Why men and women don’t always laugh at the same jokes… Men like visual humor and slapstick, while women find political jokes funnier, research suggests

Men may be from Mars and women may be from Venus – at least when it comes to their different senses of humor.

Men like visual gags and slapstick pratfalls and enjoy them more than women, a study suggests.

Meanwhile, women rate jokes about political issues and domestic relations more highly than men do.

The finding comes from 3,380 people who attended an exhibition of cartoons published in British newspapers and magazines between 1930 and 2010.

Presented with 19 pairs of cartoons, and asked to choose their favorite, gender differences emerged.

Overall, men significantly preferred visual jokes compared to women.

Men rated slapstick cartoons, such as paint cans falling on well-dressed people on the street, more highly than women did.

But they rated jokes about domestic dynamics, such as marriage, and political issues less highly.

Professor Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who analyzed the data, from the University of Oxford, said: ‘We found that men are more amused than women by visual, direct jokes such as slapstick – jokes like someone slipping on a banana peel, or, most likely the classic scene from Only Fools and Horses where Del Boy falls through the bar.

‘It seems that women are deeper and prefer subtler jokes about relationships and how people interact with each other.

‘These results make some sense because women tend to spend more time discussing social relationships, while men bond more by bantering and making each other laugh.

‘Slapstick and visual jokes are quick, witty and tend to get laughs, so may be better suited to the way men interact with each other.’

Men like visual gags and slapstick pratfalls and enjoy them more than women, a study suggests (Stock Photo)

Cartoons published in newspapers and magazines are a good way to measure sense of humor because they typically deliver a quick joke via a single image and minimal words – usually a speech bubble or caption.

The Cartoon Museum study included six types of cartoons: cartoons that dealt with social or political commentary, cartoons with verbal jokes such as puns and puns, cartoons with visual jokes, cartoons with funny situations such as slapstick, and cartoons that poke fun at domestic themes.

Both men and women preferred more recent cartoons and found verbal jokes, social commentary and jokes about domestic situations the funniest, based on the cartoons they liked most from the pairs presented.

But women were slightly more interested in domestic jokes, such as jokes about how men and women behave and romantic relationships in general, as well as cartoons about political events and politicians in the public eye.

Perhaps controversially, researchers writing in the journal Humor suggest that this could be because women engage with the world in a more ‘reflective’ way and men do so in a ‘more superficial, humour-based way’.

The findings suggest that a maximum of two characters in a cartoon is best for getting laughs, without making people work too hard to understand the motivations of too many people in the scenario.