Each study had people evaluating humour in an objective way, unaware of the gender of the person whose ability to be funny they were assessing. Typically the studies analysed by the boffins involved men and women writing captions for a cartoon.
Their work was then separately assessed for laugh value. All up, the researchers discovered that 63 per cent of men were funnier than the average woman. And where the target of a joke was a man, or the joke was neutral and not sexist in any way, "women and men expressed similar levels of appreciation" for the quality of humour.
There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.
Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling.
Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch. Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.
Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province.
I thought as much. Precisely because humor 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. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit.
Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Filth, and plenty of it.
Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same, And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail, The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
As Kipling continues:. She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy.
In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor.
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