Women and men both appreciate humor, but not in same way, according to new research which showed funny cartoons to both sexes, with wires stuck in their brains. It turns out men will laugh at anything. But women check to see if it’s really funny first. Or something.

Women were subjecting humor to more analysis with the aim of determining if it was indeed funny, Reiss said in a telephone interview. Men are using the same network in the brain, but less so, he said, men are less discriminating. “It doesn’t take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny,” he commented when asked about humor like the Three Stooges.

While there is a lot of overlap between how men and women process humor, the differences can help account for the fact that men gravitate more to one-liners and slapstick while women tend to use humor more in narrative form and stories, Reiss said.

The funny cartoon study was paid for by the National Institutes of Health. I think that’s pretty funny, but I’m a man.