My wife is a better cartoon editor than I thought.
A Stanford University School of Medicine research team led by Dr. Allan L. Reiss…
…studied the response of 10 women and 10 men to 70 black-and-while cartoons, asking them to rate the jokes for how funny they were. While the volunteers were looking at the cartoons their brains were being studied with an MRI to determine what parts of the brains were responding.
Apparently…
…they were surprised when their studies of how the male and female brains react to humor showed that women were more analytical in their response, and felt more pleasure when they decided something really was funny.
“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.”
Women were subjecting humor to more analysis with the aim of determining if it was indeed funny, Reiss said in a telephone interview.
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