At least once a month, someone asks me: Where's Adam? My whole life my name on introduction has been cause for a joke, mainly to men, but sometimes women. Rarely women. I'm grateful, honestly. I can't think of anything more perfect in my experience to remind me that my life must be immediately qualified according to my association or dissociation with a male counterpart than this unfunny retort I regularly have to brace for impact from whenever a caveman learns that my parents decided to call me Eve. Where's Adam? I know, I'm embarrassed for them too. But I do have a repertoire of responses:
Didn't you hear? I killed him.
I honestly haven't seen that dude for a few thousand years.
Yeah, he's worn out from playing with his snake in the garden.
Oh that guy, he's more into Steve these days actually.
Etc etc etc. Point is, I have formulated this repertoire to amuse people so that we don't have to sit in the awful awkward silence that comes post Where's Adam? Sometimes, if I'm in an Uber for example, I'm too tired and I play dumb and then they feel bad for me; Eve, who doesn't know about Adam. And that makes me feel even more tired; nothing is more tiring than being pitied because you're a woman. A woman who is smarter, and sharper and infinitely funnier than Where's Adam?
Women are funnier than men. We have to be. Our existence has been not just for the pleasure of men, but also for their mockery. And the less imaginative that mockery the better, the more universal, the dumb, dumber and dumberer. When men are joking about women they don't even need to try. They don't need to be smart. They literally need to just point at a pair of tits and say “BOOBS!” and other men will laugh. Because boobs are funny to men, particularly when they're inaccessible. Our body parts are hilarious when you can't have them. Have you ever seen a little girl in a playground point at a male crotch and scream PENIS and all the other little girls laugh? No you haven't because it's never happened in the history of humankind. That is not what women find funny, or how we manage our reactions to the opposite sex.
So I was watching the Pamela Anderson documentary on Netflix last night, and I'm not holding a gun to your head but you have to watch it. When I was 8-years-old I watched Baywatch every Saturday night at 7pm, and I knew that Pamela Anderson was in on something. Because everyone else on that show: David Hasselhoff, the cute guy with floppy brown hair, the surfer dude, Yasmine Bleeth… they seemed like they took all the slow-motion running and the hair tosses catastrophically seriously. But Pamela didn't. Even when I was 8-years-old, I knew that Pamela knew she didn't know what she was doing or why, but she was going to laugh at herself and the situation while doing it. During the documentary, she comments about how the only direction she recalls getting when the shooting for Baywatch – then the most popular show in the world – began was: “Just pretend that it's all real!”
Pamela Anderson was the butt of America's jokes for a long time. Decades, in fact. She was a Playboy model, for a start, and one who openly admitted that she'd had cosmetic surgery, so her breasts became a larger conversation than her own person. And for years, she had to figure out how to talk about something she reminds us is “not interesting” over and over again while keeping herself entertained. Hence an amalgamation of footage of some of the most successful men in American TV history – David Letterman, Jay Leno, Larry King, etc – harassing her about her tits, or making jibes about the sex tape that was stolen from her home with her then husband Tommy Lee, an incident we learn was enormously traumatic and exposing for Anderson in countless ways, and one that ruined her career but only enhanced his, of course. But, in every one of these segments, Anderson gives better than she gets, knocking them down at every opportunity. And she has plenty of opportunities. Honestly it's inspiring to watch. And she's funny throughout the entire two-hour doc, because if you didn't laugh at the story of her life, you'd have to cry.
I tell you who was also excellent at this: Amy Winehouse. I think Amy was a master of reading her own caricature and owning it as much as the mainstream press tried to profit from it. Even early on, when she appeared on Jonathan Ross's late night TV show, which was a big deal for a brand new artist, she wasn't prepared to answer braindead, unoriginal questions about why she was such a “confident young woman” etc. “My dad's a cab driver,” she answered. The audience laughed and not because of Jonathan Ross. (See below)
I was in a restroom with Amy once on a night out in Mayfair, and some fan came up to her and asked her if it was true that she'd moved to the outskirts of North London, ie away from trouble? And she said: “Yeah that's right. I've retired to Barnet.” She finished re-doing her eyeliner and walked off, owning the gag. She also did a good job of convincing people that she didn't care what people thought. But what's amazing about both Pamela and Amy is that despite the unparalleled levels of exposure both sustained, none of that exposure offered the truth of who they were as women. It profited others, not them. And fortunately they both had a great sense of humor about that. Tragically, only one is still around to do anything about reclaiming herself.
I'm already infuriated by the forthcoming Amy Winehouse biopic, the first leaked stills from the set feature her as a damsel in distress, breaking down in the streets of London as her husband Blake is taken away in a police car. This is not how Winehouse would have owned what happened to her. You know what Amy did when she wanted to tell her story? She went into a recording booth and she wrote a little song, and it went: “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said, No, no, no.” One of her first singles “Stronger Than Me” must have been really emasculating for her older boyfriend:
“You always wanna talk it through, I'm okay,
I always have to comfort you every day,
But that's what I need you do… Are you gay?!”
Amy didn't ask to become a joke, but it's not surprising that the media and the music industry felt the need to turn a young, brave genius who stood up to her male superiors into ridicule. Always remember that you laughed with Amy the first time you heard her talk about her life. You didn't laugh at her.
God, it's infuriating. It's infuriating because we're losing. Amy was funnier and more prepared to be honest than anyone in the last 20 years of British pop. I miss her as a figure. We will never have Amy's take on the pandemic, or Brexit, or Trump, or the latest season of Love Island, and the reason is that we punished her for what made her great. I felt the same thing watching Pamela, A Love Story. Anderson shouldn't have lost the past decade, and more, hidden away, and exiled because the sex she was marketed to sell to the world suddenly got a little too real and a little too broken for America, and the jokes everyone loved laughing at – at her expense – no longer kept men tickled. We've seen the same depressing pattern repeat itself so many times you wonder what will break it. Nobody wants to laugh about Britney Spears' fake virginity any more when there's a woman in collapse with a shaved head attacking a vehicle with an umbrella. [Cut canned laughter!] It's not funny any more. I think we all live in hope that Britney's sense of humor will one day recover.
But fuck being doom and gloom about this, I have been and continue to be surrounded by women who grow more hilarious the worse things get. I have always viewed a person's capacity to laugh at themselves as the real tell for their intelligence, and my connections with women who are able to do so have been instantaneous. Funny women seek each other out. It's an unspoken tribe we're all a part of and growing every chance we get. I've never felt more alive than in those moments of being around someone who feels seen by you, and you feel seen by them, because you both find the same thing funny, even though you really shouldn't. I remember a shoot years ago with Miley Cyrus, and she had to cover herself in paint, and she was horrifically hungover and didn't want to be there, but muscled through, and I was the one person who didn't take the shoot seriously, so she invited me to drive in her Escalade afterwards, and bumped her new record the whole way and we went for drinks at a bar, and when she went home early because she needed to feed her pet miniature pig, whose name was Pig (“sometimes you have to just call it what it is”), we went our separate ways and never saw each other again. But that was perfect.
I met the Haim sisters backstage at a recording of Jools Holland's BBC TV show the winter before they started becoming a thing. And they knew me from the internet, and immediately all three jumped on top of me in a green room, and we spent hours running around the set like idiots, because it was funny that we had hijacked this male environment full of men who were very serious about music and being men who liked music. I only remember laughing during all the years in which I knew those women. About the most bizarre things. Things that don't make sense unless you laugh at your own behavior. Like a sister barging into some toilet stalls on a festival site about to murder a guy for being rude to her other sister, and nobody knows what the fuck is going on because the festival is in Hamburg and said sister is screaming at all these guys (who are in the middle of urinating) in English, and not in German. What is sisterhood if you can't laugh at your friends' psychotic level of protectionism over one another? That's my kind of serious.
I find myself perpetually disappointed in women who aren't funny. Patti Smith isn't funny. Madonna isn't funny. I sometimes worry that Beyonce probably isn't funny. Being able to joke about your own bullshit is evolved. It's the only way to possess yourself in a world that wants to rob you of your own confidence and your own imagination and your own whimsy. It's stubborn and very male to be otherwise. Look at Drake. Whenever I'm in an Uber and they ask me Uhh where's Adam?, Drake is always inevitably playing in the background. Drake may as well be Adam. There he is. There's Adam, constantly placing the blame on another girl who hurt his feelings, or made him think sad thoughts. Drake may have released hundreds of songs in the past 14 years but he hasn't made anyone laugh once. I don't think the words humor and humility are related, and yet I consider them as bedfellows. You have to be humble enough about your own failings to be able to laugh at yourself. Life gets easier when you start doing so. Because when expectations are impossible, and the odds are stacked against you, the best thing to do is howl at how absurd it got. And if women make for the most obvious jokes, then we deserve the last laugh. Laughing is a great way to survive.
Eve,
As I reached inward to summon the appropriate amount of righteous indignation to respond to the male bashing part of this piece, I was repeatedly interrupted by my own out-loud laughter. Finally my wife chimed in with, “Share with the class” and urged me to read several portions aloud to her.
Of course, I am one of the few males who never succumbed to the primal male urges of base humor … (ok maybe once or twice 🤷🏻♂️But thankfully never in the presence of a woman)
I will watch the Pam doc now for sure. A woman close to me who has worked with Pamela closely for several years reports that she is "more beautiful inside than out", her words.
And I gained newfound respect for Amy when I read that she consciously channelled Ronnie Spector in her act, so cool… and funny.
Anyway thanks for the piece, I think I need to upgrade to paid now.
Best,
Cyril (where’s Methodius?)
PS- Your subscription page has monthly costing less than annually
You are such a brilliant writer. Thank you.