Members in the Media
From: The Atlantic

Plight of the Funny Female

The Atlantic:

A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the year, she was startled by one comment in particular:

“She’s not funny,” the student wrote.

“Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it’s worth it. If you fail and you’re not funny, you lost maybe a few minutes. But if the person laughs, the benefit can be huge.”

Read the whole story: The Atlantic

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