Your female friends are like your favourite, most comfy pair of big knickers – they’ve got your a**e covered. Keeping with the underwear analogy, we’re also one another’s human Wonderbras – uplifting and supportive, making each other look bigger and better.
The power of female friendship is so strong, I find a girls’ night out more therapeutic than a wellness retreat. The only danger of a girls’ night out is being hospitalised from hilarity.
So why the great male myth that women aren’t funny? One of the reasons is that they’re terrified to think what it is we are being humorous about. Some men presume women spend the whole time talking about the length of their members, which is not true... We also talk about the width!
Scientists tell us that laughter is innate; it originates in the oldest part of the brain, the hypothalamus. Biologists maintain that laughter increases our biological fitness. Anthropologists have revealed that Inuits hold laughing competitions and women, in all cultures, laugh more often than men, especially in all-female groups. Why?
Why are women so funny...
In truth, some people are funny and others have funniness thrust upon them. As the butt of God’s biological joke, for the female of the species, it’s a case of laugh or cry. I mean, just think of all the trials women endure.
First off, there’s the shock of menstruation when you discover that you’ll be taken hostage by your hormones once a month.
Then there’s pregnancy, where everything swells to sumo wrestler proportions; followed by childbirth, where you stretch your birth canal the customary, what, five kilometres? Next comes mastitis and, before you know it, the menopause.
Then, just when things go quiet, what happens? You grow a beard! How can that be fair? I could make a macramé hanging basket with what’s sprouting out of my chin right now.
Kathy's wickedly witty novel is out now: Matilda, Jo, Penny and Cressy are all women at the top of their game; so imagine their surprise when they start to be personally overlooked and professionally pushed aside by less-qualified men. Only they're not going down without a fight. Society might think the women have passed their amuse-by dates but the Revenge Club have other plans.
Still, we don’t whinge about it, do we girls? No. Our only motto is – laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you get salt in your champers!
But without doubt, if I didn’t have the cathartic camaraderie afforded by female friendship, I’d end up hatching abandoned bird eggs in my bra.
... and so eloquent
Men may be physically stronger but women are verbally more dexterous. Numerous studies have revealed that women use hundreds more words than men in our daily vocabularies.
My boyfriend maintains this is because there are only so many ways to say "Yes, dear."
But the fact remains that while most men grope towards a single entendre, women give excellent quip-lash. So, next time a man tells you that women ‘just aren’t funny’, explain the reason women don’t tell jokes is that we marry or work for them.
So, here’s to batting around bon mots with our human Wonderbras. I’m wearing one now and it’s so called because when you take it off, you wonder where your boobs have gone!
But one thing I never have to wonder about is where my friends have gone because I hold my friends close. Including you. So, thank you for being my pen pal.
Kathy Lette writes her amusing columns on all sorts of topics, from faking orgasms to camaraderie at divorce parties to going makeup-free and why it's easier to be a man. A new column is published in woman&home magazine every month. This one is a gem from the archives!
This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of woman&home magazine. Subscribe to the magazine for £6 for 6 issues.
