Question: Mr. L. Rx, a lot of dating gurus advise about using humor to attract women, however, you don’t say much about that. Why is that?
Answer: Well, you are right. I do not focus much of my writing on using humor as a technique to meet women.
The reason is that humor is one of those “ten percent tools” that a lot of the dating gurus recommend. By “ten percent tools”, I mean techniques that if used broadly, only work on a small percentage of women.
The tools that I recommend are technologies that result in an eighty to ninety percent success rate – something that you will never achieve just by being funny.
First of all humor changes with personality type. So what one person considers funny, the next person won’t. Even if you were to come up with a successful “humor” approach, to be successful eighty to ninety percent of the time you would have to change your jokes and/or delivery with the personality types you are approaching.
I have done this in sales, for example. I have based a sales technique on humor and had success, but still I had to change the delivery of the humor to match the personality type I was addressing. When I was doing door-to-door sales as a kid, I found that even socio-economic types have different humor and had to base my approach on that.
Having said that, humor is an obvious advantage for a guy who has the ability to be funny. Just look at some of the dating site profiles of women. Look what they put down as desired in a man. A very large percentage of women will put “funny” or a sense of humor, or some reference to humor.
The problem I see for men (besides matching the right kind of humor for the right personality type) is trying to be funny all the time. Just because a woman says she likes humor or “funny.” Doesn’t mean that it should be the only thing you do — as some of the gurus would have you believe. If you had to do just one thing all the time, “listening” to a woman has humor beat hands down.
But if you can spice up your listening with a few appropriate humorous comments now and again, it certainly won’t hurt and could just make you that special guy she is looking for.
But the reason I don’t focus on training guys to be funny is that it is still just a “ten percent tool” and as such, not worth a lot of attention as a basic strategy. In fact “trying” to be funny all the time will backfire and wreck more approaches than it will help.
When you are funny without having all the other basics in place, women will use you for entertainment and you will be relegated, more often than not, into that “friendship” role that most guys dread. And it will work on a few of a certain personality type – hence your ten percent – and that will be it.
When you listen to women as your primary focus and respond appropriately in both humorous and non-humorous ways, you can break out of that “ten percent” result and achieve the kind of success ratios we strive for – eighty to ninety percent – all the time.
Mr. L. Rx
NOTE: If you would like more in depth and organized information on how to meet, attract, and have a relationship with women consider the book How I Got 700 Dates In One Year, Dating To Relating – From A To Z, or any of the other books by Mr. L. Rx.
