Jennifer Shahade is a Philadelphia based writer and gamesplayer. She is a two-time American Women's Chess Champion (2002, 2004). Her first book, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport intertwined her own story with that of great women chess champions past and present. She is also a semi-professional poker player, and placed 17th out of more than 1200 players in the 2007 Ladies World Series of Poker event.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New In Chess, the L.A. Times, and Chess Life Magazine, for which Jennifer is the web-editor. She has coached chess to talented youngsters all over the country and also performs simultaneous exhibitions in which she plays up to 50 people at once, in locations as various as Shanghai, China, Soweto, South Africa and a Girls' Scout Convention in Los Angeles.
I've observed a disturbing pattern about women being funny.
Often, a woman will make a joke, and a guy will blatantly steal and repeat her joke, laugh at it, and act as if the women only accidentally made the joke, without actually realizing that there was genuine, male-approved humor in it. This happened to me several times but the best example I can remember is at a Sleator Kinney concert, when I made some joke about a real afro underneath an afro wig. But here's a particularly disturbing example: Conan repeating Tina Fey's jokes as if she wasn't funny enough to mean it! http://www.geekmonthly.com/ Was there really anything wrong with Tina Fey's delivery when she said that it looked like she made the magazine herself at the mall? Why did people only laugh when Conan repeated what she said word for word?
This whole phenomenon just goes to show how ingrained the "women aren't funny" bullshit is. Last year, on the worst plane ride of my life (don't fly Israir), I read an article in Christopher Hitchens article in Vanity Fair about women not being funny due to childbirth. After that article, I refuse to even read reviews of his new book, God is Not Great. It's not about principles: I read a lot of writers I disagree with. Right now I'm loving the books of the uber-conservative economist, Steven Landsburg. (Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex.) The problem with Hitchens article was that not only did I disagree with, but it was stupid, and contained almost zero self-editing or self-questioning and I just can't trust anything such a writer writes.
One of my favorite magazines, Bitch Magazine had an intellectual rebuttal to the Hitchens article, but to create an intellectual rebuttal to the theory : "Women aren't funny because they procreate" doesn't really work. You can't fight a marshmallow with a hammer. Instead, it's crucial for women to take it upon themselves to come up with tons of abortion and childbirth jokes. That brings us to the hilarious but mean show, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," which is now in its second season. The second episode of the Seinfeld-esque comedy was all about men making hilarious jokes about abortion, and women just sitting around not being funny enough to ever think that abortion could be funny. I'm working on a top ten abortion joke list that I plan to pitch to D.Letterman, but I've only got six right now. When I have ten, I promise to publish them here.
You'll notice that in this blog I often talk about books, movies and magazines that came out 1-2 years ago.Maybe I should have titled this blog: "Commentary on last year's pop culture." After all, it takes at least a year for things to settle in my brain, and also I refuse to arrange my life around prime time T.V. when I've already discovered that the best way to watch my favorite shows is on DVD at either 1 AM or 8 AM. I'm also not a fan of hardcovers. So yeah, keep your eyes open for commentary on Season four of the Wire, Season three of Project Runway, and paperbacks such as Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope and Confessions of a Heiress.
