Wash your hands before you touch the pastry, Miss Parkin used to bellow. “And don’t try to be funny.” And we didn’t – we daren’t. In those days, being funny was definitely not for girls.

Miss Parkin was never funny. In fact she was frankly terrifying. Monday afternoon cookery lessons in 3G were an ordeal of humiliation and charred rhubarb crumble. Were we bovvered? Yes, we were.

Then, almost overnight, cookery became home economics, and the boys had to do it too. On the first day Billy Fleming made a nude model of Miss Parkin out of pastry, with currants for nipples. The boys fell about laughing and the girls giggled behind their hands. Miss Parkin came over to see what was going on. She flattened the nude with a couple of quick thumps and then she gave Billy a quick thump behind the ear (you could do that, in those days). Was he bovvered? He pretended he wasn’t. In those days, girls wanted to please, and boys wanted to attract attention.

What we learnt in Miss Parkin’s lessons, apart from how to scrape the top off burnt rhubarb crumble, was that comedy gave boys pulling power. Billy Fleming wasn’t good-looking and he didn’t play football, but after the episode of the pastry nude he got off with Amanda Bagley.

Even Miss Parkin warmed to him, and after that first thump, just to show him who was boss, she let herself be seduced into the occasional chuckle by his antics with the Magimix.

The idea that humour was something that boys do, and girls watch, hasn’t gone away. A piece of research led by Dr Rod Martin and published last year in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour suggested that women shouldn’t even try to be funny, because men are put off by funny women – they find them threatening. Humour, the argument goes, is a male function – a form of strutting sexual display designed to attract a female to the nest (as Billy Fleming knew all those years ago).

And Christopher Hitchens, in an article in Vanity Fair earlier this year, argues that there is no such thing as womanly humour – women just aren’t funny, unless they are “hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” According to Hitchens, it’s all to do with childbearing – women are “innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter”. So that should soon put an end to the appalling antics of Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Jo Brand, Cathy Burke, Shazia Mirza, Catherine Tate and all my other comic heroines.

It was when I entered the sixth form that I learnt that women could be funny too. The lovely, sexy Mr Vanwyck introduced us to Jane Austen, and reassured us that, even though it was Great Literature, we were still allowed to laugh. The boys had all gone off by then to do physics or woodwork or something – good luck to them. We didn’t want them getting in the way of our dalliance with Mr Vanwyck.

Still, it took a while to dawn on me that Jane Austen was actually quite a lot funnier than Billy Fleming. And it took Colin Firth in wet riding breeches to convince me that Mr Darcy was even sexier than Mr Vanwyck. Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm was another milestone. But I was soon completely besotted with my other great literary hero, Sue Townsend’s angst-ridden Adrian Mole, who endured injustice, unrequited love, spots, bad parenting and more with baffled dignity. I love Adrian (purely Platonic, of course) because he aged as we did, so every passing daftness of our times is reflected in Adrian’s own anguished journey through life.

So what is it that comic woman writers such as Jane Austen and Sue Townsend have, which their contemporaries such as William Thackeray and Douglas Adams don’t have? I was tempted to say that the special characteristic of female humour is kindness – we smile with Austen and Townsend, we don’t sneer. Then again, Nick Hornby is unfailingly kind to his hapless characters, while that famous female wit, Dorothy Parker, is very sneery.

Is it that women observe and dissect, while men invent and fantasise? Yes; compare Marian Keyes or Meera Syal with Jasper Fforde or Dan Rhodes. But what about Stella Duffy and Jonathan Coe? Again, there are as many exceptions as there are examples. I’m beginning to think it’s a bit like airline pilots – okay, there may not be so many women doing it, but what they do is the same. There isn’t a particularly female way of flying an aircraft, is there? (If there is, please don’t tell me.)

I think the real change, pace Christopher Hitchens, is that men themselves are changing, in ways that are allowing women more space to be funny. It’s not that women have changed; as Jane Austen shows, they’ve always been funny.

Is it a coincidence that the new wave of women comedians started to hit our screens round about the same time that cooking and woodwork merged into “technology”, taken by both boys and girls at school, and personal and social education took over from the biology lab as the source for information about sex?

But while women comedians are happily frisking off into fields that were traditionally the preserve of men, there is another area of comedy where women have long held sway – since the days of Jane Austen, in fact.

Of the six finalists for the new Melissa Nathan Award for comedy romance, five are women. So maybe women do have a different outlook on life. We like a happy ending. But hang on – doesn’t that make us just the same as airline pilots?

Marina Lewycka is the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian . She appears tonight in “From Jane Austen to Catherine Tate; the rise of the female comic writer”, part of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007 series at the South Bank Centre www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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