Are women funnier than men? Are men funnier than women? Are women as funny as men? Are men as funny as women? How many more times can we flip these questions around? Is this getting annoying yet?
Both women and men have in them the ability to make others laugh, and if we’re going to define what it means to be “funny” then we have to focus on only that. There are funny men and there are funny women, so who’s to say that because there might be a larger ratio of funny men to funny women at a certain time that men are universally funnier? It might just be that the only people who think that men are funnier than women are men.
A (sort of recent) New York Times article discusses the results of a blind study that asked its participants to rank a handful of cartoons in order of which they found to be the funniest. The results, further proving the point of this article, showed that a majority of the people didn’t accurately attribute the cartoons to the correct gender of their writer. And the men gave themselves higher scores in terms of how funny they thought their cartoons were as opposed to the lower scores that women gave themselves. In conclusion, women are better than men and feminism has won. Okay that last part was a joke, excuse my efforts to be funny. But in all seriousness, while I respect the men for their confidence and the women for their humility, this small experiment reflects a much bigger picture. If something appeals to your sense of humor it’s going to be funny regardless of the gender of the person who is delivering the content – it’s that simple.
So to quote the ever so lovely Tina Fey and to draw this discussion to a close, “do your thing and don’t care if they like it.”
Photo Credit: http://www.crushable.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Tina-Fey-Amy-Poehler…