“Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated …”

. . . only if you believe the media-stereotypes and don’t know any conservatives first-hand. Both of which, of course, are true for many who have spent their entire lives in the academy. So this article in today’s New York Times didn’t strike me as particularly surprising at all. The results, however, surprised the researchers:

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”