The term “rage bait” had not been invented when Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Women Aren’t Funny for the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. Hitchens took a brave evolutionary stance and claimed that men were naturally primed to be funny to garner female attention, like baboons flashing their genitalia. A woman’s role was to be suitably amused. “It could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny,” Hitchens ventured, stating the bloody obvious. “They want an audience.”
Despite more biological guff about how childbirth makes women zero craic, I come to suspect that what Hitchens really meant to say wasn’t that women couldn’t be funny in a biological sense, but that some things are just not funny when a woman is the one making the joke. Men, Hitchens says, can banter about premature ejaculation. They can joke about John Wayne Bobbitt’s castration, but they don’t want women doing so. It’s less an argument about who is naturally funny, then, and more about who is allowed to make the joke.
The same year Hitchens was wondering why women weren’t funny, Amanda Knox was arrested for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. She was convicted in 2009 and acquitted in 2011. The trial was the subject of huge media scrutiny.
Since then there have been two books – a memoir and last year’s Free: My Search for Meaning – and a Disney+ TV series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. Knox also hosts a podcast, Labyrinths. But in spite of her acquittal, and the fact that she herself was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, every attempt to reclaim the narrative for herself provokes an intense backlash.
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This week, Knox is the subject of controversy once more, as she brings a solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Cartwheel has been described by supporters as a chance for Knox to tell a story in which she was also a victim and by detractors as “distasteful and disrespectful”. An online petition calling for cancellation has secured over 40,000 signatures. Stephanie Kercher, Meredith’s sister, claims that it “normalises and trivialises violence against women”.
Putting this claim to one side for a moment, there’s a whole genre that routinely makes light of the murder and abuse of women. It’s called true crime, and it’s been making jokes at the expense of Kercher and Knox for the past two decades. The popular show Necronomipod spends much of a 2024 episode speculating about Knox’s sex toys and the women’s sex lives. “People who role-play Harry Potter are probably also going to kill roommates,” one host jokes. “Time to slice and dice [laughter].” As Hitchens observed, maybe it’s more a question of who is cracking the joke.
“Cartwheel” is a reference to the alleged gymnastics Knox did in the police station in the hours after Kercher’s murder – this and so much of her behaviour was scoured for evidence of guilt in the judicial court and the court of public opinion. She was too silly, too goofy, too sexy. She joked and laughed too readily. This was the story. “Knox joked after Kercher murder,” read a headline in one British broadsheet. “Foxy Knoxy giggled during police quiz on killing, claims witness” was the caption chosen by the Irish Independent.
Amanda Knox: My Search for Meaning
Seven years after Amanda Knox was definitively acquitted of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, she flew to Italy to meet the man who had led the prosecution’s case against her, Giuliano Mignini. The now 37-year-old mother of two wanted to ask her former prosecutor why he had identified her as the chief suspect, pursued a murder conviction against her, and whether he felt any remorse for putting the wrong person in prison.In her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, Knox details this emotional meeting, the years leading up to it, and the shadow her wrongful conviction cast over her life. The book explores the power of acceptance and forgiveness, and how to cope with life’s most challenging moments.In this conversation with Róisín Ingle, Knox talks about the fear and confusion of being accused of such a serious crime, how she reclaimed her identity when she finally walked free, and why what happened to her made her the person she is today.
Humour can of course be cathartic. People make brilliant comedy from the darkest places. The Edinburgh Fringe is practically an industrial-scale demonstration that topics as devastating as bereavement, suicide, abuse and addiction can be comic fodder without trivialising the material. This year, Frankie McNair’s Huge Ass Mindset is a show about overcoming child abuse, a topic we’d normally think was firmly resistant to LOLs. Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer famously emerged from there also. It dealt with unfunny topics such as sexual abuse, stalking and obsession. Gadd is an interesting case, because his story involves real people, those who harmed him, as well as people he harmed. But we generally accept that his victimisation gives him a story to tell in whatever way he wants. Knox’s story, by contrast, emerges from – and is inextricable with – the far greater tragedy of Kercher’s murder, which is, of course, a story Kercher will never get to give voice to.
In 2007, Knox’s strange comic behaviour was an indictment of her guilt. In 2026, Knox has made a show about her experience – and, as she says, “about motherhood, raising a daughter in a world that is unfair and dangerous for women, and what it costs to be the kind of mother who tells her the truth about that” – and drawn the same judgment. “I don’t think anybody would mind if she wrote novels, became a painter, started to act, released an album,” someone wrote on Reddit. “It’s the fact that it’s comedy she’s turned to that feels distasteful and disrespectful.” “Even if she is innocent it’s incredibly bad taste.” Another poster agrees, “and is a massive red flag about the type of person she truly is”.
But appeals to good taste where Knox’s outputs are concerned are largely beside the point. This is her story and yet it seems she is the only person not entitled to have a view on it.
While Hitchens was all for men joking about their anatomy, he argued that childbirth was so serious women couldn’t afford to be silly about it, or much of anything else – “there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes”. In the almost 20 years that have elapsed, women have claimed the right to make jokes about their lives and their bodies, about childbirth, pelvic floor dysfunction and miscarriage. And I am here for it. I don’t think it was an innate lack of humour or po-faced seriousness that prevented us from doing so in the past. There’s just more cultural permission to talk about these topics and make them funny.
Women have claimed the right to joke about their bodies, their grief and trauma. But Amanda Knox, who has suffered too, is still not allowed in on the joke.
