Joking Around Gender

Maybe men have more heart attacks because they don’t laugh as much as women. Sure, they seem carefree as they sit back with a beer and watch football every Sunday. Yes, they get away with more with the help of the maxim “Boys will be boys.” Yet maybe they’re not aware of how good they have it.

The above comments are generalizations of the male experience, and don’t carry much weight in a debate about men and women’s humor habits. That is not cause, however, to leave the topic untouched. At least not for me.

It may be impossible to compare men and women’s laughter. If they aren’t laughing about the same things, laughing’s effect upon their respective health might not be the same. If one gender laughed more than the other, but about things that were less truly humorous, it might relieve less stress than when the other gender laughed rarely, but about situations that touched more deeply upon the authentically ridiculous.

There are laughs that cover up emotion. There are laughs that express emotion.

There are laughs that cause thought. There are laughs in reaction to thought.

Which types of laughter do men engage in most frequently, and what effect does that have upon their stress level? And women?

Before my line of thought dispersed into a fog of questions, I decided to ask for some outside input. I asked one woman and one man which gender has a better sense of humor. Admittedly, the question is removed from the issue of types of humor. I still got good answers. The context of the “men” or “women” answers revealed more than which side they fell upon. The complexity of the health question remained alive in their answers.

Both interviewees made a distinction between blunt and subtle forms of humor. One cited women as having a subtler and therefore better sense of humor. The other said women’s sense of humor is subtler, but no better than men’s.

One believed boys laugh more because their testosterone gives them the confidence to make fools of themselves and not care. The other thought that boys were funnier in public situations, whereas women laugh harder when having more intimate conversations.

According to my mini survey, men create something to find funny, laugh at it, and then move on, while women talk to each other, talk to each other some more, and then let humor come to them in the process of communication.

Women comedians actively create humor by definition of their career. And there are men who would prefer musing at eccentricity to cracking a fart joke for a quick laugh. However, it seems to me that each gender does bring a characteristic way of making light of experience. Or, in women’s case, finding lightness in experience.

Maybe boys will be boys, and that’s okay, because girls will be girls. Maybe if both accepted this and laughed at each other a little more, both would be healthier.