Let me start by stipulating that I think the next few paragraphs could get me into trouble. And if they don’t, the sentence at the end definitely will. But because I’m an idiot, I’m going to wade into the long-standing debate among comedy writers, and others, about whether or not women can be funny.

Will you let me finish, please? I mean, yes, of course women can be funny. There are funny women all over the place. Still, this is something that (mostly male) comedy writers used to discuss openly. And not just comedy writers, either: Women aren’t funny has been voiced by people as different as British journalist Christopher Hitchens and famous French filmmaker Jerry Lewis. Not these days.

Here’s what I think is behind the fact that the question is posed at all. I’m posing it, by the way, because the wonderful Catherine O’Hara just died, who was one of the most brilliantly amusing performers who ever lived, and a writer of humor besides. But was she funny funny?

I grew up surrounded by men writing jokes and scenes and bits for television around a table in what are called writers’ rooms. There’s a lot of locker-room swagger that goes on in the writers’ room—or there used to be, when I started my career 35 years ago—that often compensates for an adolescence spent being bullied by the popular boys and ignored by everyone else.

Which makes psychological sense. Being funny, for a lot of people, is a way of getting people to notice you for something other than your mortifying weaknesses, like your struggles with weight, for instance, or your inability to play any sport. Hurt people hurt people, is how psychologists explain the way people who have suffered emotional trauma pass it along. But in the comedy writing world, it’s more like Hurt people pitch the great Act Two button, and Extremely Hurt People pitch out an entire cold open.

All of that buried childhood anger and damage comes out in TV writers’ rooms, in insults and imitations and jokes about Anne Frank. Aside from the cascade of truly objectionable, utterly unusable jokes that most comedy writers indulge in when they’re together, there’s often the kind of chummy misogyny that all-male environments can incubate. Years ago, I was in a room when a writer pitched this: An older male character is giving a younger man advice about dating and marriage. You know what they say, he tells the young man, don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk for free. But then, 20 years later, you suddenly realize, Oh my God, I married a cow!

We laughed and laughed. And the next day, at the cast run-through, one of the actresses pointed to that joke and looked at us with disapproval. Really? She asked. Really?

What? We said. It’s funny.

It’s clear that you didn’t have any women in the room when you wrote that joke, she said.

Later, back in the office, we grumbled. Women just aren’t funny, we told ourselves, but of course there were no women there to make the counterargument.

Women can be just as funny as men—and please remember I said that—but they’re funny in two specifically different ways. In the first place, women in general are unlikely to be as obsessed with comedy routines as men. The guys I know in the comedy business can recite entire scenes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus or perfectly quote comedy routines they listened to, and memorized, on comedy albums in their room late at night when the other boys who could play sports were out on dates. Men can look at each other and say Serpentine, Shel or That escalated quickly and mostly they know exactly where those snippets come from. We want to write those snippets.

Men tell jokes—as in set up, punch line—following the carefully established rubric heard on comedy albums and seen in movies and plays throughout time. Male comedy writers tend to embrace the rigidity and even the artificiality of the classic joke form. In some cases, the unnatural setup, punch line exchange makes the whole thing funnier. Here is a near-perfect example of the different ways the sexes respond to the classic form. It goes like this:

Q: What’s the worst thing a woman can hear after she’s slept with Willie Nelson?

A: I’m not Willie Nelson.

Men, mostly, think it’s hilarious. Women, mostly, don’t get it.

True Hollywood Story:

There was a comedy writer and showrunner. One day, in the middle of a production week, he announced to the writing staff that, come Monday morning, he was going to officially transition to female. This was a few years before the language and protocols of sexual identity and transition had taken root, so the announcement and the complicated mid-season adjustments were challenging for everyone.

But it’s not like the staff didn’t have a sense that something was up. Clearly, the showrunner had been on some kind of hormone therapy. They had noticed changes in the way the boss looked—a puffiness here and there, foundation makeup around the neck and face—and in the more gender-neutral wardrobe choices. So, Monday morning, the assigned-male-at-birth comedy writer was going to become a female comedy writer. This was a perfect way to get a final answer to the question: Are women as funny as men? On Monday morning, when the boss came into work in heels and a nice outfit, would he still be able to pitch a setup, punch line piece of dialogue?

Well, on Monday morning, the showrunner was just as funny as on Friday afternoon. Which proves that Jerry Lewis and Christopher Hitchens and all of the rest are wrong. They may laugh at different things, they may not tell jokes according to the rigid rubric preferred by men, but women are just as funny as men in every meaningful way. Even women with a five o’clock shadow and size 11-and-a-half shoes. And that’s the sentence that I’m pretty sure is going to get me into trouble.

Photo: Getty Images

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