Skip to main content

Don’t Take It Personally: Analyzing Gender and Age Differences in Ratings of Online Humor

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Social Informatics (SocInfo 2022)

Abstract

Computational humor detection systems rarely model the subjectivity of humor responses, or consider alternative reactions to humor - namely offense. We analyzed a large dataset of humor and offense ratings by male and female annotators of different age groups. We find that women link these two concepts more strongly than men, and they tend to give lower humor ratings and higher offense scores. We also find that the correlation between humor and offense increases with age. Although there were no gender or age differences in humor detection, women and older annotators signalled that they did not understand joke texts more often than men. We discuss implications for computational humor detection and downstream tasks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/amoudgl/short-jokes-dataset.

References

  1. Basile, V., et al.: SemEval-2019 task 5: multilingual detection of hate speech against immigrants and women in twitter. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pp. 54–63 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bell, N.D.: Responses to incomprehensible humor. J. Pragmat. 57, 176–189 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Bischetti, L., Canal, P., Bambini, V.: Funny but aversive: a large-scale survey of the emotional response to Covid-19 humor in the Italian population during the lockdown. Lingua 249, 102963 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Castro, S., Chiruzzo, L., Rosá, A.: Overview of the HAHA task: humor analysis based on human annotation at IberEval 2018. In: IberEval@ SEPLN, pp. 187–194 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chiruzzo, L., Castro, S., Etcheverry, M., Garat, D., Prada, J.J., Rosá, A.: Overview of haha at IberEval 2019: humor analysis based on human annotation. In: IberLEF@ SEPLN (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Excell, E., Moubayed, N.A.: Towards equal gender representation in the annotations of toxic language detection. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pp. 55–65 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ferstl, E.C., Israel, L., Putzar, L.: Humor facilitates text comprehension: evidence from eye movements. Discourse Process. 54(4), 259–284 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Friedman, M.: The use of ranks to avoid the assumption of normality implicit in the analysis of variance. J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 32(200), 675–701 (1937)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Haidt, J., Lukianoff, G.: The coddling of the American mind: how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin UK (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hofmann, J., Platt, T., Lau, C., Torres-Marín, J.: Gender differences in humor-related traits, humor appreciation, production, comprehension, (neural) responses, use, and correlates: a systematic review. Curr. Psychol. 1–14 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hossain, N., Krumm, J., Gamon, M., Kautz, H.: SemEval-2020 task 7: assessing humor in edited news headlines. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.00304 (2020)

  12. Knegtmans, H., Van Dijk, W.W., Mooijman, M., Van Lier, N., Rintjema, S., Wassink, A.: The impact of social power on the evaluation of offensive jokes. Humor 31(1), 85–104 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Köhler, G., Ruch, W.: Sources of variance in current sense of humor inventories: how much substance, how much method variance? (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Kuipers, G.: The humor divide: class, age and humor styles. In: Good Humor, Bad Taste, pp. 71–101. De Gruyter Mouton (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Lockyer, S., Pickering, M.: Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour. Springer, London (2005). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236776

    Book  Google Scholar 

  16. Meaney, J.: Crossing the line: where do demographic variables fit into humor detection? In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pp. 176–181 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Meaney, J., Wilson, S., Chiruzzo, L., Lopez, A., Magdy, W.: SemEval 2021 task 7: hahackathon, detecting and rating humor and offense. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021), pp. 105–119 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Potash, P., Romanov, A., Rumshisky, A.: SemEval-2017 task 6:# hashtagwars: learning a sense of humor. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017), pp. 49–57 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Prabhakaran, V., Davani, A.M., Diaz, M.: On releasing annotator-level labels and information in datasets. In: Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop, pp. 133–138 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Proyer, R.T., Ruch, W.: Enjoying and fearing laughter: personality characteristics of gelotophobes, gelotophiles, and katagelasticists. Psychol. Test Assess. Model. 52(2), 148–160 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Ruch, W.: The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic, vol. 3. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Silva, L., Mondal, M., Correa, D., Benevenuto, F., Weber, I.: Analyzing the targets of hate in online social media. In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 10 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Spearman, C.: The proof and measurement of association between two things. Am. J. Psychol. 15(1), 72–101 (1904)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Svebak, S., Martin, R.A., Holmen, J.: The prevalence of sense of humor in a large, unselected county population in Norway: relations with age, sex, and some health indicators (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Vallat, R.: Pingouin: statistics in python. J. Open Source Softw. 3(31), 1026 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Wilcoxon, F.: Individual comparisons by ranking methods. In: Biometrics Bulletin, no. 6, vol. 1, pp. 80–83 (1945). http://www.jstor.org/stable/3001968

  27. Zampieri, M., et al.: SemEval-2020 task 12: multilingual offensive language identification in social media (OffensEval 2020). arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07235 (2020)

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/L016427/1) and the University of Edinburgh.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to J. A. Meaney .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Meaney, J.A., Wilson, S.R., Chiruzzo, L., Magdy, W. (2022). Don’t Take It Personally: Analyzing Gender and Age Differences in Ratings of Online Humor. In: Hopfgartner, F., Jaidka, K., Mayr, P., Jose, J., Breitsohl, J. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13618. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-19096-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-19097-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics