If I want to laugh at women, I’ll give them a map to read*

David Letterman’s recent troubles – boffing members of the young female staff – has given a less-than-gruntled ex-staffer the opportunity to fire a pot-shot at the sexist culture of the Letterman (and every other) writers’ room.

To this old writers’-room-runner and participant, it sounds like the standard whinge, which ignores both the nature of comedy writing, and the gendered difference in humour.

Writers’ rooms aren’t particularly masculinist (compared to say, Turkish prisons..

trading floors or building sites) – what they are is laceratingly brutal, because they consist of a group of people who have self-selected for their ability to think on their feet and take each other down.

If you had to choose a sports team from a writers room, it would never happen. Everyone is the one who was chosen last for a sports team.

But the put-down and one-up-well-manship has to be funny. And most women aren’t interested in, or attuned to, the sort of weird trickery that the stand-alone joke involves.

A joke is like an Escher picture, or a Heath-Robinson machine – the making of them implies a sort of slightly aspergerish fascination with how logical structures are put together.

Women’s humour tends to be more social, contextual, expressed within plot and character.

The women who can write gags can also pretty much write their own ticket.

Nell Scovell, the ex-Letterman writer, suggests that men keep women out of writers rooms to preserve the male ethos. In my experience, there’s always a desperate search for more women – both to broaden the palette of jokes, and to stop the room turning into a reminder of sad year 10 D and D sausagefests

There’s nothing funny about sexism, the old sticker says. Sadly, it may also apply to Scovell.

*is an example of the sexist humour that has no place in this discussion