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New scientific research tells us that where humour is concerned, there’s definitely a gender divide.

If you’ve ever cracked what you consider a surefire joke, only to have a member of the opposite sex stare back at you blankly, eyes rolling and shoulders shrugging, take comfort: It might not be a reflection on the quality of your material. It turns out that humour is a funny thing.

When it comes to comedy, new scientific research tells us there is a significant gender divide – the brains of men and women react quite differently when confronted with a punch line. This discovery may help to shed light on important differences between the sexes and how their brains work. It may also go a long way towards explaining why, to this very day, it remains difficult to find a female human who even begins to understand why her otherwise mild-mannered husband is prone to abruptly commencing thunderous recitations of whole passages from Monty Python movies.

It is thanks to a very serious study about comedy, published in the very serious-sounding Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that we now know gender differences in what researchers call “humour processing” to be scientific fact.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers (who must have had a good laugh over the fact that while other researchers down at the lab toiled nightly over a spleen, they were studying comedy) affiliated with the department of psychiatry and brain sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers showed 70 black-and-white cartoons to ten women and ten men as each lay inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner – a machine that is not, one must say, traditionally associated with good times and laughter. The MRI monitored brain activity as the test subjects looked at the comics and pressed one of two buttons to indicate whether they found the material funny.

What did the researchers learn from this? Well, read their report (available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/45/16496) and it will swiftly become apparent that they sure didn’t learn how to be funny. The study itself is about as entertaining as watching skin form on hot soup. But its conclusions speak to a disparity in the way in which the sexes respond to humour – and that’s interesting to scientists because humour is considered a higher-order process in humans, except when it involves Jerry Lewis.

According to the study, women were faster than men at deciding if a cartoon was unfunny, probably due to greater activity in the part of the brain that controls analysis. The women were also more likely to use more of their brains to precess and react to the cartoon. Translation: Women tend to be all business when it comes to humour. They focus hard on the alleged comedy. They decide quickly if it works for them. Then they move on, probably to nagging their husbands to take out the trash. (Ha! ha! That was just a little “joke”. If you didn’t enjoy it, it’s not my fault – it’s your brain’s!)

The most striking finding of the study involves what happens in a part of the brain known as the reward centre – an area rich in dopamine, which is released when we laugh (or when we do other profoundly satisfying things, such as win an award, triumph in a race of mock the intellect of Jessica Simpson.) This is why certain magazines that shall remain nameless feel free to make the contention the laughter is the best medicine – although most doctors agree that for people with broken legs, a cast is probably better.

When the women responded to cartoons they found funny, researchers noted increased activity in the reward centre. If the cartoon wasn’t funny, activity in the reward centre of men in the study was stable when a cartoon was amusing, and actually declined in response to unfunny comics. (Researchers point out that this pattern is quite similar to that exhibited by nonhuman primates – which is, when you think about it, pretty funny. Unless you’re a man, that is.)

So what does it all mean?

This difference between the genders is, researchers say, a result of expectations and mindset. The women in the test group – and, by extension, women in general – were generally skeptical and didn’t expect the cartoons to be funny; when they did laugh, they were surprised, setting off a “reward” in the brain. Men, on the other hand, expected to be amused; when they weren’t, they experienced disappointment.

The researchers refer to this as “disparate modes of humour processing” – thus demonstrating that (a) there may be broader significance in terms of other aspects of male/female behaviour and (b) scientists are capable of finding big and impressive words to gussy up just about any simple statement.

“the long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently.” the authors of the study write, referring to the famed book about gender differences.

And indeed, what the study tells us is that men and women likely have very different ways of processing emotional information. This is an important observation within the research community, though one that seems pretty obvious to anyone who has spent any time hanging around a little place we like to call Earth.

By: Scott Feschuk

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