ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP (01/14/84)
#N:ucbesvax:10300029:000:13086
ucbesvax!turner Jan 7 18:46:00 1984
.TL
Sex Differences in Aggressive Joking
.AU
Dorothy Fain
.AB
This study investigates the question of whether sex differences in
aggressive joking mirror the hierarchical pattern of status differences in
aggressive joking found by Rose Laub Coser (1959). A comparison was made be
tween aggressive jokes in two conversations: one conversation between three
female subjects, and one conversation between the same three female subjects
and an additional three male subjects. The jokes were compared in
a categorization by sex of initiator and sex of target. Percentages for
each category were tallied separately by sex of initiator. Response to
aggressive joking was also investigated by finding the percentage of jokes
in each category that were responded to by each sex.
.AE
.SH
Introduction
.PP
This study is an attempt to look at sex differences in aggressive
joking, and particularly to see if they follow Rose Laub Coser's findings
on status differences ("Laughter Among Colleagues," 1959). Coser
looked at aggressive joking, as well as other forms of humor, that took
place at a mental hospital. She describes aggressive jokes as follows:
"Most of the witticisms--86 out of 103--that were made at the staff
meetings were directed at some target: a patient, a patient's relatives,
an other member of the staff, or the self" (p.83). I would also like to
define aggressive jokes simply as jokes that have human beings as targets,
although in this case targets will be analyzed in respect to sex
differences rather than status differences.
.PP
There are two aspects of Coser's findings I would like to compare
with mine. She concluded that "in a hierarchical social structure they
(aggressive jokes) seem to be released downward" (p. 86). This conclusion
is partly ascribed to a need for permission from the audience in the
execution of an aggressive joke: "Those who are `on top' have more right
to be the aggressors; those who are low in the hierarchy are not as freely
permitted this outlet, even if it appears under the disguise of humour"
(p. 85). If this is true for sex differences also, one would expect more
male humor directed against women.
.PP
Coser also mentions that "The hostility that seems to accompany
subordinate positions may very well find its outlet in humour in other
situations--for example, informal gatherings--in which status hierarchy is
either absent or negligible." (p. 84). If this is true for sex differences,
women would be expected to direct more humor against men when they are
absent. In this case, permission to execute aggressive jokes would
be assumed to be either implicitly given or unnecessary.
.PP
In addition to attempting to determine whether my data follow these
patterns, I will look at sex differences in response to joking behavior,
and compare my results to those of Cathryn Davies' "`Cooperative Joking'
in Couple Counseling: an Exploration into the Sociolinguistics of Humor"
(1981). There are some clear differences between Davies' study and mine;
her study looks at joking as an "interactional discourse process," while
I have used Coser's definition of "humorous episodes": "in which laughter
was a response to an intended provocation" (p. 82). Also, Davies' examples
are of "cooperative" joking: "a discourse process which seems to offer
evidence that people are `tuned in' to each other." My study looks at
aggressive joking, the "joking processes which seem to be essentially
competitive," that Davies avoids. The response factor, however, is not an
issue in Coser's paper, while it is an important aspect of Davies' study:
"the male counselee gets cooperated with about twice as often as the female
does." I felt that in spite of the essential differences between her
study and mine, it would be interesting to see if my results were similar
to Davies' in this respect.
.SH
Method
.PP
I taped three conversations to use as data for this study: one
conversation between three men and three women that lasted two hours, and
two conversations between three women, one lasting a half-hour and one
lasting one and a half hours. All the participants are middle class,
Caucasian, and in their early 20's; all are students or recent graduates of
the University of California at Berkeley, and have known each other for
2-4 years. I am using initials to conceal the identies of my subjects,
but I will not conceal the fact that I am a participant in my own study,
which introduces issues of methodology which I will discuss below.
.PP
The male-female conversation took place at an apartment where one
female subject (H., in the transcripts) and the three male subjects lived.
The half-hour conversation took place at a dinner party at my house, and
the one and a half hour conversation took place over coffee at the third
female subject's apartment. The fact that there are two conversations for
the female group and only one for the mixed group is an unavoidable
discrepancy, but since I did not find any relevant dissimilarities in the
data collected from the two women's conversations, I have chosen to treat
them as one set of data.
.PP
The transcriptions of the conversations are limited to joking behavior,
intended jokes that are responded to with speech and/or laughter by
participants other than the initiator. In transcribing I have used
some of Davies' notation, but my basic format is vertical rather than
horizontal because this seemed most convenient for the number of subjects
involved.
.PP
The joking samples (360 total, 102 in the women's group and 248 in the
mixed group) were categorized according to these variables: aggressive and
non-aggressive, sex of initiator, sex of responder, sex of target of
aggressive joking, and whether the target was present or absent. In order
to categorize a joke as aggressive, I decided, as participant and researcher,
whether the joke was aimed at, or "about", another person. Because
of the large number of my examples, and the relative simplicity of the
categories I imposed on them in my analysis, I did not consider it necessary
to play my examples back to the other participants to collect their
judgments on what they said. I am not measuring the degree of aggressive
feeling in my examples, nor in fact concerning myself with the feelings
of my subjects at all, except as to whether they discernibly made jokes
of a certain variety or responded to others' jokes with laughter. Therefore,
I believe that the nature of this study renders it unnecessary to
document others' reactions to the tapes.
.PP
However, I am certainly taking liberties with the scientific method,
to the extent that I cannot call this a strictly quantitative study.
At the outset, I saw little possibility of conducting a study of this
nature without a certain degree of bias. My goal was to conduct it simply
enough that my methods could be evaluated with respect to my results as
easily as possible.
.PP
The number of samples in each category were converted to a percentage
of the total number of aggressive jokes in each group, except in the
comparison of men's and women's choice of targets in the mixed group.
Here, I computed two different sets of percentages: percentages of total
aggressive jokes initiated by both sexes, and percentages of aggressive
jokes initiated by either men or women only.
.SH
Results
.PP
This separation of pools of results brought to light an interesting
discrepancy. Since the women did less joking overall, and only 37% of
the aggressive joking, they did less aggressive joking than men in all
categories, when samples are tallied as percentages of the whole (except,
notably, in joking about men present and self-deprecating joking).
However, when the percentages for men and women are computed separately,
there are considerably fewer sex differences. The expected result was
that women would still joke about the men less than the men joked about
the women, but this was not the case. The men joke about the women
present the same amount (40%) as the women joke about the men present,
indicating that there is little of the status difference expected in a
parallel of Coser's results.
.PP
Also, the men joke about the other men present more than three times
more often than the women joke about the other women present. And the
women joke about the men present more than five times the amount they
joke about the other women present, or themselves. This is certainly a
sex difference that does not parallel the status difference found by Coser.
It looks as if the men have a different technique from the women in their joking
amongst each other, since aggressive joking is clearly more acceptable.
However, it would be difficult to investigate this phenomenon with a study
of this kind.
.PP
When comparing joking behavior of women in the mixed group to women
alone, however, the results do follow Coser's analysis. To begin with,
the percentage of aggressive joking in the women's group (63%) is slightly
higher than that of men in the mixed group (56%). The percentage of jokes
about men (44%) is more than twice as high as the percentage of women's
jokes about both the absent and present men in the mixed group (19.5%).
This shows that aggressive joking about men is considered less permissable
in the presence of men. One unforseen result, however, is that women's
joking about each other and themselves is considerably higher in the women's
group than in the mixed group. Perhaps this is because aggressive
joking about women is also more permissable when men are not present.
.PP
The sex differences in responses to joking are disturbing. The
women respond more than twice as much as the men overall, while the men
initiate joking more than twice as much as the women. Even more disturbing
is the comparison of responses to aggressive joking. Men's responses
to women's aggressive joking are negligible, while women's responses
to men are as high or higher than men's responses in all categories.
Most worrying of all was that the highest percentage of responses (11%)
was in women's responses to men's jokes that targeted the women present.
This does not betoken a good self-image for the female subjects.
.PP
Clearly, there is a discrepancy between sex differences and status
differences in joking. Coser's model for status differences in joking
are followed only in the respect that women do more aggressive joking,
especially about men, by themselves than in a mixed group. Although women
make considerably fewer aggressive jokes in a mixed group than men, the
quality of joking was fairly similar when considered in proportion to the
amount of joking women did.
.PP
The results on responsive behavior are more sex-typed. Women do tend
to respond to men more than women (except when joking about men present),
and men hardly respond to women's aggressive joking at all. This ties in
with the issue of permissibility that was brought up in connection with
the results on aggressive joking. If there is less aggressive joking by
women as well as little response to women's aggressive jokes in the mixed
group, then permission is the main factor involved. This, of course,
assumes that response and permission are equivalent. But this is not a
new assumption; it was one of Coser's first statements in her paper that
"Humour invites laughter, as a mark of its acceptance. If some group
members fail to respond, they indicate rejection of the humourist, as well
as of those who understand and feel with him" (p. 81).
.PP
These results are similar to the results in Davies' paper: "...the
men direct their cooperation more toward each other than toward the women,
and the women direct all of their contributions to the men." This is not
an exact parallel, but the lack of reinforcement of women is a key factor
in both sets of results. Indeed, the similarities between men's and
women's aggressive joking when considered in proportion to the amount of
joking suggests that a differential response may be the main factor in the
creation of the sex differences that were found. Further study would be
necessary to determine whether this is true, but it is an important issue
to be resolved.
.SH
Conclusions
.PP
The pattern of sex differences in aggressive joking does not follow the
pattern of status differences in aggressive joking found by Coser. A com
parison was made of aggressive jokes initiated by women, targeting men,
to aggressive jokes initiated by men, targeting women. It was shown that
the two categories have the same percentage when tallied from the total
aggressive jokes initiated by each group individually, although women do
less aggressive joking overall. Responses to aggressive joking were found
to show more of a sex difference: men responded to women's aggressive jo
king remarkably less than women responded to men's aggressive joking. It
was suggested that the lower level of aggressive joking by women overall
was causally related to the lower level of response to aggressive joking
by women.