If men are funnier than women, then it’s not by much — and mostly just to other men. Such is the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, who judged comic wit by asking students to write original captions for New Yorker cartoons.⁠ Setting aside the fact that writing New Yorker cartoon captions is notoriously difficult, even for people who do funny for a living, and setting aside the question of whether caption-writing is really the best barometer of “funny” in the natural world, researchers asked 32 undergrads, split evenly between males and females, to come up with captions for 20 cartoons in 45 minutes and “to be as funny as possible.”⁠ ⁠ The 640 resulting captions were then judged in a series of knockout contests. For each cartoon, the captions were randomly paired up and pitted against each other (the writers were kept anonymous), with readers — 34 male and 47 female students — choosing the funnier of each successive pair. Round 1 inclu...