Humor and attraction: why funny people appeal

"Looking for someone who can make me laugh." Open twenty profiles on any dating app and you will find that line, or a close cousin, in roughly every second one. Sense of humor has been sitting near the top of partner-preference surveys for years, comfortably above education, height and shared hobbies.

The trouble is that the sentence says almost nothing. Two people can both write it, meet for coffee on a Tuesday and work out an hour later that one was expecting somebody to tell the stories and the other somebody to laugh at them. Same words, two completely different orders.

Two different things under one word

The Canadian psychologists Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine did something in 2006 that sounds trivial and changed the results anyway: in the context of choosing a partner they split humor into production and appreciation. The ability to come up with something funny on one side, the willingness to laugh at the other person on the other. Measured separately, the two turned out not to be wanted equally.

The gap in their data lined up partly with gender. Women paid more attention to who was producing the humor; men leaned toward a partner who laughed at theirs. An average from a study is no script for a particular evening, though, and the spread inside both groups is enormous, so treat it as a rough outline rather than a rule.

The practical fallout is nastier than it looks. When both of you tick the "has a sense of humor" box after a date, that can mean a match. It can also mean that one of you performed all evening and the other applauded, and neither role has to be a comfortable fit for long.

Why funniness pulls so hard in the first place is suggested by a separate line of research. In 2011 Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller had roughly four hundred students write funny responses and compared the results with ability tests. The students who managed genuinely funny answers scored higher on general and above all verbal intelligence. From that angle a joke is an expensive signal: producing one under pressure, in real time and on topic, cannot be learned by heart.

Jokes are not what settles a first date

Robert Provine spent years with a team listening to where and why people actually laugh. In his 2000 book Laughter he described two findings that make short work of the idea that laughter is a reward for a joke. First: laughter is about thirty times more likely in company than alone. Second: the vast majority of it does not follow jokes at all, but ordinary lines of the "so where did you leave it?" variety.

Laughter is therefore mostly a social signal, not a grade for a performance. On a date you are not rating how good a comedian is sitting across the table. You are finding out whether the two of you land on the same beat.

In 2015 Laura Kurtz and Sara Algoe watched couples in ordinary conversation and measured how much time they spent laughing together. The pairs who laughed together more reported better relationship quality. Which way the causation runs cannot be read off that, but as an indicator of being in tune it works well, and it works from the first meeting on.

Think of the last date you walked away from feeling good about. Now try to recall what exactly you laughed at. Most people get back an atmosphere rather than a punchline, and that gap is the whole difference between tuning and performing.

Which is bad news for anyone who preps before a date. A stockpiled story is detectable; it has a different shape, a different tempo, and above all it answers nothing said just before it. A joke that grows out of the situation at the table is weaker as a joke and stronger as a signal, because it proves the person was listening.

On apps, most of the first impression happens in writing, and there humor loses half its equipment. Tone, timing and face are all missing, so a dry remark reads as an insult on a screen and an exaggeration reads as a lie. People patch this intuitively with an emoji or a "lol", a set of instructions for how the sentence should be read. Skip it and trust it will land anyway, and you lose dates before they are ever arranged.

Style gives away more than any single line

Rod Martin's 2003 research sorted humor along two independent axes: whether it is warm or cutting, and whether it points outward at other people or inward at you. Four styles came out of it, they combine freely in one person, and the overview of the four humor styles takes them apart in detail. On a first date each of them behaves differently, because the thing that carries humor between people who are close is missing: a shared history.

Sharp humor on a first date is not the red flag it gets called. It is the least readable style, because needling between people who are close works as a sign of trust, and trust does not get built in ninety minutes. The difference between "I am teasing you because I like you" and "I am testing how much you can take" shows up mostly in where the edge is pointed: at the absurdity of the situation, at absent third parties, or steadily at one particular person at the table.

Self-mocking has the opposite problem. It disarms immediately, and on early dates it ranks among the most effective ways to drop the tension. One honest note belongs with it, though: it is the self-mocking style that in Martin's data goes with poorer wellbeing, and that holds for people who have made it their default setting, not for everyone who takes the occasional dig at themselves. Diagnosing that on a date is impossible and not your job either. What is worth noticing is whether the person has other registers, or is the only target all evening.

None of these styles is a verdict on character. They are settled habits, formed for one person in a school friendship group and unchanged since, for another in a family where serious things only ever got said as a joke. They can be read as information about where somebody came from, not as a grade.

When two registers miss each other

Daniel comments dryly and keeps a straight face. Hannah takes things literally and is used to doing so, because irony was not much practised at home. On their second date the kitchen kept them waiting an hour, and Daniel remarked that this was exactly why he had skipped lunch. Hannah started apologising, saying he should have mentioned it earlier and they could have gone somewhere else.

Three seconds of silence in which both knew that something had gone wrong and neither had any idea what. Daniel came away thinking she did not get him. Hannah came away thinking he was making fun of her and she could not see why. It was not a clash of characters, only a missing code.

Irony rests on an agreement that the content of the sentence is not meant seriously, and that agreement has to be signalled somehow. Between people who have known each other for years it rides on tone, on a flicker of a smile, or simply on experience. With a stranger there is nothing to read it from, so the deadpan ironist broadcasts into empty space and wonders why it does not land. Sarcasm carries the same problem with a sting attached: it needs a target as well as a code.

The opposite mismatch exists too, where two people are on the same wavelength a bit too much. Two sharp commentators enjoy the first three dates as a shootout and only work out six months later that they have never said anything serious, because every attempt got knocked down by a punchline. A matched register is an advantage while you are getting to know someone, not a guarantee for the years after.

The fix is duller than expected: the signal can be turned up and the other side can be taught to read it. For the first month Daniel can add half a second of eye contact after a dry remark, and Hannah can learn to wait one breath before taking him literally. Whether that adjustment is worth making and how long it holds is what the piece on how humor works in a relationship after the first months goes into. Mismatched styles are the rule in long-term couples rather than the exception.

Register can be widened, funniness cannot be rushed

The honest answer to "can anything be done about it" comes in two parts and only one of them is pleasant. Funniness as the ability to produce punchlines under pressure is built largely on things that will not change in a month, namely the speed of your thinking and your vocabulary. It can be trained, but on a scale of years, not by Saturday.

The second part is more usable. Register, the range of settings you can reach for, widens fairly quickly. Someone who only knows how to needle can learn to tell a story. Someone who only knows how to put themselves down can try letting their own enthusiasm into the conversation without an apology at the end. The exercises for that, and the myths around them, are in the piece on how to be funny when it does not come naturally.

What helps most is a different skill from inventing lines: noticing what the other person laughs at. You can map somebody's register in twenty minutes, cheaper information than anything they will tell you about themselves. Where you stand on those two axes, and what you carry into first dates, is what the short humor styles test will suggest.

On your next date, try to catch one thing: who laughs first, and whether the other one joins in or waits. That small detail about how the roles get split often says more than an hour of conversation. And if the evening passes without a single laugh, it does not have to mean that one of you is unfunny. Fairly often it just means you were each waiting for the other role.