Women and Men: Laughing A lot or a little?

As stated in the article in the study completed, women do tend to laugh 126% more often than men do (Provine 59). This goes back to one of my previous blog posts when I said that (in my belief) men laugh louder and harder, but women tend to laugh at more things (more often).

In terms of laughing at different things, I tend to believe that yes, there is a difference in what males and females tend to laugh at. Although the article did not address this issue, I think that there is clear evidence for this.

I think back to last Wednesday night (October 28th). Some friends of mine and I were in my friend Abbey's room. South Park came on. The make up of the people in the room were three males (Myself, Kyle, and Mark) and three females (Abbey, Courtney, and Jessica). The three girls instantly wanted to turn off the show, whereas the three guys requested that the show stay on (We ended up watching 1/2 of the show, then switching it). But even if this is an isolated incident, it supports the previous claim that I made in this post.

However, one other interesting thing that came out of this night of South Park does relate to the article. The idea that laughter is contagious. Mark, Kyle and I were laughing uncontrollably at a certain time in the show (where the captain of a boat gets impaled with a harpoon) and two of the three girls started laughing with us (They later admitted that some parts of the episode were funny, but overall, they do not like the show).

What is not aware (to us at this point) whether or not we laughed more due to the fact that we had been drinking alcohol that night (although really, not a lot of it, ~1-2 beers per person)...that could be something interesting to think about, the effect of alcohol on laughter.