Male participants said that, on a scale from one to five, their cartoons were an average of 2. The women gave themselves a 1. Even worse, 89 percent of the women and 94 percent of men responded that men, in general, are funnier. In a follow-up experiment, Mickes asked a new set of participants to read the captions generated by the first group and guess the gender of the writer. Both men and women misattributed the funnier captions to male writers.
To get some, mostly. Not everyone endorses evolutionary psychology, but those who do would say that women tend to be more selective in choosing their mates than men are because historically, motherhood has been a life-threatening, all-consuming endeavor. If a cavewoman picked the wrong caveman, she might risk a grueling childbirth only to end up raising an illness-addled child without the help of a skillful mate. Thus, choosiness becomes paramount.
It behooves women to find a partner who will bestow sufficient time, resources, and good genes on their children—in other words, a smart man. Funny people are more likely to be smart. In one of the many New Yorker studies, the students who scored higher on intelligence tests also generated the funniest captions.
On average, women tend to use their laughter to lure in potential mates, while men use their jokes to attract as many women as they can. For decades, this response stumped psychologists. Women want men who will tell jokes; men want women who will laugh at theirs.
In , psychologists Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine showed college students images of two equally attractive members of the opposite sex. Underneath each photo, they pasted either funny or not-funny statements supposedly authored by the person.
Female participants said they wanted the funny man, rather than the unfunny one, as a boyfriend, even when they thought the funnier man was less trustworthy. In study later that year, Bressler and Balshine again found that, when considering imaginary interactions with people of the opposite sex, women said they wanted men who could make them laugh.
Men said it was much more important that a woman enjoy his jokes. As they're the ones being quoted, they're the ones setting the standard of what counts as funny.
This viewpoint also tends to find The Three Stooges funny. I have never once laughed at The Three Stooges, even when I was a child. However, I giggle til I cry listening to some of Ellen Degeneres' routines. The general public also found Mary Tyler Moore to be funny.
That's why she was on 2 long running comedies still funny and considered classic comedy. I guess my point is that everyone finds different things funny. Therefore, more people, like women or even men who are not mysogynistic, should also be able have a say in standards.
Guy makes a sexist, misogynistic joke about women. Women don't laugh because, well, duh. No, I think the logic goes: woman makes hacky, cliched "men are so stupid everybody" joke. Men don't laugh because, well, duh. That's why many men don't find women funny. If a woman can't laugh at being the butt of a joke, why do you expect a man to be? I never once thought that the Hitchens article was tongue in cheek.
And you want to know why? It wasn't. It may be why you and your friends don't think women are funny. You don't get "funny" in the first place. You're entitled to your opinion, but a reasonable argument could certainly be made that the article was, in fact, tongue-in-cheek.
ONLY feminists could acknowledge that women get fewer laughs in general, but argue this does not mean they aren't as funny. Ladies, it would seem that your insecurities are as endless as your circular logic. As the article mentions you all have had years to change minds on this subject, and so far you have not. If there is out-cry when someone points that out it's not due to it's inherent falsehood, it's because 50 years of feminist bullying has made it taboo to criticize women's abilities or lack of in even the most trivial of senses.
To this day, groups of people have all kinds of stigmas attached to them, some far more serious than humor. Like, say, that darker-skinned people are less intelligent. People have been saying that for hundreds of years and people still hold that belief to be true. You seem to be suggesting that just because it's an ingrained stereotype, however untrue and however harmful, well we should just accept it.
The only people who say things like this? People with the privilege of remaining free of hurtful stereotypes. Women don't get laughs just like women don't get recognition in other fields.
Not because they aren't qualified, but because the prevailing cultural idea is that women are not "supposed" to be as good at or better than as men at anything, and this pre-judgment does cloud objective review of their work--and the pre-judgement occurs in both men and women. Male performers, writers, and artists are, in my experience, are judged as performers, writers, and artists, while women are often judged as "women-performers," "women-writers," and "women-artists," with their gender taking precedence over their actual work, and gender stereotypes crowding out the actual value of their work.
Women aren't supposed to be funny, ultimately, because there's a power in humor. Humor is used to subvert norms, provide cultural criticism, and propose new ways of looking at things taken for granted. It is also a method of getting people to listen.
Traditionally, the ideas of women having power and being listened to are scary to those who like our sexist system the way it is, and telling women they aren't funny is just another of the long line of things women are told daily that they can't do--along with things like math and science and making reproductive choices.
Hear, hear. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference.
The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing.
But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens. Allan Reiss. Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine?
And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it? This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream uproariously.
Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny? Greatly daring—or so I thought—I resolved to call up Ms.
Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.
And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition. Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling.
Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. Image source, Getty Images. Image source, Lily Bertrand Webb.
Marina and Maddie Bye make up the comedy duo Siblings. View this post on Instagram. Related Topics. Published 13 November Published 30 March Published 21 October Published 19 August
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