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I first started exercising my funny bone during my senior year of high school. The work out regimen was quick and surprisingly easy. Humor writing for a public audience, once a week, felt natural and cathartic, like half-assing a YouTube yoga video on the floor in my pajamas. At the time, I had been dating the same boy for four-plus years. Two months later, we broke up.
Yes, this may have been a coincidence, but I also kind of think it wasn’t.
In a recent Atlantic article titled, “Plight of the Funny Female,” Olga Khazan, who is a kick-ass comedy gal, reverberates the hollow sound of frustrating experiences funny women have in love and romance. Through a combination of research-based evidence and personal anecdote, Khazan shows how, for one, a man looking for a partner “with a sense of humor” is often just interested in a slampiece who will compliantly laugh at his jokes, and not a partner who can make him laugh on her own.
Since when has the definition of “sense of humor,” a term so colloquial, become conflated with that of “confining oneself to repressive gender roles when it comes to having the ability to make people laugh??????” Does anyone know? LMK if you find out, because me and Olga Khazan are looking for some answers.
After reading her article, a lot of things started to make sense. Maybe – maaaayyybeee – my relationship with my high school sweetheart shrank as my personality grew. I gained fans at the cost of someone who used to be my #1. That’s not where my clashes in failed love and humor end, though; today, an ex added on to an angry text rant: “That’s what you get for asking me ridiculous questions and trying to be funny… It’s probably just some feminist instinct that you have triggered, right?”
I’m not “trying” to be funny, babe. I AM funny. (I’m not even going to properly address the “feminist instinct” comment – you can respond to that one internally.)
And I’m not alone: a bunch of our writers at The Rib felt that Khazan’s experiences were oddly familiar. So, without further ado, here are our own experiences in being self-proclaimed funny women who have fallen in love (or fallen in something like it):
At sixteen, I was super in love for a bit, and it went really badly. Nothing is unusual in that statement, but something should’ve tipped me off back then to boyfriend #1 being bad news – he consistently insisted that I wasn’t funny. So, I guess first matters first: Dear My Ex: No wonder things didn’t work out between us, you have no taste! Second, screw that. I am hilarious. As an almost-adult, I could never be with someone who constantly undermined my sense of humor. I will confess, I spend a lot of time kvetching about being romantically overlooked due to my goofy persona. But, I also feel weird asserting that other girls should be passed over instead of me, because we are “equally pretty, and I am funnier?” That sounds gross. And sometimes, I do get guys who are into me because I’m the class clown, but it’s always with the air that I’m a sort of performance art piece, not a full-bodied human being, who sometimes gets sad and doesn’t want to devote time to entertaining them. I think basically everyone deserves someone, and I can only hope that there is someone out there who will love me, in part, for my lifelong commitment to making people laugh.
–Caitlin Dorman
I think that when I first meet people and I crack jokes or act like the all-around goofball that I am, I’m not immediately deemed as desirable. Though the friend zone is NOT real, I think joking around with guys (sometimes jumping into masturbation jokes the first time you meet them) often first casts me as the girl who can make them laugh and not the girl that can hold a deeper romantic relationship. I think guys often look for their gal humor one place and their romantic endeavors elsewhere. And if they’re into the pixie manic dream girl shit… well, she can be quirky-funny but she can’t be crude. (Zooey Deschanel would never make vagina far jokes!) Plus, as Taylor Swift warns us, don’t boys only want love if it’s torture? And my humor is cool, not torturous—except when I tell really great (bad) puns.
–Daniella Balarezo
When I was 16 years old, I started going out with a “bad boy.” And by that I mean that I started hanging around someone who everyone else thought was a total asshole. But he was nice to me, and I liked feeling special, so I kept him around. That is, I kept him around until he told me that I “just wasn’t witty, or like, quick.” Now I had never really considered myself a funny girl, but I had considered myself a feminist, and I had real issues with someone insulting my intelligence. Needless to say, he didn’t last very long after that, but his comment certainly did. And I didn’t think I was quick OR witty for years after that. Sometimes I still don’t think I’m witty. But now I write/edit for The Rib, so fuck you, asshole.
–Sarah Master
I don’t think anyone’s ever been in love with me, so maybe that just means I’m abundantly funny rather than deficient in lovability. Or maybe it’s because when a potential mate says something funny to me, I make a pointed effort not to laugh, and to instead give him intense side-eye until he leaves. While this strategy has yet to prove effective, I think it’s only a matter of time.
–Elizabeth McClellan
While struggling to come up with an idea for this panel, I sent the link to Khazan’s article to my boyfriend.
“Can you help me write this article? I’m really stuck.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“I mean, I’ve had lots of experience with assholes telling me I’m not funny. I’m sure you remember when I co-wrote that play with Danny, and everyone congratulated him on the funny stuff and me on the sentimental stuff when really it was totally the other way around?”
“Right.”
“But I mean, you’re the only person I’ve ever dated. I don’t have as many stories specific to my romantic life.”
“Hm.”
“Well… how does it feel to date someone who’s funnier than you?”
“I like it!”
“That’s not helpful! Be shittier!”
“Oh, sorry. Yes, I am very much intimidated by your humor and funniness. And it’s a wonder it doesn’t drive me away. Because I am so unsure of myself that everyone around me must suck, particularly in comparison to the godliness that is me.
At this point, I laughed aloud and started choking on my salad.
“Ack! Stop! Stop!”
“Ha-HA! Who’s the funny one now?”
–Ali MacLeod
I’ve had boys tell me that I’m funny. I’ve also spent most of my life single. However, I’d still like to think that my sense of humor could be what draws someone in, not what scares them away. In fact, I think I’ve always had this idea that being funny could make up for some of my other qualities, like being terrible at flirting and making small-talk. And then this article tells me that it’s not enough, that it’s not what boys want. Whatever. Maybe there will be boys who don’t like that I’m sarcastic and make jokes. But I know that I couldn’t be in a relationship where we didn’t make each other laugh, so I guess I’m on the lookout for a boy who does like funny girls. If he’s funnier than me, that’s fine (unlikely, but fine). As long as we can both be funny.
–Elizabeth Purington
I like men. Men typically don’t like me back. I have an inkling that this doesn’t have a lot to do with my sense of humor, but this article might give me an excuse. I guess from now on I’ll chalk up all failed seductions to the fact that men can’t appreciate a well-placed feminist pun. Beyond that, there are some truths here. People tell me that I’m bad at flirting because I don’t laugh at guys’ jokes. If your joke isn’t funny, I’m not laughing – I don’t care how cute you are. Odds are, you weren’t planning on sleeping with me anyways, so let’s both retain some pride here. Maybe the reason that men think they’re the funnier gender is because all these ladies have been conditioned to laugh at their dumb-ass jokes. Ladies, let’s be honest from now on: don’t fake orgasms and don’t laugh at boys’ bad jokes.
–Annie Warner
My love life history is pretty dismal and pretty rife with unrequited crushes. I’ve never actually been in a relationship or gone on a date. The only time I’ve ever been asked out was by a random stranger who just thought I was cute. I don’t want to say that the reason I’ve been a single lady for 19 years (and counting) is because of my humor, but I think it might play into that. I’ve always been loud, blunt, obnoxious (and pretty hilarious). I love attention and making people laugh. But I’ve been told by a few people in my life, and by society in general, that boys don’t want girls like that – that the jokes I tell and my overall behavior aren’t feminine or classy enough; that maybe, if I were more demure, sweeter, and less crass, boys would ask me out; that I should flirt with them by laughing at all their jokes (even if they aren’t funny) and not have such a potty mouth. Isn’t the big Hollywood message to “be yourself?” Yet I have people telling me that maybe no one wants date me because I’m too true to myself. Now, I mentally beat myself up if I make a crude joke or goofy face in front of a guy I like. I was never comfortable with the idea of toning myself down or putting all my favorite personality traits on the “mild” setting just to attract a guy’s attention. It’s hard to remind myself sometimes that I shouldn’t worry about what my unrequited crush thinks about my jokes. I wouldn’t want to be with someone that doesn’t completely accept me for who I am.
–Nicole Martinez
I found high school to be a system of firmly set roles. Maybe it wasn’t to the extreme of the Mean Girls stereotypes, but it was true: changing your label was nearly impossible. Pretty soon into ninth grade I earned a “nerd” title, and that was that. Any attempt to make jokes on my part was met with strong resistance and a visible discomfort in my peers. Change and originality was anathema to the conformity that my school’s social scene promoted. However, I soon fell in love. He was funny, and he knew it. His twitter page, filled with witticisms and the occasional sportsy commentary only secured his role more. As the girlfriend, my role in supporting him was also in supporting his humor, and not detracting from it with my own. I thought that a relationship would be the environment where I could ditch my nerd archetype without judgment, but when trying to be funny, my ex met me with the same confused stares that I received in the hormone-teeming hallways at school. For three years I was conditioned to play the part I was given. It was only in my writing that my inner “funny” came out, and so I found my outlet. When I came to college, I made myself two promises: that I would find a way to write all the frickin’ time, and that anyone I dated would let me not only play my own role, but the whole cast if I wanted.
–Chloe Burns
Editors’ Note: None of the Rib writers involved in creating this post have experience with being a funny lady in love with other ladies. If you have any experiences (with male or female love interests) that you would like to share, please comment below, or send your response to the theribofbrown@gmail.com. Funny women unite!
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