Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, as the evergreen Margaret Atwood quote goes, whereas women are afraid that men will kill them. Women can’t do much about the latter but, over the years, men have tried to do plenty about the former. A favourite tactic has been to diminish funny women, because that’s apparently easier than men changing their own laughworthy behaviour. Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 essay, Why Women Aren’t Funny, has been discredited a million times over by female comedians far more self-aware than he ever was, yet the message persists that a funny woman is an anomaly, niche, offputting. After all, if women were funny, they wouldn’t get their period every month, they’d get their exclamation mark! Hashtag science.

Just think, if you must, of the comedy panel shows that have screened over this Christmas period and count how many women were featured compared with men. One to six, perhaps, as in Dave’s Champion Of Champions? None at all? “We’ve already got a woman,” female comedian friends of mine are told, still, when auditioning for a show that features five contestants. Which is fair enough, given women represent less than 20% of the population.

Funny books from funny women are still wrapped in pink covers, and illustrated with images of shopping bags and sunglasses, because men’s humour is for everyone and women’s humour is just for Barbie dolls. In her book 300 Arguments, published earlier this year, Sarah Manguso described the struggles she had to get her publisher to agree to a cover that featured something other than “a length of fluffy, pinkish lace”. She gave the designers a note and they produced “a perfect cover design”; the note read, “Pretend this book was written by a man.”

In my 20s, I dutifully read all the books that are held up as comic classics – Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Money by Martin Amis, Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – and they were like being stuck in a pub with someone loudly insisting that you admire their awesome intelligence and rapier wit. Did you geddit??? Did ya????

By contrast, the funniest novels of all time – the Adrian Mole series, Cold Comfort Farm, Heartburn, Bridget Jones’ Diary, everything by Jane Austen – were written by women, and they have a lack of ego to them, a lack of aggression. You don’t hear the cymbal at the end of each sentence.

But obviousness is too often confused with wit by literary and comedy gatekeepers. Sure, there have been some truly funny male authors: PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, David Sedaris. But because it is so much easier for men to get a laugh than women, there are a lot of mediocre male comedians, while the few women who are allowed through are invariably comic genuises. Men, as the sub-Darwinists have it, are funny to get women into bed. Women, to use Amy Poehler’s famous quote, “don’t fucking care if you like it”. So it’s hard to think of a year when funny women have felt more necessary than this one, with a self-confessed sexual harasser in the White House and so many high-profile men exposed as sex pests and worse.

My two favourite books of the year were by bold women, funny in very different ways: Jami Attenberg’s hilarious and heartbreaking All Grown Up and Sally Rooney’s deservedly lauded Conversations With Friends. Meanwhile, on TV, much has been written about American late-night comedy, with most credit going to Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and John Oliver. But only Samantha Bee is genuinely funny, while also being the most powerfully angry. And speaking of angry humour, this year also saw Alice Lowe’s ingenious pregnancy slasher movie, Prevenge, Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West (a terrific satire on social media) and Alia Shawkat in the series about female obsession, Search Party. All of these, in different ways, have got me through 2017.

But my favourite moment came, amazingly, from a panel show. Last month Jo Brand hosted an otherwise all-male panel of Have I Got News For You and, inevitably, the subject of sexual harassment allegations arose and, inevitably, was dismissed by the panel. “Some of this is not high-level crime, is it?” smirked Ian Hislop. “Can I just say, as the only representative of the female gender here today,” Brand retorted, “if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up and that wears you down.” No wonder these shows hate to have women on: they insist on ruining all the sexist lols. Funny women have power. They don’t care if you like it or not.