Plight of the Funny Female
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A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the year, she was startled by one comment in particular:
“She’s not funny,” the student wrote.
Mickes realized that university students didn’t seem to welcome, or even notice, the wit of many of her female colleagues. She’s not the only one. A recent graphic made by Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, analyzed the words used to describe male and female professors across 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessor.com. In every single discipline, male professors were far more likely than female ones to be described as funny.
“I thought, ‘maybe I’m not that funny,’” Mickes said. “But people say I'm funny. I have a great time with my female friends.”
Mickes’s story triggered the familiar shot/chaser of recognition and unease in me. I come from the kind of family that deals with minor adversity by making relentless fun of the petty tyrants responsible. (Major adversity, we smother in smoked meats.) Given three adjectives to describe me, most of my female friends would list “funny” as one of them. But I maybe make a man laugh once every other month.
On one hand, to headline Madison Square Garden.
