Last year, when I mentioned on this site Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair article "Why Women Aren't Funny," the backlash was great, in many senses of that word. "YOU ARE AN IDIOT, CORD," a commenter calling herself A FUNNY WOMAN wrote to me. As it turns out, women don't take kindly to men saying they can't do things well, nor do they like men mentioning men that say women can't do things well.

Such feminine rage was probably the impetus for Vanity Fair's latest cover story, "Who Says Women Aren't Funny?" Penned by drab New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley, the rebuttal piece gets by with a little help from top comediennes like Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig and Wanda Sykes. And it could have been great, had it not included passages like this:

It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.

At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey.

Hey now! Isn't tacitly calling Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett uglier than Tina Fey the same hierarchical bullshit chauvinists pull? Is this supposed to be a joke, lady?

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