At last the answer to the question - why do men find the Three Stooges funny?
By Aussiegirl
Can we finally have found the answer to the the riddle of why men find the Three Stooges funny? Beats me.
BREITBART.COM - Just The News
The difference between the sexes has long been a rich source of humor. Now it turns out, humor is one of the differences.
Women seem more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny.
"The long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently," a research team led by Dr. Allan L. Reiss of the Stanford University School of Medicine reports in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But 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.
Men are using the same network in the brain, but less so, he said, men are less discriminating.
"It doesn't take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny," he commented when asked about humor like the Three Stooges.
While there is a lot of overlap between how men and women process humor, the differences can help account for the fact that men gravitate more to one-liners and slapstick while women tend to use humor more in narrative form and stories, Reiss said.
The funnier the cartoon the more the reward center in the women's brain responded, unlike men who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the beginning, the researchers said.
posted by Aussiegirl @ 10:14 PM
11 Comments:
I wonder how much money they spent in doing this research. I for one never thought the Three Stooges were funny...not that I have any fundamental philosophical difficulty with eyes getting poked, since of course it all depends on whose eyes are getting poked. In other words, it's always the context that is important.
Ditto Pindar!
Perhaps the stooges are funny to a very primitive portion of the brain, one we’ve managed to develop beyond? "Hey, that's my story and I'm sticking to it."
Slapstick humor alone just doesn’t trip my trigger. I guess I’m just hooked on snappy dialog put in the proper context of course.
What I am amazed at in this story is that anyone would spend another research penny on a study proving that men and women are different. Duh!
Thanks, TJ, for seconding my opinion. I agree that snappy dialog in the proper context is what's really funny. When I read your comment, the first things that popped into my mind were two movies, "To Catch a Thief" and "North by Northwest", both with Cary Grant, certainly a master of snappy dialog. He and Grace Kelly (in the first) and Eva Marie Saint (in the second) exchange witty, sexy, funny, flirty--in short, sophisticated--dialogue that's completely believable. This is light years away from Stooge "humor".
Laugh if you want -- or don't laugh if you don't want -- but I love the Stooges.
Much of their humor was based on shtick, on predictable reaction to stimuli.
Now this is funny: Intellectual discussion of the Three Stooges.
The Stooges, by the way, were the first to make cinematic jokes about Adolf Hitler (Curly was a great Mussolini) -- and that's not slapstick.
It wasn't the eye-poking that was funny, it was the situation that prompted it.
And the clever choreography that allowed it.
As the boys got older and their reflexes slowed, their routines were less funny.
And when they had the terrible "Joe" as the third Stooge, they were not funny at all.
If Moe and Larry could have held on a little longer, after their "Curly Joe" partner's (I think one) film, they were going to use the superb Emil Sitka, who probably understood them better than any other foil in any of their movies.
In fact, he was known as "the Fourth Stooge," and he was a funny and talented gentleman, whom I met a few times while living in Los Angeles and whose Web site I visit occasionally today.
Too, there's a nostalgia in loving the Stooges, but primarily it is, I believe, their shtick, their routines used in different situations, the downright familiarity, the expectedness that makes them funny to those of us who have especially refined taste.
Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn might get a slightly cooler seat in Hell just because he gave the world the Three Stooges -- but he will get extra pitchfork jabs for the way he reportedly treated them.
The Three Stooges are, though, one of the great divides, one of the markers that differentiate men and women: That women didn't and don't like the Three Stooges is one of the primary reasons the ERA failed, and deservedly.
Oh, a little P.S.: I understand the motto of the Women's Lib movement or perhaps of the National Organization of (for?) Women is, "That's not funny."
I just knew this story would get the men out. Loved everybody's comments. First, I love both those Hitchcock films mentioned, especially "To Catch a Thief" - part of its appeal is the beauty of Monte Carlo AND Grace Kelly (here's a girly thing -- that dreamy white strapless dress she wore was heavenly) and the wit and humor of the movie. I mean, who but Hitchcock could get away with that tongue in cheek over-the-top visual cliche of the fireworks going off in the window of the hotel room over the shoulders of the romantically inclined Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But I digress.
While I confess to never finding the Stooges funny, I have always loved the slapstick humor and schtick of Laurel and Hardy. Most of their routines are classics, and always make me laugh no matter how many times I see them. My favorite is the one where they come to move a grand piano and end up destroying the house in the process. There too, you know what to expect, but the gags themselves were so beautifully choreographed and seemed to emerge so naturally from the story. Anyway -- that was great humor.
And then, men, I find seem to find the "Spam" routine in the Python series hilarious. I love the Pythoners -- especially when they'd dress up like old ladies and discussed Proust and Schopenhouer. Or the one where the son became a coal miner and his dad was a playwright.
And then there's the whole subject of the humor surrounding Hitler -- Chaplin did a take on that as well as Mel Brooks' "The Producers" with "Springtime for Hitler". There's something about evil that makes us want to laugh - like whistling past the graveyard perhaps, or as a talisman to ward of the evil. Maybe we laugh so we can dispel the evil. But then again - there was never any Stalin humor -- or Mao humor. Or even Mussolini -- even though Mussolini was so lampoonable with that strut of his.
I`m with Michael on this; I love the Stooges.
I work with a fellow from Eritrea, and HE loves the Stooges, although he never saw them until he came to America.
I suspect part of the reason women don`t like them is because of their nurturing nature; they want to help those in pain. Men like them because it`s fun to laugh at stupidity-especially at other people`s stupidity. Giving a baby a gun to play with, or tearing a hole in a pair of pants because you think a sunbeam is a spot is stupidiity beyond any normally encountered in nature (except maybe at Moveon.org.) Most humor is based on this, and the Stooges are as stupid as they come.
By the by, Lou Costello had considered joining the Stooges when he split from Abbott. I don`t know how well that would have worked; Curly and Shemp were far better at making it look painful (it was never believable when Abbott hit Costello, at least to me.) As Michael pointed out above, the speed and timing of this was important.
You know, having read Michael and Tim's comments, I think I really need to re-visit the Stooges and watch them more closely. After all, it's true that great physical, non-verbal comedy always depends on timing and choreography. That's why someone from Eritrea can find the Stooges funny...I imagine that good physical humor from any place, even the depths of the Brazilian jungle, we would find funny. And here we fetch up against the deeper questions of why humor exists, what metaphysical purposes does it serve, are there common elements in all humor, both physical and verbal, and why is it that in some sense comedy is deeper and more profound than tragedy. Actually, thinking about such things makes you appreciate even more the talent that the Stooges had.
While I, with the brilliant Timothy, agree with the brilliant Michael, I also agree with the brilliant Aussiegirl: Laurel & Hardy were the best ... until, ironically, they went to the big studio, which so homogenized their work, it was not only unrecognizable but, far, far worse, it was unfunny.
Stan and Babe, as we fans (I was for a while a member of the Sons of the Desert, Way Out West Tent) call them, were number one.
(Their last film, "Atoll K," was downright libertarian. I'd have to love them even if they weren't funny.)
Next was Buster Keaton -- whose "The General" was an almost perfect movie, a genuine masterpiece -- then came Charles Chaplin, who was himself a genius, but much of whose early work was ... well, terrible -- silly, boring, trite, vulgar, even when he himself was being creative and original. The movies themselves, though, lacked any story, coherence, or, frequently, point. (W.C. Fields sneered Chaplin was only a good acrobat.)
Chaplin scored with the "intelligentsia" with his "The Great Dictator," which did indeed have some classic moments. But he made the entire movie in order to give that dumb speech near the end. Oy.
Jack Oakie, by the way, stole the movie, or at least the scenes he was in, as the Mussolini-type character.
I was thinking that it might be of interest to investigate the various theories about humor, so here are a few websites for you all to ponder...after which you will probably feel like fleeing back to the Stooges for another helping, like a fluffy desert after a heavy meal. First there's this website: A Theory of Humor, a very long paper of which the following is the abstract: This paper presents a theory of humor, that certain psychological state which tends to produce laughter. The theory states that humor is fully characterized by three conditions, each of which, separately, is necessary for humor to occur, and all of which, jointly, are sufficient for humor to occur. The conditions of this theory describe a subjective state of apparent emotional absurdity, where the perceived situation is seen as normal, and where, simultaneously, some affective commitment of the perceiver to the way something in the situation ought to be is violated. This theory is explained in detail and its logical properties and empirical consequences are explored. Recognized properties of humor are explained (incongruity, surprise, aggression, emotional transformation, apparent comprehension difficulty, etc.). A wide variety of biological, social/communicational, and other classes of humor-related phenomena are characterized and explained in terms of the theory. Practical applications are suggested, including ways to diagnose humor-related misunderstandings in everyday life. And here's another website: The International Society for Humor Studies. Finally, on a lighter note, here's the final paragraph of a very interesting article: In the end, as long as the audience knows the norms and can thus see the incongruity, as long as the participants act in an inflexible manner but are inherently human, as long as no one appears to get hurt, and as long as the audience doesn't take the situation personally, then an attempt at being funny will succeed. (from this website: Theories of Humor and Comedy)
Thanks, Pindar -- but now we know that nothing drains the humor from something like trying to analyze it, although I'll agree with you that it's a fascinating idea. Man is the only animal who laughs, or finds things humorous. In that sense, I've often thought that laughter is the one thing that truly separates us from the animals. Let's face it, monkeys and chimps have thumbs, although not opposable. They use tools, they use language, in short - it's laughter in the end that separates us. So it's akin to something from the divine, given to us probably to help us cope with disaster, trauma, tragedy or sadness. Laughter is very close to tears -- "I laughed till I cried" -- it's a release of tension. And the most developed sense of humor is probably among Jewish people, who have suffered so much persecution and misery over the eons. We say -- if it wasn't so sad it would be funny. Well, that's a long discussion.
But - Michael -- thanks for backing me up on Laurel and Hardy, and you're right - their shorts are much funnier than the later movies. And Buster Keaton is also one of my favorites. And Chaplin was always somehow boring, even though he showed some talent in spots, I always found the tramp to be a boring character, too self-conscious, and too aware of his own "genius" status, somehow. The other guys just "were". Gee -- all that and the Stooges too -- whodathunkit? I may even watch more than 30 seconds of a Stooges clip next time one is on.
Post a Comment
<< Home