A recent study (that seems arbitrary and unnecessary) has looked into the issue of ‘funniness’ between the two sexes, and apparently men are funnier than women. The study found on average, 63% of men were funnier than the average woman.
What does that even mean, precisely? And why is this line of query even pursued by researchers? Is it valuable for our cultural advancement as a society?
The research claimed to be the first systematic quantitative meta-analysis on sex differences in humour production ability, and included studies where participants created humour output that was assessed for “funniness” by independent raters. These participants were not professional comedians. They were just your average run of the mill citizen.
There were three researchers in this study – two men and one woman, a research scientist employed by Amazon.
5000 participants were involved in the study, headed by Dr Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist at Aberystwyth University in Wales.
“This stereotype is shared by both men and women – but of course, just because it exists does not mean it is true,” Greengross said.
The study included a task where both men and women were asked to compose a “funny” caption to accompany a cartoon. Independent assesses then rated the “funniness” of each caption without knowing the gender of the writers.
Greengross said “to the best of our knowledge, on average, men appear to have higher humour production ability than women”.
He also took to BBC radio in the U.K to say “Just to clarify, the whole thing is not about ‘women are not funny’… obviously there are some very funny stand-up comedians and I know many female comedians, some personally.”
More than ten years ago, I read the late Christopher Hitchens describe ‘the humour gap’ in his provocative (when was he ever not?) essay in Vanity Fair, claiming that women can’t be funny because it’s evolutionary unnecessary for us to be so, and that 50% of humour is ‘filth’ so that automatically excludes us from its scope.
Hitchens was also a sexist man. He says in the article that men are “overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies,” that our ability to make babies is an “unchallengeable authority” and for that, men have had to compensate by being funny.
Hitchens believed that women “have the whole male world at their mercy.” I often wonder what sort of cultural and political space he’d have filled during the last few years since the #metoo movement began.
“The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex,” Hitchens said. “An average man had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life.”
For what, Mr Hitchens? For what?
He added, “Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men. Precisely because humour is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny.”
It goes without saying that humour and ‘funniness’ is completely subjective. I mean, how does one measure the success of a comedian? By the number of Twitter or Instagram followers they have? The number of shows they rack up per year? There are countless male comedians who tour the world, have sell-out shows, secure the attention and admiration of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people; whom I personally regard as funny as a concrete wall.
Earlier this year, I went to see Ronny Chieng do a set at the Enmore Theatre in front of a packed audience. I laughed out loud, once, in the entire set.
“Sara Pascoe is a great comedian and she’s probably funnier than 99% of all males in the world,” research lead Greengross told to the BBC.
(Dr Greengross, I can name more than one.)
His views seem to reflect Hitchens’, suggesting humour plays a “major role in mating”, and that typically, women look for a sense of humour in a partner as it is “strongly correlated with intelligence”.
“Men, on the other hand, prefer women who laugh at their humour. That means that over our evolutionary history, men likely had to compete harder with other men to impress women with their sense of humour.”
I still pray for a day in the future when we’re not measured by the metrics placed on us by external conventions and that reduce us to our gender.