Laughing apart: Study looks at how jokes hit differently for men and women

New study evaluates differences of comedy preference between men and women (Pexels/Luiz Woellner Fotografia)

In an age of internet memes, polarizing political commentary and various comedic preferences, a new study looks at what gets men and women laughing.

The research was led by Robin Dunbar, a professor at the University of Oxford who aimed to see if there are any major differences in sense of humour between the two sexes.

The study, which was published in the De Gruyter journal Humor, was based on data collected from 3,380 people attending an exhibit of print cartoons by well-known artists at the Cartoon Museum, in London, England.

In order to determine comedic preferences, Dunbar and his team of researchers divided cartoons of varying complexity into 18 pairs and asked participants to rate which of the two cartoon jokes was funnier. Factors such as the participants’ age, sex, and the content of the cartoons — which were originally printed in newspapers between 1930 and 2010 — were all considered.

Among participants of both genders, more complex jokes that depended on subtext were considered funnier than those that leaned into simpler, more slapstick comedy.

But Dunbar says there were limits to cartoon comedy that made a certain level of comedic complexity difficult to achieve.

“Like verbal jokes, cartoons are funnier the more mind states, essentially characters, they involve,” Dunbar said in a media release. "But there is a limit after which they become incomprehensible.”

Dunbar found that men tend to rate visual jokes more highly than women do, while women tend to prefer jokes that involve political commentary or relationship dynamics.

As the study explains, visual comedy has become a regular “feature of our cultural life, both as a vehicle to amuse and as a way of making political and social comments in the form of satire.”

Researchers say cartoon comedy represents an “intersection of our psychological and social interests,” acknowledging that socially complex vignettes are difficult to capture in a conceptual two-dimensional plane.

The study found that participant age didn’t significantly impact the humour rating assigned to a given cartoon, nor did the date on which a cartoon was published.

Overall, both sexes clearly considered social commentary jokes about domestic marital relationships and visual jokes that deploy puns and wordplay funnier than any other presented topic. Participants of both sexes were least enthusiastic about political jokes.

Women indicated a higher preference for jokes about domestic circumstances while men preferred slapstick or situational visual jokes, the study found.

“We argue that these differences in humour preference arise from the remarkable differences in social style of the two sexes,” Dunbar stated in the media release. “This explanation has previously been overlooked because psychologists and others have concentrated on IQ-type differences, which are minimal.”

The study suggests that these findings may reflect how men and women manage their relationships.