Take My Secretary Of State, Please by Nora Ephron at Huffington Post

[applegrove]

Take My Secretary Of State, Please
by Nora Ephron
Huffinngton Post
December 9, 2006

"I met Condoleezza Rice last weekend. She was much prettier than I thought she was going to be. This was at the State Department dinner the night before the Kennedy Center Honors. She was wearing a beautiful green evening dress, and she looked great. That gap between her front teeth is not as bad in person as it is on television.

I've always wanted to talk to Condi about that gap because it's very easy to fix and I know a good celebrity dentist who can do the job in less than twenty-four hours. He's expensive but Condie makes a decent salary, and let's face it, she hasn't picked up a check for the last six years, so she can afford it.

Anyway, Condi was the hostess of the dinner, and she stood up to speak about each of the honorees. She was completely competent. She was, however, not at all funny. She tried to be, but she wasn't. She was what I call not just "not funny" but NF, which is far worse -- it's truly, deeply, tragically not funny. I mention this because it may help explain why Christopher Hitchens has written a piece called "Why Women Aren't Funny," in this month's Vanity Fair. I can only assume that it's because he's spent too much time living in the same city with Condoleezza Rice.

Hitchens' thesis (let's be honest about it) has a germ of truth. There are plenty of funny women, way more than there used to be, but as a rule women are not as funny as men. The reasons are simple, and fairly boring. Hitchens quotes at length from a Stanford University study that proves conclusively that women don't respond to punch lines as enthusiastically as men do; I can't imagine why he even brings up the study unless he has a word count he's trying to meet. Why not just get right down to it? Men love jokes, women don't. Men tell jokes, women can't. Men have cocks, women don't. End of story.

............SNIP"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/take-my-secretary-of-stat_b_35949.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. I don't want to hear about these people not being in jail." n/t