Men being funnier than women is a joke so common and overused it doubles as penicillin. Male comedians enjoy more fame, money and far less people telling them to slit their own throat on Twitter. When scientists got around to actually testing this theory they found that in their small sample and test, it was apparently true. And the reasoning for their results they came up with is nothing short of ball shattering stupid. They concluded that women found comedy written by men funnier, because men being funnier is a commonly accepted trope. Yes, the reason men are perceived as being funnier is became men are perceived as being funnier.
To explain, groups of men and women were both tasked with writing image caption and then had to rate how funny they found the captions written by the other people taking part in the experiment when their gender wasn’t known. Overall, men were voted as being consistently funnier, even to women. For men it was theorised that men were just more receptive to male humour, thus rated it more highly. For women though, the explanation was a little more, odd.
When the gender of the author was revealed, the majority of the time people of either gender were asked to recall whether a man or woman wrote a previously stated funny caption. They’d invariably say it was written by a male, even if it’d actually been written by someone with t-shirt candy. Why? Because society has taught us that men are the funnier sex. Yep. Just by repeating an opinion enough, we can make it true. And we’re absolutely positive that, that information won’t be abused by anyone.