Another white man is talking about the rare and elusive “funny woman” (as the endangered beast is commonly identified). It’s happened before and if you don’t know about the instances to which I’m referring, let me summarize: women aren’t funny. beautiful women really aren’t funny. funny women aren’t beautiful.

I tend to ignore this noise because I only care about if people personally find me funny and if their brand of comedy is Jeff Foxworthy or Dane Cook or whatever that shit is that Chuck Lorre makes, then I’ll go ahead and let them be wrong in their own little world.

But I’ve broken my silence because widespread falsehoods are a pet peeve of mine. A former boss described me as having a justice gene – I can’t just sit by and let things go to shit without trying to do something about it. The good news is that my justice gene is easily sated and a blog post is sufficient to quiet the hungry growl of integrity tying knots in my stomach.

Women are funny. Funny women are beautiful. As a stand-up junkie, I’m well aware of stunning comics like Nikki Glaser, Jen Kirkman, Aisha Tyler, Kelly Oxford… you get the point. These are gorgeous women. If you just saw pictures of them, you’d think, wow, that chick’s hot. They could model. And for the benefit of the Adam Carollas of the world, these are your societal beauty standards examples. There are plenty of other gorgeous stand-up comics, writers, and performers.

Beautiful women are funny. Read an interview with Mila Kunis, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lawrence, Anna Kendrick… these women, known for making us mere mortals wear paper bags over our heads in deference, are hilarious. I would gladly friend-date any of these women and totally forget that they have the freakish beauty normally associated with exotic flowers or a Jaguar C-type.

After much contemplation as to why the concept that women aren’t funny has become so prevalent, I was hit with a eureka moment.

It’s not that women aren’t funny. It’s that men don’t like women to be funny.

The theme of most “women aren’t funny” arguments is that women like different kind of jokes. Softer, gentler jokes, with a story and the humor of a sly pun or unexpected irony. Women, it seemed, just weren’t capable of what’s actually funny. The kind of funny that only men can produce: dirty jokes. In the world of stand-up, it’s called working blue. Andrew Dice Clay (incidentally, one of my mother’s favorite comedians) is the personification of blue jokes. When people say women aren’t funny, they mean they aren’t blue-funny.

Men don’t like it when women are blue-funny. They don’t like it when they are blue at all. Women aren’t supposed to be graphic. They’re supposed to be demure. They are supposed to perform the soft, soothing comedy of food jokes (see DeGeneres, E. & Poundstone, P. – who are excellent and hilarious, by the way) that the audience is comfortable with – because a lot of women don’t like women working blue either.

We are at a point in America where a woman can be required to endure a trans-vaginal ultrasound to undergo a private medical procedure and, at the same time, saying tampon in mixed company will result in a male cringe registering 7.0 on the Richter scale. We are at a point where merely mentioning that I was on the toilet when I hit my head on the sink left the men in the room shuddering at the thought of a female expending waste. My sense of humor is blue with a side of black (there’s some dark, sick jokes that roll around in my dirty little brain). I see firsthand, albeit on a much smaller scale, what Amy Schumer encounters – the discomfort with an attractive woman who swears like a sailor and confesses sins as a raconteur instead of a shamed heathen.

Men have long been unable to bear the burdens women encounter daily. I’ve watched grown men physically fight over one yelling across the street at the other, but when the guys across the street advise me that they like me better when I’m thick, I move on with what is a regular day. Men can rarely withstand the onus of emotions, so they compartmentalize them into the office, the gym, the bottle, the laptop – whatever is convenient and accommodating of their immersion. The way men complain about a kidney stone indicates they have forgotten that there are women doing essentially the same thing EVERY DAY in order to CONTINUE HUMAN EXISTENCE. But by all means, tell me more about your urethra rock.

I’ve sat at many a table filled with women telling side-splitting stories about every filthy topic you can imagine and many you can’t. The games of “Would You Rather?” I played with my grad-school girlfriends would shock & awe Howard Stern. At long last, Bridesmaids and Inside Amy Schumer are among the beacons of hilarity in the testosterone pool of blue-funny. Society is finally coming to terms with the fact that women poop. We are tiptoeing cautiously into the nearly infinite world of ridiculously sublime tales of sexual absurdity.

We have reached the edge of the bonfire where I told the guys who couldn’t handle my whiskey my favorite joke:

Three tampons are walking towards you. Which one talks to you – the one on the right, the one on the left, or the one in the middle?

…

None of them. They’re all stuck up cunts.