Christopher Hitchens, Comedy Critic

If his career as erudite book critic, atheism evangelist, and liberal apostate doesn't work out, Christopher Hitchens should consider a career as a comedy heckler. It's not hard to imagine Hitchens, drink in hand, telling a performer to keep his day job from the back of the room.

In January 2007, Hitchens did his best explain why women aren't funny in the pages of Vanity Fair. His main reason for this female comedy gap was the less-then-iron clad argument that "The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men… Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men…" (VF itself enlisted the New York Times' Alessandra Stanley to throw cold water on its own columnist's thesis in a cover story headlined Who Says Women Aren't Funny? about a year later.)

So, who doesn't Hitchens find funny now? Liberals, according to an essay in the October issue of The Atlantic headlined Cheap Laughs.

In a survey of progressive wits, Hitchens takes out Comedy Central's faux newsmen Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and comedy writer-performer-turned-Minnesota Senator Al Franken. (Somehow Michael Moore, The Huffington Post's Comedy vertical, Calvin Trillin's Deadline poems, and those guys who sing hilarious songs about the Beltway escaped Hitchens' buckshot.)

Hitchens was a guest on The Daily Show in 2004 and appeared to have a grand time (despite his usual deadpan demeanor), quipping that Mother Teresa was "a thieving Albanian dwarf" and that Gandhi was "a naked Hindu fundamentalist" and a "half naked faker." And that's nothing compared to his comment, post-White House Correspondents Dinner last spring, that Wanda Sykes is a "Black Dyke." Talk about punchlines! Watch your back, Rickles.

Based on his essay, he was greatly annoyed by the Comedy Central host's coronation as "America's most trusted newscaster" by a completely unscientific poll on Time.com after the death of Walter Cronkite this summer. Imagine how pissed Hitchens would've been if the poll meant something? (Also, if you run into Hitchens be sure not to tell him that until recently Colbert's right-hand was a writer-producer named Allison Silverman who, horrors, is a woman—and a pretty funny one at that.)

For someone who takes great pains to point out others' lack of comedic chops, Hitchens doesn't seem to feel the need to be, you know, funny himself. (See: "Dyke, Black," above.) Here's how he donnishly dismisses liberal comedians' audiences desire to laugh at anything they say: "Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with."

Ha-ha? Hitchens would've done better to call them all thieving Albanian dwarves. At least that has some zing to it.