New Scientist reports that women get a bigger kick out of gag cartoons than men. The reason? Unlike men, they expect the joke is going to suck, and are pleasantly surprised when it's better than expected.
In particular, women appear to have a lower expectation that the cartoon will be funny than men. "Women appear to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it," says Allan Reiss, one of the study's authors, at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US.
Maybe that explains why I religiously read Howard Huge every Sunday, and then curse myself for doing so afterwards. Link (via Cartoon Brew)
