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Influence of gender on the evaluation of anecdotes
Prchlíková, Klára
Linguists have focused on humor and its typical genre, anecdotes, for a relatively long period of time. Czech linguistics analyzed mainly formal aspects of anecdotes, especially linguistic means (Bečka, 1946; Komárek, 1992). But anecdotes are not only text, they have also their place in communication. Abroad therefore much research was conducted on the evaluation of anecdotes, while special attention was repeatedly taken into account the effect of gender on this evaluation. One of the recent research was conducted in the USA by Abel and Flick (2012). The results of their research showed that women and men evaluated sexist anecdotes differently: both women and men deemed as funnier jokes directed towards the opposite sex. To compare the results of this research with my own research conducted on Czech speakers, I created two versions of the questionnaire, which contained 24 anecdots of different kinds (basis of humor: verbal, situational, absurd jokes; overall impression: positive, negative jokes; form: conversational jokes, riddles etc.). These anecdotes were evaluated on a scale not funny – very funny. It turned out that both women and men deem as funnier anecdotes directed towards the opposite sex, which corresponds to the results from Abel and Flick (2012). The questionnaire survey also showed that men compared to women assessed as funnier vulgar jokes and anecdotes from the field of black humor.
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