"A guy who can make me laugh can get into my pants," my friend Karen tells me the other day.
And here men are wasting all that money buying us drinks and spending all that energy on deep meaningful conversation over expensive, long dinners.
Turns out, we just want ya to make us laugh.
"I will take a guy who can make you laugh over a good-looking guy any day," my friend Sarah agrees.
I have to admit, I couldn't date a guy who didn't make me laugh. It's as simple as that. And I'm obviously not the only one. On practically every list of what women want in a man, a sense of humour is number one, or not far from it.
A People magazine poll from a while back that claims that of the 47,000 women interviewed, 42 per cent said that a sense of humour was the number one thing they look for in a man. Sensitivity ranked second, followed by intelligence, good looks and money.
Okay, true, it's hard to spot sense of humour across the room -- "Wow, look at him, doesn't he look funny?" -- but there's gotta be some reason Woody Allen manages to get laid.
Laughter is not only the best medicine, but it makes a fine aphrodisiac as well.
As Karen puts it, "If he tickles my funny bone, chances are I'll let him tickle the rest of me, too."
A male friend of mine clued into this when he saw the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
"Everyone wondered why this babe Jessica Rabbit would go for a guy like Roger Rabbit," Rick tells me. "Her answer: 'He makes me laugh.' At that moment I thought to myself, hell, if I can bag a Jessica Rabbit with my sense of humour, then all the suffering I went through in high school is worth it."
Sure enough, this guy is now in a happy relationship with a woman who absolutely loves his sense of humour and admits it's one of the things that drew her to him.
Oddly, a sense of humour usually ranks further down a man's list of what he's looking for in a lady -- usually somewhere after her looks and "gives good head" or something like that. In my experience, many men are also often uncomfortable with women who are funnier than they are.
Maybe guys are simply more honest about what they want. But the lab coats think maybe, just maybe, evolution has something to do with why women go for guys who elicit a giggle.
***
A group of researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee gathered men and women to sit around and watch funny movies together, then studied their reactions.
They found that people use laughter to influence how others feel about them. "Much like eye contact or moving closer to someone," says Jo-Anne Bachorowski an assistant professor of psychology who helped conduct the study, "we unconsciously use laughter to shape the emotional and behavioural responses of others."
In fact, people laugh differently depending on who they're with. The study found that women in particular laughed more frequently and with a higher pitch when they were in the company of a male stranger.
According to the researchers, high-pitched sounds like extreme laughter cause arousal in another person. So if a guy can get a gal laughing it's a good sign he makes her feel relaxed enough to let her guard down and show him that she's into to him.
"Laughing can act as a subtle permission to pursue the female," says Bachorowski. When a woman isn't into a guy or sees him as threatening, she'll hold back her girlish giggle, the researchers add.
