filler word

“Speaking of women’s comedy…”: An Analysis of Linguistic Traits by Male and Female Standup Comedians

Samuel Alsup, Eden Moyal, Jinwen (Wiwi) Shi, Yitian (Riley) Shi

The question of whether women can be funny is long outdated and has, thankfully, been answered in the affirmative. This project investigates how funny people – namely, stand-up comedians – perform (or don’t perform) their womanhood in speech. Studies conducted by 20th-century scholars highlighted multiple facets of language that are characteristic of women’s conversation, such as tag questions, hedges, and excessively specific use of color terms. This study attempts to answer the question: do 20th-century conclusions regarding “women’s language” in conversation hold up in the context of contemporary stand-up comedy (Lakoff 1998)? Transcriptions of live stand-up acts by White North American men and women indicated that certain features associated with women are indeed more salient in women’s standup, while others seem to be equally used by men and women. This points to a decreased divide over recent decades in what is traditionally seen as acceptable ways of being a man or a woman, and a trend toward accepting the vast spectra of gender identity and gender performance.

Introduction and Background

Research into “women’s language” in the 1970s and 1980s pointed to proposed differences in speech between men and women (Men, women and language — a story of human speech), including certain features of conversational speech that are more salient among, and characteristic of, women. Researchers such as Lakoff (1998), Tannen (1990), and Cameron (1997) codified these differences, noting the response to a society that taught women to be polite and therefore unimposing. A few of the features of “women’s language” include hedging, tag questions, and filler words. On the other hand, men use more expletives and are more likely to drop the “g” sound at the end of a word (Bailey and Timm, 1976, cited in Guvendir 2015; Fischer 1958).

We examined the following phenomena: tag questions, filler words, hedging, g-dropping, and expletives. Definitions and examples of each can be found in the below table.

Table 1: Explanation and examples of linguistic features examined

Since these observations were made last century, we examined whether they would hold up in contemporary times. In recent years, society has witnessed a trend of greater gender equality, including breaking down traditional gender expectations (Solbes-Canales, Valverde-Montesino, & Herranz-Hernández, 2020). Therefore, it occurred to us that it might be necessary to re-examine gender-associated language. If men and women are slowly creeping closer to each other in fields like business, sports, politics, and more, could language be among those fields as well?

Our initial hypothesis was that established linguistic gender differences would hold up over time, since we expected that linguistic norms shift more slowly than political trends and social issues.

We looked at stand-up comedy in particular for a number of reasons:

Stand-up is one of those historically-male careers, where women are considered the outlier. With women making inroads in this field, we thought to examine if language has shifted also.
Comedy, like gender and language, is a performance. Because comedy is explicit in its performance, it allows for sensitive topics to come to light in a humorous, non-threatening way.
Stand-up comedy is a version of communication in which the speaker does not end their turn or wait for a response. Because there is no verbal interaction from the audience for both men and women, we can surmise that the playing field is relatively level and the only changing factor would be the comedian’s performance.

Methods

We theorize that when speaking about gender, it seems likely that the speaker would indicate a particular stance, either in solidarity with or opposition to the demographic they’re talking about. A total of ten White, North American comedians were analyzed, each in the context of stand-up comedy. We examined sets/parts of sets where the comedian was speaking on the topic of gender or feminism, for a total of eleven minutes (639 seconds) for all comics combined. We counted instances of tag questions, filler words and phrases, hedging, g-dropping, and expletives.

To help minimize variability, we ensured that the data was from stand-up comedy performances from the past five years. We noted each time that each linguistic feature was used in each act and kept a tally per comedian. We also recorded a general topic for each clip, so as to give slightly more specific context as to the content of the act. We then quantitatively analyzed the number of various gender-associated markers that were used in the clips, which ranged from thirty seconds to two minutes, using an average use of each feature per gender alongside the totals of each performer. We compared the five masculine-presenting comedians to the five feminine-presenting comedians to see if either of the genders we examined fit the conclusions discussed in the existing literature. In order to make sure that longer clips wouldn’t hold more weight, we set our evaluation to a per-30-second rate.

Results & Analysis

We found that the average usage of the relevant linguistic features per 30 seconds for males in our data set was: 0.31 tag questions, 2.73 filler words, 1.62 hedges, 0.98 g-drops, and 1.42 expletives. In contrast, the average usage per 30 seconds for females was: 0.11 tag questions, 3.51 filler words, 2.64 hedges, 0.23 g-drops, and 0.11 expletives. The figures below show a comparison between male and female comedians for the linguistic features mentioned.

Fig. 1: Bar graph showing average feature use for men and women comedians

Our most “classic” exemplifiers of masculine and feminine speech were Bill Burr and Whitney Cummings, respectively. Bill Burr used many expletives and g-drops, and very few hedges and fillers. In contrast, Whitney Cummings used many hedges and fillers, and very few g-drops and expletives. We will relate each linguistic feature to them for context but note that they are the extreme ends of the spectrum. Transcripts from each comic’s set, as well as our summarized dataset, can be found below.

Fig. 3: Transcript of Clip by Whitney Cummings

Table 2 Breakdown of Linguistic Features in Men’s Sets

Table 3: Breakdown of Linguistic Features in Women’s Sets

First, we found that there wasn’t a big difference in the usage of tag questions between male and female comedians. Tag questions weren’t used very frequently regardless of gender; less than one time per minute on average, with half of our comedians not using any at all.

Fig. 4: Scatter Plot of Men and Women’s Tag Question Use

Bill Burr didn’t use any tag questions, while Whitney Cummings utilized tag questions twice. This difference does not appear significant across the rest of our comedians.

We saw that our female comedians used fillers more often than their male counterparts, by about one or two every 30 seconds. The graph below does show one male outlier, who was one of the younger men on stage. This will be touched on in the discussion.

Fig. 5: Scatter Plot of Men and Women’s Filler Use

Bill Burr didn’t use any fillers, whereas Whitney Cummings used an average of six filler words per thirty seconds. However, the results were more marginal over the full dataset, with an average difference of just one filler per minute between men and women.

Our female comedians tended to hedge at least once more per 30 seconds than our male comedians. The figure below shows that three out of five female comedians hedged more than the top-hedging male.

Fig. 6: Scatter Plot of Men and Women’s Hedge Use

Bill Burr accordingly hedged one time, whereas Whitney Cummings utilized hedging eleven times in a similar timeframe. While there appears to be a correlation between hedging and feminine speech in our dataset, it’s not conclusive according to our statistical analysis.

G-dropping results appeared to be much more correlated to gender than any previous linguistic feature we measured: the average female used it four times less than the average male comedian. While three female comedians and two male comedians didn’t use any g-dropping, among those who used it, the men did so much more frequently, as seen in the graph below.

Fig. 7: Scatter Plot of Men and Women’s G-Drop Use

Bill Burr and Whitney Cumming utilized g-dropping five times and one time, respectively. Though there appeared to be a correlation, with a 124% difference between the average usage of g-dropping between males and females, there wasn’t statistical significance in our small dataset.

One linguistic feature that proved to have statistical significance was the usage of expletives. Four out of five female comedians didn’t use expletives at all, while only one male comedian didn’t use them. The males that used them did so at a rate ranging from two per minute to more than five per minute, as seen in the graph below.

Fig. 8: Scatter Plot of Men and Women’s Expletive Use

Bill Burr used expletives five times compared to Whitney Cummings’ two uses. Interestingly enough, Whitney Cummings was the only female comedian who used any expletives at all, even though she tended to (otherwise) stick to what previous research deemed feminine speech.

Overall, the biggest differences between males and females in our data are in hedging (47.9%), which was slightly more common in females, g-drops (124.0%), and expletives (171.2%), which were both more common in males. Tag questions were rarely used by any of the comedians, so even the 95% differential between the sexes is statistically meaningless. Filler phrases had a slight correlation with being more common in feminine speech, but not a very significant one (25.0% differential).

Discussion

An overall examination of the results of our data shows several things.

First, some linguistic features thought to be more characteristic of women have indeed held up in a stand-up context as well as over several decades. For example, we saw that women did indeed hedge more frequently, and used much fewer expletives and g-drops than men on stage. It’s important to note that the difference between men and women for hedging wasn’t large enough to be significant. However, we can say that there might be some correlation between gender and frequency of hedge use. The results were similar for g-dropping and fillers, as they both appeared to have a correlation in our data, however, not enough to be statistically significant. As an example, female comic Taylor Tomlinson hedged twice with one g-drop and three fillers in a 35-second clip, while male comic Gianmarco Soresi hedged twice as well, with no g-drops and three fillers, in a 32-second clip. This comparison shows very little difference between them, pointing to placement somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of gender performance.

For expletive use, though, the difference between men and women was statistically significant – that is, large enough to make generalizations. This conclusion does stem from research showing that men are more casual in conversation than women, allowing for less formal speech.

However, plenty of linguistic features thought to be more characteristic of men or women in the past don’t hold up as well anymore. This could be due to simply the passage of time, the shift to allowing for more fluid gender identities in contemporary times, or potentially because of standup being a different kind of linguistic environment in that it is non-conversational. While we expected to find a more significant gap between men and women in their use of linguistic features, in reality, speech was a lot more ambiguous and closer rather than disparate.

We can look at the use of filler words for an example of this ambiguity. Though there can be exemplified differences between male and female performance, such as what we see between Whitney Cummings and Bill Burr, in today’s age it is much less common to exert these drastically different performances. Instead, we see more use of fillers somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with most comedians closer to the center than to either traditionally gendered pattern. Thus, we end up with our dataset showing a very marginal difference.

Some other observations that we made revolved around the differences within the group of male comedians. The two male comedians who displayed the most classically ‘male’ use of the features we examined were the two oldest, being born in the 1980s or earlier. The younger ones, born in the early 1990s or later, were much more likely to use features traditionally associated with women. That is, younger men were more comfortable using hedges and filler words especially. This observation might indicate that younger men are becoming more comfortable with performing certain aspects of femininity, which reflects a greater trend in playing with gender in the last few years. Alternatively, it could reflect the increasing acceptance of traditionally female features of speech – its dissociation from femininity and increased generality.

Conclusion

An analysis of contemporary stand-up comics for features of speech marked feminine or masculine showed that conclusions made in 20th-century literature no longer hold up. Features that were characteristic of ‘women’s language’ in 1990 are, thirty years later, more general and practiced by male speakers as well as females – especially by younger men who grew up in less rigid society than their older counterparts. This difference between younger and older men may indicate that younger men are becoming more comfortable performing certain aspects of femininity. This perhaps reflects a greater trend towards playing with gender and comfort in gender-expansiveness or perhaps reflects women’s speech becoming less associated with women and more acceptable in general society as time passes.

It is important also to recognize that stand-up comedy is unique among linguistic discourse contexts, as there is no back-and-forth. Since stand-up language is monologuing rather than conversational, this may factor into how speakers perform gender, and it sets this study apart from earlier studies like Lakoff’s.

Looking forward, there are multiple ways to expand this study to include a more diverse group of comedians. One way to do this would be to examine how supposed ‘gender’ differences look when race is accounted for. Lakoff and other researchers focused their observations on white women – therefore, women (and men) who aren’t white may actually display very different expressions of language, with different characteristics and perhaps at different frequencies.

Another forward-looking study could include comedians of a gender-expansive experience. Comedians who are not locked to an identity as either ‘man’ or ‘woman’ may display yet even more different expressions of gender in their language. It’s important to include not just individuals who fit a binary definition of gender. Though this concept was much less spoken about during the original studies conducted in the 1970s-1990s, society more willingly recognizes the expansive nature of gender and performance now, and linguistic study should not only reflect that sentiment but set out to describe how it fits in with language and linguistic study.

With ever-persistent debates about whether language will ever really be as egalitarian, as gender-neutral, as inclusive as we want it to be (“Women are witches, men are studs”), it is our job as linguists to catalog, describe, and advocate for change on the linguistic level so that it can influence and be influenced by the social level.

References

Cameron, D. (1997). Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In On Language and Sexual Politics (1st ed., pp. 47-64). Taylor & Francis Group.

Fischer, J. L. (1958). Social influences on the choice of a linguistic variant, WORD, 14:1, pp. 47-56, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1958.11659655

Gordon, Mo. (2023, April 13). ‘Women are witches, men are studs.’ Universiteit Leiden, www.leidenlanguageblog.nl/articles/women-are-witches-men-are-studs-blog-mo-gordon.

Güvendir, E. (2015). Why are males inclined to use strong swear words more than females? An evolutionary explanation based on male intergroup aggressiveness. Language Sciences, vol. 50, pp. 133-139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2015.02.003

Lakoff, R. (1998). Extract from Language and woman’s place. In D. Cameron (Ed.), The Feminist critique of language: A reader (2nd ed.) (pp. 242-252). London, England: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

Solbes-Canales, I., S. Valverde-Montesino, & P. Herranz-Hernández. (2020). Socialization of gender stereotypes related to attributes and professions among young Spanish school-aged children. Frontiers, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00609/full.

Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. Ballantine Publishing Group.

TED. (2014, July 31). Men, women and language — a story of human speech | Sophie Scott | TEDxUCLWomen. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iteK4P0nDO8

Appendix

Video Links:

Men in Therapy – Gianmarco Soresi

Women are Smarter than Men – Bill Burr

Feminists Want to be Men – Andrew Schulz

Gender Roles – Joey Avery

Feminism and Womanhood – Taylor Tomlinson

Men’s Interpretation of Feminism Now – Erica Rhodes

Women’s Hooters – Whitney Cummings

Feminists – Michelle Wolf

Feminist About Paying – Bonnie McFarlane

Killing Men – Robert Schultz

Transcripts:

Transcripts Repository

Comedy, filler word, g-dropping, Gender inclusivity, hedges, Swearing, tag questions

Yeah, Um… So Like, Are Filler Words Considered Feminine?

Sociolinguistics

Jennifer Beck, Jaymie Bernardo, Theo Chen, Karl Danielsen, and Calista Eaton-Steinberg

At some point in your life, you have probably experienced the intense awkward silence that comes about when it’s your turn to speak and you have no idea how to respond. Whether you’re not sure how to answer a question or you simply got lost in your train of thought, perhaps you’ve found yourself choosing one of these coping mechanisms to deal with that moment of dreaded stillness in the conversation: (1) you accept the silence and ponder your next move; (2) you fill the silence with filler words to buy time. Filler words such as “like,” “well,” and “um” are a common occurrence for people in conversation who are thinking of what to say. If you pay attention, you might notice that you use these words unconsciously in daily conversation, not even noticing when they slip out.

By observing, collecting, and analyzing video interviews, our study focuses on the correlation between gender and filler words in Californian college students. Studying the use of filler words in different genders of the cis-binary will allow researchers to better understand the way that gender and filler word usage interact. The purpose of this study is to clarify the assumption that women use more filler words than men due to persisting social pressures and the social implications of filler words.

Introduction and Background

Professor Eckert discusses in her linguistic studies that women typically have a different linguistic role in society compared to men (Eckert, 2012, pp. 90). When men speak, they try to keep up a persona that exudes confidence. As filler words explicitly foreground someone’s lack of confidence in speaking – they indicate that the speaker does not feel entirely certain about the things they are saying – men are presumed to more commonly avoid using filler words. In comparison, women generally assume a more mediating role in conversation (Van Herk, 2017, pp.110), so they might be expected to use more filler words.

Finding a connection between gender and filler word usage could indicate that one gender is less affected by the negative traits associated with filler words. In other words, one gender group may feel less social pressure to avoid filler words despite their pre-existing negative implications. Alternatively, one gender might actually prefer using filler words as modes of marking discourse to connect and organize the things they say in specific ways (Divett, 2014, pp. 37-42). A paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology found that men and women both use filler words equally when filling pauses, but that women use them more as discourse markers (Laserna et al., 2014, pp. 332-334). In this way, women use filler words to assert their authority in a conversation by directing its path and indicating it is their turn to speak. Due to the unprofessional associations with filler words, we hypothesize that women will use filler words more than men, as women face lower levels of societal pressure to sound professional. They may also utilize these words more often to direct conversation. We conducted a small-scale study of casual interactions between college-age men and women to assess the patterns of filler word use.

Methods

We analyzed 15 interviews of Californian college students posted on college-related YouTube channels. These casual one-on-one interviews asked random students basic questions about their college experiences. We looked at results from women interviewing men and men interviewing women and calculated the number of filler words (including “um/uh,” “like,” “yeah,” “so,” “I mean,” and “you know”) relative to the number of total words spoken.
Results/analysis

Previous research into this topic suggests that women do, in fact, use more filler words than men (Laserna et al., 2014, pp. 332-334). However, as gender roles become less important to our modern society, the previously discovered results may have become outdated. We set out to see if we could reproduce other studies’ outcomes in a modern, progressive college setting, while simultaneously seeking out answers as to what factors could cause the gendered differences in filler word usage.

While our final results matched those of previous studies in confirming a gender difference, the difference we found was not what we expected. Below are a couple of statistics from our data collection:

Figure 1: The most significant data from our research; note the difference between mean and median results.

Looking at the overall ratio result, our results did not support the previous findings on this topic. Women surveyed actually used significantly fewer filler words than men. Looking at the overall total words to filler words ratio, males displayed a 9.651 ratio, while females displayed a 11.885 ratio, showcasing a 2.233 difference in filler word usage between the two genders. Oddly enough, the median of the data contrasted this. The median female used more fillers than the median male. This could potentially mean that men tend more towards extremes, while women speak more similarly across the board. Indeed, one interview with a male revealed the most filler word usage of all interviews, as the male spoke with almost one filler word per five words.

In spite of the inconclusive results of our mean/median analysis, two segments of the data did show a clear trend. Across all interviews, women and men showed preferences as groups for different filler words. Women favored the word “like,” which is increasingly androgynous but still closely associated with the “valley girl” archetype. Men, in place of using the effeminate “like,” preferred words such as “yeah.” It appears that both genders selected their filler words carefully to index different personas, even if they used filler words at similar rates. This means that social pressure is still strongly at play in word choice, even if neither gender has a stronger need for the confidence lent by decreased filler usage.

Both genders together indicated another interesting trend: the presence of two, not one, spikes on the graph of filler ratios. Figure 1 below shows that there is a peak of people using ~6 words/filler word and one of people using ~13 words/filler word. This two-peak system indicates that there are likely two separate modes of speech people use, one casual with a higher ratio of fillers, and one formal with a lower ratio. Filler word use overall is likely distributed across two standard deviations centered at these spikes.

Figure 2: A histogram showing the number of interviews with a certain filler ratio. Make note of the two separate peaks – one at 6, and one at 13.

Discussion/Conclusion

Our research shows that the differences in filler word usage across genders are more complex than previous findings suggest. Figure 2 below shows the transcript between two different interviews we observed, both being asked similar questions. You can see the female interviewee produces five filler words out of 43 words total. On the other hand, the male interviewee produces six filler words out of a total 40 words. The margin of filler word usage is slim here. As we mentioned before, females have been found to favor the filler word, “like” while men favored “yeah”. You will note that in this case, the male favored the word, “Uhm.” While not every male favors the same word, overall data suggests that there is still a generally consistent difference between male and female filler word choice, especially in the use of “like.”

This could be a result of gender stereotypes for speech – “like” and “so” are associated more with femininity, while “um” and “yeah” seem more masculine. There aren’t rules for who can say what, but speech can be very gendered. Part of it might be conscious – for example, males might avoid “like” for fear of sounding feminine – but it might also be a result of who these people are spending time around and what kind of speech they naturally pick up from friends and family.

Figure 3: Transcripts of two interview segments, both involving the opposing gender. Extracted from ProWrite Admissions YouTube channel.

It is important to keep in mind that the data used for our results was extracted from online videos of causal speech. Casual speech with a fellow young person allows for a more comfortable setting, therefore allowing for more filler words to be used. Because these videos were spontaneous and filmed, it is also possible that certain participants were more nervous than others, causing them to use more filler words as they collected their thoughts. Some people are more anxious speaking spontaneously in front of a camera, which would definitely affect their mannerisms, while other people might love being filmed and thrive in the same situation, speaking with confidence and ease.

Our current research sought to analyze the long-lived stereotype of women using more filler words than men, which may exist due to the even older stereotype of women having less intelligence. With these results, we come to the conclusion that college-aged males within California use filler words more frequently in casual speech than college-aged women in California. This could result from a number of factors. For one, more male college students are in STEM fields (Blackwood, 2020) where interpersonal skills are de-emphasized, and students might use more fillers. Men could also be more willing to index a casual persona in interviews because there are fewer expectations against their intelligence that they want to combat. With the persisting sociological stereotypes that deem women less intelligent, women have to work twice as hard in order to gain the respect that men have, especially within the work field (Eckert, 2012, pp. 90). Women are held to different expectations than men, which could impede on filler word usage.

Furthermore, a strong negative social stigma exists around young women who use filler words, especially “like.” Frequent use of the word “like” is a characteristic of the valley girl accent, a Californian accent associated with wealthy, unintelligent, and annoying young women. (This NPR article talks about some other ways that women’s language is stigmatized and disrespected). Since women have to overcome these pre-existing stereotypes, it is possible that they consciously work harder at not using filler words.

Should this research be conducted in another state with another age range, or in a more formal setting, the results may differ. However, our data challenges a conventional understanding of filler word use, suggesting that this topic is very complex and requires further investigation. Potential future research could look into formal interviews between an employer and potential employee, and whether this context decreases filler word use, regardless of gender. Research could also look into stereotypes surrounding different filler words, and whether these stereotypes consciously affect filler word use.

References

Crimson Education. (2013). Home [YouTube Channel], from https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimsonEducation/about

Divett, S., Duvall, E., Graham, T. Robbins, A. (2014) How and why people use filler words (pp. 35-46). https://schwa.byu.edu /files/2014/12/F2014-Robbins.pdf

Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 87-100.

Laserna, C., Pennebaker, J., Seih, Y. (2014). Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality. Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 33(3), 328-335. DOI: 10.1177/0261927X1452699 OR https://www.researchgate .net/publication /27 5005568_Um_Who_Like_Says_You_Know_Filler_Word_Use_as_a_Function_of_Age_Gender_and_Personality

ProWrite Admissions. (2017). Home [YouTube Channel]. YouTube. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpjORe_vOMevyxImw90igLw

Van Herk, G. (2017) Gender. What is Sociolinguistics? Wiley Blackwell. (pp. 97-115)

W.K.C., Kate Blackwood. (2020, July 1.). Gender gaps in STEM college majors emerge in high school. Cornell Chronicle. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/07/gender-gaps-stem-college-majors-emerge-high-school

discourse marker, filler word, gender, Language, stereotype