It has indeed been a banner year for vaginas on television, with one-liners about the holy of holies turning up all over the place — including on saucy, female-driven comedies like “Whitney” and “Two Broke Girls.” The truth is that few of these jokes are legitimately funny. They’re more often deployed to shock, and thereby make lame routines notable. Surely Aronsohn isn’t the only one feeling a little exhausted by the V-word.

But a guy who admits “we do far too many fart jokes on ‘Two and a Half Men’” is not one to go throwing stones at the glass house of body function humor. There’s an underlying, unmistakable anger to Aronsohn’s words, coming as they do from a man who last year snarled at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference, “What makes men damaged? Sorry, it’s women. I never got my heart broken by a man.”

Unfortunately for Aronsohn, a whole lot of uppity broads are totally on the rag this week, and as word of his Hollywood Reporter rant made the rounds, they just couldn’t help expressing their crankiness. On Monday, writer Jen Kirkman issued a menstrual “fatwah” on Aronsohn, deploying a series of period anecdotes and lamenting, “Just looked out my window and vaginas are storming the streets with sitcom ideas!” And actress Martha Plimpton admonished, “Um, Lee, women are 51 percent of the population & a coveted demographic for advertisers. What are you thinking?” She wisely added that his version of “peak vagina” amounts to a mere “25 percent of all writers, producers, creators, DPs, editors & directors in television.” She joked, “3 women on television is more than enough. I say we bring it down to 2. One can be black if she wants.”

Initially Aronsohn, no doubt feeling defensive and “damaged” by all the unladylike hostility, replied on Twitter, “Women, please look up ‘irony.” Well, I did – and there was a picture of one of the creators of “Two and a Half Men” giving advice on comedy. What does it mean?

Aronsohn has since deleted his snarky tweet and, after issuing the excuse that he was simply making a “stupid joke,” has been laying low.

It’s a depressing reality of contemporary network television that too many sitcoms rely on easy shock-value words and ostensibly naughty behavior instead of crafting believable characters and employing clever writing. That’s a crime that both male- and female-based comedies are guilty of.

But Aronsohn wasn’t issuing a plea for higher standards. Instead, he came off as a squeamish boy, irked at the notion that estrogen is seeping into the man cave of his prime time. He was arrogant and dismissive, and his implication that jokes about Ashton Kutcher’s penis are somehow inherently superior to those about Kat Dennings’ vagina is utter sexist nonsense. But thanks for the apology anyway, Aronsohn. And if it’s any consolation, we’re pretty sick of your hole too.

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I hadn’t realized my taste in comedy was so elitist until I watched some of the new multi-camera sitcoms and observed what I had assumed was an already long-dead form of comedy. When I say “new,” I’m referring to multi-camera shows that have persisted after the advent/rise of the single-camera sitcom. If, like me, you’ve spent recent years watching “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development,” “Louie” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it’s a completely different experience to tune into talked-about shows like “Whitney,” “2 Broke Girls” and “Are You There, Chelsea?”

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to shoot a sitcom. There’s the traditional multi-camera style of “I Love Lucy,” “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld” — as seen currently on hits like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men.” On the other hand, “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “The Office” use a more cinematic single-camera shooting style. Multi-camera shows usually have a live audience or laugh track; single-camera shows dispense with the stage metaphor and have no laugh track. For you gamers, it’s somewhat analogous to the difference between a side-scrolling video game like Mario Brothers and a first-person shooter, like Halo.

A testament to my solipsism, I hadn’t seen any of the new multi-camera shows (all of which are more highly rated than those I regularly watch) until recently, when the matter was brought to a glaring point. The deeper we get into our Internet-powered, on-demand culture bubbles that let us watch only the things we care about, the more jarring it is to see things that have mainstream, popular appeal. For the past several years, I’ve been experiencing comedy in a completely cinematic form as opposed to the more vaudevillian stylings of its television roots. These single-camera shows — even in faux-documentary style, like “The Office” — are more polished, with music, editing, shooting styles, lenses and lighting that all aid in the creation of each show’s particular timing, realism and comedic atmosphere.

Comparatively, shows like “Are You There, Chelsea?” or “2 Broke Girls“ feel simultaneously contrived — the seams of construction are so obvious — but also more honest in their presentation. The actors remain actors and rarely disappear into their characters. They are in makeup and hair and costume, underneath a harsh light, standing on their mark, trying to deliver jokes on cue, pausing for laughter. There’s a certain grit and intensity in relating to the actors as well as the characters they perform.

If you’re accustomed to single-camera comedy, watching a multi-camera show is a startling change. Most films and shows eliminate all signs of performance, thereby boosting realism, by inserting multiple distancing layers (editing, music, specific camera lenses, etc.) between the viewer and the actor. Consider this scene from ”30 Rock”:

The hand-held camera, quick edits and natural lighting all aid in our acceptance of the performance and set as real, thereby helping the jokes hit their mark. If this same scene occurred on a multi-camera set, with typical TV lighting, a stationary camera and even slightly slower editing, we would suddenly be aware of Alec Baldwin instead of Jack Donaghy, and Tracy Morgan instead of Tracy Jordan.

In comparison, the actors on multi-camera shows barrel forward with fascinating vulnerability. Each actor has jokey jokes to pound out and laughs to wait for. An actor’s reliance on his partner’s performance in a scene is perhaps nowhere as clear as on a multi-cam show. All this without the helpful and flattering gauze of expensive cameras and location shooting. This might make the multiple-camera sitcom the perfect place for comic writers and actors to prove their ability, and simultaneously, since it is so exposing, the riskiest place for the untalented. You can’t hide in a multi-camera show, and unfortunately, most of these show are less than stellar. As the more sophisticated comedies have gone single-camera, we’ve been left without a ”Seinfeld,” “Cosby Show,” “Dick Van Dyke” or even “Laverne and Shirley” to showcase great comic ”stage” acting.

But though the writing on ”Arrested Development,” for example, is smarter and funnier, the simplicity of multi-camera shows is refreshing. The writing is often horrendously bad and the jokes consist mainly of characters insulting each other, but for all their sexual idiocy and reliance on racist caricatures, these shows have worth despite themselves.

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

The live studio audience, a set that is very obviously a set, or even a laugh track, as simple and stupid and taken for granted as it is, are subtle and powerful tools that shape our viewing experience. An agreement between the actors, the set and the audience is loud and clear: We’re putting on a show for your entertainment. For 21 minutes we experience, in the teeniest-tiniest way, the essence of comic theater. Let’s hope someone remembers what these shows can be and makes one that’s actually worth watching.

But now that the fall television season in full swing, it’s all ladybiz, all the time. On an upcoming episode of “Whitney,” its eponymous star Whitney Cummings ponders, “When did vaginas get so boring?” And in the opening moments of “Two Broke Girls,” waitress Max references “the sound of my vagina drying up” — a gag Bill Carter recently described in the ever-decorous New York Times as a “deleterious effect.” And “your vagina” turns up in zingers in “Free Agents” and “Suburgatory.” Coming next week: jokes about your mom’s vagina.

A portion of the vag effect can surely be laid directly at the feet of Whitney Cummings, who created “Whitney” and co-created “Two Broke Girls.” As Cummings told the Times last week, “If one day passes without me writing any more vagina jokes, my career is blown.” Cummings rightly notes that “our tolerance for what is edgy is changing” — when people can get unbleeped jokes all day on “Funny Or Die” or “College Humor,” why would audiences laugh at more delicately phrased jokes any more? But networks still have standards, just as joke writers still have marks to hit. “Muffin,” for example, might work in the family hour, but it doesn’t pack enough aggressive wallop. The C-word packs too much. And because it’s an anatomical term, vagina gets a pass that a pornier sounding turn of phrase would not. Enter vagina, laughing.

But why is the vagina having a moment now? A recent Associated Press story on “The vagina’s growing public profile” says it’s part of a “trend of women saying, ‘Hey, we’re not embarrassed to talk about this.’” And in his Times piece, Carter speculates optimistically that “The liberation of language could be read by some as barometer of how far women have come as creators of television content.” Really? Does all this “Power to the V” and chatting about pubic tattoos on late-night talk shows represent emancipation, linguistic or otherwise?

After all, the never-to-be-outdone penis has managed to assert itself this year as well. Matt LeBlanc’s allegedly formidable member is the unseen supporting star of Showtime’s “Episodes,” while Ashton Kutcher’s similarly Brobdingnagian rod has already more than announced itself on the revamped “Two and a Half Men.”  We are still a long, long way from one-liners about the magnificent, near-frightening quality of any sitcom star’s wonder cooch. And “vagina” is yet to be used as a brassy, admiring synonym for moxie.

It doesn’t take long, when you’re thinking of a put-down or a punchline, to veer toward the genitals or their excretory and sexual functions. And why not? Douche commercials aside, our privates truly are the core of our humanity. They motivate and enthrall and sometimes disappoint and embarrass us, yet keep the species going. They’re beautiful and weird, and all it takes is one picture of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog to prove that inside almost every adult is an 11-year-old boy.

For now, “vagina” is still the Voldemort of prime time, a word that has been unspoken for so long that it has a mystical, fearsome ability to shock.  So simple. So plain. So powerful. But though it can provoke titters, “vagina” by itself isn’t uproariously funny. And if your prime-time sitcom can’t provide real jokes for its punchlines, chances are it won’t be long before your slot disappears altogether.

Yet it would appear that our conquest by the short skirt-wearing, cutesy gun necklace-sporting Cummings — who writes her self-titled show and also co-created the marginally more promising “Two Broke Girls” — is all but inevitable. A recent Sunday New York Times Magazine profile in which she describes herself as “the weird, quirky, funny girl” ominously warned that “There Is No Escaping Whitney Cummings.” 

“Whitney” may yet prove to be something other than the lame one-joke disaster NBC is currently showcasing it as. Who’d have thought “Cougar Town” would evolve into something funnier and more multidimensional than its dismal first few episodes? But despite the media blitz and near frantic promotion, is there really an audience for more clichés about how supposedly hilarious our gender differences are? The truly horrific “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” a 90-minute collection of “Men are like this, but women are like this!” jokes, sank like a rock in its opening weekend.

Yes, men and women are different. But humor comes from originality and specificity, the way that Alison Brie makes “Community’s” Annie  an uptight dork but a thoroughly rich character, or the way that Margaret Cho can wring wry wit out of real pain and anger. “Bridesmaids” was a movie about bridesmaids and managed to avoid sinking into the morass of tired “men are such beasts and girls are such girls” jokes. Sunday night’s female Emmy nominees and winners — smart, complicated, breathtakingly goofy women like Melissa McCarthy, Martha Plimpton, Jane Lynch and Tina Fey, among others — prove that you can be funny and a woman without constantly having to be funny about simply being a woman. And America may just not get into that giant Hot Tub Time Machine back to the Comedy Barn, where the Token Female is doing a routine about why the line is always longer in the ladies’ room.

Ward Cleaver is the best. Mike Brady is ok, but with a caveat: “We’re already moving into the era of alternative family structures….” It seems likely that Shapiro has never watched half these shows, but did perhaps thumb through a TV Guide or flip past Nick at Nite in the early ’90s:

Archie Bunker (All in the Family, 1971-1979)

Archie is a good dad but a horrible person. Here’s where television begins to change from the respectful view of fathers to the flower-power view of fathers as racist, bigoted, old men you can mooch off of for years on end.

Steven Keaton (Family Ties, 1982-1989)

Steven is in one way a reversal, in another way, a step forward for liberals. Where liberals were militantly anti-father with regard to conservative dads, they’re all of a sudden in favor of traditional father roles when dad uses his authority to promote hippy liberalism. Steven always gets the last word, even if we love Alex.

It’s culture commentary as grand conspiracy! “In 1985 the anti-cyborg LIZARD PEOPLE who control television allowed a positive portrayal of robots with ‘Small Wonder’ but by 1986 it was back to their typical electronics-bashing….”

Shapiro, formerly the world’s youngest hack columnist, is no longer the world’s youngest anything, and so I guess I can’t begruge him his new schtick, but I can’t imagine even the dullest wingnut feeling compelled enough by the thesis (all of your favorite trash TV is a plot against you!) to pick up an entire book on the subject.

The great Roy Edroso has been on the case of Shapiro’s miserable worldview for some time and is required reading on the subject. But can I just:

Al Bundy (Married … With Children, 1987-1997)

A horrible father, a vulgar personality, and a cynical jackass. The Left’s newfangled view of traditional fatherhood takes Archie Bunker a step further, now stating that middle-American conservative dads aren’t good dads or good people.

Al Bundy was a blue-collar tragic hero, you dolt!

The fun listicle ends with a shot at the dads from “Modern Family,” who are guilty of portraying gay parents, without showing the disastrous consequences of gay parenthood (generally: happy, well-adjusted children, from families where they always felt loved and appreciated, in my experience). Still: After complaining about the Left undermining fatherhood for years by presenting fathers as absent or abusive, the Left hands Ben Shapiro two perfect dads and he’s still unsatisfied.

I can’t imagine what he’ll think of the pilot I created, “Three Dudes and a Horse, All of Whom Are Married to One Another, Raise Children in West Hollywood.” (ABC just picked it up! Being on the Left is great!)