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.