Dick Jokes Won’t Get The Girl

Every man knows that if you don’t look like that underwear model on the Pierre Cardin billboard, you can still be “the funny guy.” You can still get laid even if you’re short, fat, balding and even a jerk as long as you can induce the ROFLs and LOLs. Right? Wrong. A new psychology study has found that men could very well be the more humorous gender… but only to other men.

The study from the University of California San Diego Psychology department ran two separate but related experiments. The first experiment had 16 undergraduate men and 16 undergraduate women write funny captions for cartoons. All were instructed to be as funny as possible (I would very much like to see those instructions). Then, 34 men and 47 women rated those captions.

The study found that men did better than women but not by much.

“The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype,” said one of the study’s authors, Laura Mickes.

What’s more interesting is that other men rated men’s captions to be funnier. Male raters gave 0.1 points more than female raters to captions written by men.

“Sad for the guys  who think that by being funny they will impress the ladies, but really just impress other men who want to impress the ladies.” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a professor of Psychcology at UC San Diego.

So why are men considered funnier than women when in reality, it is only other men who think so? Amanda Marcotte has a few ideas. She writes on Slate:

• Men and women may be equally funny when asked to write jokes (but) people who have conducted humor contests for the public at large find that they have far more entries from men than from women, demonstrating that men probably try harder to get the LULZ than women. This doesn’t surprise me one bit, considering my personal experiences of watching women’s jokes get ignored, stolen by men, or regarded as gross and unladylike. Half the reason to make jokes is so people laugh at them, and if your femaleness prevents people from laughing at your jokes, you’re going to give up.

At the end of the day, men seem to have more license to be funny than women do. Women continue to be monitored by the joke police but as long as those policemen are only men, I’d gladly be considered a criminal.

Contact the author here: syahidah@morningquickie.com