Adam Carolla Is Funny Enough for a Guy

Adam Carolla has been fawning over cars and bandsaws and the wisdom of football coaches for years, and the first thing that makes some people roll their eyes is a tired old comment about women not being as funny as men.

Image from www.adamcarolla.com

If you look at my Twitter feed, you'll see that I've made a few jokes about his comments, and I seem to be jumping on the backlash bandwagon. Hell, I'm even writing a post about it. But in my defense, I'm just an attention whore, trying to get a few RTs and the approval of a few female comics with 100X the followers I have.

I'll admit that's a big part of why I'm picking this moment to talk about Carolla and his ideas.

Because he's not dangerous all of a sudden. He's not nudging America towards misogyny and insensitivity. He did take a dig at a few comedians, but he did it only a few seconds after he said he thinks Kathy Griffin is a "super-funny chick". If anything he said could make me mad, that would be it.

Why does this recent interview matter? Why do we care that he said "The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks"?

It's a banal and shortsighted argument, even when the dude making it tries to sound smart, like Christopher Hitchens tried. So my reaction to Carolla's statement is really the same as my reaction when listening to him say that anyone who drives a Honda C-RV has given up on life. Or when he gets moist talking about how great sports are because "toughness and tenacity is something that you should hope your child has, versus, o— you know, a— a gift for music or math equations. You want a kid that's fucking tough. You want a kid that's not a pussy."* I roll my eyes and recognize the holes in the argument pretty much immediately.

I disagree with anyone who says that he shouldn't have a show, or he should lose his audience, or that he should apologize. I'm not even sure that he really believes the claim he's making. He's been performing for a long time now. And he's been trying all sorts of things to be funny. This might be ironic. It might not be. He might be doing his own version of the World Inter-Gender Championship. Or he might be as dumb about this as the interview suggests. He's clearly not dumb about getting attention just as his book is coming out.

The sticker price is the same whether you love him or hate him or don't care but decide to buy it anyway.

Whatever he really thinks, these statements are ready-made straw man arguments. I like seeing them out there, because all I have to do is quote them, and a lot of people will immediately recognize their stupidity.

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*This quote is taken from the May 9, 2012 episode of Pete Holmes' You Made It Weird Podcast.