Your TV shows think women aren’t funny
This is not a post about how TV show writers are sexist. It isn’t. But it’s not not that either.
In the book Only Joking by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, the writers posited (with support from social scientists) that one of the reasons men tend to be better at making jokes than women is that it’s the closest men can get to making women make sex noises in a social setting, and that’s a very appealing outcome for men. The flip side — men making sex noises — bear little relation to what men sound like when laughing, and (I imagine) carries less appeal to begin with.
I unquestioningly repeated that supposition for years. It made a certain amount of sense to me, and heck, there were more male stand-ups than female, so it was right, right? I came to reject it later for any number of reasons, obvious to non-obvious. But the idea that men are inherently funnier than women persists in a large segment of our population.
One segment of the population that appears to stridently believe this? TV writers. I’ve developed a bit of a hypothesis on the subject that I’m set to unveil here:
If a TV show believes itself to be a comedy, the first baby born to the main cast on the show will be a boy. If a TV show believes itself to be a drama, the first baby born to the main cast will be a girl.
It’s very silly, to be sure, but I have receipts.
How I Met Your Mother’s first baby born to the main cast was Marvin, a boy. Nashville’s was Cadence, a girl. Friends had Ben, and so did Community. Bones had Christine. Judith on The Walking Dead, Joshua on Boy Meets World, Baby Nicky on Fresh Prince. Heck, Full House had twins, and both were boys.
To be sure, there are exceptions to this. The first baby born to the main cast on The Big Bang Theory was a girl. On the other side, Lost’s first baby was Aaron, a boy. So I don’t claim this to be an infallible insight.
But right or wrong, I think there’s a definite trend here, and one that I bet you’ll find more confirmations than exceptions. Does it mean anything? Ultimately, not really. It’s popular convention that men are funnier than women (please note that I did not say it’s accurate, just popularly accepted). That that would be reflected in how our TV shows introduce babies is no big surprise. But once you start to notice this trend, I promise you’ll never stop.