Attract Women with Humor

What do you think women seek in men?

Intelligence? Physical attractiveness? Sophistication? Wealth? Religion?

All of these matter but one thing rises above them all; humor.

Humor will attract women above all else.

A sense of humor is critical for men in the dating arena.

A recent blog post by eHarmony indicated that humor is the overall number one trait a match must have.

If you don’t think humor is important guess again.

Humor and Female Attraction

Humor will attract women beginning at a young age.

Even in adolescence, humor is important to females. The study “Ideal Partner Preferences Among Adolescents” found for adolescent girls, attributes such as intelligence and humor, were very important to girls when they were instructed to indicate their preferences for various characteristics in an ideal long-term partner.

In 2006, the study “Mate selection criteria: A trait desirability assessment study of sex differences in Serbia” found that female college students, asked to evaluate the degree of desirability of sixty behavioral and personality traits in a potential mate, focused less on the partner’s physical appearance and were more concerned with “socioeconomic” status and “mental” attributes, including sense of humor.

The study “Heterosexual romantic preferences: The importance of humor and physical attractiveness for different types of relationships” found that male targets who used self-ridiculing humor were rated by women as more desirable than similar individuals who did not use humor.

These and several other studies show that men who exhibit a sense of humor and who use humor in their social interactions attract women.

In all of these studies the women were instructed to read information about a target and then make a choice or to evaluate the target on several personality traits.

However one study analyzed how humor can attract women with a different approach.

The study examined whether a sense of humor exhibited by a man is associated with having greater desirability to a woman he approaches after she had the opportunity to overhear him.

Impact of Jokes to Attract Women

The study, Men’s sense of humor and women’s responses to courtship solicitations: an experimental field study, analyzed humor and it’s ability to attract women.

In the study 60 women, who were approximately 20 – 26 years old, were alone and seated in a chair in a sidewalk area in front of different bars in France. The study didn’t say the specific town but did indicate it’s on the western part of France and is a popular tourist area.

3 men were used in the study. They would wait for a young woman to sit alone and would sit at a table near her and have humorous conversations and non-humorous conversations. Specific jokes were used in the humorous conversations. The jokes used on the women were not “crude” or “sexual” in nature.

In both conversations (humorous and non-humorous) the men were instructed to discuss their summer jobs for 3 minutes. The conversations were always the same for the first 3 minutes and then one of the men would say “That’s enough talk about work: I’ve got some good jokes to tell” and would proceed to tell 3 jokes.

Here are three jokes used in the experiment:

JOKE 1
Two friends were talking:

“Say, buddy, could you loan me 100 Euros?”
“Well, you know I only have 60 on me.”
“Ok, give me what you got and you’ll only owe me 40.”

JOKE 2
A young teacher is interviewing for a position. He is asked “Can you give me three reasons why you wanted to be a teacher?”

The interviewee promptly answers: “December, June, and July.”

JOKE 3
A little boy asks his dad, “What’s a bank?”

His dad answers: “It’s a place where you put your money for awhile, before the IRS takes it all away.”

The three jokes were told loud enough for the woman to hear them. After the jokes were told, two of the men would leave the table. The guy who remained at the table was the one who told the jokes.

He would then get up, approach the woman and say this “Hello. My name’s Antione. I noticed you when I arrived here. I just want to say that I think you’re pretty. I have an appointment now, but I was wondering if you might give me your phone number. I could phone you later, and we could have a drink together someplace to get to know each other.”

At this point the woman would either give the man her number or wouldn’t.

Below are the results from the study. You can see that women were nearly 3 times as likely to give the man her number if they overheard the jokes versus not overhearing the jokes.

The study found that a man who used humor was perceived more favorably by young women who had the opportunity to hear him.

When the guy asked the woman for her number, the likelihood she would give her number was increased.

Conclusion

It’s clear that humor is critical to attract women.

The studies above clearly show that humor is an important trait for men. The study where women overheard jokes is an interesting approach.

A limitation I see is that only one type of humor was used. The jokes were about other people. I am curious how self-depreciating humor would work. Hopefully there will be further studies on this.

Either way, give it a shot. You got nothing to lose.

Be careful with the type of humor you use to attract women though. The study “Reactions to Heterosexual Opening Gambits Female Selectivity and Male Responsiveness” found that women approached by a man using a cute opening line that could be classified as sexual humor (“You remind me of someone I used to date”, “Bet I can out-drink you”) responded more negatively than when they were approached with an non-offensive opening line (“Hi”, “What do you think of the band?”).

Choose your humor wisely if you go that route.