Good Sense of Humor is in Important For Attracting Women

Women Get the Last Laugh But Not The Joke

Women might take longer to get the joke, but they'll probably have the last laugh, according to research from an Ivy League college.

Experiments by Stanford University professors, intended to uncover how humor works, found that women have lower expectations of 'gags' and use more of their brain to process them.

However, women laughed for much longer, showing more appreciation for punch-lines.

Professor Allan Reiss, director of the Ivy League college's Center of Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, said the results fit male and female stereotypes about jokes, with men tending to find simpler jokes much funnier more quickly.

The findings also showed that women exercised more discrimination about the quality of jokes.

He said: "We found greater activity in the prefrontal cortex in women, indicating women are processing stimuli that involve language areas of the brain.

"The interpretation of that finding is that women tend to respond more to word play and narrative than slapstick."

One of the experiments involved placing ten women and ten men into an MRI scanner and showing them black-and-white cartoons on a screen.

The scanner revealed which parts of their brains lit up in response to the joke and how long it took them to decide whether they found it amusing.

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