Look Who’s Laughing: Are There Differences in Men and Women?

While laughing is a shared human trait, there are surprising gender differences in how and why people do it.

Some feel that the purpose of laughter is to strengthen human bonds. Men and women both laugh but they differ in engendering and responding to laughter.

Do Cultural Expectations Fuel Gender Differences Regarding Laughter?

Notwithstanding some outrageously funny female comedians, male comedians dominate the comedy shows and live circuit. Why?

Research finds that women are more attracted to men with a sense of humor and men are more attracted to women who appreciate their humor.

Female comedian Fran Leibowitz suggests, “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent to saying that a woman is pretty.”

Who Laughs More?

The balance to the fact that men generate more laughter by telling more jokes is the finding that women laugh more.

In a large, naturalistic study on gender and humor, researcher Robert Provine had men and women observed by his assistants in natural settings to compare the degree to which men and women laugh.

The Findings:

• In the course of a year and 1,200 case studies, Provine and his researchers found that while both sexes laugh a lot, females laugh more. In fact, women talking to women generated the most laughter.
• Men with other men led to laughter only about half as often as women with women.
• Women laughed more in mixed conversation and regardless of who was speaking, women were twice as likely to laugh as their male counterparts.
• Men are more likely to elicit laughter from someone else than laugh themselves.
• In conversations between men and women, females laughed 126 percent more than their male counterparts, meaning that females do the most laughing while males do the most laugh-getting– something which begins in childhood. The class clown is usually male.
• When genders are mixed, the men more often prompt the laugh, and the women are more often the audience.

The Role of Neurochemistry

In his consideration of these differences, Scott Weems, author of Ha! The Science of When We Laugh and Why, invites us to look at neurochemistry. Studies that compare the MRI’s of men and women laughing show similarities—but also differences.

When rating cartoons as funny on a scale from 1 to 10, women’s brains show more activity in the region of the brain responsible for producing words. They also show increased activity in the dopamine or reward center of the brain.

For women, the funnier the joke, the more the activity. For men, activation remained moderate for all jokes. The interpretation is that women listen with more openness and are thus more pleased. Men, the joke makers, may carry more expectations and thus experience less delight as the recipients of humor.

Humor and Sustaining Relationships

One of the observations made by Robert Provine in his studies of humor and gender is that whereas both men and women may smile when they are alone, they both really only laugh when they are with someone else.

Laughter really is the shortest distance between two people and, as such, is an important source of connection, intimacy, and sustainability for partners.

Scott Weems found:

• Nine out of ten couples consider humor as an important part of their relationship.
• Compared to partners in dysfunctional relationships, those in strong ones appreciate their partner’s humor more.
• Couples together for more than 45 years claim that laughing is crucial for marital success.

Maybe there are important reasons for the similarities and differences—the seemingly complimentary ways that men and women differ when it comes to humor and laughter.