At the start of this episode, you talked about the preponderance of men in your Komedy Klass submissions. This triggered two thoughts for me, one likely obvious to anyone with any knowledge of statistics, and one more speculative.
First, this would definitely explain the "women aren't funny" trope (which pisses off many people, because of course there are lots of hilarious female comedians), but it's a persistent perception that male comedians are funnier, and this would help explain that perception.
Even if you have a biased sample (if your audience skews male), so the ~20:1 ratio among your submissions does not reflect the population as a whole, it is still clear that a much larger proportion of men has an interest in creating comedy. If they are ~50/50 in the overall population there will be a much larger absolute pool of men creating comedy. If you have two populations that normally distributed in terms of humor ability, even if you have identical distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation), you will see two things when you're looking at the rightmost end of the distribution (the funniest people):
1) If you combine the two populations and you look at the right tail of that curve, it will be dominated by members of the larger population (men), so you expect a lot more very funny men than very funny women.
2) Looking at the populations separately, the most extreme members of the larger population will be more extreme than the most extreme members of the smaller population. That is, the very funniest men will be funnier than the very funniest women.
This doesn't even take into account the fact of greater male variability (on basically any trait the male distribution is wider than the female distribution), which would make it even more skewed towards men at the upper end. Of course, the population at the right tail of the curve is all that matters, because successful humor writers and comedians all come from the very funniest members of the population.
Second thought, and this is speculative. WHY would humor be of greater interest to men? It's certainly not my area of expertise, but since one major explanation I've read of humor is the "benign violation" theory, it feels like creating humor is a form of risk-taking (if someone perceives your violation as not being benign, they'll get mad). Men are much more prone to risky activities than women (for rational evolutionary strategy reasons). What do you think?
Magicians (stage magicians, the card trick guys, the escape-artists) are nearly 100% guys. It's a form of courting behavior, just like being a bard. Humor also can come as a form of courting behavior, for guys (because a subset of women are more attracted to "brains" than pure physicality).
Women are less likely to be comedians, because men are statistically more interested in physical features of women, and less in "find someone who's witty and you can live with" (look at the difference between male-oriented pornography and romance novels.)
Look at Roseanne Barr -- she grew up in an apartment building with holocaust survivors. Her humor was a coping mechanism -- life's really dark, so let's find the funny.
You can say that higher intelligence leads to better humor potential. I think that's fair, but I don't think you want to say that the "successful humor writers" come from the very funniest members of the population. Maybe top 1%? Or top tenth of a percent? Tom Lehrer gave up on his "humor career" to go be a mathematician, after all.
Humor's a tough field, and if you have something else you're better at, you're probably doing that for a living (the number of "actually gets paid for their humor work" guys who Don't Work for the Federal Government is probably lower than you think).
One of my favorite examples of Nordic exceptionalism is that in three of the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, and Finland) tax records are just publicly available information—and Finland even has a thing that people call “national envy day”, when “every November, Finnish media publish the names of about 10,000 of the country's biggest earners, plus hundreds of celebrities and sports stars, making headlines with top 10 lists of the biggest tax payers.” I mean… lol what an extraordinary part of the world that is, in so so many different ways. Little article about this phenomenon:
Well, that's the Nordic countries. Way back before Ukraine became a dictatorship, their supreme court ruled that it was a constitutional right to lie on federal income taxes (it is not a good idea to trust people who do extensive business in the Ukraine).
At the start of this episode, you talked about the preponderance of men in your Komedy Klass submissions. This triggered two thoughts for me, one likely obvious to anyone with any knowledge of statistics, and one more speculative.
First, this would definitely explain the "women aren't funny" trope (which pisses off many people, because of course there are lots of hilarious female comedians), but it's a persistent perception that male comedians are funnier, and this would help explain that perception.
Even if you have a biased sample (if your audience skews male), so the ~20:1 ratio among your submissions does not reflect the population as a whole, it is still clear that a much larger proportion of men has an interest in creating comedy. If they are ~50/50 in the overall population there will be a much larger absolute pool of men creating comedy. If you have two populations that normally distributed in terms of humor ability, even if you have identical distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation), you will see two things when you're looking at the rightmost end of the distribution (the funniest people):
1) If you combine the two populations and you look at the right tail of that curve, it will be dominated by members of the larger population (men), so you expect a lot more very funny men than very funny women.
2) Looking at the populations separately, the most extreme members of the larger population will be more extreme than the most extreme members of the smaller population. That is, the very funniest men will be funnier than the very funniest women.
This doesn't even take into account the fact of greater male variability (on basically any trait the male distribution is wider than the female distribution), which would make it even more skewed towards men at the upper end. Of course, the population at the right tail of the curve is all that matters, because successful humor writers and comedians all come from the very funniest members of the population.
Second thought, and this is speculative. WHY would humor be of greater interest to men? It's certainly not my area of expertise, but since one major explanation I've read of humor is the "benign violation" theory, it feels like creating humor is a form of risk-taking (if someone perceives your violation as not being benign, they'll get mad). Men are much more prone to risky activities than women (for rational evolutionary strategy reasons). What do you think?
Magicians (stage magicians, the card trick guys, the escape-artists) are nearly 100% guys. It's a form of courting behavior, just like being a bard. Humor also can come as a form of courting behavior, for guys (because a subset of women are more attracted to "brains" than pure physicality).
Women are less likely to be comedians, because men are statistically more interested in physical features of women, and less in "find someone who's witty and you can live with" (look at the difference between male-oriented pornography and romance novels.)
Look at Roseanne Barr -- she grew up in an apartment building with holocaust survivors. Her humor was a coping mechanism -- life's really dark, so let's find the funny.
You can say that higher intelligence leads to better humor potential. I think that's fair, but I don't think you want to say that the "successful humor writers" come from the very funniest members of the population. Maybe top 1%? Or top tenth of a percent? Tom Lehrer gave up on his "humor career" to go be a mathematician, after all.
Humor's a tough field, and if you have something else you're better at, you're probably doing that for a living (the number of "actually gets paid for their humor work" guys who Don't Work for the Federal Government is probably lower than you think).
Dang, I assumed most of your audience was female. Now I feel special.
One of my favorite examples of Nordic exceptionalism is that in three of the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, and Finland) tax records are just publicly available information—and Finland even has a thing that people call “national envy day”, when “every November, Finnish media publish the names of about 10,000 of the country's biggest earners, plus hundreds of celebrities and sports stars, making headlines with top 10 lists of the biggest tax payers.” I mean… lol what an extraordinary part of the world that is, in so so many different ways. Little article about this phenomenon:
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/privacy-what-privacy-many-nordic-tax-records-are-a-phone-call-away-idUSKCN0X91S0/
Well, that's the Nordic countries. Way back before Ukraine became a dictatorship, their supreme court ruled that it was a constitutional right to lie on federal income taxes (it is not a good idea to trust people who do extensive business in the Ukraine).