Effects of Sex and Type of Humor on Humor Appreciation

The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement

The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulness. Across five preregistered studies (Ns = 118-54,905) with varied stimuli and perceiver samples (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), variance-decomposition analyses found that perceiver characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high potential for explaining and predicting humor appreciation (here, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting amusement. Implications for humor-appreciation theories and applications are discussed.

Feminist Humor: Who Appreciates it and Why?

Despite popular-media claims that feminists lack a sense of humor, there has been little actual research investigating feminist humor and people's reactions to it. Three experiments investigated reactions to humorous feminist slogans that subjects classified into thematic categories. Subjects in Experiment 1 were females and males, over 30 years old, who considered themselves feminists or strongly sympathetic toward feminism. Experiment 2 used female and male undergraduates, under 30 years old, with varying levels of sympathy towards feminism. Subjects in Experiment 3 were students enrolled in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades of a summer enrichment program for academically gifted students. The females in Experiment 1 gave the highest humor ratings, while the females in the second experiment gave the lowest ratings. In Experiment 3, sex differences in humor ratings were not reliable, but ratings of the extent to which subjects agreed with the slogans were higher for females than for males. The results of the three experiments suggest that both gender and feminist sympathy influence reactions to feminist humor.

MANAGERIAL HUMOR AND SUBORDINATE SATISFACTION

Humor may be a useful managerial tool, contributing to effectiveness and subordinate satisfaction. A survey explored 290 workers' job satisfaction and impressions of supervisors as a function of subject age, subject sex, supervisor sense of humor, and supervisor sexual humor. Subjects rating their supervisors high in sense of humor reported higher job satisfaction and rated other supervisor qualities higher than did subjects rating their supervisors low in sense of humor. In general, the differences between ratings, given low and high sense of humor supervisors, were greater for younger (under 15) subjects than older. Older females downgraded supervisors who used sexual humor, while younger females and males did not. Future research should attempt to relate humor to objective measures of leader effectiveness.