The Woman’s Humor has evolved into quite a big project with a massive social media presence that exceeds its Instagram page created in 2015. Currently, it has over 1 million followers on Facebook and 983.3K of them on Twitter. Meanwhile, on Instagram, it has 183k fans who follow them for their relatable and high-quality jokes.
Bored Panda reached out to the person behind these accounts to learn more about them.
Their mission and purpose for these pages are quite straightforward: “Just posting funny memes!” They simply hope that their audience will leave their page with a smile or a chuckle that makes people’s time online a bit more awesome.
When asked about the name of the page, they assured us that their content isn’t just for women - it’s for everyone. “We're all about making stuff that anyone can enjoy,” they added.
Further inquiring if they believe there’s something like women’s humor, they told Bored Panda that it’s subjective and that each person has their own definition of funny. “Everyone's got their own flavor of fun,” they said.
As much as we’d like to completely put differences between men and women aside, unfortunately, women find it much harder to find their place in the comedy industry. A comedian, producer, and writer, Allie Loukas, in her piece “Exploring the Gender Imbalance in Comedy,” mentions the unfortunate phrase “Women aren’t funny” that she has heard too many times.
As she was marketing a film with a female comedic lead, she didn’t expect it to be so difficult in the year 2019. Loukas was baffled by this, saying “Funny is funny, right? Well, the answer to that, I think, can be boiled down to something along the lines of society has basically conditioned us to find reasons to think women are not funny.”
She explains that women in comedy have been criticized much more harshly than men. In general, she believes their experiences aren’t normalized the way men’s are. That’s why she decided to make a film about a girl figuring out her life without a dating component. “It is not important to the story I wanted to tell. We are women. We have funny stories to tell, and we don’t always have to have a date to tell them,” she adds.
Despite trying to combat such stereotypes, her movie was still categorized as a Sex and the City or Real Housewives type of thing. Similar to the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, which was bombarded by internet trolls, who were very pleased to see its trailer being the most disliked on YouTube ever. Loukas says the same goes for other comedic movies or shows starring a woman. “The averages with women are almost always down-rated, which has little to do with quality and much more to do with gender disparity.”
Recently, we’ve witnessed this exact situation during the 2024 Oscars. Though Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was the biggest blockbuster of 2023 and the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman, she wasn’t even nominated for best director. However, the film had no trouble making it into the Best Picture category, proving that comedies, especially female-led ones, have more hurdles to overcome.
In order to solve this issue, Loukas believes that all we really need to do is support and believe in each other and realize that being a woman isn’t easy, but it can be funny. She encourages us to give an equal chance to everyone who wants to make people laugh. “I honestly think the more we begin to talk about these issues, the better it will be,” she adds. To her, now seems like the perfect time to combat existing stereotypes, as there has never been a generation more willing to fight gender imbalance than the current one.
Unfortunately, too often, the phrase “women aren’t funny” completely puts them off expressing humor on a public stage. As a result, we see more men on stage, further feeding into the stereotype. To encourage them, Loukas reminds them that they don’t have to enter comedy on patriarchal terms or follow the ideal of what a funny female is. Their stories and experiences can be valuable, witty, and relatable to everyone; all they have to do is share them.
