Jesse Bering just can't get enough of that sociobiology. This time, in a post about how an allegedly tiny number of female humorists are "crowded out on the roster of female comedy all-stars by a long list of Sapphic wise-girls" he volunteers the following explanation for why there are two, like, totally different kinds of senses of humor, one, "humor production" for boys, another, "humor receptivity," is for girls.
And of course, maybe because it's about men being "productive" and women just "receptive," Bering naturally gravitates to the sexual selection solution.
The authors [of the study Bering is expanding on here] interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor.
Source: Scientific American
If Miller really thinks that then he's an idiot. Not because it's implausible, though it is. But because maybe, just maybe, not everything about "reproductive fitness" is about the reproduction part.
For instance I wonder if... naw... couldn't possibly be... you could test his hypothesis by assessing whether men are more likely to joke around women (which would help confirm his hypothesis) or around mixed company (which would be the null hypothesis if one wasn't a sociobiology fetishist) or around other men. Which it seems to me would be at least as effective at helping men defuse tension between rivals, boost morale when things looked bad, enhance camaraderie and thus group bonding, and so on.
What are the odds that male bonding, morale boosting, and tension defusing might increase men's likelihood of surviving long enough to be reproductively successful? Oh, right, silly me, the only possible sources of selective pressure in humans were spreading seed and avoiding leopards.
Similarly, if I was to try and test the "humor receptivity" side of Miller's hypothesis I might also look to see if more women are found in comedy audiences, whether men and women are equally likely to appreciate other people's humor, or if men are more likely to listen to and laugh at other men's jokes.
Oh, and hey, here's Bering with another welcome notion:
Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize.
And finally, if I was to try and test Bering's "lesbians have little penises inside their brains that make them act like men" hypothesis, and maybe backup Miller's humor-receptivity hypothesis, I might check out the audience composition of women comedians (lesbian and otherwise.) Would we see more women in the audience, equal numbers of men and women, or more men? Remember, if any men at all show for women comedians, or appreciate their senses of humor, that's going to substantially complicate the "women evolved to laugh at men's jokes" notion.
Also, yeah, I guess the first thing people always say about humorists like Lucille Ball, Mae West, Mary Tyler Moore, Christine Lavin, Moms Mabley, Gracie Allen, Roseanne Barr, Carol Burnett, Imogene Cocoa, Phyllis Diller, Fran Dreshcher, Terry Garr, Valerie Harper, Gilda Radner, Tracy Ulner, Ana Marie Cox, Nikol Hasler, Totie Fields, Madeline Kahn, Fanny Brice, Jane Austin, Tina Fey, Louise Lasser, Amy Poehler, the Roach sisters, Sarah Haskins, Erma Bombeck, Goldie Hawn, etc. is "what a bunch of dykes."