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Shane Gillis and the Limits of Credentialism
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
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.
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?
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 man 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.
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.
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