Parky’s putdown a giveaway about him
Is Michael Parkinson having a laugh when he says men are funnier than women, asks Barbara Ellen.
WHY do unfunny men never stop going on about unfunny women? This time, it was the former TV chat show host Michael Parkinson. Disagreeing about men finding it difficult to express their emotions, he said that most men he knew were sensitive and funny: ‘‘It’s a very contentious statement, but they’re much better than women in their sense of humour.’’
He went on to grumble about his comments getting him into trouble. You can’t say anything these days, can you? Especially when it’s demonstrable codswallop.
Let’s deal with this in the fragrant ladylike way that women are really good at. Parkinson is entitled to conclude that one sex is ‘‘much better’’ at humour. It’s his business — and no reflection at all on his archaic attitudes — if he managed to sit in front of innumerable female guests and find none of them particularly amusing. Nor is it Parky’s fault if he’s unable to recall the countless delusional male bores gassing away on his show, because, let’s face it, not all of them were Muhammad Ali.
However, this isn’t really about Parkinson. ‘‘Women aren’t funny’’ is a cultural stink bomb that goes off every few years. The routine goes like this. Step one: a bloke denounces female comedians and/or all womankind as unfunny. Sometimes, they put superior male humour down to mating rituals, because, hey, that’s just science!
Step two: people like myself exhaust and demean ourselves arguing back, painstakingly listing funny, gifted women. Cue earnest musing on the comparative differences of male/ female humour and how people have been conditioned to accept ‘‘masculine’’ comedy as the gold standard, thereby ensuring that women need to be much funnier to succeed.
Vicious harridans like myself may shrilly observe that women sometimes protect fragile male egos by laughing along with their unfunny drivel, which men rarely reciprocate. And so on. Forever.
This time, I’m not biting. I refuse on the grounds that it’s unfair for women to be goaded into these periodic displays of defensiveness. When did a man ever feel obliged to produce a list of ‘‘amusing male comedians’’ to counter an absurd generalised accusation that ‘‘men’’(all of them) aren’t funny?
Let’s turn the focus away from the nonissue of ‘‘unfunny women’’, and on to those saying it. It tends to be a certain type, doesn’t it? As in, not the bright, witty guys, who are comfortable around women. And not the erudite male comedians, who’d be unlikely to feel threatened by women killing it in their field.
In fact, irritating as the unfunny women line is, it is useful in one regard. Any man who comes out with it is instantly exposed as a tragic, chauvinist, insecure blowhard. We need to stop complaining and start thanking them for the headsup. — Guardian News and Media
Observer
COVID19 has had many negative impacts. But there have been some silver linings. One has been the unique window of opportunity the coronavirus has given us to completely rethink tourism in New Zealand. Nowhere is this more pressing than in Central Otago.
Overtourism has threatened to put infrastructure under intense pressure, fundamentally change the character of existing communities, line the pockets of big business while bypassing locally owned operations, and more.
Yet this week in the Otago Daily Times, the cheerleaders for two new proposed jet airports, one in Wanaka and one 15 minutes’ drive away in Tarras, went head to head. They were Colin Keel, of Queenstown Airport Corporation (QAC) and Michael Singleton, of Christchurch International Airport Ltd (CIAL). Their answers made it very clear that both parties intend to move forward with their plans. This reinforces what both QAC (backed by Auckland Airport) and CIAL are saying publicly and privately elsewhere. Read their lips: the race is on to build major jet capacity in Central Otago.
While there is talk of involving the community, understanding our needs, talking to a range of people etcetera, there is considerable cynicism around whether the outputs of such ‘‘consultation’’ will actually have any impact on decisionmaking. The suspicion is that these two shareholderdriven airport companies have made their minds up, and that any discussion with the community is merely box ticking.
More importantly, it shouldn’t be left to executives with highly vested corporate interests to consult with affected communities — that responsibility lies with district councils.
The problem is the Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC), at any rate, appears to be totally disengaged with what their residents and ratepayers have to say. It has been revealed that Queenstown Lakes district councillors have not had even one session together to develop a council strategy around airport infrastructure in the past 12 months (and presumably longer). Not one. Nor have they sat down together to discuss the MartinJenkins airport assessment reports, which cost us over $200,000 and which we were told were commissioned to inform the next statement of intent from QAC. That SOI was agreed to without consideration of the MartinJenkins reports at council level.
Does this strike anyone else as unacceptable, irresponsible even?
Mayor Jim Boult, himself a welldocumented cheerleader of airport expansion in Wanaka, has recently confirmed in the media that he ‘‘will not comment’’ on anything discussed publicly by the Wanaka Stakeholders Group, a group which now represents 3500 people, mainly based in the Upper Clutha, which oppose jets into Wanaka.
So if the mayor of a district won’t even meaningfully engage with a group representing a huge number of ratepayers deeply concerned about a complex issue, what hope is there for ‘‘consultation’’ or even the notion of taking the community’s wishes into account?
Many Upper Clutha ratepayers were surprised by the real cost of such lack of consultation. An additional $2.7 million dollars of ratepayers’ money has been committed to upgrades to
Project Pure which move the upgrades away from QAC’s proposed jet runway. Despite many official requests for the detail, they only came to light after the council published them in a report. This $2.7 million is just the tip of a very large, jetfuelled iceberg.
Consultation aside, by far the