About ten years ago Deborah Frances-White had her first show on Radio 4, Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice and it is genuinely very funny and quite poignant. You can listen to it here, if you want:
https://deborahfrances-white.com/writing/rolls-the-dice/
So, in answer to the question "Is she funny?" the answer is that she managed one very amusing radio series, which is more than most of us will achieve. But listening to it, her show suggests a few points:
- As they say, everyone has one book in them. Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice was DFW's one book.
- You realise that she has what we might euphemistically call some significant formative experiences, from being adopted, to ending up as a Jehovah's Witness. Some of her current politics are almost certainly influenced by these.
- Whilst the show is funny, it does not give you the impression that she is a particularly deep thinker.
That last point is really hammered home by her appearance on Triggernometry. I had to stop listening after the appalling stupid claim that men only had short hair after they had to cut it off when fighting in the First World War. You can, for instance, go to the second floor of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and you will see what male hairstyles looked like before the war, and they certainly weren't long. Oscar Wilde, who is her example of a long-haired Victorian man, was always an outlier, and aesthete who was seen for his entire career as sitting outside normal societal norms, so a terrible example of what was accepted as normal during the nineteenth century.
I had to stop listening to the Triggernometry episode, for fear that the stupidity would prove to be contagious, but one point I noted from what I listened to was how DFW presents arguments which suggest that she sees things in aesthetic terms, and pushback to progressive policies as as aesthetic objection to the unfamiliar, hence her very strange bus-driver-in-a-clown-suit argument. And I feel that this is common approach for people who see themselves as progressive in the modern world. So, a writer in the Guardian, for instance, will suggest that the only meaningful difference between a Christian, a Muslim, and an atheist, is the aesthetics of how they practice their beliefs, rather than their belief systems representing, for instance, actual beliefs. Thus, being a woman becomes an aesthetic choice, rather than representing something with substantial and meaningful biological difference and potential oppression.
It's like the supposed liberals believe that everything only exists on the most superficial level (and I use the word "supposed" because they are not terribly liberal in any practical sense). Worthwhile to think about this whilst DFW meanders through absurd assertions about two-spirit people, or how many Victorian prisoners were orphans.