Women Aren't Funny

Tis a fact.

Girl's just aren't that funny.

Why? Well, Germaine Greer reckons it's because women don't have to be funny. Whereas blokes are expected to be funny. They'll compete with each other to be wittiest, cleverest, and most charming bastard at the bar. In fact, that's pretty much all males do for a social life: they sit at a bar with other men, and practise taking the piss out of each other. On the other hand, women are simply expected to stick their tits out when the men come in, and not talk about their womb too much. Right?

Wrong. Because blokes aren't really that funny at all in real life, are they. Get a gang of lads together and they'll turn into a pack of smarmy boorish bastards quicker than you can put your Audi A3 keys on the bar, and order 4 bottles of Peroni. Whilst the girls, far from exuding the demure supernatural charm of a goddess, tend to be quite plain, have big arses and leave shit all over the bedroom.

Which is why the new Ikea ad by Mother is absolutely 100%, bang on the bullseye's bloody nose when it comes to portraying the foibles of the sexes. Look.



And that's not the only brilliant thing about it.

Granted, there's a few clunky bits in there (the canned laughter, the staged audience, the fucking awful ninja joke) but these are simply the residual costs of capturing the excrutiating naffness of these men and women in such a hauntingly realistic way.

No, the real (if flawed) genius of these ads is the thinking behind them. Not necessarily the thinking that there's a conversation worth having about people being messy in the context of the kinds of storage they might use, because there isn't. That's an inherently boring, and circular conversation, even to a halfwit on Facebook who in all likelihood won't be buying storage solutions any time soon. However, the thinking that a TV ad can throw you into the middle of a narrative and leave you to figure it out for yourself without patronising you or squeezing your hand hysterically for 30 seconds is a pretty powerful idea we could all do to be reminded of.

So well done Mother for reminding us that an advert can be anything at all - even a fake TV show about some twats - and that a woman will never EVER be funny.