Women Are Not As Funny As Men

From Tina Fey to Amy Poehler to Amy Schumer, we are living in the golden age of funny women. Yet it is still thought that men are funnier. In order to test out this stereotype, the University of California decided to see what they could find. They asked men and women to write funny captions to go along with a series of New Yorker cartoons. 600 people then were then asked to rate how funny the captions were but they were not told whether it was a male or female who wrote them. The captions written by men were rated as funnier overall, but only by a slight margin. Interestingly, men also rated the captions written by other men to be funnier than the women’s captions, suggesting that men may have their own brand of humour.