But Seriously: Why Is There a Gender Gap in Laughter?

March 12, 2007, 7:58 pm

But Seriously: Why Is There a Gender Gap in Laughter?

By John Tierney

In my column on laughter, I mention that female speakers are more likely to laugh than male speakers are. That’s one aspect of a large gender gap that Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, discovered when he left the lab and went out into the wild — well, sidewalks and shopping malls — to observe “laugh episodes.”

When men and women converse, “females are the leading laughers, but males are the best laugh getters,” Professor Provine explains in his 2000 book, “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.” He reached this conclusion by noting each time laughter occurred in a conversation and recording who laughed — the speaker, the audience, or both.

Overall, he found that speakers outlaughed their audiences by close to 50 percent. But the pattern varied enormously according to gender.

When a woman spoke to a female audience, she laughed about 70 percent more often than her listeners. When she spoke to men, the ratio got more lopsided: she laughed more than twice as often as the guys listening to her.

When a man was speaking to a male audience, he laughed about 20 percent more than the audience. But when he was speaking to women, they laughed a little more — about 8 percent — than he did.

“As audiences,” Professor Provine writes, “both males and females were more selective in whom they laughed at or with than they were as speakers — neither males nor females laughed as much at female as male speakers.” He notes that another study in England found a gender gap starting at an early age: “Among children viewing cartoons, girls laughed more with boys than with girls, and girls reciprocrated boys’ laughter more often than boys reciprocated girls’ laughter.”

Guys can quickly come up with an explanation for the Laugh Gap: We’re funnier. Women can counter: No, you’re just more ridiculous. (As one of Professor Provine’s female colleagues put it: “When dealing with males there is so much more to laugh at.”) But as I explain in the column, laughter isn’t usually a response to wit or absurdity — it’s generally an involuntary response that functions as a social lubricant. Professor Provine found that only 10 to 20 percent of the laughs he recorded were triggered by anything remotely amusing. So whether men are funnier or more ridiculous, there’s something else causing most of the laughter.

Feel free to post your theories on what that is. (You can also weigh in on the question of who’s funnier, men or women, but that’s not going to explain the Laugh Gap.)