Who you calling funny? A limited, biased study raises comedy eyebrows

Mic drop: some people were funnier than others, according to some studies done some time ago

(Getty Images/iStockphoto (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

This morning I read a study named “Sex Differences in Humour Production Ability: A Meta-Analysis”. Now, if that title doesn’t get your juices flowing, try this headline from, the BBC: "Men are funnier than women, study claims". That's an absolute corker...​

Several articles have since emerged in the press with almost identical headlines.

But while the reaction from comics has largely been of the eye-rolling variety, the fact that this study has made headlines at all is perhaps symptomatic of something greater.

Headlines that are a little inflammatory will get more clicks, but when the world we occupy and the cultural choices we make are often navigated by a search engine algorithm, what effect do they have for those of us working in comedy – and on our audiences?

I’ve worked in comedy as a writer, performer and educator for 12 years, and I’m also a bit of a science nerd in my spare time. So my first instinct when I heard about the study was to devour it along with some of the older studies it cites (some of which go back to research done in the seventies). It was a fun morning. I drank a lot of coffee.

The study itself makes for a pretty “meh” read. Asking questions is what science is all about, but this paper asks to understand sex differences in humour while also articulating why the data it has drawn from is limited and biased. That itself is quite the joke.

It proudly asserts that it’s the first of its kind to collate a bunch of other studies that look at our “humour production abilities”, which for a moment made me think of a sweatshop full of elves writing Christmas cracker jokes.

It even concedes that the test conditions were “somewhat artificial, and do not represent everyday production of humour… [and] ignores the social context in which most humour is produced”. It also never shies away from the fact that the existing studies have largely been limited to Western cultures and heterosexual people, and that it only looks at one type of humour (verbal).

Yet still we are left with those big headlines. If I type “women are funnier than men” into a search engine (I’ve tried a few times on various peoples’ devices today), articles with a headline asserting the opposite are everywhere.

That’s certainly less funny, particularly when thinking about some of the young people I work with and how impressionable and insecure they can be when creating their first attempts at comedy.

It’s concerning that headlines like this, and the accompanying effort at evolutionary justification, simply fuel an existing behavioural stereotype which implies straight men should be funny and straight women should be grateful appreciators. Everyone else… is forgotten.

When an area of our culture and indeed of our experience as humans is ring-fenced for less than 50 per cent of us, at best it's annoying. At worst, it punishes great work and great minds into silence.

It’s also off-putting to new audiences who might otherwise be up for trying a new show or comedy act. If you’re forever being told one brand of ice cream is better than all the others, why would you then take the risk of parting with your cash to try those “inferior” brands?

None of us have to look far to see how these external pressures are expressed differently depending on the gender, sexuality, race and culture of a person. That is where we have to stand together and call BS.

Humour is subjective, with one person’s bad joke another person’s comedy gold. Heck, some of us even find cats with toast on their heads funnier than most comedians. The most important thing is that humour belongs to all of us. And if any institution says otherwise, they are just plain wrong.

Gem Carmella is a comedy writer-performer, screen actor and educator. She has recently created Monty Python inspired comedy writing courses with charity Ministry of Stories in conjunction with BBC History and is currently developing her second solo show, #LifePundit