How the New Yorker’s Caption Contest Relates to Mating Success

Uh oh, they figured out that men are funnier than women because women can’t write funny enough captions to New Yorker cartoons.

In this study, 400 university students (200 men and 200 women) completed measures of abstract reasoning (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices), verbal intelligence (the vocabulary subtest of the Multidimensional Aptitude Battery), humor production ability (rated funniness of captions written for three cartoons), and mating success (from the Sexual Behaviors and Beliefs Questionnaire). […]

This study confirmed three predictions derived from a sexual selection model of humor: intelligence predicts humor ability, humor ability predicts mating success, and males show higher average humor ability.

I bought the article so I could see the cartoons they used, but all they said was that “Participants were given three cartoons without captions from the New Yorker magazine’s cartoon caption contest (cartoons were at least one year old to reduce the possibility of familiarity)” and that the challenge was to “write as many funny captions as they could, for all cartoons, in 10 min.” Later, “six judges (four men and two women, all students) rated the funniness of each caption on a scale from 1 (‘not funny at all’) to 7 (‘very funny’),” and that no one should stress, because “[t]his open-ended humor production is a reasonably valid measure of spontaneous humor ability.” The current caption contest is above if you want to demonstrate your mating skills.

[Via]