Am I too dumb, or too over-educated, or just not wired the right way to get The Three Stooges? I can never remember the trio's first names, even though I could identify the Pep Boys (Manny, Moe, & Jack) and all the Marx Brothers, even Zeppo. I never found the Stooges funny. All that aggressive slapstick made me wince. Is it a girl thing?

My husband, on the other hand, joins those men (including Mel Gibson, who produced the 2000 TV Stooges movie) who revere the Stooges. He can repeat routines, make the clicking-clucking noises, and do the hand gestures. When I curl my lip, he looks at me, the professional film critic, as if I were someone who doesn't get basic addition, or couldn't spell Mississippi.
 
My colleague Nell Minow suggested that there may be physiological roots for the difference in our senses of humor. She referred me to a study published in Nature in which neuroscientists studied empathy responses using magnetic resonance imaging. The results suggested that men and women are wired differently in this key area: Women respond to seeing someone they dislike suffering pain with empathy, and men with pleasure at another's misfortune. In other words, women empathize with the victim of violence (hence the wincing every time Moe pulls Curly's hair out by the roots), while men experience schadenfreude when folks get their comeuppance. Men enjoy watching someone get whacked -- as long as it isn't them. Maybe it's because every time someone else gets picked on, they get a reprieve.

It may simply be that women see pain where men see pratfalls.

The science remains pretty iffy but, while women are less likely to laugh at the physical misfortune of others, there's still a lot of comedy out there that satisfies, and not just prefab romcoms. A comedy like The Devil Wears Prada appeals to women because they can identify with Anne Hathaway's naive college graduate and happily witness the comeuppance of her vicious editrix boss, played by Meryl Streep. And yet what really made that movie work was that even the villain had a moment of grace where we saw behind her carefully constructed mask. It's the humor of social, rather than physical, discomfort that makes women laugh.

That doesn't mean that women don't enjoy slapstick, or pratfalls; it's the relentless nature of these comic tools that extract the joy from certain styles of male comedies.

It's no surprise that the Farrelly Brothers (Dumb & Dumber) have made a Three Stooges movie that appeals to their core, predominantly male, audience. The Stooges' trademark routine is preverbal -- a bully and his victims tied to him by blows of attention, the schoolyard trinity. The movie captures these moments, and I wish my laughter hadn't been grudging at the sight of Larry climbing a ladder armed with a buzz saw, knowing that it would cut the ladder in half and there would be a world of pain for all involved, including pompous innocent victims in nun habits. OK, I laughed. I got it. And so did the nuns.

My problem was that I couldn't identify with the trio to begin with. I just don't find the stooges deeply funny, or worth reviving. Whereas I enjoyed the male-driven The Hangover because it was a comic assault on so many fronts: sight gags (a tiger in the bathroom!), social conflict (outcast Zach Galifianakis' desperate attempts to assimilate), unexpected plot twists (the night from hell told backwards), and sexual misunderstandings -- alongside comic putdowns and pratfalls.

The enormous success of The Hangover and bawdy buddy films like Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin have ushered in the dawn of the age of female-driven comedies because that relatively complex formula works equally well with women and men. The Apatow-produced Bridesmaids proved that there is a big market for the techniques of these witty, sexual, and social comedies with female story lines. What I loved about Bridesmaids was the zany comic interplay between the women, like the slapstick view of sex from a woman's point of view that opened the movie. The comedy is every bit as antic, but the physical gags aren't as relentless or violent. In part, it may be because when women want to do damage, they use their tongues. The flat-out flatulence and poop comedy was less amusing, to me at least, even when it was a woman in a wedding dress who lost control of her bowels on a busy street.

The funniest movie I've seen recently is part of New York's Tribeca Film Festival this week, and opens theatrically in August. Written, directed, and starring Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), 2 Days in New York is a hilarious cosmopolitan comedy that combines awkward nudity, sausage smuggling, and sex-act jests with the kind of light farce and snappy dialog of early-career Woody Allen. (Featuring a terrific Chris Rock as Delpy's live-in, and her French father playing a cracked version of himself.) And the jokes don't hit the viewer on the head with a hammer, rubber or otherwise.

Every woman who's sat around a Scrabble board, or bellied up to the bar with her girlfriends, or swapped stories about swaddling babies, knows that our laughter bonds us. We have a sense of humor, thank you very much. And an appetite for funny movies that reflect our real experience beyond the Velveeta Cheese of prepackaged romcoms. There's room for the bawdy jokes of Bridesmaids, and the kooky cosmopolitan humor of 2 Days in New York, and the unexpected domestic comedy of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right.

We certainly have a lot to laugh about, and an abundance of potential story lines -- as Bridesmaids proved so well. Just don't expect us to howl at The Three Stooges, OK?