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Gina Barreca has written several humor books with titles like “They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted” and “Perfect Husbands (And Other Fairy Tales).”
She doesn’t credit her success to her imagination.
“I don’t make anything up,” Barreca said. “If you listen closely, you don’t need to invent comedy. You just have to pay attention.”
Barreca spoke Wednesday at Packard Music Hall about the differences between what men and women find funny as part of the 2013-14 Trumbull Town Hall lecture series.
Women are told their whole lives they aren’t funny and have no sense of humor, but Barreca said that’s not true.
“Put three women together for more than 13 seconds, there’s gonna be laughter,” she said. “You always hear laughter in the women’s room.”
Growing up, she saw how the Italian women in her family and in her Brooklyn neighborhood would defer to the men when they were with them, but they had their own little jokes they would share among themselves when they were alone.
But men and women tend to have different approaches to humor.
“Women don’t tell jokes; women tell stories,” Barreca said. “If a woman says, ‘I have something to tell you,’ if you’re smart, you’ll sit down. You’re going to be there for a long, long time.”
And the old adage that men love “The Three Stooges” and women hate them highlights a more complex difference.
Just as the Stooges smack each other around physically, men often smack each other around verbally to express friendship. Barreca said her husband’s friends frequently will greet him with a crack about his baldness.
“We don’t go up to each other and say, ‘Mary, three months pregnant or going heavy on the gravy?’ We don’t do that,” Barreca said.
Instead, women greet each other with a compliment, which the recipient will deflect – if you tell her she looks good, she’ll tell you why she doesn’t. Barreca said it’s because of the ways women are conditioned by society.
“Women feel fat if they can’t fit into the jeans they wore in high school,” she said. “Men feel fat if they can’t fit into a foreign car.”
Toward the end of the lecture, Barreca read excerpts from some of her books, including a section rethinking some of those cliches accepted by most people as gospel, like “Grow where you are planted” or “Love is blind.” And one twist she is particularly proud of realizing is that “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” really should be that “Best friends are diamonds.”
“They’re resilient, made under pressure and extremely valuable.”