Scientists recently came a step closer to explaining one of the great mysteries of life: Why it is that, generally speaking, men love the Three Stooges while women hate them.

The answer just might lie in the brain scans of 10 men and 10 women taken while they looked at single-box cartoons - the kind with a black and white drawing and a caption underneath. Analyzing the scans, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine discovered several important things about the difference between a man's sense of humor and a woman's.

First, while men and women agreed upon which cartoons were funny and which weren't, women were a lot faster to decide something wasn't funny in the first place. Too, the women's brains were more active in language processing and executive function than the men's were. This meant that women analyzed the joke more than men did. The scientists theorized this indicates men start out thinking a joke is going to be funny while women don't.

The most interesting finding, though, was that when a woman did find a joke amusing, the reward center in her brain lit up - the same place that ignites if you make a lot of money or if a drug-user gets a rush from cocaine. The funnier the joke, the more it lit up. It's not that the women found the jokes more amusing than the men did, but that the women seemed

surprised to find themselves amused in the first place.

Dr. Allan Reiss, who led the research team, believes the study gives some insight into why men like slapstick humor more than women do. Asked about the popularity of the Three Stooges, he said, "It doesn't take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny."

I seem to belong to that minority of women who actually like the Three Stooges. I suspect it may be because as a small child in the dark ages of children's television, I clocked as many hours with Moe, Larry and Curly as I did with my grandmother. And while I was never big on all the eye-gouging and nose-twisting, I liked the chaos and the ridiculous plots.

I recently asked a group of acquaintances, male and female, about their opinions of the Stooges, to see if the theory that most women hate them and most men love them held up. It did. I am sadly in the minority of Stooges-loving women.

But I got some insight into why it is that boys (and I, for that matter) like them so much - it's precisely because they're so annoying.

As my friend Robert put it: "I loved the Three Stooges when I was 10 years old. . . . I'm not quite sure it's accurate to say I found the Three Stooges funny, though. What my friends and I found funny was driving the adults in our lives crazy by running around the house all day going Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. 'Have you done your homework?''Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.' It still cracks me up."

Me, too.

(Monitor columnist Hillary Nelson lives in Canterbury.)

------ End of article

By HILLARY NELSON