The Sexes and Two Sides of the Laugh Gap

In one of Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia” cartoons, the cigarette-smoking doyenne of guy-gal wisdom devises a “Gender Differences in Humor Quiz” aimed at settling that age-old question, “Are you a man or woman?”:

“Check the things you find funny:

1. Larry, Moe or Curly.

2. Men dressed as women but with their hairy legs showing.

3. The disparity between the ideal and real.”

It’s no surprise that men find physical, adolescent and sex-stereotype humor funnier than women do. But there are subtler distinctions in both subject and style, several recent books note. Social scientists have been documenting this laugh gap for 30 years.

While men tell most of the jokes, women do most of the laughing. That’s due as much to the ways we are socialized as to distinctions in delivery or in what each gender naturally finds funny.

A boy who earns laughs with competitiveness, put-downs and aggression is likely to be viewed--approvingly--as a class clown. A girl who shows the same behavior might well be labeled a problem child.

Trained to be nice, many girls learn early to be passive, self-deprecating, feminine and to laugh compliantly (and with mouth closed) at Uncle So-and-So’s banal jokes at Thanksgiving dinner.

Men are more likely to get their laughs at someone else’s expense, setting up a punch line like a basketball player driving for a layup. Women tend to share humorous personal vignettes drawn from the dialogue of their lives. The humor often spins off of feeling vulnerable, the conundrums of relationships, child-rearing and career climbing in an unequal workplace.

Even tragedy can be funny.

In comedian Julia Sweeney’s hilarious monologue “God Said ‘Ha!’ ” she explains how visions of her life as a happily divorced sophisticate hosting heady soirees is derailed when her brother Mike is found to have terminal lymphatic cancer. Her parents and brother move in with her. As if this was not enough, Sweeney then discovers she has a rare form of cervical cancer, and a hysterectomy is scheduled for after her brother’s death. She transforms tragedy into humor seamlessly.

Sweeney says: “The doctor said, ‘The good news is, we were able to save your ovaries by moving them up about a foot and a half. And if you decide you want a biological child, we can harvest the eggs and fertilize them and then you could find a surrogate to carry it.’ And I thought: Great. Now I have to meet a girl and a guy.”

Sweeney’s story is about her vulnerabilities and is rooted in her experiences. She laughs to survive, to tell herself she isn’t crazy.

“Women’s humor comes out of a habit of getting together and telling stories in the kitchen,” says Nancy Walker, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of five books on women’s humor. “Men’s jokes are competitive, it’s ‘I can tell a better, funnier joke than you.’ The upshot of women’s stories is, ‘Now you understand me better.’ When we laugh, it is the laugh of recognizing our own experience.”

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For women taught from birth to be altruistic and supportive, “passivity and the sharp, aggressive expression of wit are an impossible mix,” writes Barry Sanders, professor of English and the history of ideas at Claremont Colleges and author of “Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History,” (Beacon Press, 1996).

To be funny is to assert the self and “take up space” in the conversation, the antithesis of “the script we hand women to take up as little space in the world as possible,” says Barreca. This is why women are more likely than men to resort to self-deprecating humor (“My shoe size is greater than my IQ”), she says. Putting oneself down makes one less threatening and undermines the fact that she is being assertive.

“One of the first rules about stand-up for everyone is to poke fun at yourself,” says comedian Judy Carter, who teaches stand-up comedy in Venice. “A woman will make a joke about being fat before a man will joke about losing his hair.”

Carter says women often come up to her after shows to tell her what they liked. Men who approach usually try to top her act with a “really funny one.”

Women, including a great many comedians, tend to adhere to what critic Emily Toth described as “the humane humor rule.” She notes that women rarely make fun of what people cannot change, such as social handicaps (stuttering) or physical appearance (obesity).

“Women humorists attack--or subvert--the deliberate choices that people make: hypocrisies, affectations, mindless following of social expectations.”

Women’s humor takes its material from the powerful rather than the pitiful, laughing up the power structure: at the boss, social institutions or the imprisoning nature of traditional mind-sets.

“Murphy Brown, Brett Butler and Roseanne are all good evidence of the humane humor rule,” says Regina Barreca, associate English professor at University of Connecticut and editor of “The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor” (1996).

Socialization also explains a phenomenon Barreca calls “feel dependence.”

“If you put women in a room together and they hear a joke or see something funny, they look around to see who is laughing before they laugh,” she says. But in a casual gathering, “It takes about 36 seconds for women who are together and who don’t even know each other to laugh. Women laugh differently when they are together. . . . They wipe mascara from under the eye, hold the arm under the bust, slap the hand down and finally there is the laughing with the mouth open instead of with your hand over your mouth with men. You defy everything your minister, your mother and your second-grade teacher told you. You become the incarnation of every sort of outlaw.”

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Strides have been made by female comedians who have blasted their way to the top of TV sitcom-dom without playing the straight dumb pal a la Gracie Allen to George Burns and Mary Livingston to Jack Benny.

Women have also achieved some status in stand-up comedy, a particularly male format with the microphone (phallic and whip-like), the elevated stage (comic as dominator) and the lights that blind. Roseanne, says Sanders, is not only a “domestic goddess” but also a revolutionary. She and comedians like Sweeney, Butler and Ellen DeGeneres are making it less difficult for all women to be funny and are blurring the lines between male and female humor, as anyone knows who has sat next to a man while watching them.

“Even though when we laugh together, we may not be laughing at the same thing, there is a chance that we are,” says Barreca. “It turns out one of the most provocative questions you can ask someone is, ‘What do you find funny about that?’ Only by asking that question can we find out, not only the differences, but the similarities. We may be laughing not from two sides of a wall but from opposite ends of a bridge.”

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What We Laugh At

Guy Humor:

* The Three Stooges, Benny Hill, Roadrunner cartoons, anything where pain serves as punch line.

* Howard Stern, the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles,” bare butts “mooned” out the car window or photocopied and passed around the office, other fun with bodily parts and/or functions.

* Put-down jokes: “How ugly is your wife? My wife is so ugly. . . .”

* Guys in drag, from Milton Berle to “To Wong Foo . . .” to Dennis Rodman.

* “Gotcha!” gags, from cream pies in the face to squirt guns to paint guns.

* Female anatomy jokes.

* Derogatory nicknames for pals, like Buckethead or Lard.

Gal Humor:

* Tampon jokes and stories about menstruation.

* Male anatomy jokes.

* Sylvia comics.

* The scene in “Thelma and Louise” in which they blow up the tanker after the trucker makes lewd remarks.

* The scene in “Fried Green Tomatoes” in which two teenage girls steal a parking space from Kathy Bates, saying: “Face it, we’re younger and faster.” Bates then rams their car, saying, “I’m older and I have more insurance.”

* “This bugs me the worst. . . . The husband thinks that the wife knows where everything is, huh? Like they think the uterus is a tracking device. . . . ‘Hey Roseanne, Roseanne! Do we have any Chee-tos left?’ Like he can’t go over and lift the sofa cushion himself.”--Roseanne’s stand-up routine

* “Going to a male gynecologist is like going to a mechanic who does not own his own car.”--comedian Carrie Snow

* “Women don’t tell jokes about two Dalmatians and a man. We use the part of the brain men use to remember punch lines to remember our sister-in-law’s birthday.” --Regina Barreca, author of two books on women’s humor.