Yes, each to her own on comic taste, but is it so rare for women and men to laugh together?

The other day, I wanted someone to do something boring for me, because I was too lazy. “Can I bend you to my will?” I said, quoting for the millionth time from Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, in which languid young aristos entreat one another to pass the time eating Fuller’s walnut cake and trying on frocks. Having swallowed Mitford hook, line and sinker at an impressionable age – has anyone written a PhD on why she was so irresistible to girls of slender means? I am not alone – she accompanies me through life.

If I want to wriggle out of a social situation, I call socialite Cedric to mind, “chucking” Norma Cozens’s dull dinner because Lord Merlin had foie gras and a marquesa with two-inch eyelashes on offer (“he measured”). If I think of savagery, Uncle Matthew’s entrenching tool flashes into view; if I want to summon an image of ne plus ultra luxury, a glass bath in whose sides swim goldfish (Linda, installed in a flat in Paris by her lover, Fabrice).

This may not sound funny to you, but it made, and still makes, me crumple with a laughter based on familiarity and nostalgia for that original connection – and a realisation that a large part of it was pure fascination for a life entirely beyond my understanding.

We know that humour is personal. We know that we will find different things funny at different times in our lives and that some things will always strike a chord even if others remain poker faced. We also know that it is impossible to create a list of virtually any sort without provoking howls of outrage. So I don’t envy Will Hersey, charged with creating a list of the “24 Funniest Books Ever Written” for the magazine Esquire.

But neither can I remain entirely sanguine about the fact that only two of his chosen books were written by women, and none at all by writers of colour. Not being a regular reader of Esquire, I mightn’t have noticed unless the novelist Jonathan Coe, no slouch in the humour department himself, had not pointed to the lack of women on Twitter: “Only two of these books are by women,” he wrote, “suggesting that ladyhumour does not really exist, or at least that men are 12 times funnier than women.” (Coe’s position on this sort of thing, incidentally, is appreciated even more when you know that his novel Number 11 imagines a culture prize awarded to the best culture prize.)

Naturally, many corrective suggestions were forthcoming: Coe’s own, Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot; work by Nina Stibbe, Barbara Pym, Nora Ephron, Helen Fielding.

But the point is never specific omission. Taking one’s eye from the distaff for a moment, I’d suggest that a list of “the funniest books” that couldn’t find room for PG Wodehouse, Keith Waterhouse or Peter Tinniswood was barking up the wrong tree; others might point out that that ties me to a particular place and time and that writers who are included – Philip Roth, John Kennedy Toole, Evelyn Waugh – beat them into a cocked hat, lols-wise. If I argue passionately for a spot for Dorothy Parker over Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn, Brooker’s fans might well accuse me of not having read him closely enough, and this would be entirely true, though I still believe my hunch.

No: the point is the assumptions that underlie what makes a piece of writing funny, or satirical, or powerful, or heartbreaking. Here, in a list assembled by a man and published in a magazine aimed at men, it’s interesting to note several entries whose comedy derives from different varieties of status anxiety, powerlessness and the despair, fear and anger they induce: Robin Cooper’s The Timewaster Letters, for example, or I, Partridge, Lucky Jim and The Diary of a Nobody. The genre is multi-faceted, and not only to be enjoyed by the chaps, but it essentially boils down to Man Rages against The Man.

Then there is the genre entitled Come and Have a Read if You Think You’re Hard Enough: Martin Amis’s Money, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S Thompson, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Concerning masculinity, linguistically innovative, with a fair smattering of drink and drugs, these are not books for chicks.

None of which silliness matters, until it does. I’m under no illusion that a woman compiling a list of books for a primarily female readership would come up with a quite different list, or that, say, a newspaper concerned to bolster its highbrow credentials would probably not exhort people to immerse themselves in Harold Robbins in their spare time. Some years ago, I recommended Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant novels in a radio feature about summer holidays, to which the presenter gingerly suggested that they didn’t sound exactly like a beach read. Philistine, I thought, but she may have had a point.

But horses for courses leads to a horrible and reductive compartmentalisation of reading that in turn creates barriers (“literary fiction”, for example) and shuts doors not only on readers, but on writers too. When I was thinking of writers of colour who might have featured on this list, the Booker prize-winning Paul Beatty came to mind, as did Junot Díaz and others. But it also made me realise that when creativity isn’t a level playing field, the consequent artworks are less diverse than they have every possibility of being; the point, I think, that Marlon James makes when he argues that he should be as free to write science fiction and fantasy as any white author, rather than labouring under the spurious expectation that he should write about “the black experience”.

Comedy can and does come from anywhere – any class, race, genre, nationality. And with that thought, as Bertie Wooster would say, tinkety-tonk.