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The Differences
What does it take to tickle someone’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Why does a woman like the hapless, shambling but sweet and romantic Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents and a guy prefer the loutish Ben Stiller in DodgeBall, which has many, many scenes where guys are hit in the groin?To get a deeper insight into this mysterious process, Stanford University psychiatrist Allan L. Reiss, MD, recruited 20 male and female college students. Inside an MRI, the men and women looked at 70 cartoons flashed on a small overhead screen and rated them on a funniness scale. When the results came back, Reiss made an unexpected discovery: Men and women process funny differently. The analytical region of women’s brains was more active than the men’s, suggesting women studied the cartoons more. When they found the cartoon amusing, the reward region of their brains lit up noticeably more than the guys’.
All of which is a fancy way of saying women appear to think a little more about whether they find something humorous. They don’t necessarily expect to laugh and so they enjoy it a lot more when the joke works for them. With men, apparently, it was more like, Hey … cartoon. Must be funny. Funny is good.
So it’s no surprise comedians find that women make tougher crowds. Insult comic Lisa Lampanelli says, “The first thing women do when you get on that stage is size you up.” Do they ever, agrees Eddie Brill, an experienced stand-up who books comedians for David Letterman. “They even look at my shoes,” he laughs. “So with an all-female crowd, I’ll wear really nice shoes.”
The smartest comics know how to work both sides of the room. New York City comic Shaun Eli admits it’s self-serving. “If you bash women at a comedy club and half the people there are on dates, the women aren’t going to laugh, and the men are going to realize their girlfriends aren’t laughing, so they’re not going to laugh,” he says. “You alienate the audience.” Consequently, Eli, who has braved the stage since 2003, avoids put-downs and instead tees off on quirky news items, like “In Florida, three masked men stole $4 million in coins. They were described as armed and extremely sore.”
But why are women so selective, and why do guys laugh at pretty much … anything? To get an answer, I described my Jackass viewing experience to Regina Barreca, a professor of English literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. She has made a career of studying men and women and humor, so I figured she would know. “You mean Jackass, the movie?” she said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “I love that. I guess you don’t confuse it with Jackass, the opera, or Jackass, the ballet.”
I defensively tried to deconstruct the funniness of a dude clinging to a rope with a dead chicken hanging off him but didn’t make much headway. I was laughing too hard.
Women may bash men for having the sense of humor of a nine-year-old boy, but men strike right back, accusing women of having no sense of humor at all. It’s a misperception, Barreca says, based on three things. One is that women don’t like crude. “We don’t do eye-poking, head-slamming humor. No woman has gone up to another woman and said, ‘Pull my finger.’”
Second, women don’t tell jokes. They tell stories. When a woman says, “I have something funny to tell you,” if you’re smart, you’ll sit down, because you’re going to be there for a long, long time.
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