Official Friday Silliness Thread's Salute to Sex and Laughter

Popular Science ^ | July, 2006 | Per Study of Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine

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From the OFST Education FIles: Subgroup The Sexes and Silliness and Sex

Women Like Funny Men


Women Like Funny Men--The Study: “The influence of humor on desirability,” Evolution and Human Behavior, Jan. 2006

The Findings: Psychologists Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine enlisted 210 undergraduate psychology students at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, to consider, for class credit, photographs of campus peers. Each photo was paired with a remark that was ostensibly funny (“My high school was so rough, we had our own coroner”) or ostensibly dull (“I like having friends over for dinner”). Women found the “funny” men most desirable, and a follow-up study showed that men preferred women who were receptive to their jokes.

Why Bother? The scientists acknowledged in their paper the well-established observation that “humor is . . . more readily appreciated in the presence of others” but wondered why it is that women prefer funny guys. Could the phenomenon be a matter of Darwinian survival? The lead scientist declined an interview, but the paper suggests that studies like it further our understanding of evolution by pinpointing which human traits might confer survival advantages. One theory is that men may “produce humor more” to help “monopolize the reproductive potential of more than one woman,” a.k.a. to spread their genes.

For the abstract click here Original study abstract
Evolution and Human Behavior Volume 27, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 29-39

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---But name any other female comic. Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Sandra Bernhard, Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Margaret Cho . . .---

Rosie O' Dumbbell