Ha! (17 page)

First, he had ten males and ten females view forty-two cartoons while being monitored using an MRI scanner, then he asked them to rate the funniness of each one on a scale from 1 to 10. Half the cartoons had previously been assessed as funny whereas the other half were not—a difference that Reiss hoped would allow him to compare brain responses based on joke quality. In addition, he made subtle changes to some of the cartoons, modifying them just enough to ruin the punch lines. “I was fascinated by what very small changes were necessary,” he reported afterward. “Changing just one word in the caption could make the difference between a hilarious cartoon and a totally unfunny one.”

As expected, Reiss found that both males and females showed strong brain activation in regions known to process visual images, as well as in frontal areas dealing with the logical mechanisms associated with humor. Men and women also scored similarly on the number of cartoons they found funny. In other ways, however, they differed substantially. For example, women showed significantly more activity in the left
inferior frontal gyri, a region important for language. This region includes Broca's area, which is essential for producing words and speech.

Another subset of regions also showed more activation in women during humor processing—namely, the dopamine reward circuit. As discussed in
Chapter 1
, these are the regions that are responsible for giving us pleasure when we eat chocolate—or understand a joke. They were activated in both males and females during joke processing, but to a far greater degree in females. Such activation even increased for women the funnier they found the jokes. For men, activation remained moderate for all jokes, except the ones with the funny parts removed—which led to a
decrease
in activity.

“The results help explain previous findings suggesting women and men differ in how humor is used and appreciated,” said Reiss in a press release distributed shortly after his paper's publication. The greater activation within language and reasoning centers of the frontal lobe suggests that the brain's analytical machinery becomes more intensively engaged in women than in men when reading jokes. This indicates either that women approach jokes with a more open mind, allowing their brains to ramp up once the joke begins, or that they dedicate more cognitive effort to coming up with a resolution when it's over. Reiss prefers the first interpretation: “This difference in brain activity seems to have more to do with [women's] expectations than their actual experiences. . . . Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So, when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it.”

This difference in expectations tells us a lot about how the two sexes look at life. Men expect a lot, and when they don't get it they become sour. Women expect little and are happy when they get anything at all. When they “get” the punch line, their reward centers light up because the pleasure is so surprising. Women don't laugh more than men because their brains are more active—they laugh more because their minds are more open.

Is it possible that women approach humor with a more open mind because men expect them to laugh at all their jokes? Or could it be that they laugh more because men give them so much reason to? Both explanations seem possible, but there's a third option, one that also helps clarify why women laugh more when men are present rather than absent—perhaps Lakoff was right when she claimed that women are more sensitive to humor because they're so commonly discriminated against. Laughter may be their only defense. Certainly no one can deny that humor often includes sexual biases.

Sexist jokes are an especially controversial issue, with so much already written about the topic it's difficult knowing where to start. For example, we know that women dislike jokes that make fun of female victims. We also know that they dislike sexual humor that objectifies their gender. My favorite finding, however, is that men like the cartoons from
Playboy
more than those from
The New Yorker,
whereas women express no such preference. Actually, that's an oversimplification, because the study looked at a lot more than just this, but it did find that men rate sexist cartoons from
Playboy
up to 25 percent funnier than those from more journalistic periodicals chosen for their “relative innocence.”

By now, no one should be surprised that women aren't fans of sexist jokes. But this doesn't mean that they're the more sensitive gender. Consider, for instance, this joke from Wiseman's LaughLab experiment, a rare example of women laughing at men:

        
A husband stepped on one of those penny scales that tell you your fortune and weight and dropped in a coin. “Listen to this,” he said to his wife, showing her a small, white card. “It says that I'm energetic, bright, resourceful, and a great person.” “Yeah,” his wife nodded, “and it has your weight wrong too.”

Only 10 percent of the men in Wiseman's experiment found that joke funny, about as low a rating as you can get. For women—well, it ranked much higher.

Nobody likes being laughed at—women and men alike. But there's a broader question regarding the impact of sexist jokes on our behavior: Do sexist jokes reflect gender biases, or do they create them?

Psychology has well established that stereotypes have strong, negative impacts on our beliefs. Studies have shown, for example, that people who see African Americans portrayed in stereotypically negative roles in comedy skits are quick to adopt negative attitudes toward that group in real life. Exposure to such stereotypes can even increase the likelihood of falsely accusing African Americans of committing a fictional crime.

Sexist humor has similar impacts on perceptions of women, according to a study of sexist attitudes conducted by Thomas Ford at Western Carolina University. Ford first gave groups of adult males assessments of existing sexist beliefs, asking them to agree or disagree with statements like “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” From those assessments, each subject was classified as possessing either low or high hostile sexism. Next, some of the subjects read a series of sexist jokes targeting women (e.g.,
How can you tell that a blonde has been using the computer? There's Wite-Out on the screen!
) along with equally aggressive jokes not targeting women (e.g.,
What's the difference between a golfer and a skydiver? A golfer goes whack . . . damn, a skydiver goes damn . . . whack
). As a comparison, other subjects read a series of nonsexist and sexist stories not involving humor.

To see what impact the sexist jokes and stories had on subject attitudes, Ford described the National Council of Women, an organization committed to the political and social advancement of women and women's issues, and asked all of the men to imagine making a donation to this organization, up to $20. They didn't have to commit any actual money, only to imagine themselves doing so. The final amount they chose to give was what Ford regarded as his dependent measure.

When he analyzed his data without taking into consideration the subjects' existing sexist beliefs, the jokes appeared to have no impact on how much money they committed to the organization. However,
when he differentiated the responses of those scoring low and high on the sexist scale, a very different picture emerged.

Ford found that, compared to low-sexist subjects, high-sexist subjects were willing to commit much less money to the National Council of Women—but only after reading the sexist jokes. The nonsexist jokes, as well as the nonhumorous sexist stories, had no impact on their donations. To confirm his findings, Ford varied his experimental design by asking the subjects how much money a fictional university should cut from student organizations with similar woman-related causes. The results were the same. High-sexist subjects advocated the most drastic cuts, but only after reading the sexist jokes.

If you're like me, you find these results surprising and even a little frightening. Sexist humor does indeed appear to be more insidious than misogynist propaganda. It could even be that humor elicits opinions and emotions more effectively than direct prejudice because it works at a level below conscious awareness. In other words, by “flying below the radar,” humor amplifies existing prejudicial beliefs, giving them a voice without allowing them to be openly questioned.

Because it reveals how influential humor can be, Ford's research is a good argument against stereotype-driven humor—even lawyer jokes. Granted, it only matters if we already have prejudicial attitudes toward these groups (in fact, low-sexist subjects pledged
more
money to the National Council of Women after the sexist jokes). But as we've seen, humor always contains two messages: what the humorist is saying, and all the other stuff left unspoken. When that unspoken stuff is hurtful or prejudicial, the easiest way to slip it in is to use a joke. Again, it's a matter of intent.

S
PECIALIZATION
I
S FOR
I
NSECTS

Near the beginning of this chapter I talked about specialization and how we humans evolved to our current successful position by being extreme generalists. It's time to return to that topic, which brings me to one of my favorite quotations of all time:

        
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

This quote appears in Robert Heinlein's
Time Enough for Love,
a science-fiction novel about a two-thousand-year-old man who lives so long he loses the will to go on. So far in my life I've accomplished thirteen of the items on Heinlein's list, and unless I spend some time on a farm or contract a deadly disease, I'm unlikely to complete many more. I like the quote because it shows just how varied life can be, and how wonderfully flexible our brains have become in preparing us for life's different challenges.

Here's another, perhaps more familiar quote by Heinlein: “When apes learn to laugh, they'll be people.” I like this one too, because it implies that laughter is part of what makes us human. In the pages that follow, we'll put this theory to the test, not by determining whether apes have the capacity to laugh—they do, as we've already seen—but by looking at the ways that our complex human brains develop, culminating in an ability to laugh. Few people other than Aristotle would argue that an infant who hasn't yet laughed doesn't have a soul, but I think we'd all agree that people of different ages laugh at different things. This variability says a lot about our cognitive development, as well as about how complex and “human” our brains have become.

Consider, for example, one of our first developmental hurdles: “object permanence.” This is the ability to recognize that the world exists separate from our perceptions, and that when we close our eyes, the world doesn't disappear. It takes infants up to two years to fully appreciate this fact, which is why toddlers love to play peekaboo. There's a time in our development when seeing something disappear means that it's gone forever. Sometime later we recognize that objects and people continue to exist even when they can't be seen. Between these periods
there's a transitional phase when the brain experiences conflict—a moment of confusion or indecision. A child who no longer enjoys peekaboo probably has mastered the concept of object permanence. One who is terrified by this game probably hasn't figured out the trick.

As it turns out, apes not only laugh, they have a pretty firm grasp on object permanence too. As do dogs, cats, and a few species of birds, including the raven. For example, if you hide food behind a barrier, then move the barrier around, each of these animals will recognize that the food is still there, even after an extended period of time. Have you ever read about scientists claiming that dogs are smarter than cats? Tests involving object permanence are how they make such claims, because dogs perform slightly better than cats on such tests. So do ravens, so score one for the birds.

Examining humor in children allows us to see what cognitive stage of development they're in. After object permanence, a big challenge for children is achieving “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others and to understand that others have beliefs and intentions that are different from our own. In short, it's the ability to overcome egocentrism.

Children below the age of about six can't tell the difference between a lie and a joke because they lack the theory of mind to recognize that these are different things. For similar reasons, they also don't understand irony and sarcasm. In each of these cases the literal message is different from the intended one, and the listener must recognize this by considering the motivations and intentions of the speaker. Because children younger than six typically don't get that someone can have different intentions than their own, the humor in sarcastic statements is lost. One study found that many children as old as thirteen fail to recognize sarcasm in spoken remarks, even when they realize that the remarks themselves are incorrect.

I have never changed a diaper, number one on Heinlein's list, and I've also never raised a child. But I have many friends who have, and they consistently claim that it's a cruel fate seeing them master the art of sarcasm just in time to become a hormone-ridden teenager.