The nerds at Live Science found a talk delivered to the APA which discovered the obvious:
Humor increases male attractiveness to women.
But they also found that the effect was not as significant when it came to female attractiveness being bolstered by humor. That’s another instance when Good Charlotte was right.
This provided the most food for thought:
In addition, people who were deemed less funny were also found to be less attractive than their ratings from the researchers.
“If you weren’t funny, you were definitely perceived as being less attractive, so that’s a word of warning,” Doerksen added.
I suspect that there’s a feedback loop here. Handsome men and beautiful women can get away with less funny jokes while still being perceived as funny. And ugly men can more effectively overcome their ugliness with humor than can unattractive women.
As a self-referencing aside, my wife found my sense of humor to be one of her favorite aspects of me when we were getting to know each other and appreciates it to this day. And when I was a barista in my early twenties I got a lot of tips from women in their thirties and forties, comparable to the tips that the prettier lady baristas got from older men trying to impress them.
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