I do not think that men are more unobservant than women as a rule. The comment was, at best, mildly chuckle-worthy. Certainly not worth grinding a conversation to a halt and making your mother-in-law feel embarrassed.
I do not think it’s a question of learning to find such comments amusing so much as learning how to lighten up in general. Do you just never carry on conversations with people who have a slightly different sense of humor than you?
I guess if I interpret your question in the right way, the answer is yes. For if I keep failing to laugh at someone’s jokes, the conversation (if it’s just chit-chat) tends to stop happening.
Like I said above, it wasn’t that I particularly chose to stop talking, it’s that I was at a loss for what to do–and so ended up not doing anything, which in this case, means not talking.
Chalk it up to my slow-wittedness.
About 24 hours later, I come up with a lame reply: “No, it just goes to show that women are crafty,” said in a way that indicates I don’t really believe what I’m saying but I’ll play along for the sake of fun. A lame reply, but it probably would have served, and it only took me 24 hours to figure it out.
I should clarify–I don’t mean my MIL is solely responsible for the awk. I’m plenty awk myself. I was just commenting on the fact that for whatever reason she brings out the awk in me to a degree almost no one else ever does.
-FrL-
I do this all the time, only usually it’s in response to an insult. I got so frustrated when I was a kid because someone would insult me and I’d only think of a response at like 3 a.m. the next morning.
As for bad jokes, usually if I totally don’t get why they’re funny I just smile and make a sound that’s somewhere between a snort and a cough. No, it’s not a pretty sound, but it’s a response and better than nothing and most people mistake it for a laugh and the conversation can continue and not screech to a halt. Might be kind of hard for a guy to carry off, though, especially if it sounds more like you’re hocking a loogie (is that hocking or hawking? I thought the latter implied selling…ew), but could be worth trying.
I think you probably could if you didn’t find yourself unconsciously threatened by it. I wouldn’t laugh if my wife cracked that joke since we’ve had some recent disagreements where I think that unfair generalization was unfairly applied to me. But if a female co-worker cracked the same joke about men being unobservant, I’d have to laugh, because hey, it’s funny when flighty dames say that kind of shit.
If I make a comment that my son thinks is at cross purposes with the conversation, his wife’s usually right there to say: “Just smile and nod, Dave. She’ll be happy if you just smile and nod.”
He needs to work at making it look more casual, though. And on not saying, “I’m smiling and noddin, Ma.” Sarcastic git.
Other comments that get thrown out are: “OOOOOKay!”, “And, coming from left field. . .”, and “We love you, Mom.”
On the subject of laughter, I vaguely remember a radio piece explaining a study that had counted up incidents of laughter in different groups. They concluded that most laughter is not about funny things so much as it’s a group-forming process. It’s a social bonding thing that relies on common experience. So a comment that labeled the MIL as out-group would have felt like a stick in the conversation’s wheel-spokes.
And saying something like that could get me the smile and nod treatment, depending on the conversation.
I found humor in the joke. It’s inoriginal, yes. But I don’t think it’s a sign of massive social ineptitude to utter such a thing and find it funny…unless she was convulsing on the floor with laughter. That, I would be mystified about.
Eh, but if the dialogue went like this, it would be funny (and potentially offensive, but that is nature of humor sometimes):
“Yesterday someone tried to smell a scratch-and-sniff sticker at the bottom of a pool and died!”
“This person had to have been blonde, right?”
It’s all about timing and wording the punchline just so. The MIL’s met the right conditions, IMO.
Well, it’s not really the same as, “This person was probably a man because men are unobservant.”
It was more like, “A woman managed to live in a man’s closet for a whole year.”
“That’s just like a man not to notice.”
I hear you. My mom does this all the time, but instead of making jokes that are at cross purposes with the conversation, she gives advice. Advice that no-one asked for, and advice that is usually incorrect, badly informed, and not well thought out.
In your case, she would have said, in her “I’m a sage old woman and doing my best to contribute to the conversation”-voice:
“Well, he’s probably a Gemini. Gemini don’t notice their surroundings as much as other starsigns.”
Or, when I complained about the cat having pooped on the heavy woolen carpet:
“I saw a commercial the other day for SuperDetergent. You just spray it on and put it in the washer” . Um, thanks for playing, ma. That carpet is about ten times too large and twenty times to stiff to put in the washer. And you know that carpet, so if you had given the matter a little bit of thought, you would have realized that.
It bugs me to no end when she does that. I should smile and nod, yeah. But after years and years, it is very tempting to tell her: “Don’t trouble yourself giving any more advice, mom. You just give me one more chore when you do. And that is to suppress my annoyance and force myself to smile and nod.”
I have to agree with overlyverbose here. The polite way to handle jokes that you don’t find funny is to pretend they were funny anyway and give a little chuckle at least.
You seem to be expending too much effort on trying to figure out if the joke is “true” and worth laughing at, when it would be much simpler to just recognize that she was TRYING to be funny and give her the little chuckle she was looking for.
Try it, and I think you’ll find it is a bit less awkward next time.
Of course. Unless she’s actually a bigot, which I doubt she is, she’s making fun of the stereotype. It’s laughable to think that men on a whole are less observant than women, so it’s funny that there is such a stereotype in existance and she’s pointing it out in a tongue-in-cheek way.
No, she’s definitely not making fun of the stereotype. She buys into it, and many others.
-FrL-
I think what you have to buy into to make that funny is not that men are truly less observant than women, but that men are generally more powerful than women in society. The mouse chasing the cat is funny. The cat chasing the mouse, not so much. We know how that ends. Keep in mind that she probably grew up in an era when men’s dominance was taken for granted, and poking fun at their foibles was a way for women to cope with the situation.
I’m like Auto. . . easily amused, so maybe it wouldn’t be as easy for you to do this.
But I’d just look over at the other person in the room and give them a knowing smile, and then we’d both laugh at our inside joke that the same person keeps saying bad jokes.
The other person doesn’t need to know you’re doing this, so it’s a win-win. . . unless someone lets the cat out of the bag. But even if that happened, you wouldn’t notice. . . cause you’re a man!
::looking at Auto:: 
But in that case the humor depends 100% on whether the listener agrees with that premise. If you don’t agree, there is zero humor whatsoever.
In which case, a person making that statement to a mixed audience should expect the joke to fall flat to some portion of the audience.
Personally, if someone reacted to me in the same way as you did to your MIL, I’d quickly form the opinion that that person has a flawed humor gene.
Hehe, I’m not saying that I think that you don’t have a sense of humor, but I do think the awkwardness of the situation is more on your side than the MIL. If anything, she sounds like the normal person!
If the people in my family stopped talking to each other whenever one of us made a corny joke or said something dumb or that could be perceived as rude, we’d just be sitting there looking at the floor during our get-togethers, and that wouldn’t be very much fun at all. Instead, we get over it.
Unless:
Heck, figuring out other people’s sense of humor is an organic endeavor for most. You don’t get started with a group of friends just telling the right jokes from the start. You flesh out the theory of what they can appreciate piece by piece. Usually, the other people are nice and polite enough that you can get good banter going to amicably find a humorous middle ground. A cold shoulder just shows that you aren’t willing to engage, which gives the message that you don’t want to be friends.
I think that this is the heart of the matter. You’ve got a longer history with her than we have.
I’ve got a Bible-thumping, gun-toting, Ann Courier-adoring die-hard, far right wing Republican BIL who is constantly poking fun at liberals, democrats, atheists, and marketers, of which I’m all four. I could laugh or at least go “ha ha” at jokes about any of these from anyone else in the whole word, except this guy.
For the joke, everyone is missing what’s really funny. Japanese houses are tiny! Our new house will be about 840 sq. ft (78 m2). There’s no way we would overlook someone in our house.
Thats what MILs are for 
For anyone, their relationship with their spouse’s family can be difficult. You’ve chosen one member of the family, but got the whole kit and kaboodle, with very little choice in the matter. You are breaking into a shared history, connecting with a different dynamic. It takes a bit of effort to make the relationship work, and there will be rough edges. Sometimes you got to develop a thicker skin, or some stock responses (as Yllaria and family illustrate), or play along a bit even when you don’t entirely agree.
I’m lucky - I get on with my inlaws. It’s easy when they are round the other side of the globe <that would be a joke, son>. But I spent a year after I got married with my FIL as a lecturer, and my MIL ran a theology course I was doing for 5 years. I was seeing my MIL more regularly than my wife was for a while. So I related to them outside of the family dynamic. But I had to cultivate a sense of them so I avoid the awkward bits - we don’t always succeed, but it works most of the time.
As for your MIL - I thought her comment was funny - but my wife always suggests that I don’t notice anything at all - new clothes, new haircuts, reorganised living spaces, children. I liked her follow up comment as well. The point is, I think she knows you find it awkward. I also think she understands your humour threshold - and she is not above tweaking that threshold. So, YMMV, but I would relax about it. When your MIL plays you as gently as that, she probably actually likes you.
Si
For my own mother in law, we generally resorted to saying “Some start earlier than others, you know…” to one another, or sometimes, “oh, dear, has it started already?” in an oblique reference to the probable dementia underlying whatever malapropism she had come up with. Occasionally I would assure her with great sincerity that I would happily care for her in her clearly immanent dotage even if she kept talking like that. But my mother in law was Dutch and so enjoyed full contact teasing and harrassment as a form of expression of love.
My own mother has also been known to insert her own personal brand of insanity into a conversation now and again. Sometimes it’s downright breathtaking and can drop a conversation in its tracks at forty paces.
My siblings and I eventually came up with a solution, which I will share with you. Get a stock phrase. Any old stock phrase. We ultimately settled on “Hooookay, so, how 'bout them Seals?”. This later morphed into “how 'bout them Braves?” when we moved to a city with no hockey team.*
The objective of the stock phrase is to change the subject while giving mom the heads up that she is being weird again in the determined opinion of her brood. You must then continue talking about the team, making up the particulars as you go, until somebody gathers their wits sufficiently to introduce a new subject. This does not take very long if the subject of the stock phrase is boring enough.
Both techniques must be employed with the kind of tooth grindingly tolerant love and affection displayed so beautifully by Yllaria’s kids above.
Personally, assuming your mother in law is not humor impaired, I thnk you should choose, “Did you hear about that lady who hid in the guy’s closet for a year?” for all future incidents of this type.