Click on any dating site these days and the one desirable quality most sought in most ads by members of both the sexes is a good sense of humor.
Everyone wants a partner who is funny. Humor has been viewed as the one behavioral characteristic that men and women seek in roughly equal proportion. At least popular theory suggests so.
According to humor researchers however, there exist reported gender differences in the use and appreciation of humor.
Eric Bressler, a psychologist at McMaster University in Canada, says that men and women don’t mean the same thing when they say they value humor in a long-term partner.
In his research, forthcoming in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, subjects were asked to choose a potential date of the opposite sex. Bressler found that women want a man who is a humor “generator,” while men seek a humor “appreciator.” That is, while women want a guy who can crack a good joke, men, to a large degree, want a partner who laughs at their antics.
Bressler’s study indicates that humor probably developed through sexual selection because it is most desirable in romantic relationships. Women don’t care about a friend’s sense of humor, whether male or female.
However, a woman who displays a typically male sense of humor-one that’s aggressive or competitive-is a turnoff to men, says Don Nilsen, a linguistics professor at Arizona State University in Tempe and an expert on humor. Many men feel threatened, perceiving a funny woman as a rival or worrying that they’ll become a target of her sharp tongue. “I think every man in the world loves humor, even the sexual put-down humor, of Judy Tenuta or Joan Rivers,” he says. “But very few men want to marry them.”
According to Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, the humor divide has developed as a result of sexual selection: Women are the choosier sex, and because they prefer funny men-a signal of cognitive fitness-men, through evolution, learned to use humor and wit to attract a mate and to outshine rivals.
John Morreal, a professor of religion at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, who has studied humor for 25 years, agrees. “Men taunt other men with clever nicknames and insults,” he says. “That isn’t something that women do. They don’t tend to play practical jokes, or engage in humor that humiliates or puts somebody down.”
In response to male humor, female laughter may have evolved as a signal of sexual interest. A German study found that when male and female strangers engaged in natural conversation, the degree to which a woman laughed while talking to a man was indicative of her interest in dating him. How much the woman laughed also predicted the man’s desire to date her. Conversely, how often a man laughed was unrelated to his interest in a woman.
The basic difference in the way men and women deploy humor lies in the fact that while women tend to use humor to bond with others, males tend to use humor as a tool to compete with other men. Studies show that men are more likely to use humor to garner attention away from other males when they are in the company of women.
