore jokes about sex and sexuality are not fun, therefore not funny, therefore do not count as jokes.

The quote above doesn't say sex jokes aren't funny. It says sex jokes are CW material and belong in the CW material thread, even if they're funny.

Suppose the mod thought they are funny. Then he would see they belong in the fun thread, which is where fun and funny things go.

It is not sufficient for a topic to be CW adjacent. We all know full well boners are not CW material because the CW thread has never had a boner thread. It has gender war threads. His joke was not even about CW sex material. Meanwhile, in the fun thread, a litany of posts about topics like Trump and Anthropic. Oh, that's not CW?

Quote from FFT OP:

This thread is not for anything Culture War related

Content that is both fun and CW is thus excluded.

If you don't think a particular post fits those declared standards, you should be reporting it.

If you don't think a particular post fits those declared standards, you should be reporting it.

That won't do anything. As Amadan just wrote, there is no sidebar, there is only precedence. The rules are what the mods do, not what is written.

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We all know full well boners are not CW material because the CW thread has never had a boner thread.

It is really not difficult to find examples of top-level posts in the CW thread which mention erections:

None of these contain boner jokes, or are about boners. They are about other topics, often sexual, and make some kind of mention of erections or a synonym in the course of the exposition. That's completely different.

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Well, what do you think "trust the experts" means?

Oh well it actually did mean vibes, papers and essays. What is the world coming to?

I know. It depresses me that the denizens of that sub were willing to take that principle to its logical conclusion, surrendering even subjective aesthetic judgements to the "experts".

"This utterance does not obey the Joke Axioms of Applied Humouristic Theory, thus it is not a joke.", is itself a joke.

The most popular comedians are not at all the smartest, in fact many do poorly in school, like Gillis / Louis CK / Theo Von

Um... you are posting a jab against credentialism, and yet with straight face consider academic success in the mandatory battle royale gulag as a measure for smartness?

The overreaction to this fairly mild joke is brutal - I don't know why the observation that there are more camel toes in a modern gym than in a zoo struck a nerve. And even less why said nerve was so exposed. I think because it was the offhand way the comment was delivered - not only he did what modern blue tribe hate the most - being judged, but that he dared to make this judgement not a center piece of the monologue or even the joke. A fat unattractive straight guy has the audacity to think so little of their hypersexualization attempts, that he give the hot jacked gay guys more screen time than to their vaginas. The ultimate insult.

Credentialism except from telling something about the mindset of the person with the credential - the more indifferent said person is about the piece of paper, the higher the chances of real brain functioning behind the eyes. The moment you say - I have a bachelors in something, which means you should take me seriously, you know it is safe to discard their following sentences.

A friend of mine, and me graduated from really high end and very selective school for gifted kids. That is actually one of my achievements in life that I really hold dear. She continued with the academic path, it took me more than 15 years to get a bachelor's. She really likes to lean heavily into her various diplomas when discussing stuff - both from - I have studied this so I know more than you, and life owes me a bit of nice things to happen to me because I am educated angles. So I had to snap at one point with "Look - you think you are smarter than the others because you graduated X, I graduated X because I thought I was smarter than the others. We are not the same." . It didn't land as well as the Shane's whore joke did.

As an offtopic - the step by step episode where Dana and Cody are into di.. SAT scores measuring contest, to which Cody is even unaware he participates in is one my favorite.

I don't know why the observation that there are more camel toes in a modern gym than in a zoo struck a nerve.

I believe the only women who can wear tight-fitting pants and yet not expose their camel toes are the pretty and slender ones – it’s just how female anatomy is – and women who aren’t like this don’t want to be reminded of it. The bygone patriarchy enforced the norm of female modesty which acted as a sort of non-aggression pact among women and took the ‘unfair’ advantage of hot women away. Feminists have demolished this without thinking twice and now their daughters and granddaughters are rightfully mad. Ideas have consequences.

The expansion of credentials has been a disaster. Most credentials are useless, and in fact most outside of highly technical degrees are almost an anti-intellectual signal. The degrees do not, generally, require any serious rigor, no real achievement, and therefore are mostly ways for the schools to admit more dummies to study things that don’t matter in an environment where failure is almost impossible. Comedy should not be a stand alone area of concentration in a college. Very few humanities programs have serious rigor, and even those that do serve no useful purpose.

People who want to work in writing or comedy or art or music would be much better served to major in business to manage their career and do the work of learning the craft on their own in places where they get meaningful feedback from the future audience for their work. It’s not useful to become a good comedian to study it in a classroom and read theory. You need to get out in front of a crowd in a bar and fail until you learn how to read the crowd and tell jokes that land. Or play music in seedy bars until you learn to put on a good show.

The expansion of credentials has been a disaster. Most credentials are useless, and in fact most outside of highly technical degrees are almost an anti-intellectual signal. The degrees do not, generally, require any serious rigor, no real achievement, and therefore are mostly ways for the schools to admit more dummies to study things that don’t matter in an environment where failure is almost impossible. Comedy should not be a stand alone area of concentration in a college. Very few humanities programs have serious rigor, and even those that do serve no useful purpose.

They serve a function from the perspective of employers in corelating well with baseline proficiency . There is a huge gap in writing skills and other signifiers of ability of 4-year grads, even for humanities degrees, vs high school grads. Screening for degrees saves employers time and boosts productivity without having to interview everyone. This could also mean improved customer satisfaction from having smarter and more competent employees.

Screening for degrees saves employers time and boosts productivity without having to interview everyone.

So does an IQ test.

A degree works because it is an IQ test, just one that costs at 50,000 dollars and 4 years of your life to complete, much like high school used to be in the days before graduation rate became something governments would be punished at the voting booth for failing to sufficiently game.

Now, there's an entire industry that depends on forcing perfectly good high school graduates to spend at least 50,000 dollars and 4 years of their lives, in co-operation with a management system that refuses to employ anyone who didn't take this kind of IQ test. If they wanted to increase the fee, management has no reason not to agree, forming the bedrock of the academic-managerial complex, if you will.

A degree tests both IQ and conscientiousness. An IQ test is much cheaper but not a full substitute. An IQ test plus far easier hiring and firing would be, but we don't have that either in most professions. This may be why high-turnover professions can get away with just the Wonderlic (which, ironically, was the test banned by Griggs) and no degree.

many employers use the Wonderlic, which is very similar to an IQ test, in addition to checking for the usual credentials. But some may only use the Wonderlic. I agree IQ is way more efficient, but OTOH it does not test for diligence . getting a degree is a grind due to large coursework and having to show up , and many people do not finish for this reason .

Exactly, but it also means that the people getting these degrees not only waste 4 years of their productivity being IQ tested, but because they start out upwards of 200K in debt, which delays all kinds of things that would be useful for the economy. Crazy things like, buying a house, taking vacations, having children and thus needing the kinds of things you need to feed and clothe a child. These things, in 1950, generally happened in your twenties, and now most people are forced to delay their home and family starting activities into their thirties which reduces the likelihood of having lots of children and thus raising children. This has by now created a situation in which the population is shrinking and thus unless we import workers, there’s no way to keep the systems running.

These things, in 1950, generally happened in your twenties, and now most people are forced to delay their home and family starting activities into their thirties which reduces the likelihood of having lots of children and thus raising children.

The difference is birth control, not economic reality. If you have kids you will find a way to keep them fed and clothed. There are government programs to help, even. Impoverished teenagers have kids regularly and, yep, those kids don't starve to death, they have diapers, etc...

In the fifties these things generally happened in your twenties because their birth control didn't work very well. Today birth control works very well indeed.

Birth control doesn’t help obviously, but I also know enough young people who want a family and children and can’t scrape up enough money to be financially stable enough to try it. If young couples had financial independence, a decent home, and a way to make sure that mom could raise the kids, there’d be less need to use contraception as well

In the fifties they didn't have any of this. Sex made babies and that was an acceptable price to pay. Housing, transportation, groceries, etc were all more expensive in real terms; but if you wanted to copulate there was a chance you'd have to get married on short notice and have a suspiciously developed premie. And that's the way it was.

but it also means that the people getting these degrees not only waste 4 years of their productivity being IQ tested, but because they start out upwards of 200K in debt, which delays all kinds of things that would be useful for the economy. Crazy things like, buying a house, taking vacations, having children and thus needing the kinds of things you need to feed and clothe a child. These things, in 1950, generally happened in your twenties

Remember when I said this system was fundamentally just child sacrifice?

Well, I meant it.

This has by now created a situation in which the population is shrinking and thus unless we import workers, there’s no way to keep the systems running.

Or in other words, the sacrifices to the academic-managerial system have consumed everything, just like those Easter Island heads. The system has to look for more and more people who are born outside of it (and ban every other sector of economic activity) to keep its asset prices inflated.

One notices the system lives in fear of those who would rather burn them at the stake instead, and the split between Blue and Red (and the other dichotomous groups that are proxies for this) is in many ways a looming socioeconomic pension crisis specifically because we sacrificed too many kids, and too much youth, in the service of building [or inflating, if you will] so many heads.

Which is perhaps in large part why, right now, the political fight in the West is between the academic-managerial class and everyone else. That class is expecting a payout in political power that most countries simply can't afford to honor if they want to remain solvent.

I largely agree, though I think it’s also the old people as well, as so much of current social and political activity seems to be going towards coddling the elderly and at best ignoring if not punishing the young that it’s almost absurd. Tax rates for retired people is capped in my state, especially real estate taxes which fund stuff that workers and parents need like good roads, schools, police departments, etc. Most of the entitlement programs outside of WIC by dollar are for old people— SSI and Medicare cost more than the military at this point, and with no requirement that the older people do anything productive for the economy or society in general.

As far as infrastructure, there’s much more political will for things that older people want around than for stuff younger people want. Play grounds are too much money, but golf courses get breaks. Low end restaurants you could reasonably take a family with kids aren’t built as often as higher end places that are pretty kid-unfriendly. If you’re under 40, you don’t matter

In fairness I was going to add that- the old have a lot to do with why the academic-managerial complex is dominant in the first place, with outdated cultural outlooks that were harmful back then too.

But I'm too angry to talk about it at this point and I have no idea how best to exploit it (and am to a point the wrong identity; the progressives already have that exploitation on lockdown, as they embody the fantasy the old always wanted).

Playgrounds are too much money

And if you send your kid there we'll abduct them and destroy your family. The future is too unsafe.

I am aware that there are still a few places where the spirit of the West lives, and maybe if I can get to one...

There is a huge gap in writing skills and other signifiers of ability of 4-year grads, even for humanities degrees, vs high school grads.

This gap has been rapidly closing in the last two decades thanks to lowering standards at universities. Frankly the only reason the gap hasn't disappeared completely is because of similarly lowering standards at high schools.

yeah as long as there is a gap, the universities serve a purpose. the college dropout rate still stands at 50% and many still take 5-6 years of a "4 year degree "suggesting it has not necessarily gotten easier. I think this "lowering standards at universities" is much more anecdotal. There are certain standards that degree-awarding colleges must follow.

I think a sort of college can be useful for these fields. The problem with today’s colleges is bloat.

Most importantly, people who want to work in writing or comedy or art or music should write or act or draw or make music. But most will benefit from working with like-minded peers and learning theory. So imagine a group of people in a profession who practice, work and somewhat live together, and older members coach the younger ones. IMO, that’s art school as it should be.

(Notice the above description doesn’t mention “admin”. A couple managers, social media consultants, etc. are probably ideal, but there should be way more professors, not the other way around; and if there are more admin than students…is the institution a school anymore?)

Art school, even a literal clown college, can be a net benefit that is seriously worth your taxpayer money. But the artists should definitely perform or give away their works publicly. Then it’s obvious why.

Now credentials for creative work are practically meaningless. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. have credentials most importantly because if they mess up, someone will die or suffer seriously. And attend many lectures and exams because these skills are more methodical and can be measured far more objectively. Your “GPA” for a creative profession is your output and awards, and awards from an ingrained “credentialed” institution are less accurate than an organic one (see the slop that gets “prestigious” awards, sometimes literally AI slop).

Isn’t art school typically a non-collège program focused on teaching technical skills?

There are several types of art schools. Some are non-degree programs (AI tells me the traditional name for such schools is "Atelier"). Some are Masters of Fine Art (MFA) programs intended for people who already have undergraduate degrees (not necessarily in art). But many are college programs granting a bachelors' degree (BFA).

I don't think "technical" is really the right criterion here. I'm an engineer, which is plenty technical, but that doesn't necessarily say much about my ability to do any particular job. In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.

I mean, I know a fair bit of university math and have some basic university-level knowledge in a bunch of technical fields, with a bit more in one specific area. But the main thing my degree tells an employer is that I'm reasonably intelligent and capable of putting in the work to learn difficult things.

I've had plenty of colleagues without engineering degrees who were about as capable of doing the same jobs. Maybe my education prepared me a bit better (in fact i would argue this), but it was hardly some strict prerequisite.

That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession. My competence base is pretty broad and nonspecific, and a lot of what I actually need to know for my job is stuff I learned afterwards anyway, or could have learned through other routes.

So I guess my point is that there's a much more meaningful distinction between degrees that actually qualify you for a specific profession and degrees that mostly give you a foundation to build on. Whether they're technical or not doesn't seem like a particularly useful way of making that distinction.

Im trying to find a better term for what I mean. What I mean by technical is a program that is skill based and related fairly closely to actual career paths that a person might do in the future. So an engineering degree that’s math, physics and engineering skills taught with the aim of working in engineering is technical, but so is a business based degree that teaches the kinds of skills that would be typically used in an office setting doing business work — things like marketing, finance, accounting, business management, etc.

What im making a distinction against is the kinds of humanities degrees that are based on learning things that are not based on any kind of useful skills. At best provided that the school cared enough to require professors to do so, you might end up with marginal writing and research skills. Even then most of those skills would be more easily taught in the technical degrees. They’re mostly useless, and I can’t imagine that anyone would look at a guy with a history or literature degree and choose them over a person with a degree in some more “technical” degree focused on useful skills that can be immediately applied to my actual business.

I think you're significantly underestimating how much of required engineering is actually learned in university (or you're overapplying the American liberal arts college generalism to everywhere). A random mechanical engineer is going to know fuck all about DSP and I, as an electrical engineer, would be completely lost if I had to do a stress analysis of some motor part.

Engineering degrees are better IQ tests than most degrees (probably no better than hard sciences though, or computer science at better schools), and MUCH better conscientscious tests than most degrees. It's REALLY hard to phone in an engineering degree no matter how bright you are.

I don’t think anyone disputes that.

What I dispute is the claim that an engineering degree is only an IQ test with the contents of the degree supposedly being irrelevant (where software engineering is a major outlier).

I am not. I'm saying that most engineers are actually not working in hardcore engineering in their subfield.

There are career paths as an engineer that actually depend on the technical specialization of said engineer but those are far fewer than the vaguely technical generalist roles that absorb engineers of various different backgrounds and some people of other backgrounds as well.

Engineering frequently works as a sort of finishing school for the non-retarded.

I’m not talking about hardcore engineering but basic stuff. Show a circuit to a civil engineer and they have no idea what’s going on. That is hardly ”hardcore engineering” (and frankly neither is basic DSP - it’s normal third year stuff).

Maybe, but according to the engineers union in Sweden, less than 10% of engineers work as technical specialists and my own perception of what my friends/acquaintances from school have done, which includes hundreds of people, bear that out. Few ever worked with things that required their technical speciality and even fewer stayed with it for a significant amount of time.

agree. employers get so many applicants. they need some way to filter at scale.

That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession.

There is right now an interesting trend going on. First generation UK migrants sending their second generation progeny to study medicine in my EU country because it is relatively cheap and the tutors take bribes (and anyway are forbidden from failing them because the university really like the tuition fees). When they come back to UK they will be more capable killers than SAS and Spetsnaz combined.

In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.

I wonder how this is different than your IQ + your demonstrated ability to jump through hoops.

Universities love to say they "teach you how to learn". In my mind, this is cope. There is no indication that they are making an effort to do this, nor that it is even possible.

Universities love to say they "teach you how to learn". In my mind, this is cope. There is no indication that they are making an effort to do this, nor that it is even possible.

Regardless of their purpose , whatever it is, employers sure want it.

Employers don’t want the things universities teach you, they want the evidence that you can function in a normal white collar office environment.

Sorta. A high GPA means you’re intellectually capable of absorbing large quantities of material. It’s more than just being able to function in a particular environment. If an employer sees that someone has a 4.0 in literature or philosophy, that signals they’re good at reading and making sense of large amounts of text. This is useful in a work setting when having to process reports, or make sense of disparate pieces of information. But the high GPA is also indicative of an ability to fucus and get work done, so there is an IQ and attentiveness component.

It’s also a point that you chose a major that has no practical value in the real world. Im not sure about most employers, but to me, it’s sort of a negative that a person chose an entire course of study that everyone knows is useless.

Yes, it has signaling value. So does an IQ test. But no one says that the process of taking an IQ test makes you smarter.

Really, we've been down this road a million times. I've never heard a convincing argument against Bryan Caplan's "The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money".

I think they are both true. his book is right but at the same time employers derive value from degrees.

I think its more that you demonstrate that you're capable of long term sustained effort at solving difficult abstract problems. Forcing you to do this does in itself teach you how to think.

This is both separate from demonstrating a willingness to jump through hoops and it is teaching something important beyond the object level.

Now, if you're getting a degree in something simple that doesn't require work or intellectual ability, that also doesn't have practical applications then that is probably more or less useless beyond the fact that you might have qualified for the education in the first place.

Good professors model critical thinking skills and ask their students to reflect on the material in a manner they may not have considered. Don't just memorize the formulars. Figure out what purpose they serve and think about how you might use them to make something real.

I think in general "teach you how to learn" may be cope in a lot of cases. But "teach you how to think" is absolutely not. Just from personal experience, a lot of the students I started university alongside were terrible at reflecting on the material. They became better due to interacting with it and receiving feedback from the professors.

I don’t doubt that good individual professors can have a positive effect, but these are quite rare. If there is a pedagogical philosophy, it’s not something that the university is promoting. Teaching is often an afterthought. In almost no cases is there a serious effort to educate educators, especially using any sort of evidence driven approach. College instructors are often just thrown into classrooms with no training. How can they “teach you to think” when they dont know the first thing about teaching?

That is what I love about electricity. You never need bother remembering anything if you have just basic math skills.

I think they do "teach you how to learn" but that really consists in widening the distance between checkpoints and motivating you to figure out how to learn by yourself. Some people can develop these skills alone but it isn't easy.

I don't remember where I originally heard this, it might have been my theater teacher in high school, or it might have been an interview with some big name comedian, but it is something that has stuck with me since I was a teenager...

Humor is by it's nature transgressive, it is about violating norms. The purpose of "the punchline" is to make it clear that you are fully aware of the transgression and "making fun" of those norms not just shitting on them like an asshole.

Has anyone involved in this scandal in any capacity had the temerity to state the obvious - that women are generally not funny because nobody expects them to be so?

There are lots of funny ladies. Ellen has been funny for decades.

I have a slightly more nuanced take on this, but I didn't sleep very well last night so it might come out a little disorganised.

It's emphatically not the case that women aren't funny. My current favourite standup comedian is Jordan Jensen, who I discovered via clips she shares on Instagram. When I saw her live, I could hardly breathe from laughing so hard.

Click on the link in the paragraph above. If you're a heterosexual man (as are most of the people who post here), I'm betting you didn't look at her picture and think "would". And indeed, Jensen constantly cracks self-deprecating jokes about her appearance, complains about how often she's mistaken for a lesbian, how she envies women who are more naturally feminine than she is, and how in many regards she's more masculine than the men she dates. She's also rib-crackingly hilarious. I posit that this is not an accident.

So it's not the case that women generally aren't funny. It is absolutely the case that hot women generally aren't funny.

The reason for this was cleverly illustrated by an old CollegeHumor sketch, "POV: Hot Girl". The titular character goes to a bar and meets a male childhood friend and two of his friends, one of them asks where she works, and she replies "I work for a PR firm. It's a living!", whereupon all three men laugh uproariously. We hear her internal monologue: "I should seriously consider doing standup comedy". The joke, obviously, is that the men aren't laughing at her lame joke because it's funny, but because they want to get in her pants. In social settings, hot women essentially never receive accurate feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't, as people will laugh at their jokes for reasons unrelated to their comedic value ("boys will laugh at girls when they're not funny"), meaning attractive women never get opportunities to hone their comedic craft. In the tiny pool of female standup comedians successful enough to make a living off it, there are essentially zero lookers, despite physical attractiveness generally being considered an asset in the entertainment industry. (Amy Schumer isn't turning any heads even post-Ozempic.)

I know what you're going to say – sure, straight men have ulterior motives for laughing at a hot woman's unfunny jokes, but straight women don't, so hot women must still be receiving some accurate feedback on which material works and which doesn't. But I suspect the halo effect has a lot to answer for here, and in much the same way that attractive waitresses receive more tips even from other women, I imagine a straight woman might well laugh at an unfunny joke told by her hot friend. Women are also more conformist than men: if Plain Jane is at a party, Sexy Stacy tells an unfunny joke, and all the straight men in her vicinity laugh – Jane might well laugh along for the sake of fitting in.

But the more I think about it, I think the dynamic I'm describing might be even broader than this. When I saw Jordan Jensen live, there were two support acts prior to her. The second one was a short weaselly Jew (whose name escapes me), who was pretty funny. The first was a six-foot tall jock who looked like a J. Crew model, and he was hopeless.

Think about the most successful male standups in history. I daresay you will be hard pressed to find one that would be considered unequivocally handsome in strictly physical terms. (Shane Gillis himself is no head-turning beauty.) Louis CK, Dylan Moran, Patton Oswalt, Danny DeVito, Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie "Suzy" Izzard, Mitch Hedberg, Bill Burr, Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin – I could go on, but I think my point is abundantly clear (especially given how many of these comics' routines feature bits in which they vent about the frustrations of being sexually undesirable). Black comics fare a little better, but I still think it would be fair to describe Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock as "a little funny-looking". The dynamic is much the same as for hot women: when a physically attractive man tells a joke, people might laugh at that joke for reasons other than its comedic value (namely, the halo effect; because they find him generally charming; because they're a straight woman who wants to be his girlfriend/wife), which inevitably gives the man a misleading impression of how funny he really is and compromises his ability to hone his comedic instincts. The only people who can get constant, accurate, real-time feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't are people whom no one has ulterior motives for laughing at: namely, people who are ugly and poor.

Let me illustrate it another way. There are many Hollywood actors who moonlight as models for fashion brands, watches, cologne etc. (e.g. Jake Gyllenhaal, Timothée Chalamet, Ben Affleck, to name the first three that came to mind). Can you name one person who first achieved fame as a standup comedian and who is still best-known for that vocation who does fashion modelling on the side? I honestly can't think of one.

Another potential rebuttal to my theory is that there are at least a handful of successful, attractive Hollywood actors who didn't come up through standup, but who turn in legitimately funny performances in comedy films. (Despite his reputation for portraying Literally Me™ in assorted serious indie dramas, Ryan Gosling was hysterical in The Nice Guys and Barbie.) The difference, I would argue, is that film is a fundamentally collaborative medium, and a lot of what makes a funny performance comes down to the chemistry between the actors, the director's coaxing of the performance from the actor, and judicious cutting in the editing suite. For standup, by contrast, the comedian is on his own, with no one to bounce off once the house lights go down. It's probably the purest kind of comedy there is, and to make it in that industry, you have to be really funny.

So, yeah. Being a jester is an uggo's game, because uggos are the only ones receiving accurate, real-time feedback on how funny they are which they can use to refine and improve their material.

Separate from this, I think there's a separate but related dynamic wherein men are sort of expected to be funnier than women. Guys go for looks, women go for status, and being funny and making other people laugh is one way a man can make himself seem higher in status and in turn make himself seem more attractive to the opposite sex. But even if an attractive woman could somehow make herself funny, that in itself wouldn't make herself more desirable to the opposite sex. People respond to incentives: if most men would rather date an unfunny twenty-two-year-old who's a 9 than a hilarious thirty-year-old who's a 3, most women intuitively understand that their time would be better spent making themselves hotter than making themselves funnier. The only women who invest any effort into being funny are women who have nothing else to fall back on to make themselves seem attractive i.e. unattractive women. In other words, there's more baseline competitive pressure for men to be funny than women.

It wouldn't surprise me if this fundamental dynamic likewise explains the underrepresentation of women in rock music and similar. Single-minded devotion to one's artistic muse is only one reason of many that people join rock bands, and probably not even very high up on the list: a big part is the desire to be a rock star i.e. to be seen as locally higher in status i.e. to get groupies into bed. I think most people intuitively understand that a smelly dude with a guitar is more attractive to women than a smelly dude without one, whereas a hot girl who plays in a band isn't necessarily more attractive to men than a hot girl who doesn't play in a band. If a woman is trying to nab herself a husband, her effort is better spent trying to make herself more physically attractive. It follows that the only women who'll join rock bands are either a) women who simply cannot resist following their artistic muses, or b) physically unattractive women desperate for something to make them seem more attractive or higher in status than they otherwise would be: no man really wants to date a girl who's a 4, but if you had to date a 4, a 4 who plays in a band might seem that bit cooler than a 4 who doesn't.

Matt Rife

Was this intended as an example of a hot male standup?

Yes. He is a successful comedian and I would guess his following is largely female.

If the best example of a successful and conventionally attractive male standup comedian you can think of is one who achieved his appearance via extensive cosmetic surgery, I think that rather demonstrates my point.

Christopher Hitchens (in?)famously wrote that essay on this topic many years ago, arguing the opposite, but I always thought it was tongue-in-cheek, and his response to those who disagreed with him was usually something along the lines of "If they want to make such an effort to entertain me, well I'm happy to be amused."

Popping up in my Instagram feed a lot is Arynne Wexler, who I would consider very attractive, though she may not precisely have the little drop of Retsyn that would actually make her my "type." People will obviously disagree.

I was actually thinking about that Hitch essay while writing this comment.

I agree that Wexler is hot, although does she actually make a living from standup? I was under the impression that was just one string to her bow. From her social media presence she seems to rather aggressively market herself as an "anti-woke" comedian, which suggests that her material is more based around "owning the libs" clapter than actual comedic material.

I agree with your overall point but you're overselling how focused guys are on looks and underselling how much they care about other factors. Both men and women are attracted to creativity and status. Every time I ask a friend what they like about a girl they just started seeing, something creative comes up. "She draws", "She published a novel", "She plays guitar". People with creative pursuits tend to be more interesting to talk to.

Girls max out how attractive they can make themselves. Maybe you start as a physical 5/10. With great effort you get yourself to 7/10, but you're unable or unwilling to advance further. The same distinguishing logic works for the 7/10 as the 4/10. 7/10 looks + cool beats 7/10 + boring. Also you seem more like a peer to rockstar types when you also have a musical career, so it's a winning strategy for nabbing them. See the singer from The Distillers marrying Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age.

Additionally: your theory predicts female rockstars should be mid, but that's not what I see? Girls in bands, both big and small, tend to be a bit prettier and more stylish than baseline. (Pop music girls tend to be just straight hot. Why that difference is another issue entirely). It helps get the audience emotionally invested when you're easy to look at. Once I went to a diner before a show. There was a girl there that was way prettier than anyone else there. She was getting stares the whole time. When I went to see the show I found out she was one of the acts.

Can I just say, the fact you two are using the Hold Steady and the Distillers to support your arguments makes me feel like you're competing specifically for my favor and I love it. I hope you both win

your theory predicts female rockstars should be mid, but that's not what I see? Girls in bands, both big and small, tend to be a bit prettier and more stylish than baseline.

I would agree, but with a slightly different take: the female equivalent to Meatloaf (appearance-wise) would not make it.

Susan Boyle did kinda make it for a bit, but then again she kinda got through as a deliberate freak show and had the TV Talent Show pathway work for her where the Meatiness worked as a point of differentiation.

Every time I ask a friend what they like about a girl they just started seeing, something creative comes up.

Dare I say this effect might be contaminated by social desirability bias? "I like her because she's so creative" sounds a great deal less crass than "I like her because she has cracking tits and she's great in bed".

Even then, no one's debating that, ceteris paribus, creative people are more interesting to talk to. The point is, your friends aren't dating these women because they're creative. Your friends never would've asked these women out had they not found them physically attractive: physical attraction is the rule-in criterion, "being creative" is just gravy.

Additionally: your theory predicts female rockstars should be mid, but that's not what I see?

Maybe I'm overgeneralising from my personal experience + the most famous female rockstars. Dublin's post-punk scene exploded in popularity over the last decade, including a handful of female musicians, and I genuinely cannot think of even one that I would call more attractive than mid. Any list of the greatest female rockstars in history is bound to include Janis Joplin and Patti Smith, neither of whom were anything to write home about in terms of looks even at their peaks. Stevie Nicks, not bad-looking but hardly a knockout. I'll grant that Debbie Harry was a legitimate stunner.

Dare I say this effect might be contaminated by social desirability bias?

Yeah, suppose a genie who offers men two deals:

  1. While her physical appearance is otherwise held consistent, your girlfriend/wife is uglified by 1 point on the 10 point scale, say from a 7 to a 6. However, she now draws!
  2. While her physical appearance is otherwise held consistent, your girlfriend/wife is yassified by 1 point on the 10 point scale, say from a 7 to an 8. However, she no longer draws or plays guitar or whatever.

I imagine deal 1. gets near universal denial and deal 2. gets easy majority acceptance, where the rejections to 2. mostly come out of risk aversion or concern for some type of monkey’s paw situation.

One point on the 1-10 scale is a big deal though. What if it was 0.1 points on the scale? 0.01?

My broader point is that looks aren't literally everything for guys, even if they're the most important factor. Guys aren't pure looks maximizers. They frequently make tradeoffs against pure looks. This is more pronounced when you look at relationships than casual sex. Imagine a 7.5 whose hobbies are watching the office and tiktok, versus a 7.3 who plays guitar at fun house parties and gets your homies invited. Which would you rather date?

One point on the 1-10 scale is a big deal though. What if it was 0.1 points on the scale? 0.01?

Indeed, it only further highlights how little female “creativity” matters relative to looks, that it’s immediately conceded that we need to divide the delta by 5, 10, or 100 to make the thought experiment less obvious.

It also further highlights the male burden of performance and the female bar being on the floor, where “she draws” or “she plays guitar” is understood to be an earnest compliment for a woman by her boyfriend or husband. In contrast, “he draws” or “he plays guitar” by a woman about her boyfriend/husband would make him sound like a loser without further qualifiers, as such descriptors sound like someone characterising an elementary or a high school family member, respectively.

Imagine a 7.5 whose hobbies are watching the office and tiktok, versus a 7.3 who plays guitar at fun house parties and gets your homies invited. Which would you rather date?

The 7.3 who likes drawing attention to herself by playing guitar at house parties is likely thotting around even harder on Insta and TikTok than the 7.5 Office and TikTok watcher.

I couldn’t care less about a girlfriend/wife’s ability to get my homies invited places, except insofar the caring goes into the negative, as such ability (holding looks equal) is correlated with traits I wouldn’t want in a girlfriend/wife. The bros are more than able to fend for themselves.

So, yeah. Being a jester is an uggo's game, because uggos are the only ones receiving accurate, real-time feedback on how funny they are which they can use to refine and improve their material.

Ah, this is why I'm terribly unfunny: I'm just too darned handsome.

In the tiny pool of female standup comedians successful enough to make a living off it, there are essentially zero lookers

Iliza Shlesinger, Sarah Silverman, Nikki Glaser, Whitney Cummings, Kelsey Cook, Taylor Tomlinson, Maddy Kelly… and that’s just off the top of my head. And of course if you expand the criteria slightly to successful improv/sketch comics the field expands even more and you get people like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kaitlin Olson, Tina Fey, Veronika Slowikowska, Ashley Padilla, Jane Curtin…. I could keep going, but I think the point is made.

Iliza Shlesinger, Sarah Silverman, Nikki Glaser, Whitney Cummings, Kelsey Cook, Taylor Tomlinson, Maddy Kelly

I've only heard of half of these. Even in her prime Silverman was mid, as far as I'm concerned. Tomlinson is about as good-looking as Maggie Gyllenhaal, so not bad-looking by any means, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the start of her modelling career. Kelly I would also consider mid. I'll grant Whitney Cummings, Kelsey Cook and Iliza Shlesinger. "Three" seems numerically equivalent to "essentially zero".

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kaitlin Olson

Granted, but I'd consider them both more comic actresses than comedians, and I addressed the point about standup vs. comedic acting in the upper post.

Tina Fey

Mid even in her prime.

Veronika Slowikowska

Mid.

Ashley Padilla

Mid.

Jane Curtin

Mid, even in her prime.

You are already moving the goalposts. (And revealing that you just don’t follow stand-up very closely, making the value of your takes on the industry pretty questionable.)

What goalposts am I moving?

And just because these comedians aren't famous outside of the US doesn't mean I don't follow standup closely.

In social settings, hot women essentially never receive accurate feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't, as people will laugh at their jokes for reasons unrelated to their comedic value

I'm not sure there's such a strong link between friends laughing at jokes in real life and the craft of being a stand up comedian. Even for men, looks and social status also matter pretty significantly in how likely you are to get a laugh. Indeed, I would say that women laughing as a form of flirting with a guy they are interested in is more common than the gender-switched variant you talk about (although they both definitely happen).

Although if you're looking for good looking female comedians, shout out to Taylor Tomlinson (who incidentally learned stand up as a fat teenager in church).

You're correct that there are a lot of people who are funny on an interpersonal level, but who would die onstage if they ever attempted standup. Making one's friends or colleagues laugh is a very different skill from making a roomful of paying strangers laugh. But I nonetheless think that, for someone who has never attempted standup (or any other kind of comedy, like improv or sketch comedy), the former is the best proxy for the latter a complete amateur is likely to have.

I know what you're going to say – sure, straight men have ulterior motives for laughing at a hot woman's unfunny jokes, but straight women don't, so hot women must still be receiving some accurate feedback on which material works and which doesn't.

I wasn't going to say that actually because the notion that hot women would ever feel compelled to tell jokes to or have banter with either other hot women or plain women never occurred to me.

But even if an attractive woman could somehow make herself funny, that in itself wouldn't make herself more desirable to the opposite sex.

Indeed.

It follows that the only women who'll join rock bands are either a) women who simply cannot resist following their artistic muses, or b) physically unattractive women desperate for something to make them seem more attractive or higher in status than they otherwise would be: no man really wants to date a girl who's a 4, but if you had to date a 4, a 4 who plays in a band might seem that bit cooler than a 4 who doesn't.

I'd also argue they are in many such cases willfully entering a predominantly male subculture in order to increase their mating chances due to themselves not being able to find eligible mates the conventional way for whatever reason.

So, nerd queen.

Also, to be more generous, often times the sorts of women who are that obsessively driven towards an artistic pursuit or hobby don't get along with other women, or at least with the normie female social scene.

I'd also argue they are in many such cases willfully entering a predominantly male subculture in order to increase their mating chances due to themselves not being able to find eligible mates the conventional way for whatever reason.

Oh yeah, this is a valid point. Big fish in a small pond.

I think there may be a degree of truth to what you’re saying, but remember Berkson’s Paradox. The null hypothesis is there is no relation between humor and attractiveness, no effect by which ugly people train their humor in order to win friends and influence people. You just never even notice the unfunny plain people, and they don’t become celebrities.

Keep in mind that there is a less-polite two-sided version of the paradox, too: not only do you not notice the unfunny plain people, the people who are funny and beautiful also go so far in life that they do not have to put themselves in front of the likes of you. There are more pleasant occupations out there than "stand-up comedian", if someone abundantly blessed with both wits and looks even has to work at all (as opposed to, say, being a cocktail party regular on some rich guy's yacht).

Absolutely. Hypothetically, there could be a 10/10 woman out there who is exactly as funny as Jordan Jensen. We would never hear about her. Why would she bother to pursue a gruelling career in standup when she could marry a Saudi prince and never have to work a day in her life?

Notice how there's a massive gulf (even in Hoffmeister's maximally generous list) between the looks of "stand-up comedians" and "screen actresses who specialize in comedy". One gets paid a lot more for a much more pleasant job.

For clarity, I don't think there's any intrinsic correlation between being (un)attractive and being the specific kind of funny necessary to be a successful standup comedian. My argument is that the only people who become successful standup comedians are people who are not unusually physically attractive, which doesn't imply that being unattractive in itself confers some kind of competitive advantage. Physical unattractiveness is necessary but not sufficient for a successful career in standup.

You made an error in the code.

Or does nobody expect them to be so because women are generally not funny? Chicken/egg problem.

I think women are generally not expected to impress men with sophisticated social skills.

Men have the burden of performance. It extends beyond sexual/romantic situations too.

Your male coworker who never has anything funny or interesting to say is one boring dude. Your female coworker who never has anything funny or interesting to say is just your female coworker.

Did Shane’s norm violation go too far in the eyes of some women, thereby evoking their ire?

Hoes are indeed big mad (x24). You’re not supposed to Notice much less point out the female love of being sex objects and farming sexual attention, discourse about which feminists of various stripes have now Streisand Effected into the mainstream.

Apparently, as part of the hoe maddening related to the Gillis fallout, it’s now even a trend that TikThots will wear their usual thotty attire to the gym and post videos with captions attempting to reclaim the wearing of whorish outfits to the gym as a form of Empowerment and sticking it to the patriarchy. Not exactly defying the meme-gender allegations.

That's literally the joke he was making. "I'm probably in the background of like 6 tiktoks right now." He also has an old Gilly and Keeves sketch (edit: this was actually from the new season of Tires) about the same situation, where he innocently glances at some hot girl at the gym only to be ambushed by her and her boyfriend who were deliberately trying to entrap him for a video. He's joked in the past about throwing on his tard face as an uno reverse card.

It’s also a bit in the most recent season of Tires.

Oh that's probably what I'm actually remembering. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure fitness influencers were enough of a thing back when he was making Gilly and Keeves.

Yeah, it's the "hello, human resources?" meme, but in the gym instead of the office. You're allowed to directly ogle women wearing sexually provocative athletic wear only if you're equally attractive, otherwise you have to avert your gaze and watch them on social media instead.

Make a brutal kind of sense - social media viewing is much easier to monetize.

The businessman inside me suddenly wants to sell women's sportswear with 'Whore' written on it.

Just pitch it as "reclaiming your sexuality" and you're golden. Twerking and W.A.P are both considered feminist.

Dew it. It’s not a coincidence how the Playboy bunny became a female lifestyle brand and how JUICY pants blew up for a few years.

it’s the perfect job for a trustfund kid and provides an extremely glamorous social life

I'm going to disagree with you on this one. Developing a stand up act is extremely humbling. It involves years of going to crappy bars to perform for unsophisticated drunk people for terrible money.

There's no glamour until you have a high level of success.

I think having any sort of "credentials" about comedy should be counted as severe negative points of credibility for any judgements made about comedy. Taking comedy seriously enough to get a degree in it utterly defeats the purpose. Also the fact that such a degree exists in the first place and that my tax dollars likely funded the program and likely subsidized the girl's loans to pay for it too makes me want to burn everything down.

Dave's first rule of comedy was that if you have to explain the joke, the joke is not funny.

And if you have to explain that a joke is not funny, it's hilarious.

They wouldn't be complaining if they didn't see people laughing.

Also the fact that such a degree exists in the first place and that my tax dollars likely funded the program

If you can't appreciate the dark comedy of such a joke, then irony is truly dead.

Oh it's funny, and it's sending me to the funny farm thinking about it

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