Research about playfulness in adults has viewed it as something that emanates from personality and other individualized characteristics, and therefore many previous studies adopted a trait approach to predict playfulness, largely ignoring gender differences. The author conducted a facet-level analysis of the so-called big-five personality predictors and of four humor-related attributes and analyzed whether playfulness should be considered individually or compositely. She generated hypotheses from the extant literature and surveyed hundreds of undergraduates to discover characteristics distinctly different between the playfulness of young adult men and women.