When Mae West said, “What a tragedy for a man, what an opportunity for a woman,” she summed up one of the ways in which women’s comedy differs from men’s — in some cases, women can see possibilities for comedy and humor where men can only see failure.

I’m not only thinking about governors, of course. But I’m not not thinking about them.

When things fall apart, women’s comedy comes into ascendency. Women are often their funniest after their worst experiences.

Women use comedy to narrate their experience and so diffuse the pain.

If you’re a woman, how many times have you called your best friend in the middle of the night, woken her up from a sound sleep to tell her the most horrible story about being abandoned at a party, being set up on the world’s worst blind date, about being fired, about being embarrassed, beginning the conversation with tears of anger or depression and ending with tears of laughter?

I bet it’s a lot.

How about if you’re a guy?

I bet it’s fewer.

Your friend will try to retrieve your sense of perspective by introducing humor; I would say it works more effectively with women.

Traditional forms of therapy work on the same, rather feminized principle: Tell somebody your troubles and it’ll help solve them. It is important to remember, however, that to anyone besides a therapist whom you pay to hear your problems, you had better make your stories as palatable as possible. It’s all right to complain as long as you don’t seem self-pitying and narcissistic.

The greatest comics always complained about their lives. Carol Leifer’s complaint about her ex-husband — “It was a mixed marriage,” she confides, “I’m human, he was Klingon” — is very different from the tedious repetition of wrongs so familiar to us all. Learning to frame our disappointments and anger by using comedy give us a sense of control over our own lives as well as letting other people express their concern without having to manipulate them into sympathy.

Dorothy Parker once commented that if all the girls at the Yale prom were “laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” “To hell with criticism,” remarked Tallulah Bankhead, “praise is good enough for me.” Mae West said that it was very hard to be funny when you had to be clean. When were images of strong, bitchy women found funny — when were these condemned? How could Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers get away with condemning their husbands and children in a 1960s world that believed in the “feminine mystique?”

Is it true, as Joan Rivers claims, that “There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl?”

More about this in a later post, but I’d like to know what you think particularly about Rivers’s line….