A good portion of it is being able to take any situation, seeing it from a different point of view, that is often humorous, and making the audience see that new vantage point or the first time.
There is a stereotype that men are funnier than women. New research (n=5,057) found that, on average, men appear to have higher humor production ability than women. Humor may play a role in mating, with an evolutionary basis. It is correlated with intelligence, which may explain why women value it.
humor is the ultimate feel good complex after shopping for women at least so go figure if you are broke and can still make her laugh then you got your very own female doofus button
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I’m not confident in their criteria for inclusion in this meta-analysis, at least based upon what is included in this excerpt.
Creating humor “on-demand” is such a narrow definition of what is funny. In the methodology they cited, specifically the captioning exercise, I’d say the experimenters so narrowly defined how to measure “a sense of humor,” that they’re only measuring the social differences in respondents rather than their comical abilities.
I’m a pro TV/film writer and have worked in comedy most of that time. We give “writing tests” to job applicants, so I’ve seen a lot of comedy auditions, so to speak. The funniest people would have probably performed middle-of-the-road on this shoehorned exercise. True humor is a cognitive blender, where ideas and connections are made in ways that run counter to our expectations. It’s hard to codify and measure, and it’s very relativistic.
A quip on a cartoon, force-fed in the artificial environment of a psych study is not the same thing as wit. Yes, there will be some correlation, but the experimenters miss the mark.
There may be some subtle cultural differences in the types of humor produced/appreciated by men and women, but I think there are few real differences in ability between men and women overall.
Jokes aren’t the only way to be funny. The funniest guy Ive ever known isn’t telling jokes, they just blurt out whatever they think might be funny about whatever is being talked about in a conversation or something.
It’s more wit and confidence than writing skills.
Someone further down in the thread said
True humor is a cognitive blender, where ideas and connections are made in ways that run counter to our expectations.
If women like humor and it attracts mates men probably devote more effort to training that ability than women do. Many things associated with telling jokes, like confidence and being outspoken, are considered masculine. It might be similar to saying women are more talented, on average, at putting on makeup. Most men never put effort into learning how and if they did are socially stigmatized for displaying feminine traits.
I don’t know how you might test for innate talent.
