Language ability and sex affect humor appreciation.

Subjects (63 men and 63 women) completed a humor appreciation scale and 20 trials on a word-recognition task using a divided visual field. Factor analysis extracted eight factors from the humor scale most of which differentiated subjects on the basis of liking for various humorous contents including disparagement and non-sense humor. Subsequent analyses showed that greater liking for specific types of humor was associated with basic language abilities. The results also support sex differences in humor preferences and Freud's tripartite taxonomy of humor contents.