About two months ago this landed in my twitter feed. Don't ask me, incidentally, why it was two months ago rather than, say, five weeks, because if you do I will tell you. The link more or less speaks for itself, in case you're not inclined to follow it. The reason it landed in my twitter feed (not just mine, of course, but, for the purposes of this blog, mine) was because someone wanted to point out a curiosity about the list- there are no women on it.
I have to say I don't know why people post jokes on twitter. A lot of people are in comedy in some way, aspiring, on the ladder or even at the top of their game, still tweeting jokes for free when they could be storing them up for use later in front of a paying audience. Many jokes on twitter are immediate, and won't be funny in another hour. Some, I guess, are, for whatever reason, not suited to any other medium. Maybe part of the answer is that it is truly annoying to have come up with something really funny and have nobody to share the joke with. Whatever the reason, twitter is full of jokes, laps them up, and doesn't care who is telling them. If you're funny, you're in. As a white male I don't feel fully confident in telling you discrimination doesn't exist on twitter. I'm sure it does. But all those people who don't care about who you are as long as you're funny have a choice that would normally be left to a commissioning editor or someone similar. On twitter, just follow the right person and you get a free stream of jokes.
Anyway, back to about two months ago. It occurred to me that it would be easy enough to compile a list of funny twitter females. I scribbled an initial list of 3 or 4 that came to mind off the top of my head. Then I thought I'd ask for suggestions from my followers on twitter. I don't have a massive amount of followers, so even though I asked people to retweet my original message, I thought that I'd get maybe 1 or 2 more names and then I'd have to sort of find the rest myself and then maybe put the results on storify or something for posterity. Then, having posted this harmless and hardly noticed little tweet, I went to work.
When I got back, later, I idly checked my twitter feed. From I narrative point of view I imagine it is now fairly obvious than I had way more responses than I had expected. I don't know how many, it took me 2 complete attempts just to catalogue all the names that got mentioned. The final list contained 182 entries. The original tweet was retweeted 73 times. The definitive final list of women received a grand total of 105 votes. Nobody knew they were voting, to be fair, but I have decided this is going to be democratic. This slew of electoral enthusiasm came from huge numbers of people, male and female alike, with no other idea than to tell me all of the women they found funny. Some people tweeted me two or three times, with just lists of funny women. I'd love to just make a huge list of all them, if for no other reason than to let them all know somebody thought they were funny. But that's impractical, even though it does sort of accentuate my point, which is that if you ask twitter for funny women, you'll get no shortage of answers. They're out there, so there is no excuse for your list excluding them like a social underclass. Without too much ado then, here they are. In alphabetical order, because I really only use the pretence of democracy as a filtering system, this isn't a popularity contest, here are 10 of the funniest women on twitter: