Am I funny? For years, I thought so. When I first learned to speak, I would
memorize jokes. Without knowing the meaning or context, deliver them to crowds
of family at holidays. I would always follow the punch line with my signature
(surely copyright infringing) “wakka wakka wakka!” From adolescence through my
teenage years, I fancied myself a real comedic savant. But what does this have
to do with feminism?
My childhood friend Haley is funny. Much funnier than me. A
couple of years ago she told me about a study on gender and humor. Laura Mickes
of UC San Diego conducted the study, which attempted to quantify which gender
was funnier.
Mickes and her team had participants fill out their own
captions for New Yorker cartoons. The
participants rated other participant cartoons, they rated their own
performance, and they then revisited the cartoons and guessed the writer’s
gender. In the original rating, cartoons by men were rated .11 points higher
(on a 5-point scale) than those by women.
Two things stand out from this round of the study. First, though both
genders found the men created funnier cartoons, the support was stronger among
other men. Second, the men used more sexual humor and profanity in their
captions, but this style wasn't utilized in the highest rated entries. Put another way, the lewd humor was not effective.
The follow up experiments had the most damning results. Men
rated themselves an average of 2.3 on the 5-point scale, and women rated
themselves an average 1.5. And when reexamining the cartoons (and not being
told the gender of the writer) both men and women falsely attributed the higher
rated cartoons to men and the lower rated cartoons to women. So while the men
were technically funnier in the study it was marginal. Further, the men were
wildly inconsistent and received much more credit than they deserved.
I have looked at other studies and comedic differences between the genders exist, because evolutionary psychology has a lot to say on these phenomena. Men overwhelmingly tell more jokes in social settings, and thus unsurprisingly
fail more often. In an interview with The
Atlantic evolutionary psychologist Gil Greengross put it simply: “it's
worth it. If you fail and you're not funny, you lost maybe a few minutes. But
if the person laughs, the benefit can be huge.”
Evolutionary psychology is a social and natural science
approach that considers psychological issues through the lens of modern
evolutionary perspectives. Essentially it is one attempt at answering the
nature versus nurture debate. One of the primary vehicles for psychological
adaptations is sexual selection. To an evolutionary psychologist, a lot of our
social constructs can be explained as tools that facilitated mating for our ancestors. Humor is associated with
intelligence; in fact some studies show the
two correlate. Intelligence being an important attribute in dating and mating, the
comedic desperations of men appears as a natural outcome. Men are pressured to be as
funny as possible as much as possible, because life itself depends on it.
Evolutionary psychology and feminism can seem at odds. The
latter is often misconstrued as biological determinism, which is a favored
excuse for misogynistic behavior. However, I think the theoretical framework is
useful and should be considered. I plan to examine the relationship of evolutionary psychology and feminism in a
later blog post.
As I researched evolutionary psychology for this post, I was reminded of our discussions of cultural feminism. The theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology could
bolster cultural feminism’s embrace of gender differences. By
attempting to understand gender differences, by finding the evolutionary benefits that may correlate
with gender differences, our society can attach value to those differences. We
can celebrate how the ethic of care has benefited us. Last, we can fight
against unfounded assumptions such as that men are inherently funnier. Men are not innately the more humorous gender;
we are just trying a bit too hard. When you throw enough mud at the wall, some
of it is bound to stick.
Mickes' study and Greengross' related study respectively:
http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Humor%20%26%20Gender.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/attachments/95822/humor-predicts-mating-success.pdf
(http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/plight-of-the-funny-female/416559/) (Link to Atlantic article quoting Gil Greengross)
(http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/plight-of-the-funny-female/416559/) (Link to Atlantic article quoting Gil Greengross)
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