On one typical Saturday night in high school, my friend Jon and I were watching stand-up comedy on television. I remarked that there were very few female comedians featured on the show. I thought I had made an innocent comment, but it sparked a reaction for which I wasn’t prepared. He responded without hesitation. He spoke without thinking or considering.
“That’s because women aren’t as funny as men,” he said. He spoke what he believed to be a universal truth.
Before I launched into a diatribe about how women aren’t raised and socialized to be funny and how society makes it hard for female comedians to become successful, not to mention that it’s so much harder for women to gain recognition in any field than men and that talented women are underrepresented in any field, be it comedy or neuroscience or what have you, I stopped myself. For a moment before I spoke, I worried that he might be right. And even if he wasn’t right, perhaps more importantly, I worried that the majority of people agreed with him.
Few studies have been done to clarify how humor and gender influence one another, but it’s illuminating to look to studies in other fields of psychological research to shed light on this area. In Social Psychology, we learned that the number one feature that heterosexual males look for in a mate is physical attractiveness. Not only that, but physical attractiveness is the number one trait by a commanding margin. Intelligence, sense of humor, personality and all of the rest fall far behind. On the other hand, the most important traits in men that heterosexual females look for are sense of humor and intelligence. So we revere sexual attractiveness in women and sense of humor in men. At first glance, I thought “This doesn’t mean that women aren’t as funny. This means that women aren’t as focused on making people laugh to get a mate, so they don’t.” But then I really thought about it. If these desirable characteristics have been constant for generations, this means that from an evolutionary perspective, women don’t need to be funny to survive and that natural selection is picking out the funny women. Apparently, funny women are and have been a dying breed. This I find utterly terrifying.
I hope that it’s not that simple. I’ve heard people also make the argument that evolutionarily, women are bred to be sexually attractive and men are bred to have good personalities, so in survival of the fittest, unattractive women need to compensate for their lack of physical appeal by offering some sort of valuable trait, for example sense of humor. To say that women need one desirable trait to pass on their genes, to say that women have a choice between being funny and looking funny is simplistic. It creates a false dichotomy: a woman is either of value for being physically attractive or for having a sense of humor. And there’s nothing in between.
Sarah Silverman is one female comedian who has found success by undoing this generalization. She exploits her physical attractiveness by saying unthinkably offensive things. Here’s this seemingly defenseless, sweet girl and she’s talking about raping babies. That works for her. She’s found her niche, but it’s not a formula that applies to everyone.
In my limited knowledge of stand-up comedy, I find that it’s a generalized truth that female comedians tend to poke fun at themselves more than at others, and male comedians tend to poke fun of others more than they do of themselves. This brings up the question of empowerment versus self-degradation. I would argue that it’s more socially acceptable for a woman to mock herself and for a man to put down someone else. A man who makes a joke about another person is in control, in power, is elevated above the mocked. A woman who makes such a joke, on the other hand, is dangerous. She’s powerful. And oh yeah, she’s a “bitch” (and more often the more degrading term). Such a word doesn’t fit for men in this context. A man who makes a sharp observation isn’t the male version of a bitch. He speaks the truth. He’s applauded. But we believe that women are insecure and that making jokes about others makes a woman catty and jealous.
In further studies on humor, a researcher had senior staff at a hospital tell a joke and then had junior staff tell the same one. The senior staff got more laughs than juniors. Control and assertiveness make good comedians. Aggression is a typically more male-identified and male-revered trait. So that explains a lot, but it doesn’t justify anything.
On the topic of insecurity, I think that there’s some element of true, unabashed self-awareness that a self-effacing comedian possesses. While it’s easy to label a self-mocker as self-conscious and to say that she’s insecure, there’s a level of ownership that comes with celebrating one’s faults and putting them out there for the world to know. Making fun of another person or a generalized group of people is more of a mark of insecurity than making fun of oneself. It’s what we do when we feel unsure of ourselves: we superficially bring others down to our level or beneath us to feel better about ourselves.
Robert Provine performed a study on gender and humor in the year 2000 in which he had both men and women tell the same joke to men and then to women. He reported that 60 percent of men laughed at jokes made by other men, but far fewer men laughed at women. 71 percent of women laughed at the jokes made by males but only half laughed at women. Both genders laughed more at the joke told by men than they did at the joke told by women, and women laughed more in general. So it’s to be concluded that men are the funny ones and women are the ones who find them funny.
Given that it’s so much harder for a woman to get a laugh, it’s no wonder that so few female comedians find success. There are so many forces of biology and society holding women back from asserting their humor that I’m willing to give female comedians a lot more credit than what they get. But beneath all the delineations and dichotomies, the differences and outside forces to be examined, we can focus on the universal points and undefeated truisms underlying humor. For instance, everyone loves “Seinfeld” and knock-knock jokes are never funny.
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