Are Women Funny? A Vanity Fair Roundtable Discussion

GENDER ROLLS Fey, Hitchens (inset) (Photo: Getty Images) Last winter, boozy British curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens wrote a humorous if not entirely accurate piece for Vanity Fair titled "Why Women Aren't Funny," the thrust of which is that men have a biological imperative to be funny in order to convince women to sleep with them, whereas women don't have to be funny because men want to sleep with them regardless of whether they're funny or not. (Okay, though he sort of lost us at the whole "a lady's sense of humor goes out with her uterus" thing at the end.) In the latest edition of VF, Carter has handed the reins over to error-prone New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley to defend her gender's good honor. The results are mixed.