The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.

The quip hinges on a double meaning of “two faces”: the literal expectation that women must present a cosmetically perfected public appearance, and the figurative “two-facedness” associated with political duplicity. By fusing these, the line satirizes both the gendered labor of appearance management and the cynicism many people feel toward politics. It implies that women are deterred not by lack of ability but by the compounded burdens of public scrutiny—having to meet aesthetic standards while also navigating a profession stereotyped as insincere. The joke’s bite comes from treating these pressures as an absurd, everyday inconvenience, thereby exposing how normalized they are.