Jessica Abrams and Amy Bippus found in their study that both men and women find jokes at the expense of the opposite gender funnier than jokes made about their own. Participants were given jokes to read about both their own and the opposite gender and asked to rate the overall funniness of the joke as well as their perceived level of self-esteem. While the overall study found that men and women both found jokes about the opposite sex funnier, they found that women rated the jokes targeted men much funnier than the men rated the female targeted jokes. The researchers found this may be contributed to lower self-esteem in women than in men. To me, this makes sense. Even in class lectures we discussed that women, in general, have a lower confidence levels than their male counterparts do so the fact that they would want to make fun of men unconsciously harsher is a valid finding.

This research can be applied to the stereotype that men are funnier than women because maybe those who find men to be funnier are taking into consideration not only the quality of their jokes and the comedic timing but also the (possibly higher) confidence level while on stage, in a movie or on paper than that of a women. A limitation that could be observed in this study is the fact that maybe the jokes that the women were given to read just happened to be funnier jokes than the ones the men were given. Maybe the group of women had a better sense of humor than the group of men did. These both could be possible factors as to why the women thought some of the jokes were funnier than the group of men. Also, maybe the attribution to the women’s low self-esteem could have been due to a bad day or maybe other personal problems going on and their self-esteem wasn’t as low as they reported it to be and similarly, the men’s level of self-esteem could have been exaggerated. I think a good example of this from pop culture would be The Simpsons in this show Homer Simpson is the stupid man and his wife Marge knows this and is often times irritated at his antics and what he says. Even more irritated than Marge at Homer’s behavior is Marge’s sisters Selma and Patty. Every time they all get together Selma and Patty never fail to mention what an idiot Homer is and what a mistake Marge made by marring him. I know I personally find Homer’s relationship with his two sister-in-laws to be hilarious.

Abrams, J., & Bippus, A. (2011). An intergroup investigation of disparaging humor. Journal of Language & Social Psychology;, 30(2), 193-201

I think the best way to addressing the stereotype that men are funnier than women would be to first look at how humor is perceived and what traits may be associated with having a good sense of humor. Greengross and Miller found in their study that humor is found to be sexually attractive. Miller and Greengross believe that intelligence should be a good predictor of humor which in turn should predict how successful someone is with a member of the opposite sex, or “mating success” as it’s defined in the article. In this experiment, 400 college students of which half were male and half female took various tasks to determine the correlation between humor, intelligence and mating success. To measure intelligence, participants were tested on their verbal vocabulary skills. Next to determine mating success, these participants were rated on the answer they provided to the Sexual Behaviors and Beliefs Questionnaire. Finally, participants were measured on humor producing ability where they were asked to make up captions for cartoons. According to this study, men rated higher in all three categories than women. 

I personally think there are a few problems with this article. For starters, a person’s “mating success” is based on how many sexual partners you have in a life time. I think this is the opposite of success in terms of mating. I think the more sexual partners you have means the less stable relationships you’re in. Also, both the authors and conductors of this research are men. This could be a potential bias, especially if they knew exactly who wrote what captions for what cartoon. Even if that information was kept confidential, it is a very real possibility that they thought the nature of the captions was funnier than those of the women’s. Men aren’t necessarily funnier than women, however, men and women do have different views and opinions of what is funny and what is not. I would be interested in this study done with maybe an additional two female researchers also scoring the cartoon captions as well as replacing the defined definition of “successful mating” with something a little more solid such as overall agreeableness or how well the participant typically gets along with others. I think it is fair to say that having a good sense of humor can be a good predictor of certain types of intelligence; however intelligence isn’t necessarily a solid predictor of humor. I would also be interested in seeing how other measures of intelligence compare to students senses of humor. This study focused solely on verbal intelligence which tested students on vocabulary words. I would be curious to see if the same results were obtained if they just compared GPAs.

References:

Greengross, G., & Miller, G. (2011). Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Journal of Intelligence, 39(39), 188-192