When François Rabelais said, “Laughter is man’s attribute”, he was of course talking about mankind… But the question still needs to be asked: are men and women equal when it comes to laughter?
To find out, let’s take a look at the figures and the scientific literature on the subject.
Who’s the funny one?
According to a very serious meta-analysis combining the results of 28 studies published over the last 40 years, there is a 32% differential between men’s and women’s perceived ability to make people laugh.
In other words, men are clearly funnier than women.
That’s what men say, but women say it too.
This lends credence to the thesis of essayist Christopher Hitchens, who in 2007 wrote an article in Vanity Fair with the provocative title ” Why women aren’t funny ” (note the absence of question marks).
Laughing woman…
For Hitchens, the reason why women aren’t funny while men are is to be found in the laws of reproduction.
Competing with each other to attract women, men need to demonstrate that they are handsome, strong and intelligent, and humor is precisely one of the most irresistible manifestations of intelligence.
As for women, well, since they have no other role in this game than to let themselves be seduced and plucked, the evolutionary cycle has not led them to exercise the skills of drollery.
Uh… You’re entitled to find these explanations laughable… And frankly outdated.
Humor in context
More credible are the works that question the place of laughter in socialization.
We discover, not surprisingly, that humor is fundamentally cultural, and that what makes us laugh here and now is not necessarily what made us laugh yesterday and elsewhere, without knowing what will make us laugh tomorrow.
In other words, nothing is funny in itself, but humor is always embedded in a context and a system of references.
So it’s not absurd that, in a patriarchal context, since humor is perceived as a quality relating to the ability to act on one’s environment, it’s more readily classified as masculine.
And it’s not surprising either that, from childhood onwards, little boys are valued and encouraged when they play the clown, while little girls are expected to be patient, to listen and to take an interest in others rather than in their own self-importance. Thank you, stereotypes!
The power of laughter
But making people laugh isn’t just about being witty and daring – it’s about real power! A resolutely subversive act, says historian Sabine Melchior-Bonnet in her book Le rire des femmes – Une histoire de pouvoir Laughter is first and foremost a physical movement of the whole body (not exactly in keeping with the idea of the decorative, discreet woman), but also and above all an emancipatory act.
According to the author, to laugh is to seize on reality to cast an ironic, even outspokenly anti-establishment gaze upon it, and to replace conventional narratives with a personal imagination.
But it’s also a question of positioning yourself in your environment by showing your active presence, and taking those you make laugh with you.
When women laugh at each other
It’s not surprising, then,” continues the historian, “that women who laugh at each other have long been mistrusted.
So much so, in fact, that even though the feminist movement, from its very beginnings, was permeated by humor, making it one of its sharpest weapons in the struggle, it came to be seen as harsh, surly, a killjoy and stuck to the first degree.
It’s okay for women to laugh at men’s jokes.
In fact, by laughing, they flatter them and it pays off, if we are to believe the results of a Swiss study indicating that a candidate increases her chances of being hired if she laughs during an interview with a recruiter.
On the other hand, women laughing without men is immediately less welcome!
Towards a new era of laughter?
But times seem to be changing.
While the sexist humor of boys’ clubs seems to be getting far fewer laughs, unless it’s up against an outright shift in the social tolerance threshold for rudeness, women’s humor could be gaining recognition.
The very recent study Think funny, think female: the benefits of Humour for Women’s influence in the digital age, based on Ted conferences and start-up pitches, shows that humour is becoming a major asset for women leaders.
Those who dare to be funny win more support and exert more influence than those who only play the serious card.
Better still, being funny gives these women an edge over their male competitors.
Women may well be the future of laughter… if not the future of man!
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