Funny men get the girl—a theory backed by science
Ditch the pickup lines and go for punch lines instead. A recent study shows that when two strangers meet, the more a woman laughs at a man’s jokes, the more likely she’ll agree to a date. The chances are even better if they are laughing together.
Humor is often linked to intelligence, and the attraction to funny guys means girls love them for their brains. But Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies in the University of Kansas says there is no connection between the two.
He performed three studies and published them in “Sexual Selection and Humor in Courtship: A Case for Warmth and Extroversion,” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology
The first study had 35 participants study the Facebook profiles of 100 strangers. Their judgments on the stranger’s personality were compared to a survey answered by the Facebook account owners. Hall found out that funny people were more likely to be extroverted than intelligent, and were seen by strangers the same way.
The second had 300 student participants and found out that GPA and ACT scores had no effect on how funny they claim to be.
The third experiment had 51 pairs of single heterosexual college students meet each other for the first time. They were left alone in a room to talk for 10 minutes.
The experiment shows that the more times a man tried to be funny and the more times a woman laughed at his jokes, the more interested she is in him. It has to be the men, though. The reverse was not true for women who tried to be funny.
When the participants laughed together, they were also more interested in each other.
Hall points out reasons why humor is important in a relationship:
• Humor points to having a sociable and agreeable personality. “Part of what it means to be social is the ability to joke along with people,” Hall said.
• Men use humor to gauge if women are interested in them. “Men are trying to get women to show their cards,” Hall said. “For some men it is a conscious strategy.”
• When men make jokes and women laugh, they may be performing a script in courtship. Men acting like jokers and women laughing along may be part of it, too. “The script is powerful and it is enduring, and it dictates everything from asking someone out to picking up the tab,” Hall said.
• Humor is valuable for humor’s sake. “Shared laughter might be a pathway toward developing a more long-lasting relationship,” Hall said.
