Great Sentences In Blogger History

So there's this fellow named Christopher Hitchens, who cultivates a reputation as scathing but mostly winds up as merely dubious. Most recently, he's written an article for Vanity Fair titled Why Women Aren't Funny.

So far as can be ascertained, he's not being ironic.

Now, certain examples might spring to your mind to show that Mr. Hitchens is in fact what we call full-of-shit-up-to-his-eyeballs.

If we're talking about funny performers, we have only to look to the casts of such TV shows as Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, which positively overflow with funny women, especially in the former. There's a reason why most of Alyson Hannigan's work since Buffy the Vampire Slayer has featured her flexing her comedy muscles. And if we cast our minds back, before it sank into the dirt Buffy itself was often a very funny show.

If it's the non-performing line we're after, Gilmore was created and chiefly written by a woman and at her departure, well, the show hasn't exactly been gaining in laughter.

These are only a few examples-no doubt you or I could come up with lists as long as my arm of funny women performers, writers, and so on.

And bloggers. As you might imagine, the always-thoughtful Amanda Marcotte and Shakespeare's Sister, themselves members of the not-funny brigade, have something to say about this theory of Mr. Hitchens.

Amanda writes, in Pandagon:

Hitchens knows what kind of humor about male bodies is acceptable in all-male groups, no doubt because he spends so much time in them. He also knows that women do not make such jokes amongst themselves, because he spends so much time at the salon with just the gals. An alternative explanation comes to my mind, due to my lifetime of experience being female. As a general rule, I’ve learned it’s best to avoid making the crude jokes referencing female anatomy around men who think they’re being daring when they obliquely reference sex with, “If you catch my drift,” and hope your imagination fills in the rest. They don’t seem to find humor that sucks the “mystery” out of their preferred sex objects’ physical form as funny as I do.

But it's Shakes who comes up with the Great Sentence In Blogging History. It's at the end of this excerpt of her self-titled blog:

It occurs to me that men like him seem to write articles like this just so that women like me can issue stern and unfunny responses, thusly proving his thesis. I’m not particularly good at acknowledging my own attributes, but I’ll be damned if I let someone tell me I’m not funny. I know how to tell a joke, and tell it well; I can deliver one-liners off the top of my head with flawless timing, never regretting five minutes later having missed the perfect rejoinder; I even do brilliant pratfalls. I know I’m funny—but I’m simply not amused by being told by a pugnacious pigass I can’t possibly be simply because I have a cunt.

A cunt which, by the way, is herself a piquant raconteur.

Any sex that can come up with a line like that instantly disproves Hitchens' thesis.