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Laughter

Women need four animals: a mink on their back, a jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bedroom, and a jackass to pay for it all.

—
OLD JOKE

Two veteran seductresses, Lisa and Carol, are chatting with me over wine spritzers about their old lovers. Lisa brings up a high school flame: “Johnny H!” she says. “He was short and unattractive by traditional standards. My god, though, he was ‘The Man.’ He was funny with that ability to laugh at himself . . .”

Carol breaks in, “Like Ben! You remember the one I was with for nine years? I wouldn’t call
him
,” she air-quotes, “ ‘especially attractive.’ But
whooza
, he had this tremendous sense of humor. Some of the most wonderful times in bed are when you start giggling and laughing over something. And you just lose it.”

Lisa slaps her hand on the table. “I think laughter
is
an orgasm.”

For women the funny bone is a high-volt erogenous zone. A good sense of humor, say researchers, is “the single most effective tactic men can use to attract women,” and a standard request on female dating sites. If a woman laughs at a date’s conversation, the greater her desire to see him again, and if she thinks her husband is witty, the more satisfied she is with her marriage. “Make her laugh at something,” advised thinkers from the Middle Ages on, “women delight in hearing nothing else.”

There’s logic in women’s desire for mirth: they may get a bigger kick out of verbal humor. In a Stanford University study of humor, researchers found greater activity in the language areas of the female brain than the male brain, as well as higher levels of stimulation in the mesolimbic region, the site of euphoria. Men who amuse women also advertise cognitive fitness. A witty conversationalist exhibits social prowess, self-confidence, adaptability, empathy, energy, and creative intelligence. And he’s less likely to bore a lady, short or long term.

Humor, too, is just plain sexy. “What is more seductive,” writes philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “than a stroke of wit?” Or wordplay, jokes, and “linguistic zaniness” in general? A corny one-liner like a mistyped hospital note—“Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized”—will go further with the cute doctor than a black Amex. Comedy weakens inhibitions, excites through incongruity and surprise, releases endorphins, and creates intimacy. When we laugh, we shake off culturally imposed shackles and thumb our noses at civilization and its discontents. Comedy, by nature, notes critic Susanne Langer, is transgressive and erotic—“sensual, impious, and even wicked.”

Laughter wells up, Langer contends, from ancient fertility rites and the celebration of cosmic vitality. Dionysus, the mythic founder of comedy, was accompanied by a troupe of funnymen: satyrs and assorted pranksters. Hermes was an incorrigible joker whose jests “tricked the mind, even of the wise,” while his Norse counterpart, Loki, clowned through the Eddas, acquiring two wives and numerous mistresses. They’re members of a Trickster brotherhood, fabled for channeling irrational impulses and seducing women with their impious humor. Don Juan, the “
burlador
” (trickster) of Seville, snared women with his outrageous ruses and wit, and in one version of the story, left them “limp with laughter.”

Time and again, ladies’ men loot hearts with laughter. Will Ladislaw, the sprite-like artist of George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
, lures Dorothea away from her husband with his seductive “merriment.” After a dreary dispute with the morose Casaubon, Dorothea encounters Will in Rome, who steals her affections with his humor and hilarious account of their first meeting. Mary Stanger, on the other hand, has the prince of fiancés, a devoted, handsome financier in Somerset Maugham’s
Up at the Villa
. But the witty Rowley Flint laughs him off the stage. On a moonlit drive through Tuscany, Rowley mocks the stiff banker with such comic panache that Mary giggles uncontrollably and changes plans.

A “hero should make the heroine laugh,” commands Leslie Wainger, a Harlequin book editor, “laughter is sexy.” Except for a contingent of tortured viscounts and sullen bikers, popular Romeos show women the funny. Reginald Davenport of
The Rake
hooks his lovely estate manager, Lady Alys, with humor, spoofing her recommendation for a new crop: “One of nature’s major puzzles,” he grins, “is the mangy mangel-wurzel.” As Alys cracks up, she thinks “how intimate shared laughter could be.”

Shared, too, in many romances is the comic script. Contrary to the cliché of women as humor appreciators and men as generators, the hero and heroine trade sallies as equals in heated erotic exchanges. In Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s
Fancy Pants
, the protagonists go toe to toe in a battle of wits. The tart-tongued Francesca Day escapes a porn movie set and bums a ride from a droll pro-golfer, Dallie Beaudine. Throughout the Southern golf circuit, they lob wisecracks and gibes, until they end up parked beside a swamp. He ribs her about gators that feed in the night, she sasses him back, then they’re on the trunk of his Riviera, with her foot on the license plate while she cries, “Oh yes . . . Yes. Dallie!”

Casanova, a noted wit, knew well that Venus is the laughter-loving goddess. Trained in improvisational comedy, he regarded humor as his defense against despair and as his entrée to women. An early starter, he charmed his mother at eleven with a racy aperçu. Asked by a guest why
cunnus
(vagina) was masculine and
mantula
(penis) feminine, he replied, “It is because the slave takes his name from his master.” As a teenager, he parlayed his humor into the good graces of a Venetian grandee, Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, who installed him in his palazzo and introduced him to his circle of women. Casanova’s raillery, however, ran away with him. Seated alone once with his patron’s favorite—a voluptuous young adventuress named Teresa Imer—he engaged her in a bit of “innocent gaiety” and sexual peek-a-boo. When Malipiero caught him red-handed, he was caned and banished. But Casanova exited laughing, recycling the story for future comic fodder and seduction.

With twentieth-century British author Roald Dahl, comedy was king, professionally and romantically. Author of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and other classics, the tall, handsome Dahl enamored hordes of women with his antic wit. His humor—bizarre, ribald, and often grotesque—wasn’t for the faint-hearted. But women reveled in it. They were “crazy for him,” and he slept, said friends, “with everybody on the east and west coasts.”

In a Dahl short story, “The Visitor,” his alter ego has a diary that makes Casanova’s read “like a parish magazine.” Dahlesque exaggeration aside, Roald’s life was not dull. Born to Norwegian parents in Wales and raised by a single mother (his father died prematurely), he was a wild child and wiseacre in constant trouble with authorities. Later, as a fighter ace in World War II, his plane crashed in the desert, where he permanently injured his back. Humor became his anodyne thereafter—and aphrodisiac.

While on assignment as a British agent in America, he was inundated with women. Like his seducer of “The Visitor,” he simply talked to them “more wittily than anyone else had ever done before.” One conquest, French actress Annabella, remembered how he seduced her at an opening-night party with a black comic tale about a rich man who made gruesome bets. He charmed and trysted with the
gratin
, including such notables as Ginger Rogers, Clare Booth Luce, and journalist Martha Gellhorn.

In 1952, he met and won over movie star Patricia Neal with his madcap humor. She was entranced, but their marriage, which lasted thirty years, was rocky. They did not get on, and the Furies struck: a son contracted hydrocephalitis in a freak accident; a daughter died at seven; Neal had a stroke in 1962; and Dahl endured a slew of torturous medical procedures. He was not faithful. In 1972, he met the jazzy, imaginative Felicity Crosland, divorced Neal, and married “Liccy” in 1983. They lived in his country home, “Gipsy House,” until he died at seventy-four, side-splittingly funny and endlessly fascinating.

Today, reports a
New York Post
feature, comedians are the rock stars of the hour, attended by “chucklefucker” groupies wherever they perform. Many are slapstick buffoons and few are pinups. Standup comic David Spade is short and weasel-faced, but he has a romantic history worthy of Casanova. Another blade, James Corden, the rotund star of BBC comedy shows, said, “My weight was never a concern” with women; I “could always make them laugh, so they tended to overlook my physical imperfections.” The proverb “A maid that laughs is half-taken” still holds. “Finding someone funny,” writes a British columnist, “is the first step to rolling in bed with them. It’s easier to get rich than it is to be truly, charismatically funny.”

Mental Intercourse

The act of engaging in intelligent and interesting conversation.

—
Urban Dictionary

Clare in
The Time Traveler’s Wife
has a husband who seduced her for twenty years before they met. Henry DeTamble possesses a paranormal faculty that permits him to hitch rides on the space-time continuum, and woo his wife-to-be from age six on. In perhaps the longest foreplay in literature, he courts Clare at every season of her life with razzle-dazzle conversation in three languages. He talks to her eloquently and wittily about the wisdom of the ages (he owns four thousand books) and tells ripping tales of his adventures.

Next to comedy, and often mingled with it, is conversation that shimmers with intellectual and narrative excitement. The mind is an engine of enchantment; well-turned ideas, learning, and stories pulsate with sex. The female preference for smart, entertaining men is nothing new, but a recent study shows that women want conversational proof. Stimulating talk, they say online and in person, is “always a turn-on.”

Brilliant dialogue, claims Geoffrey Miller, may be an ingrained courtship strategy. In his “ornamental brain” theory of evolution, alpha females chose suitors who put on the fanciest cerebral show, who flaunted the highest G factor (general intelligence) and largest vocabulary, and told the punchiest narratives. For the flames to really fly, men and women participated together in a reciprocal exchange of stories and ideas.

Learning and narrative ability are profoundly seductive. Although brainiacs can be tedious bores, men who spin knowledge with verbal aplomb can charm the pants off women. “All that information streaming back and forth,” writes author Francine Prose, is like some sexual “bodily fluid.” According to philosopher Guy Sircello, we feel “intellectual brilliance,” when it’s finely expressed, in “our most erogenous parts.” The same with narrative drama. Stories, say literary critics, are, in essence, “discourse[s] of desire” that duplicate lovemaking in structure and theme and stir us at profound erotic depths.

Amorists through the ages have recognized this cerebral spell. Ovid believed love was fueled by intelligent, eloquent conversation. A man, he decreed, should acquire culture, learn two great languages, and avoid boring a lady. To charm women, instructs the
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
, men must master sixty-four branches of knowledge and excel in the art of storytelling. In one exemplum, the author envisions a suitor leading his lover to the rooftop, where he conducts a “pleasant conversation” that ranges from astronomy to spicy love stories. Honoré de Balzac served notice to men in the nineteenth century: unless a lover provides cultured, scintillating talk, a woman will despise him as a creature “destitute of mental vigor.”

Trilby, the eponymous peasant girl and model of George du Maurier’s novel, doesn’t love the taciturn Svengali who co-opts her but the artist Little Billee, who talks like “the gods in Olympus”—high culture mixed with lively anecdotes.

Jonathan Franzen’s philosophy professor, Ron, plies his learning for less benign purposes. His highbrow riffs in “Breakup Stories” have granted him his life’s ambition: “to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women.” Even after he meets his intellectual match, Lidia, he can’t resist exercising his brain-to-brain seductions on other women.