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Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?

This line is from this Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens, and is based, in part, on this Stanford Uni study

What the study basically showed is that in an experiment measuring men and women's responses to various cartoons, men seemed to "expect" a cartoon to be funny from the start, while women were more cautious, waiting until the punchline.

Hitchens then supposes that in society, men have learned to be funny as a way to impress women.

Is this plausible, or even likely? Would anyone be able to provide further information?

If that is the case, that men tend to "learn" to be funny would it then stand to reason that a greater number of men will be considered funny than women, because they have an incentive for being so?

Related Question: Do women prefer men with a sense of humor?

Andrew Grimm
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Sonny Ordell
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    The claim from Hitchens and the experiment from Stanford Uni seem miles apart to me. The study was about differences in the brain during the consumption of one type of humour, where the article was about the production of humour. – Oddthinking Nov 18 '11 at 11:30
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    @Oddthinking not sure the edit was appropriate? I limited it to western countries since other countries may have different standards of humor. The claim from Hitchens is based on the results of the Stanford study, in that he supposes men are funny to exploit the way women possibly process humor, exploiting the reward center. – Sonny Ordell Nov 18 '11 at 11:42
  • I also tried to avoid making the positive claim that men taken on average and as a whole are funnier than women, which is very hard to prove. – Sonny Ordell Nov 18 '11 at 11:44
  • Sonny, I am sorry if I have edited it inappropriately. Feel free to change the parts you don't like back. While different cultures do have different standards of humour, Hitchen's argument didn't seem to rely on that - if he is right, the gender difference should be across cultures. I thought it better to let the answer dictate the domain, rather than arbitrarily limit it in the question. – Oddthinking Nov 18 '11 at 12:41
  • @Oddthinking I just want to make sure the question assumes as little as possible. Hitchens argument is based around men being funny to impress women, but is that true in all/most cultures? – Sonny Ordell Nov 18 '11 at 12:44
  • I understand avoiding *making* the claim yourself, but the question doesn't *make* the claim - it merely quotes the claim made by Hitchens. By putting the claim in the words of the original claimant, we can be more confident we aren't arguing against a strawman (quoting out of context notwithstanding). The original question referred to the articles, but then asked a question that wasn't directly claimed in either of them - hence the edit. – Oddthinking Nov 18 '11 at 12:45
  • Hmm, I apologize, I somehow actually missed the first few words of the question where you directly quote Hitchens. Sorry about that, not sure how I missed it. – Sonny Ordell Nov 18 '11 at 13:25
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    How exactly does a funnieometer work? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Nov 18 '11 at 15:18
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    Men _look_ funnier than women... – Flimzy Nov 18 '11 at 16:46
  • @dmckee Humor being subjective is a problem, although not an impossible one. There seem to be somewhat objective measures and standards and we can use information like the success of male comedians to female comedians for example. – Sonny Ordell Nov 19 '11 at 02:14
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    @Sonny: And the result you get is bound up in the social matrix of the performers, the audience and (if your not careful enough) the experimenters. And your going to try to state some kind of absolute result from that mess? Really? You can keep it. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Nov 19 '11 at 03:00
  • @dmckee are you asserting that there is no objective approach we can take to try and get an accurate indication if one gender is "more funny" than the other? Given there are demonstrated differences in how men and women process humor, I don't know that that assertion makes sense. – Sonny Ordell Nov 19 '11 at 03:18
  • I personally believe that this is true, but I am skeptical that it is possible to prove it in a rigorous sense. A test for that: Can you design an experiment that would prove or disprove the hypothesis that men are funnier than women? – Mason Nov 24 '11 at 05:28
  • @Mason I don't see why such an experiment couldn't work. We can measure responses to humor, so measuring differences in reacts to men and women in different situations/styles of comedy could give a good indication. – Sonny Ordell Nov 24 '11 at 10:09

2 Answers2

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The linked question, Do women prefer men with a sense of humor? along with the Stanford university study linked in the question show evidence of differences in how humor is processed and that humor likely evolved as a sexual selection trait.

If that is the case it would make sense that men would tend to be funnier than women. Men would be actively competing to be funnier than each other, which would not be as true for women.

As to whether or not men are objectively funnier than women, this New York Times article about a study at the University of California, San Diego which measured the perceived of how funny each gender was in a blind test.

A selected excerpt:

How to determine something so subjective as what makes one person giggle and another give a dismissive shrug? To create a blind test, 32 undergraduate men and women were asked to perform a variation on the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. Each was instructed to be as funny as possible coming up with 20 captions for 20 cartoons in — think fast — 45 minutes. The researchers then asked 34 undergraduate men and 47 undergraduate women to rate the funnier captions in pairs, without knowing the sex of the authors, assigning scores to the writers depending on how they fared.

While men were deemed ever so slightly funnier (0.11 points out of a theoretical possible score of 5.0), they were mostly considered funnier by other men. There goes the peacock theory. Other differences? Men tended to use profanity and sexual humor slightly more often than women (only slightly, thank you, Melissa McCarthy), though neither sex necessarily considered those types of jokes funnier.

A link to the study.

I find it odd that blind as opposed to double-blind tests were performed, as this is a subject area rife with bias.

Even so, the findings of at least one study show that men perceive themselves and other men to be funnier than they are and that men are considered funnier than women, although only marginally.

It's hard to say anything for sure at this stage beyond speculation, as only a single study has been performed.

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Rachel McGilray
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  • Too bad we couldn't produce an experiment where a male and female comic deliver the same material with the same body movements, voice inflection, cadence, and timing, to the same crowd in the same setting, with the crowd having no recollection of either performance ever being performed before seeing the other. Which would generate the best reaction? – jdstankosky Oct 29 '12 at 20:10
  • @jdstankosky: not such a bad idea. Animated stick figures, written text (removing voice from the equation), large sample of randomly assigned people from the same population... – Oddthinking Oct 29 '12 at 22:35
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    Good answer, but this phrase is strange: `men perceive themselves and other men to be funnier than they are`. It seems better as just `men perceive themselves and other men to be funnier`, since "funniness" is subjective, and `funnier than they are` implies that there's some objective funniness that men perceive incorrectly.. – Brendan Long Oct 30 '12 at 16:37
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    @BrendanLong funniness is subjective unless you give it an objective measure, like the score in the test above. – ReasonablySkeptical Dec 27 '16 at 14:08
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I was asking myself the same question and found this experiment about how the ability to produce humor is correlated with the ability to mate.

The way humor is measured here is again something with cartoons: people are asking to complete as much cartoon as possible and then all those cartoons are rated by judges. For each participant the best cartoon gives the score.

One of the conclusions of this study is that males participants clearly shows a better ability to produce humor, as shown in table 3.

Anne Aunyme
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