You may be familiar with Christopher Hitchens’s odious 2007 Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” either because you had the misfortune of reading it in real-time, or because you’ve had to listen to many very, very funny women be asked about it for the last decade. The thesis of the essay sounds like an idea a man came up with while day-drinking and then crapped out a thousand words on: basically, women, a la flightless birds cloistered on an island with ample ground food and no predators, didn’t need to evolve senses of humor because they would survive—i.e. get dick—regardless of whether they were funny.

Hitchens’s essay fundamentally misunderstands the reason why some hot people, not just women, are not humorous. To be funny, you must allow yourself to look ridiculous—to be laugh-at-able. And the number of man-hours the average super-hot person spends maintaining their appearance suggests an earnest level of both hard work and vanity. When Ben Stiller played Derek Zoolander, the entire joke was how seriously this average-looking guy took being hot. But when Stiller starred in Dodgeball, the comedian had muscles that made you feel like he spent a lot of time shooting Blue Steel at his own, very real abs in the gym mirror during free weight sessions. Stiller had crossed into the uncanny valley of “funny for a hot guy”-ness, where an increase of gorgeousness is correlated with a decrease in humorousness.

Using knowledge from high school pre-calculus (final grade: B+), I have created a proprietary algorithm to determine which combinations of traits—smarminess, buffoonishness, self-awareness, and obliviousness—allow some of our most beautiful actors to still make us laugh. It is both unassailable and perfect. This is the Hot-Funny Guy Matrix.

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Chris Pratt (Buffoonish, oblivious)I was extremely concerned when Chris Pratt got hot. Though Pratt started his career as a bonafide babe as the sexy brother on Everwood, he became a comedy star playing goodly-hearted, dough-gutted doofus Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation. Once Pratt got cast in Guardians of the Galaxy and started posting topless photos of his shapely muscles, it became more difficult to believe he was as hapless as Andy—you were left wondering why this guy was running a shoe shine stand in Indiana and not, like, underwear modeling anywhere other than Indiana. But in Pratt’s action movies, he manages to infuse his roles with the same kind of bumbling sweetness he had before he got ripped.

Matthew McConaughey (Buffoonish, middlingly self-aware)McConaughey is a goofball, but he is just self-aware enough to capitalize on his borderline-creepy, musclebound stoner image—he could overpower you after luring you into his beachside trailer, but he just wants to toke and talk about the metaphysics of acting. He’s done it in everything from movies like Dazed and Confused and Magic Mike and Wolf of Wall Street to his catchphrase-cum-youth empowerment organization “Just keep livin.” But you also get the sense that this is, indeed, just how McConaughey keeps livin—after all, there were no cameras present when he got arrested for smoking weed and playing his bongos at a neighbor-disturbing volume.

Channing Tatum (Buffoonish, self-aware)It is hilarious that Channing Tatum used to be a Tampa-based stripper. He knows it, Steven Soderbergh knows it, the good people of Tampa know it. It will never not be funny when Tatum strips. I would watch Tatum strip on Ellen. I would watch him strip in Magic Mike Even XXL-er. I would watch him strip in a house with a mouse, and I would watch him strip in a box with a fox.

Kumail Nanjiani (Nerdy, self-aware)Nanjiani is an actor whose humor is divorced from his sex appeal. A lot of his very self-aware comedy, whether on Silicon Valley or elsewhere, focuses on what a dweeb he is. But unlike the kind of hot people who feel the need to keep insisting they’re dorks (e.g. Olivia Munn), Nanjiani is a legitimate nerd to the extent that he literally co-hosted a video game podcast with his wife Emily V. Gordon. His hotness and funniness eventually came to a head when he did a GQ shoot about how to not be racist when dressing up for Halloween, in which he posed topless in blue paint.

Ryan Reynolds (Smarmy, self-aware)From his first major role as the hot, funny, titular asshole in Van Wilder, to his career-defining role as the hot, funny, titular asshole in Deadpool, Reynolds’s comedy has been fueled by his extreme gorgeousness. His comedic persona is dizzyingly self-aware, a sardonic burgoo of narcissism with a sprinkle of self-loathing—it’s like early Chevy Chase with a Twitter account and slightly more defined abdominal muscles.

George Clooney (Smarmy, somewhat self-aware)Hollywood’s most charming actor has always tread the finest of lines between self-awareness and obliviousness. See: this extremely funny story in which he both ridicules Leonardo DiCaprio for acting like the King Joffrey of the basketball court and brags about how great he is at basketball.

James Franco (Smarmy, oblivious)Franco is at his best when he’s in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s hands—his roles as a stoner in Pineapple Express and as himself (a pretentious pseudo-artist) in This Is the End are iconic comedic performances that suggest great self-awareness. However! Both characters—and, you could argue, everything Franco does outside of the greater Apatow-verse—are a meta commentary on the public’s perception of him, rather than who he thinks he actually is. Just when you think Franco’s turned a corner, he starts talking about The Disaster Artist like it’s Citizen Kane.

Justin Timberlake (Buffoonish, smarmy, oblivious)I get the impression Justin Timberlake thinks he could have been an actual cast member on Saturday Night Live. He also photobombs Jessica Biel with a frequency that I find distasteful.

Paul Rudd (Platonic ideal of humor and male beauty)Rudd is at the center of this matrix not just on the strength of his long and prolific career in the field of funny hotness, but because he would still be funny even if he weren’t hot—his humor is not a commentary on his looks, but rather an independent quality that happens to coexist with them. He is self-aware enough to know what’s funny about himself—he’s successfully involved with the Apatow, Ferrell/McKay, Poehler, and Wain/Showalter cliques—while also projecting the guilelessness that many male screenwriters seem to find appealing in fictional women: a perceived lack of awareness about what a stone cold fox he is. He does physical comedy (the fight scene in Anchorman) just as well as he does snooty dickhood (Wet Hot American Summer). Paul Rudd should be in every comedy.

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