Playing Yourself Is Funnier if You’re a Man

It’s the small instances of comic sexism that annoy me most. As when, in Yahoo’s latest best/worst list, Jennifer Aniston gets voted worst actress for The Bounty Hunter, while Ben Stiller gets voted best actor for Greenberg.

Um, they’re both playing themselves, so I’m not sure what the deal is here — oh, wait, I forgot that Greenberg is a neurotic indie dramedy, so it’s automatically good, but The Bounty Hunter is a screwball rom-com, so it’s automatically bad. And that it’s OK for Ben Stiller to play himself, because he’s Ben Stiller, while Jennifer Aniston is never going to do anything right. And women just aren’t funny anyway.

Neither one is a great actor, but they’re equally passable. Is that really too much to admit?