The Great Divide

An interesting article in Reader's Digest has revealed that when it comes to humour, there's definitely a gender divide. A study was conducted, in which ten men and ten women were shown seventy black-and-white cartoons (whoa, that's damn a lot of cartoons to watch. Guess they didn't have Prelims and O levels to worry about, huh) as each of them lay inside an MRI scanner. This monitored their brain activity as each test subject watched the cartoons then pressed one of two buttons to indicate whether or not they found it funny.

There's a part of our brain known as the reward centre, which is an area rich in dopamine (I will pretend that I know what that is) - some substance that's released when we laugh or do other satisfying things that make us really happy, so when the women responded to cartoons they thought were amusing, there was increased activity in the reward centre, which decreased when they watched the unfunny cartoons. The men, on the other hand, showed activity in the reward centre to be stable when a cartoon was amusing, and activity declined in response to what they considered were the unfunny cartoons. Now what's really funny, is that according to researchers, this pattern of what happens in the men is rather similar to that of nonhuman primates! Haha!

Well basically, the difference in the findings reflect how the two genders respond to humour, and can be applied to men and women on the whole. The results showed that the women were generally skeptical and didn't expect the cartoons to be funny, so that when they did laugh, they were surprised, thus setting off a "reward" in the brain. For the men, however, they expected to be amused, and when they weren't, they experieced disappointment.

So I guess that'd mean that while the men are busy guffawing away at some horribly lame joke, the women will be sitting there, trying very hard to comprehend what in the world's so funny, which would make us girls a very cynical bunch of SERIOUSly unfunny people (get it? SERIOUSly as in serious? Like, a play on words? D'ya get it? ... Okay, never mind. I didn't laugh either - just testing out the reliability of the research findings).

Perhaps this might serve as an explanation to all those men out there who have at least once in their lives, tried approaching a remotely intelligent looking woman at a bar with a corny pick up line, only to be swiftly and rudely rejected. It would also serve as a warning then, to all the adolescent males who have yet to do it, but are certainly thinking about it, NOT to even try. Then what about those men who've tried to pick up a whole group of women at once?

Ouch. I can only imagine the pain they must've felt.

Humour really is a wonderful thing - but only when it's actually funny.

All hail the era of the cynical female!

We have arrived.