I'm not one to publish new empirical research at a blog, but this is a good chance to do so.
As it happens, whilst scrambling to put together syllabi for the new semester, one finds the need to take a break at some point during the week. I thought an investigation into the frequent query, "Why Is It How Come There Are Never Any Women Published in The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs Section?" would be in order.
The bad news is, my well-deserved break from work didn't last very long. It turns out that by searching the well-indexed set of New Yorker DVDs one can find quite easily and quickly all past authors of everything ever written there. 3 minute breaks bite.
The good news is, I bargained in some new time to write this up, and that tripled the length of the break. The following is thus novel empirical quantitative research. It has not, I'm being asked to clarify, been peer reviewed.
Out of 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era) 17 have been women. (1)
That's 12.782%.
See the Figure below for further representation of this finding:
This also means that the incidence of men appearing in Shouts and Murmurs is nearly 7 times greater than that for women.
There has not been a women author of that section for over three years, since 2004. That's more than 156 weeks or, results show, nearly 1100 days.
Our results also show that Susan Orlean is kinda funny. And Bobbie Ann Mason. Who knew. (2)
Patricia Marx holds the lead in female contributors, as a 7-timer.
That pales in comparison to Steve Martin's 29 times.
The paleness of the comparison is, to be specific, 24.138%. The grammatical accuracy and proper interpretation of the 'pale/compare' phrasing in that last sentence, however, is erroneous to a statistically significant degree.
See Figure 2:
QED
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1.This research is premised on the assumption that Larry Doyle, this week's author, is not female.
2.Someone, I'm sure. See Cohen (forthcoming 2008).
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This is brilliant (and the graphs rock).
I thought the consensus was that women just aren't as funny as men. :) Clearly, the New Yorker agrees...
Did Christopher Hitchens ghost write this?
This makes some sense. Your average dork turned pseudo-humor writer is usually a man; because we are inherently prone to debasing ourselves.
I wrote a little study on that issue once. Compiling a bibliography of MA theses, I noted that punning thesis titles belonged almost exclusively to male authors, while titles beginning in "An Attempt at..." belonged to female authors. This pattern was statistically significant at better than 5%. My interpretation was that male students are conditioned to rebel a little, while females are conditioned to underplay their achievements. Instead of "A Taxonomy of Newts", they play it safe and call their work "An Attempt at a Taxonomy of Newts".
Perhaps you should do a larger study comparing the pre- and post-Title IX Shouts and Murmurs eras. If you find that the proportion of women contributors in the pre-Title IX era is higher than in the post-Title IX era, then you could postulate that your results above are due to a decline in the numbers of Funny Women caused by an increase in the number of Humorless Femnists, as we all know feminism annihilates one's sense of humor. This must be the explanation as it cannot be the case that the New Yorker is biased against women, and anyone who says so is just a Humorless Feminist who will never, ever be published in Shouts and Murmurs.
Comedy Central came up with a list of the "100 Greatest Stand-up Comedians" --
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1532323
I counted about 8 as women, although some names I may not recognize. I don't think it necessarily has to do with Humorless Feminists (though they don't help), but with short or average-height males needing to do something to compensate for their sub-tall height in order to attain status and attract mates. I reviewed the data on heights of comedians here:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/05/heights-of-comedians-average-joes.php
They're perfectly average, hence in need of cultivating some talent that will get them noticed. Sense of humor in a girl isn't as magnetically attractive to guys as the converse is, so girls don't bother improving their yuck-yuck ability as much as trying to look prettier and act more pleasantly.
Sweet and dandy.
However, Shouts and Murmurs never has been, is not now, and never will be funny.
Sure, I read that rag and many other old-style middlebrow intellectual journals. Culture and art criticism's okay, when not trying to be pathetically contemporary. The New Yorker's special international political reportage is often exceptional -- at times spectacular.
An exemplar of humor?
New Yorker no.
On graph 1, shouldn't the second bar only go up to 116?
There, you've been peer-reviewed. :)
Goodness, it took 1000+ readers before someone caught that? I have to say, my faith in the peer review system is a tad shaken. (Put another way: thank you Diane. Fixed.)
Of course women are funnier than men. One of their best jokes is that men don't know that.
Come on people, it's 7 times men-to-women, not 8. Where are the mathematicians around here to catch this stuff?
77.218/12.782 = about 7. I'd written 8 in the original post, which was based on 100/12.
dude, surely you realize that mathematicians don't DO math, they just discourse over the STRUCTURE of math.