In an essay in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens posits that men are funnier – in fact, far funnier – than women.

Not that women don’t make great wits and comedians. Hitchens points to Ellen DeGeneres and Sandra Bernhard as examples of talented female wags. But the fairer sex, in his view, is burdened by cultural imperatives: for women it’s all about being pretty, not funny. And by biological responsibilities: it’s hard to be hilarious when you’re eight months pregnant. Hence their funny bone lacks the robust strength of we males, or so claims Hitchens.

Remarkably, he gets some support in his view from two acclaimed female comic voices, Fran Lebowitz and Nora Ephron. (Well, he called Ephron and she didn’t disagree with the notion.) Lebowitz apparently agreed, saying “humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?”

What’s interesting about the piece is not his theory, but that he does a fairly decent job of proving it (though of course it can’t be proven, and humor is so subjective and contextual that his thesis can’t be absolutely true).

Writes Hitchens:

“If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.”