Men and women have significantly different understandings of humor, especially when it comes to gendered jokes. A study by the universities of Würzburg and Kaiserslautern-Landau deals with this.
“We were particularly interested in knowing whether jokes that despise men might pose a threat to masculinity,” says study author Silvana Weber. In a series of experiments, men and women were given 20 jokes from five different categories – by men and women. Here are two examples: “What do you call a man with only half a brain? Highly talented.” “What do you call a woman with her own opinion? Wrong.”
“Our results indicate that women perceive misogynistic jokes as a threat, especially when they are told by a male speaker”, says the psychologist. However, this effect does not appear in men – not even when the joke is told by a woman. “Apparently, man-hating jokes do not pose a threat to men, regardless of who tells them.” One explanation for this could be that men generally have higher status and greater power in society and therefore don’t see their status threatened by a joke.
Men are less vulnerable
In a round with only male participants, the researcher worked with the hypothesis that men would show stronger derogatory tendencies and more anger if the jokes were told by a woman. In fact, none of the hypotheses previously formulated could be confirmed in this experiment: neither the content of the jokes, nor the gender of the narrator, nor the interaction between them influenced the reaction of the study participants. “This suggests that men do not react to gender discriminatory humor in the same way as women.”
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