The Laugh Gap Explained

March 16, 2007, 11:33 am

The Laugh Gap Explained

By John Tierney

Here are three explanations that readers came up for the Laugh Gap between the sexes:

1. Women are lower status. “For all that the sexual revolution has changed gender relationships in the West,” Annie wrote, “there are still huge differences in social position between the genders. Women are still lower on the social scale than men, and that may well explain why they laugh more, especially when they are in the presence of men.”

2. Women are kinder and more empathetic. “I often laugh not because someone is especially funny,” a woman named Jackie commented , “but because I sense that the person/speaker wishes to be found funny, and I want to be kind o that person. I think the gender gap persists because . . . women intuit emotional signals differently/ more finely than men, so more often pick up on the cues as to when someone wishes to be found funny and . . . men more often want to be found funny.”

3. Men are funnier — or at least they try harder and take more risks to be funny. Greg wrote: “I believe men are more willing to be funny (and may in fact be funnier–though I am not sure). Women, again in my experience, are much less willing–for whatever reason to appear to be silly, contrarian, disrespectful–many of the sources of good humor.”

I ran these theories by Robert Provine, the University of Maryland researcher whose field research in laughter was described in my column. He saw merit in all of them, although he cautioned that anyone who tries to explain why he or she laughs is in danger of rationalizing the irrational. “Males don’t decide to laugh less in the presence of females, or females to laugh more in the presence of males,” Professor Provine said. “They just do it.”

Lower status explains why women underlings laugh in the presence of a male boss — and assuming there are more women in subordinate jobs and social roles, then women would be laughing more regardless of whether men are saying anything funny or not. But there’s more to the Laugh Gap than just the traditional status hierarchy. As Jackie and Greg noted, men and women tend to assign themselves different social roles when it comes to provoking laughter. A study in Belgium, the United States and Hong Kong found that boys are already doing more joking than girls by age 6. When the sociologist Rose Coser observed attempts to be witty at staff meetings at a hospital, she found that 96 percent of the witticisms were made by men (even thought here were plenty of women present).

When I’ve asked stand-up comics to account for the preponderance of men in their business, I’ve gotten the kind of answer evolutionary psychologists would give: funny men are winners in the mating game. A reader named Beevod (a male, I’d guess) put it succinctly: “Make a woman laugh and she’s yours for life.” Women can be hilarious (cf. Sarah Silverman), but fewer of them bother trying because they don’t get the same rewards for it.

Professor Provine demonstrated this difference by analyzing more than 3,000 personal ads in newspapers in eight American cities, keeping track of how often people sought someone with a sense of humor, and how often they advertised themselves as being funny. He found that women sought laughter more than they promised it, whereas for men it was the reverse: they were more likely to advertise their own sense of humor. “The evidence is clear,” he writes in “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,” his 2000 book. “Women seek men who make them laugh, and men are anxious to to comply with this request.”

Even if men do most of the joke-telling, that in itself doesn’t explain the Laugh Gap, because Professor Provine’s research also shows that most laughter isn’t prompted by conscious attempts at humor. People mainly use it unconsciously to signal of cooperation and friendliness. But given the expectations that men and women have about whose job it is to elicit laughter, it makes sense that women would readier than men to laugh at the opposite sex. As Professor Provine explained it to me:

We can prime ourselves to be “laugh ready,” or “laugh reluctant.” Women, for example may be more playful and prone to laughter in some than other situations. Early on, girls probably learn the value of communicating that they are entertaining playmates. Although not voluntary, laughter is quite predictable and follows suprisingly precise rules. It is a complex vocal dance. Society is not kind to those who violate the rules of laughter by laughing oddly, or at the wrong time. Laughing at the wrong time and or in the wrong way is a leading symptom of psychopathology and neuropathology. A visiting Martian would have a tough time figuring the rules of human laughter and being able to fit into human society.

The expectations about who’s supposed to get laughs are probably another reason there are fewer women stand-up comics: they have to be especially funny because the men as well as the women in their audiences aren’t as ready to laugh at them. That’s not fair. But in most circumstances, Professor Provine figures that the Laugh Gap doesn’t particularly bother people. “Women laugh most in the presence of men whom they are attracted to and like men who make them laugh,” he says. “They don’t care if the guy gets his yuks in or not. Men, of course, are attracted to women who laugh in their presence, being unable to resist their considerable charms.”

So it looks as if all three theories of readers are right. The Laugh Gap is partly due to status, partly due to women’s empathy for what their partner is looking for, and partly due to men’s desire to make their partners laugh. Here’s Professor Provine’s summary of the situation:

Laughter plays a central role in human meeting, matching and mating. Both sexes know what they want and seek it. While excessive female laughter in the presence of a desirable male may have its roots in a submissive response to an alpha male, who’s complaining? Men are attracted to women who laugh in their presence, and women like men who make them laugh. A quick survey of your next cocktail partly or scan of the personal ads reveals the role of laughter in sexual politics. Laughter is a valued commodity in the sexual marketplace and is an unappreciated component of the mysterious quality of charisma.”