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The difference between women's humor and men's humor is the difference between Erma Bombeck and The Three Stooges.

I've worshipped at the Bombeck altar since reading her three-times-per-week columns in the newspaper when I was a kid, so to be keynote speaker at the humor conference held in her honor this year is a privilege. Almost 400 people will attend. Isn't that great?

It's great, except that the new Three Stooges movie is playing in nearly 4,000 theaters. You're smart; you do the math.

Even if each showing attracts only six guys, each of whom has spent whole months of his adolescence perfecting the "nyuck, nyuck" sound and therefore lacks what might be defined as a "personal life" or "women friends," Larry, Moe and Curly still get more box office than Bombeck.

Why is it that a group that once included a character named "Shemp" still wields power over the comic imagination of America?

It's because American men still believe women don't really have a sense of humor. Despite the fact that if you put three women together for more than 13 seconds and we all start laughing, there are guys going around saying "Whatsamatter, honey, can't you take a joke?" when his date doesn't laugh at the work of Dennis Miller, The Stooges or Caligula.

Believe me when I say that women hate the Three Stooges. If you're sitting next to a woman who's cooing "No really, I simply adore the Three Stooges," she's faking it. In fact, I believe you can eliminate blood tests at the Olympics by merely showing The Stooges: You laugh, you play on the men's team. Women do not do the eye-poking, head-banging, butt-slamming humor that the Three Stooges do so well.

Have you ever seen two women go up to each other at a conference, a wedding or networking event and, by way of greeting, say, "Pull my finger?"

Men do it all the time. In the Three Stooges paradigm, men insult each other by way of indicating affection.

"Hey Frankie, you've had that jacket since 1992. I'll buy you a new suit just so I don't have to look at those stripes!" That's their way of saying, "Hi, how ya doing, how's the family?" And it's impossible to insult Frankie because he's going, "Suit's still good. Can't button it, but it fits all right." If you say to a woman, "Barbara, you've been wearing that suit since 1992," Barbara will lock herself in the bathroom until she can order new clothes from a catalog. She won't think it's a funny joke.

Actually, men often think women don't have a sense of humor because women rarely tell jokes.

Instead, like Erma Bombeck, women tell stories.

We have totally different ways of communicating. When a woman says, "Let me tell you something funny," you better sit down and pour yourself a cup of coffee. You're going to be there for quite some time.

Erma Bombeck wrote humor challenging the underlying assumptions of traditional domesticity. Although some of it can be placed in the self-effacing tradition ("After marriage, I added 30 pounds in nine months, which seemed to indicate that I was either pregnant or going a little heavy on the gravy"), her essays often contained less sympathy and more bite than the conventional "good mother" was meant to possess ("So you swallowed the plastic dinosaur out of the cereal box. What do you want me to do, call a vet?").

When Bombeck quipped "I don't think women outlive men … it only seems longer," she challenged the system that would have us believe women live easy lives.

Bombeck taught women to forage for humor - to find it, to hunt for it, to gather it up in its raw state. Author of When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Or Too Tired For an Affair and All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room, Bombeck's column ran in more than 900 newspapers and she became the best friend of every harried, fraught, overworked and imperfect woman in the world.

I'll take Bombeck's fresh laugh over Moe's whack to the forehead any day.

- Gina Barreca

Gina Barreca, author, professor and commentator, is part of the 2012 EBWW faculty. This column appeared on the McClatchyTribune wire April 19 as 350 writers from around the country gathered for this year's workshop.