Gender and humor: The state of the art

This article presents an overview of the topic of gender and humor. Humor is seen as situated discursive practice. I discuss the marginalization of women's humor in everyday life, in scientific models, and in theories of humor. I identify four dimensions of joking as specially sensitive to gender: status, aggressiveness, social alignment, and sexuality. For these four areas, I summarize research from the fifties up to the present, which illustrates historical changes in the gender order of humor. Gender still influences humor, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. In specific humorous activities, a particular type of femininity and/or masculinity can be stylized. Stereotypes in joke content can bring gender issues to the foreground of attention – in an affirmative or in a subversive way. In order to show some potentials of feminist humor, I discuss a sketch by a German stand-up comedian, in which a woman turns the tables on a colleague's sexual advances by reversing traditional behavior patterns.