Men and women have significantly different understandings of humor, especially when it comes to jokes with gender stereotypes. A study by the universities of Würzburg and Kaiserslautern-Landau deals with this.
“We were particularly interested in whether jokes that despise men can pose a threat to masculinity,” says study author Silvana Weber. In a series of experiments, men and women were told 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 gifted.” “What do you call a woman with an opinion of her own? Wrong.”
“Our results indicate that women perceive misogynist 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 pose no threat to men, regardless of who tells them.” One explanation for this could be that men generally have a higher status and greater power in society and therefore do not see their status threatened by a joke.
Men are less vulnerable
In a round with only male participants, the researcher dealt with the hypothesis that men would show stronger deprecating tendencies and more anger if the jokes were told by a woman. In fact, none of the previously formulated hypotheses could be confirmed in this experiment: neither the content of the jokes nor the gender of the narrator nor their interaction had an influence on the reaction of the study participants. “This suggests that men don’t react to gender-discriminatory humor in the same way as women do.”
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