The Comedy Battle of the Sexes
The @VanityFair Titans of Late Night picture was haunting me so I fell into an IMDb rabbit hole & made an infographic pic.twitter.com/y63Ib1J5aK
— Melissa Hunter (@melissaFTW) September 18, 2015This tweet got me thinking about how some people still claim men are intrinsically “funnier” than women. I suspect that comedy is like the vast majority of other professions where success is determined by hours of practice, mentors, and opportunity, while intrinsic skill has little to do with it. But the scientist in me asks, how would you test that?
For classical musicians, the standard has become for people to audition behind a curtain, so one’s gender, age, appearance, etc do not influence how their performance is judged. Obviously, for comedians, we would have to go to more extremes to test comedic ability while masking gender. Thus I propose the:
Comedic Battle of the Sexes!
A proposed scientific test of which gender is funnier
First, we need to convince a nationally televised late-night talk show host to participate, after that, it’s all easy. We find one woman and one man to captain two gendered teams of comedy writers. These captains put together a team of writers (5 or 6 writers each maybe). We’ll need to make sure we don’t end up with an all-star team versus scrubs. We won’t learn much if we have Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and Sarah Silverman vs three guys who wrote for Mad in the 90s. The captains will have to build their writing teams under a salary cap, such that their members total comedy-related earnings from the last year do not exceed some amount (I dunno, a million bucks?). I’m just stealing this salary cap idea from fantasy football. Once we have the teams put together, we’re ready for a two week long experiment.
Every weekday, each writing team puts together a traditional late-night show opening monologue. We have a bag with 5 red balls and 5 blue balls. Each night, a ball is selected (and not returned to the bag), and that determines which monologue will be performed. This ensures each team will have 5 monologues performed in a randomized order.
Next, a late-night host performs the selected monologue, without knowing which team’s script he is using. And the audience rates the shows, also not knowing which team was being performed. Thus, we have a double-blind study, eliminating any potential biases held by either the performer or the audience. It would be even better to convince two hosts to participate. Then say, Kimmel could perform the selected monologue and Fallon could do the non-selected one each night. Of course, it’d also be nice if there was a female late-night host, but I’m trying to keep this realistic. If people insist on a control sample, we can make a group of people just watch C-SPAN, or maybe just an old Leno re-run.
Now for the data collection. We set up a web page (and maybe a cell-phone app) so people can rate each show. We could even let people put each individual joke in order from funniest to lamest. Along with their ratings of the shows, we’ll ask participants relevant things about themselves like their age, gender, if they think men or women are funnier, etc. We can bring people into the lab and measure their physical response to the shows and compare that with how they rate the shows (maybe they say one show is funnier, but they actually laugh more at another).
Finally, the data analysis. Given all the ratings, we should be able to answer the question of which team was funnier. We can break things down by sub-groups, maybe old men only find women funny, maybe young women only find men funny? There are all kinds of possibilities!
My prediction–I bet professional comedians of both genders are good at their jobs, and there will be no statistical differences between them. I’d bet both teams make lots of good funny. But if there is a big difference, this could totally be a Nature paper!
Postscript: Of course there’s a natural follow-up study to be made. Maybe mixed gender writing teams are funnier than either single-gender writing teams…
