I Am a Boring, Humourless Feminist

An easily forgettable guy on Tinder dropped a reference to The Book of Mormon, and I had to admit I’ve never seen it. As he was raving about it I played along nicely, commenting how some of my friends are fans, maybe I’ll go one day. Then he mentioned that its brilliance stems from it being written by the same people as South Park. I wanted desperately to be The Cool Girl, to join the comradery born from a compatible sense of humour and a love of small round cartoon characters swearing their disproportionate heads off.

But I couldn’t, because I hate South Park.

Even writing that sentence in the privacy of my own room surrounded by broken eyeshadow palettes and wayward embroidery needles, I can feel the glares and eye rolls of boys who are much more cultured than me, who understand quality satire in ways I never shall and whose taste in musicals is validated by the Tony Award.

But first let me explain: I hate South Park because I don’t find it funny. It’s too crude for me; I cringe at the obscene sexual references, I’m uncomfortable at the excessive swearing, and the slapstick violence leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’m glad the show calls out transphobia regarding Caitlyn Jenner, for example, or undermines gender roles, but I don’t enjoy it, I don’t laugh. However mine is the incorrect attitude, the attitude of boring feminist girls who don’t have a sense of humour and who don’t find appeal in the shock factor of a song about raping babies.

Roxane Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist critiques Caitlin Moran’s publication How to Be a Woman for its lack of intersectionality and implicit racism. She almost sadly notes that the New York Times and many others gave it rave reviews, overlooking its problematic attitudes towards Muslim women because it’s funny, and apparently humour is otherwise dead in feminism and “we love the narrative of feminists as humourless”. At first I was miffed by this characterisation, it must be a totally misguided act of misogyny to think that feminism is a bunch of droll, boring chicks who enjoy sapping the fun out of life itself.

But it is accurate; I have no sense of humour. I am boring, unfunny, cynical and, what’s that term? Oh yeah, a “PC Police”. Because I don’t like South Park, or American Dad!, or Family Guy, TED, 21 Jumpstreet, Sausage Party, or jokes that come at the expense of marginalised people (which is most of them).

This humour is seen as objectively amazing, and disliking it makes you objectively boring. But this humour is also objectively masculine. How can I be desensitised to a joke about shoving a fist nonconsensually up someone’s asshole when I’ve been taught to fear dark streets, bars, public toilets and quiet beaches in case of rape? How can I laugh at slapstick borderline sexual violence when I have been so strongly and successfully conditioned to be terrified of it? An excess of the F word is not funny when I associate it with drunk men getting physical and scary.

I only speak for myself but allow me to make a generalisation and say that women are not in a position to find this humour funny.

I will not apologise for being humourless because it is incorrect; I simply demand jokes that require more creativity, more social awareness than falling back on tropes of putting others in positions of pain or humiliation.

I love Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I laugh aloud minimum three times an episode and definitely have a crush on Jake Peralta, though potentially only because he’s such a nice Jewish boy. Featuring two black men, two Latina women, a homosexual male, a bisexual female and a Jew in the main cast, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has as much diversity and sociopolitical commentary as South Park, but without the violence and uncomfortable edginess. Amidst slapstick and witticisms, the show addresses pretty serious issues of racialized police violence, homophobia and a lack of female leadership in the NYPD. Of course, Brooklyn Nine-Nine still doesn’t have the same amount of social status as the aforementioned shows and movies, and I conspiratorially hypothesise this is because the humour is too “nice”, too “feminine”, and femininity immediately devalues the worth of media. In the same way chick-flicks are looked down upon in comparison to their masculine cop-show car-chase shoot-up equivalents (Clueless and Bridesmaids are taken less seriously than Die Hard or Fast and Furious), the loud and rough edged masculine humour of South Park trumps the tactful hilarity of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

If I spend the rest of my life known as the downer who calls out her friends’ inappropriate jokes, the black hole who sucks the fun out of harmless adult cartoons and the unsmiling, dull robot feminist, so be it. But let it be known that my feminism wants nothing more than hilarious TV shows, woke stand up comedy and laughter til I cry.

Moreover I want this kind of humour to be seen as valid. There are gendered “rules” for humour, gendered standards for what is funny, and because I am feminine and because I am feminist I will continue to be boring until these roles are dismantled.

Stay funny,

Hannah