Reading a chapter from Warren Buffett’s Tap Dancing to Work the other day, I was surprised to find myself chuckling out loud. Now this guy is kind of funny, I thought to myself as I turned the page and grabbed another Danish. This guy is kind of making me laugh. And those thoughts that I had quietly, in my head, to myself, made me realize just how rarely I do have those thoughts in my head. And that thought led me to another thought, which was: why is that? Why, on the whole, are men just not that funny?

I can’t exactly figure this out. Men, who certainly possess not only the savvy but also the know-how to _be _funny, for some reason, are just _not. _I began to notice this at a pretty young age, and unfortunately, a lifetime of living—and not a little bit of regret—hasn’t done much to convince me otherwise. Why do they even try? my 7-year-old self would wonder as I watched Alan Alda flounder helplessly through yet another failed rerun of M_A_S*H. _Why is every single Korean-lady extra so much funnier than he is? _

And that is kind of my point: TGFW, or, Thank God For Women. An old acronym my mom and I made up a long time ago, after another night of endless eye-rolling at my dad’s seemingly interminable dinner "jokes." From Madeleine Albright to Kate Upton to Sinead O’Connor, so sue me, women just make me laugh. And I’m not talking about the kind of sweet, sexy laughter that I use when I am trying to butt someone in line; I am talking about the loud, snorting, disgusting laughter that essentially _explodes _out of me when I have fully and completely given myself over to yet another zinger flung by Barbara Piasecka Johnson. The kind of laughter that makes me understand why in the hell God invented laughter in the first place.

Please don’t think that I am arguing that all men are humorless. There are some extremely acceptable male comedians out there: Joel Osteen, Abraham Lincoln, the man who played Phil Spector in HBO’s Phil Spector. But even those guys, while insightful and amusing, aren’t exactly_ funny_. Hell, half of Lincoln’s comedy comes from being so tall! And the truth is, when I think of those three men, and then I think of just about any woman—let’s use Cathy Guisewite of the comic strip _Cathy _as our example—I don’t even have to think anymore. Has any one of those men ever uttered anything even close to the zings that fly swiftly, sharply, and uproariously from Cathy’s chocolate-loving mouth? Game over.