The joke's on men: Women more likely to enjoy humor

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It seems women are more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny, a new study has found.

A research team led by Dr. Allan L. Reiss of Stanford University studied how male and female brains react to humor by evaluating brain scans as 10 men and 10 women looked at black-and-white cartoons.

The study, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that women were more analytical in their response, and felt more pleasure when they decided something really was funny.

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," Reiss said. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."

Men are using the same network in the brain, but less so, he said. Men, according to the findings, are less discriminating. "It doesn't take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny," he commented when asked about humor like the Three Stooges.

While there is a lot of overlap between how men and women process humor, the differences can help account for the fact that men gravitate more to one-liners and slapstick while women tend to use humor in narrative form and stories, Reiss said.

The funnier the cartoon, the more the reward center in the women's brain responded, unlike men, who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny.

Reiss' team studied the response of the men and women to 70 cartoons, asking them to rate the jokes for how funny they were. While the volunteers were looking at the cartoons, their brains were being scanned to determine what parts of the brains were responding.