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Research by accident
One day backstage in the '30s, Larry, Shemp, and Moe were playing cards. Shemp accused Larry of cheating. After a heated argument, Shemp reached over and stuck his fingers in Larry's eyes. Moe, watching, thought it was hilarious...and that's how the famous poke-in-the-eyes routine was born.
Here is much more, via Craig Newmark. If you have any evolutionary biology "just so" stories as to why women don't like The Three Stooges, I'd like to hear them.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 28, 2008 at 08:40 PM in Film | Permalink
Comments
No comments so far? Hmm... I'd say the stooges are low status individuals, allowing for men to feel greater status watching them (the superiority theory of laughter), while women shun the stooges weak value, opting instead for the stylings of more attractive/alpha comedians, like Dane Cook.
Posted by: Erich at Dec 29, 2008 12:15:58 AM
One possible theory:
Men like it because it's dumb.
Women dislike it because it's dumb.
Posted by: mr commenter person at Dec 29, 2008 12:36:52 AM
I suspect that women enjoy relationship oriented humor (like romantic comedies)because they are more socially/group oriented. Men like slapstick (Three Stooges) because they are more visually oriented, and because men are less empathetic and risk adverse than women.
I can imagine some experiments that would test this hypothesis.
Posted by: Godfrey at Dec 29, 2008 1:16:10 AM
Women are interested in social complexity, and not uncomfortable with things not decided.
Men are interested in abstracting from complexity and deciding something on the spot.
A fight is a decision method, and so holds the interest of men.
Vicki Hearne's take here.
Posted by: rhhardin at Dec 29, 2008 2:02:55 AM
I wonder of Tyler's point is that there are 10,000 possible ad hoc evolutionary psych. explanations for this phenomenon. Perhaps Tyler is doubtful of Evolutionary psych's predictive usefulness?
Posted by: godfrey at Dec 29, 2008 2:52:30 AM
Here goes:
Say that the violence, brutality, as humor, is symbolic of a taste or willingness to challenge the focal interpretations that create social order. The humor relates to the removal of the lynchpin of the social order. The aesthetic has to do with disdaining the accepted or conventional norms holding the order together. All humor is about asymmetric interpretation, but the zaniness is about upsetting the deep/high norms/interpretations.
Say that indulgence of the pulling-out-the-lynchpin themes/attitudes correlates to thinking about it. Say that by frowning on the theme/aesthetic/attitude, one makes it less likely.
Say that when the lynchpin of the social order is removed -- e.g., overturning the alpha male (Martin Sheen carving up Marlon Brando) or seceding from the band -- women's investment in off-spring suffer greatly. Those investments are specific both to the individual children and to the established social order. Men, on the other hand, continue to spread their seed regardless of shake-ups in the social order. So men's genes overall gain more/suffer less from removal of the lynchpin of the social order, and hence from indulging themes or attitudes that relate to such turmoil.
Women prefer to laugh about asymmetry of interpretations that are "shallower", closer to the surface of established norms/order, resting on top of the deeper interpretations that constitute the order. Men laugh about interpretations that are deeper, that have more resting on top of them. Thus, men's have a stronger like for zaniness.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Dec 29, 2008 5:58:36 AM
Oops, silly me, I wrote as though women were more likely to spawn women and men are more likely to spawn men!
Nevermind.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Dec 29, 2008 6:22:57 AM
How about the obvious-- women are entirely peripheral in the Stooge Universe.
Posted by: MattF at Dec 29, 2008 8:22:23 AM
The women in the Stooge shorts often get the upperhand against their nonsense, but it is usually the upperhand -- violent slaps against the boys.
Compare that to the Honeymooners. There it is not only that Alice gets the upperhand against the male-childish stupidity of Ralph, but she does so with grace and hilarious one-liners. She offers the foil against the boys -- an evaluative benchmark, if you will -- that clearly demonstrates the stupidity *and* weakness of their chauvanistic ways without the need for female slapstick comedy.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 29, 2008 9:18:21 AM
But I went off topic in two ways.... Sorry.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Dec 29, 2008 9:27:46 AM
On further thought, I think my story might be salvageable, if the turmoil following the overthrow of the social order imperils existing children and/or makes child-rearing less viable for a spell (because women have a shorter fertility/spawning window than men do).
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Dec 29, 2008 9:47:16 AM
"men"? "women"? In Britain they were screened at the Saturday childrens' shows.
Posted by: dearieme at Dec 29, 2008 10:45:01 AM
WHY DO PEOPLE ENJOY ''SLAPSTICK''?
"Finally, there is a gendered dynamic operating as well in such comedy. For the most part, men tend to favor slapstick and crude kinds of humor (e.g. the fart joke or other gross bodily functions), while women tend to favor more relationally based humor. Most women do not relate to the Three Stooges, for example, but many men do. This may reflect cultural norms for the sexes, along with differences in how both grow up and are socialized. Boys games, for example, tend to feature a lot of rough-and-tumble group play, whereas girls games feature more relational one-on-one activities like tea parties, playing with dolls, dress-up, etc. Even girl group activities, such as shopping, or playing jump rope, tend to have relational dynamics in them.
"This is not to say that girls (or women) don't have taboo impulses or cruel streaks, but it comes out more frequently in verbal humor than in physical humor (as demonstrated in the film "Mean Girls"). Yet this gender dimension is only a generalization, as there certainly are many women who enjoy slapstick humor (I'm one of them), and many men enjoy relational (romantic) comedy (my spouse is one of those)."
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Comedy-Movies-3262/PEOPLE-ENJOY-SLAPSTICK.htm
Posted by: Danascot at Dec 29, 2008 12:07:37 PM
The violence in the Stooges is a male monkey game - for example, male gorillas challenge each other with bellowing, dust-throwing, chest-beating, tree-branch thumping, even wrestling. Females don't do this.
For women to enjoy the Stooges might indicate that they were participating in male games and challenging the male hierarchy, which females just don't do.
Also, violence shatters the social hierarchy, which concerns females, since they are invested in their current position, to which they have carefully climbed. Drastic changes may endanger their own status and that of their children.
Thus females may be more worried about the results of violence than males - they may have more to lose. (As we know, people are more worried about loss than eager for gain.)
Violent outcomes for status are esp. dangerous for females as the entire troupe could split apart and the whole social network destroyed, the social network they rely on for literal child support. Beta males who lose a challenge to the alpha just stay beta - they may have less to lose after the few bruises?
Posted by: StreetWalker at Dec 29, 2008 12:17:36 PM
I think the first comment is on the right track. The 3 Stooges are extremely sexually undesirable, or infantile, in both action and appearance, so the pathos (or disgust) is more immediate to women than the humor. Whereas Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin, Keaton, Marx Bros., etc., the humor can get through.
Posted by: anon/portly at Dec 29, 2008 1:36:33 PM
""men"? "women"? In Britain they were screened at the Saturday childrens' shows."
So Britain's children are manlier than its adults?
Posted by: Tom at Dec 29, 2008 1:41:52 PM
My sister and I (also a woman) loved The Three Stooges when we were kids. I don't know if I would now if introduced to them for the first time. Maybe men retain a taste for juvenile humor that women lose somewhere.
Posted by: MTheads at Dec 29, 2008 2:43:20 PM
Dominance displays that determine the male heirarchy are no longer interesting to mated women unless their mate is among the contestants.
Posted by: Cyrus at Dec 29, 2008 11:20:05 PM
The comment by StreetWalker sounds a lot like mine. A school of thought!
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Dec 30, 2008 8:05:03 AM
@Daniel Klein
"A school of thought"
Indeed. While I confess I was driven to Hansonism with a stick, here we are now. Pleasure to meetcha.
Posted by: StreetWalker at Dec 30, 2008 10:33:35 AM
Some of the people here are on the right track when they try to come up with explanations for the real mystery, why the Stooges are amusing to (some) men.
I'm a guy and I've never found them anything but irritating.
Posted by: Jens Fiederer at Jan 2, 2009 12:32:44 PM
I basically agree with rhhardin's point, which, I think is getting at the idea that women seem relatively more comfortable with a greater level of pluralism. There's a lot of descriptive work on this in the fields of adult learning, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology.
It's also interesting to note that this explanation ties the observed gender differences with the observed age differences (if they exist), as children are more likely than adults to seek singular, universal truths. This is cited in developmental and educational psychology when we notice things like the fact that children prefer algebra (with it's dualistic right and wrong answers) to, say, english classes.
Of course, these aren't really evolutionary and "just so" arguments; just the application of existing knowledge to new situations (really our baseline). If we wanted to make a just so story for *why* this phenomenon occurs, then that's another matter. But that would be a different level of analysis.
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Posted by: Mike at Jan 7, 2009 2:23:19 PM
