I should probably not have said, in so few words on television recently, that women aren't as funny as men. Put so baldly, the observation sounds like deliberate provocation, as if I was baiting feminists, or looking for some kind of a knee-jerk response. I was actually trying to present an aspect of the psychopathology of everyday life that strikes me as interesting and important. Women are at least as intelligent as men, and they have as vivid and ready a perception of the absurd; but they have not developed the arts of fooling, clowning, badinage, repartee, burlesque and innuendo into a semi-continuous performance as so many men have.

The phenomenon of men's dominance of the comedy realm is so conspicuous that all kinds of cod explanations have been given for it. According to one cracker-barrel psychologist, the pleasure generated by a response to a gag is patterned on the male orgasm rather than the female. Another wiseacre has convinced himself that making people laugh is exerting some kind of power over them. In my version, the man who opts for the role of joker in the male group is not looking for power but for acceptance; the other roles in the group are not accessible to him, perhaps because he is weaker or poorer or less imposing than his peers. His audience has, as it were, the power of life and death over him; if he fails to get his laugh, he "dies". Men's dominance of standup has even been attributed to the phallic character of the microphone, absurdly enough. Though it might be comforting to believe that simple misogyny prevents women being given a fair go, even this will not wash. The juries who give prizes to comedians are usually composed of both sexes, and audiences certainly are; but still the female performers don't make it, don't get the prizes, don't get the audiences and don't make the money.

I have heard it said that women can't be really funny because they aren't willing to make themselves look ridiculous. The truth seems to be that female comics are only too willing to turn themselves into grotesques, and to base their comedy in a disparagement of their physical selves. Pamela Stephenson of Not the Nine O'Clock News briefly toured the working men's clubs of Britain with a courageous routine featuring menstruation jokes, which she probably got away with because she was blonde and gorgeous. (Since she became a sex therapist, she has given up making jokes altogether.) Dawn French and Jo Brand have both made comic material out of obesity. French and Jennifer Saunders began their comic partnership as the Menopause Sisters, and used to do one routine with tampons in their ears. Comments sent to a blog I came across bewail the tendency of female comics to work around the themes of "bras, periods, chocolate, WeightWatchers". Whatever the problem is, it's not narcissism or vanity - rather the opposite.

When they are not running themselves down, women comedians are often astonishingly vicious towards other women. Joan Rivers's attacks on Elizabeth Taylor are legendary. Zoe Lyons has a one-liner about Amy Winehouse self-harming: "She's so irritating, she must be able to find someone to do it for her", a joke that many women would find unfunny in the extreme.

Every year produces a new crop of women standups who will take the world by storm, and when the froth subsides very few names persist: Jenny Eclair, Jo Brand, Victoria Wood. Shazia Mirza has been heard to say that if only she could marry a rich man she would be off the circuit tomorrow, which suggests another reason why women don't mature in the comedy business.

Comedy is learned; you get better as you go along. Men who emerge as professional comedians grow up within a dense masculine culture of joke-making and have been honing their skills ever since they started school. Girls have nothing similar of their own and are not invited to horn in on the guys' act. When men in the audience give women comedians a hard time, it is because the sharing of the joke is an important male bonding mechanism. We might also ask ourselves why the women in the audience cannot counterbalance male uneasiness with loyalty and enthusiasm for comedians of their own sex. Can it be that women are programmed to laugh at men's jokes, as they are not to the jokes of their sisters? Comedian Arthur Smith once said, "Women don't get shags after gigs. Men do." This may be more revealing than Smith knows. Women comedians are probably not looking for shags in any case; if they were, they probably couldn't say so.

The greater visibility of male comedians reflects a greater investment of intellectual energy by men of all walks of life in keeping each other amused. It is now a truism that men never talk to each other about things that matter. Most of what takes place when men are together is phatic communication, intended to build fellowship rather than intimacy. This kind of communication is sometimes derided by women as meaningless, but it is actually functional, because it draws the group together. Men who drink, play and joke together are boon companions, who hang together for fun. He laughs loudest who laughs last; one joke kicks off another. The man who cannot hold his own in repartee will even learn other men's jokes off by heart, so that he can fill a void in the general banter. Women famously cannot learn jokes. If they try, they invariably bugger up the punchline. The male teller of jokes is driving towards his reward, the laughter of his mates. The woman who messes up the same joke does so because her concentration is not sharpened by that need. She is not less intelligent, simply less concerned.

Given an opportunity to perform a finished comedy routine, a female comedian will make you laugh as hard as any man. Put her in an improvisation situation along with male comedians, and she is likely to be left speechless. Quiz show Mock the Week usually invites one woman every other week or so, and every time I have been watching she has been eclipsed by the furiously competing six males who complete the cast of the show. Before she can get a word out, one or other of them will have snatched the microphone and gone riffing away on something he prepared earlier and has adjusted for the precise occasion. There is, after all, an element of trainspotting, of one-track-mindism in comedy that is alien to women.

At the heart of the judgment that women are not as funny as men is another far less inflammatory observation: that women are less competitive. Competition drives men to more and more outrageous and bizarre mental acrobatics, to stay ahead of the game and have the last laugh. The greater the pressure, the faster the firing of neurons in the male brain. You get your best results from women when you take the pressure off. Men do the inspired lunacy; women do droll.