Why aren’t women funny?
Well, let’s finally find out.
“…for some reason I don’t laugh at women’s jokes, they seem naive or primitive! Men have more arrogant humor)” – writes a viewer under one of my videos (punctuation and spelling preserved). Before that, he half-jokingly asks “can women joke?” and adds that “Humor is for girls, boys aren’t funny!!!”
Despite the fact that there are people who simply generalize thoughtlessly, but in the case of a specific comic they laugh at what they find funny, and are surprised that “a woman is funny!”, there are also those who really don’t find it funny at all when a woman is on stage. And not only with specifically female topics of jokes (childbirth, menstruation), but also with completely gender-neutral ones, but performed by women.
A woman who jokes (or, as they define it, “tries to joke”) on stage or in life evokes a whole range of emotions: surprise, irritation, contempt, anger, even admiration (“whatever, she’s also joking”), but not laughter at all.
This fact may not seem like a problem to some, but to me, as a stand-up comic, it is tangible and noticeable. Women in Ukrainian comedy have to make a lot of efforts to feel equal to men. So that we are not singled out as a separate subgenre of comedy, for example, or not declared superior “let’s support the girl”. I believe that the problem exists, and in fact not only for comedians, but also for all women who are regularly denied a say, whose jokes are not responded to, who mostly feel insecure, while men absolutely calmly make even extremely unfunny jokes.
So why do some people find “female humor” unfunny?
In short, it’s a completely social phenomenon and an indicator of deeply internalized and almost unconscious sexism. More on that later.
Laughter is essential to social interaction. It’s a surprisingly rich and varied form of communication, occurring in over 95% of conversations, if you think about it. People laugh (and joke) for a variety of reasons. We laugh when we’re happy, to establish a hierarchy, to express agreement, to relieve tension in a group, to signal cooperation, to communicate a safe environment, and so on.[i]
Laughter can be “dominant” or “subordinate” (it even sounds different). The higher a person’s status, the more likely they are to laugh dominantly, and the less likely they are to laugh submissively, conformingly, or reactively. To give an example: the one who teases someone laughs dominantly, while the one who is teased usually laughs as a subordinate[ii].
Dominant laughter is casual and does not depend on the situation. The one who is joking at that moment feels relaxed and is the initiator of this laughter. Subordinate laughter is reactive, it is a response to the joke that was made. Subordinate laughter is very contextual. For example, a person may laugh when someone he considers to be higher in status makes a joke, and ignore someone he considers to be lower. Have you ever had a situation where no one reacts to a woman’s joke in the company, and then one of the men repeats it — and everyone laughs? That’s it.
By the way, the very establishment of hierarchy is constantly happening in stand-up. The stand-up comedian has to prove to the audience that he is the boss here, at least for those 15 minutes, while the hecklers who shout from the audience challenge this status. And sometimes the audience can express its higher status with silence. It is precisely because the more famous you are, the easier it is for you to perform, the more willing the audience will laugh at any of your jokes. That is why stand-up comedians really need the “attributes of power”: a microphone, a stage, lights. That is why the same jokes can “fly in” in one hall and completely fail in the next.
We are not talking about conditionally objective criteria for the quality of jokes now, especially since the hypothesis that women’s jokes are less funny than men’s is refuted by research. For example, in a study by Kim Edwards (University of Western Ontario), participants were asked to evaluate comedic captions to pictures (without specifying the names or gender of the authors) – jokes created by men and women were evaluated exactly the same.
That is, the perception of a joke as funny or not is significantly influenced by the personality of the person telling the joke: their social status and rank in the group.
Here we must note that in studies that examined people with different ranks, this rank was determined by involving guys from the same fraternity. And the more senior were the fraternities with “experience” of two years or more, and the lower-ranking were the newcomers.
In the absence of a background in the group, the hierarchy is established on the spot. Of course, it all depends on the presentation of each person, on his or her status (for example, I just entered the auditorium, but I am a teacher – and this immediately gives me a higher rank), but also on certain stereotypical assessments. For example, older people often consider themselves more important, and younger people are often considered to be of lower rank. Do you already feel what I am leaning towards?
It is precisely to the point that people who never laugh (have no desire to) at women’s jokes, regardless of what kind of jokes they are, almost certainly also default to perceiving women as inferior, regardless of objective fact. I assume (I think not without reason) that this is related to the blatant contempt for women in general. After all, feeling that a person is hierarchically inferior just because she is a woman is classic, textbook sexism.
Women themselves resort to this, by the way, considering themselves low-ranking, but they only agree to show consent and laugh with men whom they perceive as dominant.
And, of course, all this can also be extended to phrases: “all young comedians are not funny”, “men in stand-up always make stupid jokes”, “if there are swear words in the jokes – it’s bad humor” (here a feeling of superiority arises thanks to the white coat).
And I have a separate remark for those who want to give me examples of stand-up comedians who are not funny to them (including myself). I will not say that all women are funny, I will only say that not all men are. I checked.
[i]Bachorowski, J.-A. and Owren, M.J., 2001, Keltner, D., 2009, Grammer, 1990.
[ii]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103116302359