Columnist
Your female friends are like your favourite, most comfy pair of big knickers – they’ve got your a**e covered. Keeping with the underwear analogy, we’re also one another’s human Wonderbras – uplifting and supportive, making each other look bigger and better. I find a girls’ night out more therapeutic than a wellness retreat. The only danger of a girls’ night out is being hospitalised from hilarity.
So why the great male myth that women aren’t funny? One of the reasons is that they’re terrified to think what it is we are being humorous about. Some men presume women spend the whole time talking about the length of their members, which is not true… We also talk about the width!
Scientists tell us that laughter is innate; it originates in the oldest part of the brain, the hypothalamus. Biologists maintain that laughter increases our biological fitness. Anthropologists have revealed that Inuits hold laughing competitions and women, in all cultures, laugh more often than men, especially in all-female groups. Why?
In truth, some people are funny and others have funniness thrust upon them. As the butt of God’s biological joke, for the female of the species, it’s a case of laugh or cry. I mean, just think of all the trials women endure. First off, there’s the shock of menstruation when you discover that you’ll be taken hostage by your hormones once a month. Then there’s pregnancy, where everything swells to sumo wrestler proportions; followed by childbirth, where you stretch your birth canal the customary, what, five kilometres? Next comes mastitis and, before you know it, the menopause. Then, just when things go quiet, what happens? You grow a beard! How can that be fair? I could make a macramé hanging basket with what’s sprouting out of my chin right now.
Still, we don’t whinge about it, do we girls? No. Our only motto is – laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you get salt in your champers!
But without doubt, if I didn’t have the cathartic camaraderie afforded by female friendship, I’d en
