Women perceive the ability for a man to produce humor as a good quality for a potential mate. This is because humor producing abilities go hand in hand with being perceived as physically fit and all around healthier according to Christopher Wilbur and Lorne Campbell. Humor and perceived level of humor are both important components to the start of romantic relationships as was found in this particular study. It was also pretty evident that how humorous a woman thought a man was could be not only based on how funny he actually was but also based on his other traits as well. this is due to the fact that by a man being funny he is also showing a woman that he has other likable traits as well like intelligence, for example which is linked to a good sense of humor (Campbell & Wilbur 2011). I found the findings of this article to be interesting, however I would have liked to see the reverse side of this, how men respond to women’s humor producing abilities. Also, in this study they used all different age groups, ranging from kids in high school all the way up to adults in their 60s. I think the findings may have been more concrete if the difference in ages of participants wasn’t so great.

            An article published in Vanity Fair titled “Women aren’t Funny” explains this claim by attributing it to biology, evolution, and science. Women already appeal to men, because their physically desirable while men can’t rely merely on their looks to get by. They need something more, something funny. In this article, the author interviews some female comedians to see if his theories on humor right. Fran Lebowitz a famous female comedian said on the matter, "The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what's more male than that?" Also in this article it is speculated that “the reason women aren’t funny” has to do with the fact that humor is a sign of intelligence and for many, many years young girls were told not to appear too smart because men didn’t like that in a wife and that men “simply want women as their audience and not their rivals.” Although I disagree with the pretty bold title of this article, I did see how humor may be perceived as a male dominated field, also, it’s not necessarily that women aren’t funny, but it’s just men don’t want them to be.

Wilbur, C., & Campbell, L. (2011). Humor in romantic contexts: Do men participate and women evaluate?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(7), 918-929.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701

Women seek men who are funny as mates because it signals intelligence. This is what Geoffrey Miller’s theory states. This particular study was put to the test by looking at the role humor plays in marriage cross-culturally (Butovskaya et al. 2011). In this particular study, 3,024 married couples from The Unites States, The United Kingdom, China, Turkey and Russia were given a questionnaire which focused on questions like “How often does your spouse make you laugh?” This study was also interested in looking at the level of general satisfaction participants felt in their marriage along with perceived spousal intelligence, kindness, understanding and dependability in a crisis. In all societies except Russia, husbands were reported as making their wives laugh more often than vice versa. In Russia however, the wives were perceived to be funnier than their husbands. This study attributes this to the fact that Russia is going through tough economic times and the women are having an easier time dealing with the stress than the men are and are able to look at the economic situation in a more optimistic way. The findings in this research showed that spousal humor was positively associated with marital satisfaction as well as correlated with high levels of intelligence. Humor relates not only to positive interactions in marriage, but also positive interactions in social contexts which may weigh in on the marital satisfaction. If a spouse is well liked at work or the life of the party, this will make them, in turn, more desirable to the other spouse. I thought this study did a really good job of avoiding biases. The researchers even made sure questions were phrased so all participants would understand what was being asked. For example, The questionnaire avoided asking questions about specific types of humor like sarcasm and joking around on purpose because those vary from culture to culture.

            An article published in the Los Angeles Times last week titled, “Don't Make Us Laugh” focused on a study conducted at the University of California at San Diego in which they took 16 male and 16 female college students and had them write captions for 20 cartoons from the New Yorker magazine. Later they had a group of separate college students, who weren’t told if a male or female wrote the caption, come in and rate which one they found to be the funniest. The captions written by men scored higher than those written by women, but just barely. In this article, the illusion that men are funnier than women is explained through the theory that men are under the impression that women will choose funny, average looking men over handsome, unfunny men. Having this in consciousness makes men work considerably harder at being funny than women do. I thought this theory was an interesting way to look at gender differences in humor, it coincides with both studies where it was found that women were much more attracted to the humor trait then men were.

Butovskaya, M., Imamoglu, O., Lucas , T., Nowak, N., Parkhill Last, M., & Shen, J. (2011). Do women seek humorousness in men because it signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test. International Journal of Humor Research, 24(4), 435.

Editorial. (2011, October 25). Don’t Make Us Laugh. Los Angeles Times, p. 14.