Science: Sense of Humour Discovered in Women

Analysis of New Yorker cartoon captions gives men only a slight lead over women in the humour department.

A new study on gender and humour offers a four-year delayed rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 article “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Researchers at UC San Diego asked men and women to provide captions for New Yorker cartoons, which were then rated by men and women without knowledge of the author’s gender. According to the results of the study, women were only slightly less funny than men on average, but men were significantly more likely to assess themselves as funny and rate other men highly. They also found that in a subsequent memory assessment, funny captions were more frequently misattributed to men, while the lame jokes were disproportionately remembered as created by women. The research team was headed by one woman and four men in case it got too hard for her tiny female brain.