BANGOR – Gina Barreca says she gives good scarf. Twirling a tan, silk number flung around her neck, Barreca fired off the comment near the start of a show Tuesday night. Filled with sexual innuendo, the comment tickled the 80-plus women who came to hear the professor-turned-humorist proffer insights into the myriad differences between men and women.

It took a minute for some to grasp the somewhat vague reference to oral sex. Once comprehension set in, the laughs were hearty. They were rollicking, deep, long belly laughs that signal women really having a good time.

A compact bundle of energy, Barreca, an author who teaches English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, drew a lot of belly laughs during her monologue at the Bangor-Brewer YWCA. Barreca was the celebrity kickoff to the second part of Women’s Week 2000, a series of events intended to benefit the female gender and to help others understand them.

Best known for her near-sacrilegious observation that “women hate the Three Stooges, (“Bopping someone on the nose and poking them in the forehead is not funny to us.”), Barreca said women tell jokes differently from men. This doesn’t mean women lack a sense of humor – far from it. With direct jabs to the female truth center, poking fun at everything from a penchant for makeup to PMS to the male obsession with (ahem) penis size, the feminist-wife-professor proved she knew what makes women laugh.

“You can’t get women together for more than three minutes before laughter erupted,” said Barreca. “Even when we pan someone, it usually is softened by humor,” she said, illustrating the point with the lesson she learned about scarves.

With four books under her belt, as well as numerous appearances on shows like “Oprah”, and the televised news magazines “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” and “20/20” – “anything with a number in it,” she quipped – Barreca said she learned to wear scarves from the “so-called authorities” who appeared with her on these shows.

Of particular note was the barb-filled debate she held before one taping of “Oprah” with the duo that authored the 1995 tome “The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.”

Though Barreca referred to “Rules” authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider as “the antichrist” who urge women to never laugh, never to offer to pay their way and, in general “wipe out your personality entirely,” when in the company of an attractive man, she noticed they wore scarves as they made a national splash with their controversial book.

She recalled verbally jousting with Fein and Schneider before an “Oprah” taping.

The authors, in thick New York accents, had asked Barreca, also a native New Yorker, if she was married. “I said, ‘Yes.”‘

The women then asked, “How many times have you been married?”

“I said, ‘Two times,”‘ Barreca recalled.

“They said, ‘Oh, we’re both on our first marriage.”‘

To which Barreca replied, “Well I’m on my last,” she said, receiving an appreciative hoot from the audience.

Pithy insights were offered on topics from religion to the many titles given to the month of October.

Terming herself a “recovering Catholic”, Barreca said she grew up in a large Italian family in the Bronx. “Guilt came with my mother’s milk,” she said.

Yet she was quick to credit her mother and, after her death, a stable of aunts with giving her strength and an identity that enabled her to forge ahead.

She was one of 13 women in the freshman class at Dartmouth College in 1975, shortly after it turned coeducational.

“It was an amazing education,” said Barreca. Swarthy with dancing brown eyes, the humorist said she was the only working-class student at the college. Her female friends there “were all like Gwyneth Paltrow and I was Totie Fields,” she joked.

Barreca remembered spotting the college motto on her first trip to the campus cafeteria. Quoting rom grammarian Daniel Webster, the banner proclaimed, “It may be small, but there are those who love it.” Barreca recalled saying, “that’s really a funny motto for a boy’s school.”

Along the way, she tossed in the observation that October is “Domestic Violence Awareness Month,” “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”, and “Own-A-Handgun” month. October also marks a celebration for Apple Jack, the nation’s oldest distilled beverage. “So we have liquor, guns and violence in one month. Did a man think of this?” she asked.