Why aren't there any funny women?

The media loves this topic; "why aren't women as funny as men" often crops up as a headline on minor newspaper articles or on lame discussion shows.  Each time a few names are bandied about, usually French and Saunders, or Victoria Wood, or Jo Brand, or more recently Sarah Millican, along with near-laboratorial dissections of their performances, as though in doing so a great secret will be discovered (that they were all born male?) and then we can relax and get on with all that fun laughing stuff!

Usually these discussions will garner mention of Christopher Hitchens' old 'Vanity Fair' article on why women aren't funny...or rather, why he thinks they aren't.  The crux is that it's all about basic evolution, you see...men have developed humour as a way of attracting women whereas women don't have to develop humour to attract men, because they look nice.  It's an age-old idea (and Hitchens does mention that he thinks plenty of men aren't funny, either, but you don't tend to hear about that bit whenever the article is mentioned).  

Personally I think that if you're a good-looking person of either sex, people will automatically think you're not very funny.  It's a form of self-preservation in that if you believe there are people who can successfully combine pulchritude with humour, then that puts you at a disadvantage (plus it's bloody depressing!).  There's also the psychological theory that nothing funny even happens to the truly good-looking; no pratfalls or self-deprecation or humorous incidents in the supermarket.  They are exempt from all that (in that they're also exempt from general failure; hence the reason some people like to pick with extreme fascination over the failed marriages of beautiful celebrities, because pain and suffering and horrible life events aren't supposed to happen to them!)

So if you're not very good-looking and you're a man, then people are well-disposed to think you're funny before you've even opened your mouth.  But I actually do think the same theory applies to not-very-good-looking women.  My personal theory on why people think women aren't funny is actually that it's all in the material.  Because if you listen to stand-up comics you'll hear men and women telling mostly the same stories; they generally all joke about the same things.  Jokes about weight and kids are the mainstay of most mainstream comedians' routines (both are subjects I don't personally find very funny regardless of who's delivering the lines).  But when a woman tells a joke about her kids, or her weight, it's because she's obsessed with these things; it's decreed that that's all she can talk about, whereas men are just making witty, slightly detached, observations.  Men can slag off other men, too, without being called bitchy.  

Of course, all this mainly applies to the bear-pit that is stand-up comedy, which is naturally more of a male environment to start with.  In day-to-day life I would say that most of the wit I've encountered has come from women, though being female myself that might mean I'm ever-so-slightly biased.  But I suppose the crux of it all is; some people are funny and some aren't, and that's...well, just about it, really.  Apologies if you were expecting an amusing punchline.