I asked #gaming if there were any good female comedians and the list was very short. I only managed to come up with one that I like.
Are women just inherently unfunny? If so, why?
Or are women just less interested in comedy so not many try it out?
Hard mode: Try and answer without pulling the comments section into an Amy Schumer circlejerk.
She should make another one called Rich Vos Isn't Funny.
I think it has something to do with the way men interact with men and the way women interact with women. It is just non stop ruthlessness sometimes. You need to develop a sense of humour just to deal with the trauma. If I slipped on some ice and broke my arm, I would be ridiculed before I received anything resembling help. Women just aren't like that.
It isn't just the content. It's everything. The analysing of an event, the timing, it's just done better by men, for some reason.
Hard mode: Try and answer without pulling the comments section into an Amy Schumer circlejerk.
Done. Like Amy Schumer's career.
...ah, damn it!
I think it has to do with a couple things, that are kind of but not completely related. One is likely just natural disposition - women are more likely to want to enter fields that involve nurturing or caring, like healthcare, teaching, nursing, etc. This is easily noticed by a cursory glance at gender numbers in most first world countries. It's notable that it's you find more women in technology in some third-world countries like India than you do in places like the United States. That's most likely because they're working hard to pull themselves out of the grinding poverty they find themselves in, so they'll accept a job that's not quite in their temperament in exchange for money.
The second thing likely has to do with the overall drive to massively excel. You'll notice at the top of almost every field you find a man. Athletic competitions are one thing, but also CEOs, world leaders, nearly every field has overwhelmingly men at the top. It's not because men are just better at everything, but it rather has to do with the drive to reach the top. Men tend to go to the extremes more than women. Not just at the top, but also at the bottom. Women tend to go more naturally toward the center of the bell curve.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but I recommend this talk by Professor Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University. The link is a text readout of a speech he gave in 2007 regarding possible cultural differences in men and women. I found it extremely interesting.
Bonnie MacFarlane (Vos) actually did a decent movie on the subject called "Women aren't funny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqVk78EcSw
I would theorize that since comedy is based on surprising people with unexpected and often anti-social thought patterns, ones that often aren't trying to express something without trying to gain empathy or social acceptance from the audience it comes less naturally to women who are for the most part evolutionarily predisposed towards cooperation and group mechanics, where as most male comics heavily draw from their humiliation and anti-social, inconceivably awkward social behavior to surprise the audience. Now this isn't true of all comics but generally being able to live with rejection is a trait many comics have.
Also female comics frequently make "jokes" seeking social acceptance or to portray themselves in a positive light.
For example a female comic may make a joke about how much she hates a make up commercial and makes fun of the models and then goes and buys the same make up to look like them but fails completely. Or a story about an awkward date.
Now a male comic instead may tell a story about shoving a frozen hotdog up his ass and masturbating but then realizes that the hotdog was all he had to eat in the house and now has a dilemma as to whether to eat the hotdog.