research books on humor

International Society for Humor Studies Journal

The Society's journal, HUMOR , provides an interdisciplinary forum for the publication of high-quality articles on humor as an important and universal human faculty. Contributions include theoretical papers, original research reports, scholarly debates, and book reviews. The journal is currently published by DeGruyter, and all submissions are peer reviewed. Since 1988, HUMOR has published over 1000 articles and book reviews.Below are links to sample articles and book reviews with free online access on the DeGruyter website.

Comedy Bootcamp: Stand-up Comedy as Humor Training for Military Population Authors: Andrew Olah, Janelle Junkin, Thomas Ford, and Sam Pressler (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Satire without Borders: The Age-Moderated Effect of One-Sided versus Two-Sided Satire on Hedonic Experiences and Patriotism Authors: Mark Boukes and Heather LaMarre (2023: HUMOR : 36.1)

The Humor Transaction Schema: A Conceptual Framework for Researching the Nature and Effects of Humor Authors: Jessica Milner Davis and Jennifer Hofmann (2023: HUMOR : 36.2)

Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century Author: Danielle Fuentes Morgan Reviewers: Danielle Bobker and Catherine Sauvé Dowers (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape: A New Generation of Research Editors: Jody C. Baumgartner and Amy B. Becker Reviewer: Sara Polak (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

That’s not funny: how the right makes comedy work for them Editors: Jody C. Baumgartner and Amy B. Becker Reviewer: Sara Polak (2022: HUMOR 35.4)

Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes, and Societal Change Author: Ignatius Chukwimah Reviewer: Tessa Dowling (2023: HUMOR 36.1)

Current Editor-in-Chief Christian F. Hempelmann Literature & Languages Department Texas A & M University, Commerce humorjournal-at-gmail.com

Former Editors-in-Chiefs Salvatore Attardo Literature & Languages Department Texas A & M University, Commerce Thomas E. Ford Psychology Department Western Carolina University Giselinde Kuipers Sociology Department University of Amsterdam Lawrence Mintz American Studies Department University of Maryland Victor Raskin Linguistics Department Purdue University

ISHS Executive Secretary Martin D. Lampert Psychology Department Holy Names University humorstudies-at-outlook.com

Editorial Board Members Salvatore Attardo Texas A & M University, Commerce Nancy Bell, Washington State University Delia Chiaro University of Bologna Wladislaw Chlopicki Jagiellonian University Jessica Milner Davis University of Sydney Thomas E.Ford Western Carolina University Gil Greengross Aberystwyth University Giselinde Kuipers University of Amsterdam Liisi, Laineste, Estonian Literary Museum Sharon Lockyer Brunel University Moira Marsh Indiana University John Morreall College of William & Mary Alleen Nilsen Arizona State University Don Nilsen Arizona State University Elliott Oring Cal State University, Los Angeles Rene Proyer Martin Luther Univ. Halle-Wittenberg Victor Raskin Purdue University Willibald Ruch Zürich University Limor Shifman Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem Villy Tsakona National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens

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Humor Research [HR]

• Edited by: Victor Raskin and Willibald Ruch

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• Eur J Psychol
• v.12(3); 2016 Aug

Three Decades Investigating Humor and Laughter: An Interview With Professor Rod Martin

a Department of Psychology, Westminster Hall, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Nicholas A. Kuiper

Since the start of the 21st century, the investigation of various psychological aspects of humor and laughter has become an increasingly prominent topic of research. This growth can be attributed, in no small part, to the pioneering and creative work on humor and laughter conducted by Professor Rod Martin. Dr. Martin’s research interests in humor and laughter began in the early 1980s and continued throughout his 32 year long career as a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario. During this time, Dr. Martin published numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and books on psychological aspects of humor and laughter. Professor Martin has just retired in July 2016, and in the present interview he recounts a number of research highlights of his illustrious career. Dr. Martin’s earliest influential work, conducted while he was still in graduate school, stemmed from an individual difference perspective that focused on the beneficial effects of sense of humor on psychological well-being. This research focus remained evident in many of Professor Martin’s subsequent investigations, but became increasingly refined as he developed several measures of different components of sense of humor, including both adaptive and maladaptive humor styles. In this interview, Dr. Martin describes the conceptualization, development and use of the Humor Styles Questionnaire, along with suggestions for future research and development. In doing so, he also discusses the three main components of humor (i.e., cognitive, emotional and interpersonal), as well as the distinctions and similarities between humor and laughter. Further highlights of this interview include Professor Martin’s comments on such diverse issues as the genetic versus environmental loadings for sense of humor, the multifaceted nature of the construct of humor, and the possible limitations of teaching individuals to use humor in a beneficial manner to cope with stress and enhance their social and interpersonal relationships.

Nick Kuiper: I would like to thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for this special humor issue of Europe’s Journal of Psychology (EJOP) that honors your many contributions to the psychological investigation of humor and laughter. Over the past 30 years or so you have published numerous scholarly articles, chapters and books on various topics pertaining to humor and laughter. Your creative approach, combined with a rigorous theoretical-empirical orientation to your research, has resulted in a very strong positive influence on the field. Psychological investigations of humor and laughter have increased dramatically over the past decade, with the number of published research studies soaring. Many different facets of humor and laughter have been explored, with several of these being represented in the articles presented in this special humor issue of EJOP. Taken together, these contributions further mark the importance of utilizing a rigorous theoretical-empirical approach to increase our understanding of the various psychological aspects of humor and laughter.

Perhaps we could begin this interview by going back to the start. What was it that first piqued your interest in examining humor and laughter from a psychological perspective?

Rod Martin: Soon after I began as a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Waterloo in the Fall of 1979, I began talking with my research adviser, Herb Lefcourt, about possible topics for my Master’s thesis. There had previously been a lot of research showing the adverse effects of life stress on emotional and physical health, and Lefcourt was interested in looking at personality traits that might potentially moderate these stress effects. Lefcourt was really an early proponent of positive psychology before that label became popular. He was especially interested in the factors that make some people particularly healthy and resilient, rather than focusing on mental disturbance and emotional distress.

My research advisor had become quite well-known for his earlier research on locus of control, and at that time he was conducting some studies on the potential stress-moderating effects of this personality dimension. So we began talking about what other traits or characteristics might also help people to weather stress and adversity without becoming overly distressed or ill, and we started thinking about sense of humor as an interesting research topic. There has long been a great deal of popular lore about the health benefits of a good sense of humor, but very little scientific research had been done on it. In fact, this was right around the time that Norman Cousins came out with his book Anatomy of an Illness ( Cousins, 1976 ), in which he described how he supposedly used laughter to cure himself of a life-threatening disease. So this was about to become quite a hot topic. Looking back, I think I was fortunate to get into this line of research just at that time.

Nick Kuiper: How did this interest in humor and laughter translate into research studies?

Rod Martin: Given the individual differences approach that Herb Lefcourt took in his research (and which I have generally continued to follow), we first had to find a reliable and valid way of measuring people’s sense of humor. So I spent a couple of months delving into the scholarly literature looking at how earlier researchers had approached this topic. I quickly discovered that the concept of sense of humor is much more complex and multifaceted than I had thought, and there weren’t any well-established measures that seemed appropriate for our purpose. Most of the research on humor up till then had focused on humor appreciation, which involves asking participants to rate the funniness of different types of jokes, cartoons, and other humorous materials, and then looking at how these funniness ratings correlate with other characteristics of the individuals. This is a valid approach for some purposes, but I didn’t think it got at the aspects of humor that were relevant to what I was interested in. Some people might find lots of jokes amusing and enjoyable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they produce humor, or that they are able to maintain a humorous outlook particularly during times of stress. So I started thinking about other ways of conceptualizing and measuring sense of humor, particularly using self-report scales. The only published self-report measure of sense of humor I could find was the one Sven Svebak had recently developed in Norway, which seemed quite interesting but had not yet been used much in research and hadn’t really been validated.

One big concern we had at that time was that there might be a large social desirability bias in a self-report humor measure: a sense of humor is so positively valued that people might not be willing to admit that they don’t have one, and might not give valid answers on scales. I thought we might be able to get around this if we had participants recall past experiences of being in a variety of stressful and non-stressful life situations and asked them to report how much they would typically laugh in each situation. This led to the development of the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire, which became the main focus of my Master’s thesis. I also created the shorter Coping Humor Scale, which more directly asked participants to rate the degree to which they use humor to cope with stress in their lives (see Martin, 1996 for an overview of research using these two humor scales).

Over the five years of working with Lefcourt on my Master’s and Ph.D., we carried out a number of studies, first looking at the reliability and validity of these measures along with Svebak’s scale, and then examining stress-moderating effects using life events scales and self-report measures of positive and negative moods. We also conducted some experimental studies in which we had participants watch a very stressful and rather gruesome movie called Subincision , under either humorous or non-humorous conditions, and assessed their level of emotional distress via behavioral observation and self-report. Herb had quite an infectious sense of humor himself, and I remember having a lot of laughs with him and his other graduate students while doing that research. Fortunately, we got some rather nice results from those studies, and we published them in some journal articles (e.g., Martin & Lefcourt, 1983 ) and later in our book, Humor and life stress: Antidote to adversity ( Lefcourt & Martin, 1986 ).

Nick Kuiper: What do you view as the most significant findings that emerged from this early work on sense of humor as a strategy for coping with stress?

Rod Martin: Those early studies focused on a stress-moderation paradigm, and did produce some evidence that individual differences in sense of humor moderate the association between stressful life events and negative moods ( Martin & Lefcourt, 1983 ). In other words, individuals with higher scores on certain humor measures showed a weaker correlation between life stressors and distressed moods than did those with lower humor scores. These findings gave support to the idea that people who have more of a sense of humor are better able to cope with stress and therefore are less adversely affected by it. Those early studies helped to stimulate more interest and research on this topic and were also picked up by the media, contributing to the development of the “humor and health movement” in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Nick Kuiper : How do you see your early work addressing the broader issue of humor’s role in psychological well-being?

Rod Martin: After I was hired as a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario in 1984, I started collaborating with you, as well as some of my graduate students, on further studies on humor and stress. My first PhD student, James Dobbin, was interested in the effects of stress on physical health, and we ran some studies looking at various components of the immune system ( Martin & Dobbin, 1988 ). Among other things, we were able to replicate the earlier stress-moderator findings using immunoglobulin A as the outcome variable, thus extending the earlier findings to physical health as well as emotional well-being. In the research with you, we explored some possible mechanisms of these stress-moderating effects. For example, we looked at how the humor measures related to cognitive appraisals of stress, and found that people with higher humor scores tended to perceive potentially stressful events as more of a challenge, whereas those with lower humor saw them more as a threat ( Kuiper, Martin, & Olinger, 1993 ). This gave support to the idea that the benefits of a sense of humor for coping may be partly due to the way it changes the individual’s appraisals of stressors. In other studies we found that those with high humor scores tend to have more stable self-concepts over time, suggesting another possible benefit of humor for coping ( Kuiper & Martin, 1993 ).

Later we ran a number of studies looking at the correlations between the sense of humor scales and a variety of measures of psychological well-being, including positive and negative moods, self-esteem, optimism, mastery, purpose in life, and so on ( Kuiper & Martin, 1998 ). Surprisingly, we found that many of these well-being variables were unrelated or only weakly related to the humor scales. This got me thinking that our approach to measuring individual differences in humor may have been a little too simplistic. I started thinking more about ways that humor could be detrimental as well as beneficial for well-being, which led eventually to the development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire ( Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir, 2003 ).

Nick Kuiper : Over your career you have devoted considerable energy to measuring a variety of individual differences in humor and laughter. Some of your earliest work, for example, developed both the Coping Humor Scale (CHS) and the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ). What do you see as the primary theoretical reasons for taking this individual differences approach to humor and laughter?

Rod Martin: I gravitated toward the individual differences approach mainly because that was the approach I learned in graduate school, so it has always been most familiar to me and consistent with the way I think about psychology generally. This also seems most consistent with the popular concept of “sense of humor,” which is generally viewed as a fairly stable trait or personality dimension. The major limitation of this approach, though, is that it lends itself most readily to correlational research, which has the drawback of not being able to demonstrate causal relationships between variables. If we find a correlation between a particular humor measure and some aspect of well-being, we don’t know whether the humor actually causes the well-being. An alternative approach would be the sorts of experimental methods taken by social psychologists, and certainly I see that type of research as also being very important in the study of humor and well-being. A drawback of the experimental approach, in my view, is that it can often be somewhat artificial, whereas the individual differences approach seems to have more external validity. So we need both approaches to offset each of their limitations.

Nick Kuiper : Although humor and laughter have been examined in many studies, these constructs can sometimes still remain a bit elusive. In this regard, how might we best define humor from a psychological perspective?

Rod Martin: I view humor as quite a broad and multifaceted psychological phenomenon that encompasses several components ( Martin, 2007 ; Martin, 2016 ). The first is the cognitive aspect, namely the perception of incongruity, which has also been referred to as “bisociation” or “cognitive synergy.” It seems to involve the simultaneous activation of two or more incompatible interpretations of a situation in the mind. It also tends to be associated with a playful, non-serious frame of mind and some degree of diminishment, in which things are viewed as being less important or admirable than they usually are. These cognitive elements are what make something “funny.”

Second, there is the emotional component. The cognitive processes activate a unique emotional response, which I refer to as “mirth.” In the English language, this word “mirth” has a long lineage and seems to be perfect as a technical term for this emotional aspect of humor. Mirth is related to joy, but is somewhat different because of the element of “funniness” involved. It is accompanied by activation of the pleasure circuits in the limbic system as well as various autonomic and endocrine responses, and is what makes humor so enjoyable.

Third, there is the social or interpersonal aspect. I see humor as being fundamentally a social activity. We are much more likely to laugh with other people than when alone, and most humor arises in response to the behavior of other people or human-like traits in non-human animals. From an evolutionary perspective, I think humor evolved as a mechanism for enhancing group cohesion.

The final component is laughter , which I see as a hard-wired nonverbal expression or communication of the emotion of mirth. Laughter occurs also in other primates, so it has a long evolutionary history going back long before we evolved language and other higher cognitive abilities. So laughter is the way we let others know we are experiencing mirth, and it also has the effect of eliciting this emotion in the listener. That’s why laughter is so contagious. Strong laughter can also intensify and amplify the emotion of mirth. Usually this happens when people are in small groups, and they engage in intense bouts of laughter that are very enjoyable and create strong feelings of group cohesion.

Some theorists might define humor more narrowly, focusing only on the cognitive aspect, for example. But I think humor should be defined broadly enough to include the constellation of all these elements. In any one instance of humor, one or another of these elements might predominate. For example, in more cerebral types of wit the cognitive element might be primary, with very little mirth or laughter. At other times, laughter and mirth might predominate and the cognitive incongruity component may be minimal. Sometimes people experience mirth and even some laughter when alone, so the social element may be lacking, but usually this occurs in a “pseudo-social” situation such as watching a comedy show on TV or remembering an amusing incident that involved other people.

Some researchers see laughter as something quite distinct from humor, and argue that it frequently occurs as a sort of social signal of friendliness that has nothing to do with humor (e.g., Provine, 2000 ). However, the research evidence for that view is very limited, and I’m not convinced by it. I would draw the boundary of humor broadly enough to include most instances of social laughter. Even though people may laugh when there is very little cognitive incongruity present, I think the playfulness and diminishment aspects are typically still occurring, and certainly the mirth and social dimension.

Nick Kuiper: To what extent do you think contemporary researchers are cognizant of the main distinctions between humor and laughter? What would you see as the most profitable directions for future research in this area?

Rod Martin: I think some contemporary researchers are actually exaggerating the distinctions between humor and laughter. I agree that laughter sometimes occurs outside of humor, but that may be an anomaly. In general, I see laughter as one component of the broader constellation of phenomena of humor. However, I think it can be worthwhile to study each of these components individually. For example, psycholinguistic studies investigating cognitive aspects of humor can focus on the essential elements involved in the perception of incongruity and what makes something funny, without being concerned with the emotion of mirth or laughter or the social dimension. Other researchers may be more interested in focusing on the emotional component and the neurological and physiological aspects. Others may focus on the social dimension or on laughter. In fact, I think this kind of narrowing in on various sub-components might be the best way to make progress in understanding the broader phenomenon of humor. Even for those of us who are particularly interested in psychological and physical health aspects of humor, it might be beneficial to focus on particular dimensions individually and see how they relate to various aspects of health and well-being. For example, the cognitive component of humor may be particularly important for coping with stress, whereas the emotional aspect may be particularly relevant for physiological health.

Nick Kuiper: More recently you have developed an assessment instrument to measure four different humor styles, namely, the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). This scale provides a measure of individual differences in affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor and self-defeating humor. Could you please take us through the thinking and process that led to the development and validation of this scale?

Rod Martin : In the late 1990’s I started thinking more about the idea that the relevance of humor to health and well-being may have more to do with the way people use humor than the overall degree to which they have a “sense of humor.” Some people can be very funny and comical without necessarily being particularly healthy from a psychological perspective. We only need to look at comedians like Chris Farley and John Belushi for examples of this. I went back to the writings of some earlier psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Gordon Allport, and even Sigmund Freud, and looked at how they distinguished between healthy and unhealthy forms of humor. This led me to the idea of looking at the psychosocial functions of humor in everyday life, some of which may be beneficial for well-being while others may be detrimental.

I worked particularly with one of my graduate students, Patricia Puhlik-Doris, on the development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire, and both her Masters and Ph.D. focused on this measure. In coming up with the four dimensions, we were influenced by the research on agency and communion as two primary, orthogonal dimensions underlying interpersonal traits and behavior. Agency has to do with individual autonomy and control, whereas communion relates to social connectedness. So we saw self-enhancing and aggressive humor as being on the agency dimension – one healthy and the other unhealthy – whereas affiliative and self-defeating humor were healthy and unhealthy forms on the communion dimension.

In developing the HSQ, we quickly found out how difficult it is to assess these different functions of humor using a self-report format. I don’t think most people are consciously aware of the implicit goals and psychological effects that their humor may have at any given time. They’re only aware that they’re laughing because something seems funny to them. Similarly, I don’t think most people use humor in a strategic way to achieve particular goals. We don’t say, “I’m going to say something funny now in order to cope with this stressful situation or to make that person look like an idiot.” Instead, humor tends to occur quite spontaneously most of the time, arising out of unconscious processes. Nonetheless, I think we can see that humor serves various functions by looking at the patterns of consequences over time.

In our first attempts at creating items for the HSQ we tried to ask research participants directly about the degree to which they engaged in humor for various purposes. But people had a hard time answering these questions, and we were unable to get any reliability. So then we worked on items that get at the functions of humor more indirectly, asking more about the typical context and consequences of their use of humor. Over a couple of years we went through several revisions of the scales, using a number of different subject samples, before arriving at a final measure with four scales showing good reliability, discriminant validity, and a consistently stable factor structure ( Martin et al., 2003 ; Martin, 2007 ).

Nick Kuiper: The HSQ has been a phenomenally successful assessment instrument, with over 125 published studies using the measure and more than 500 citations. Why do you think the HSQ has been so broadly endorsed and employed in contemporary humor research? What are its main advantages for research on humor?

Rod Martin: It certainly has been gratifying to me to see how widely used the HSQ has become. It has now been translated into over 30 languages, and I frequently get emails from researchers all over the world asking about it. I think it has gained such wide acceptance in part because it did turn out to be more strongly predictive of various aspects of psychosocial well-being than the earlier humor measures. The four scales do seem to have quite distinct patterns of correlations, both positive and negative, with a range of variables involving well-being, personal relationships, and personality more generally. So it does seem to have been quite successful in doing what we set out to do with it. The fact that we put so much care and effort into developing the HSQ also likely helped, both with the strength of the results, and with its perceived usefulness for further research. Also, I think the HSQ came along just at a time when research on humor was starting to become more main-stream in psychology. Previously, I think humor was seen as a topic that was perhaps not “serious” enough for respectable research. The positive psychology movement was probably a factor in making topics like this more respectable.

Also, some brain imaging studies came out around that time, showing that particular areas of the brain are activated in response to humor. There seems to be an odd perception that if something can be seen in the brain, it is more real and scientifically valid. As more researchers started getting interested in looking at humor, the HSQ happened to be available as a reliable and reasonably well validated measure, so they naturally started using it, giving it further momentum.

Nick Kuiper: What are some other ways that you see the HSQ being used in the future?

Rod Martin: In recent years, my students and I have been developing versions of the HSQ for different purposes. For example, we have peer-report formats and also versions specific to particular relationships such as friendships and dating relationships. This has led to some interesting findings about the role of humor styles in different types of relationships. Also, we’ve been developing versions for assessing humor experiences over shorter time frames rather than using it as a trait measure. We’ve used these in a number of daily diary studies, looking at the way within-person changes in the frequency of the different styles of humor from day to day are associated with corresponding changes in individuals’ positive and negative moods, relationship satisfaction, and so on. This has led to some interesting findings of different patterns of results within individuals over time as compared to the cross-sectional findings. For example, one of my recent graduate students, Kim Edwards, found that, for people who don’t engage in self-defeating humor very often overall, this style of humor actually tends to be positively associated with psychological well-being on a day-to-day basis ( Edwards, 2013 ; Edwards & Martin, 2014 ). However, for people who use it a lot, it is negatively related to well-being. So this research helps to tease out some more fine-grained nuances of the humor styles.

Another avenue of research that I’ve been involved in with my students and my colleague Lorne Campbell is to develop an observational coding system based on the HSQ framework. We’ve used this system to rate the humor that occurs naturalistically in dating couples while they’re engaged in conversations about conflict-related issues in their relationships, and also in friendship dyads discussing stressful experiences in their lives ( Campbell, Martin, & Ward, 2008 ). We found that these humor style ratings were predictive of various outcomes such as feelings of satisfaction and perceptions of problem resolution following the conversations. By observing humor in “real time” like this, we can start to see how different styles of humor may lead to various outcomes. I think there is still a lot of potential for further research using these different kinds of methodologies based on the HSQ framework.

Nick Kuiper : In the HSQ two of the humor styles are generally considered to be adaptive (affiliative & self-enhancing) whereas two are generally considered to be maladaptive (aggressive & self-defeating). How hard and fast do you see this distinction to be? Could you envision instances were maladaptive humor use may actually prove to be facilitative (e.g., a small amount of self-defeating or aggressive humor used in the right context)? How might researchers develop a means of examining this issue? What is necessary for investigators to consider in order to come to a more complete understanding of the function of humor from an adaptive versus maladaptive perspective?

Rod Martin: From the outset, we saw the different humor styles as having rather fuzzy boundaries. Some styles of humor may be benign or even beneficial when used sparingly, but detrimental when used excessively. The diary study findings with self-defeating humor that I mentioned previously are a good example of that. As long as you don’t use it too much, it may actually be beneficial. Also, I think the differences between healthy and unhealthy forms of humor can be very subtle. For example, I think there is a difference between self-defeating humor and self-deprecating humor. Self-deprecating humor is a healthy form of humor in which you don’t take yourself too seriously and are able to laugh at your own mistakes in a self-accepting way. I think this comes out of healthy self-esteem. In contrast, self-defeating humor arises from low self-esteem, and involves excessively self-disparaging humor that is used to ingratiate oneself with others. However, it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two in any single instance. Similarly, friendly types of teasing can be a form of healthy affiliative humor, whereas more destructive teasing is part of aggressive humor. Again, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between them. Also, it’s important to recognize that we conceptualized the four humor styles as being relatively independent of each other, meaning that people can be high or low on more than one of them. Some people who are high on affiliative humor also engage in a lot of aggressive humor, and in fact the two styles tend to be weakly positively correlated, at least in western cultures.

I certainly don’t see the HSQ as the final word on healthy and unhealthy forms of humor, and I have no doubt that it will eventually be replaced by something else, as research progresses. I think it has been useful for identifying some broadly-defined functions of humor and showing different overall patterns of associations with aspects of well-being. But I think future research will need to become more fine-grained, breaking these humor styles into smaller components, and also looking at them in various combinations. There may also be other relevant humor styles that are not currently included in the HSQ that will be identified by future researchers. It will also be useful to pay more attention to the interpersonal context of the humor. For example, aggressive humor is likely to be less detrimental when directed towards a member of an out-group than when directed at someone within the in-group. For this kind of research, we may need to move away from the trait approach and self-report scales and do more observational and experimental studies.

Nick Kuiper: When talking about humor styles, what has research indicated in terms of the relative genetic and environmental loadings for each style? What are some of the broader ramifications of these loadings? For instance, what do these loadings suggest for any attempts to alter an individual’s characteristic pattern of use for the four humor styles?

Rod Martin: I’ve collaborated with my colleague Tony Vernon and others on some twin studies to determine the heritability of the humor styles. The first study seemed to show that the two positive humor styles have a sizable genetic contribution, whereas the two negative styles are entirely influenced by environmental factors ( Vernon, Martin, Schermer, Cherkas, & Spector, 2008 ). However, in subsequent studies we found that, for all four humor styles, about half of the variance can be explained by genetics and half by environmental influences ( Vernon, Martin, Schermer, & Mackie, 2008 ). This is very similar to what researchers have found for most personality traits, such as extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and so on. In fact, the twin studies also show that part of the variance in humor styles is due to the same genetic factors underlying these broader personality traits. In other words, the different humor styles can be viewed as expressions of particular personality traits, at least to some extent. Affiliative humor tends to be an extraverted style of humor, for example. I would interpret these findings as indicating that humor styles can be changed to some degree, but it would be difficult to change them a lot. Just as it’s very difficult for an introverted person to become an extravert, it would be hard for a person who is low on affiliative humor to become someone who is always telling jokes, engaging in witty banter, and making others laugh.

Nick Kuiper: In considering “sense of humor”, it is clear that current researchers view this construct as being multi-dimensional in nature. One prominent example, of course, is the HSQ, with two of the humor styles often thought of as being more adaptive (e.g., affiliative and self-enhancing humor) and two being more maladaptive (e.g., aggressive and self-defeating humor). In addition, the HSQ also considers the self versus other focus of the humor style being used (e.g., self-defeating versus aggressive). It is also the case, however, that sense of humor can be divided up in many other ways. Just one example distinguishes between humor appreciation (the ability to enjoy or appreciate humor in one’s environment) versus humor generation (the ability to generate humorous or witty comments in response to various interactions with one’s environment). If you were to build upon the HSQ, what other dimensions or facets of sense of humor would you consider adding?

Rod Martin: I certainly agree that “sense of humor” is a multifaceted concept. When we think of the different components of humor that I talked about earlier (cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, expressive), it’s clear that there are many different humor-related dimensions along which people can differ from one another. These different dimensions are not necessarily correlated with each other, and some may even be negatively correlated. Humor creation ability seems to be completely unrelated to humor appreciation, for example. So I don’t think we’ll ever be able to capture all the relevant dimensions in one measure alone.

When we developed the HSQ, we were interested in certain aspects of humor that might be particularly relevant to psychosocial health and well-being. We were not trying to create a comprehensive measure of “sense of humor.” There are lots of other dimensions, such as humor appreciation and humor creation ability that are likely not very relevant to psychological well-being. Overall, I don’t believe that someone needs to have a good sense of humor to be psychologically healthy. Some very funny people who laugh and joke a great deal have a lot of emotional disturbance and dysfunctional relationships, and some very serious, introverted people are well adjusted and have healthy personal relationships. So I don’t think I’d try to incorporate these other dimensions into the HSQ, since this was not the purpose of it.

Nick Kuiper: Do you see it as being possible to try and develop a very broad-based sense of humor measure that would incorporate the most important facets or dimensions of sense of humor, as described in the contemporary humor literature? What might such a measure look like?

Rod Martin: I think it would need to be more of a battery of tests rather than a single measure. I’m thinking of something like the Wechsler intelligence tests that have a dozen or so sub-tests, each designed to assess a different aspect of intelligence. In a comprehensive humor test battery there would need to be different sub-tests for getting at different humor dimensions, such as humor appreciation, humor creation ability, humor styles, and so on. They would also need to be different types of tests, some being maximal performance-type tests to assess humor-related abilities, others assessing typical trait-like behaviors, some involving behavioral observation or peer reports, and others using self-report methods. Instead of leading to one overall “humor IQ” score, this test battery would produce a profile of scores on a number of different dimensions, mapping out each individual’s unique combination of humor-related abilities, preferences, styles, strengths, and weaknesses.

Nick Kuiper: How might such a broad-based sense of humor measure be used in research to help advance our understanding of an individual difference approach to humor and laughter?

Rod Martin: For the most part, I think each dimension would likely need to be studied independently in relation to other variables, because I’m assuming that they’re largely independent factors. Thus, I think they would each show different patterns of relationships with other personality traits, well-being variables, abilities, and so on. There might also be some interesting interactions among different humor dimensions, such that one dimension might moderate the relationship between another dimension and some other personality trait or ability. The possibilities here are endless!

Nick Kuiper : Let’s talk a bit more about the ways that humor may be related to stress and personal well-being. Underlying this type of research is a major distinction between humor that an individual might be exposed to (for example, watching a comedy film) versus humor that is a personality characteristic or trait of the individual (for example, having a “good sense of humor”). Perhaps you could comment on the usefulness of this basic distinction in humor theory and research, while also highlighting some of the major findings in this domain. What might you suggest for future research directions?

Rod Martin: I think the distinction you’re talking about also relates to a broader distinction that I make between what I call “performance humor” versus “conversational humor.” Performance humor includes things like television sit-coms, stand-up comedy, humorous books and movies, which are mostly produced by people who make their living on humor. Conversational humor involves everyday joke-telling, humorous personal anecdotes, witty banter, irony, and other funny comments that tend to occur spontaneously in all sorts of social interactions. Performance humor is certainly an interesting topic for research, but I’ve always assumed that conversational humor is much more relevant for health and well-being, which is what I’ve been most interested in. Spending a lot of time laughing at sit-coms on TV is likely to make you less healthy, rather than more healthy! In my view, if there really are any emotional or physical health benefits of humor, they’re more likely to come from conversational humor.

At the same time, though, I think it can be very useful to employ comedy videos and other types of humorous materials in experimental studies to investigate psychological and physiological effects of humor. There have been quite a few studies in which participants are randomly assigned to view either humorous or non-humorous videos, in order to examine the effects of humor on mood, blood pressure, heart rate, immune system functioning, etc. These are the sorts of experimental investigations that are useful for demonstrating causal effects, as I mentioned earlier. I certainly think there’s a need for more of these kinds of studies in this area of stress and well-being, rather than relying too much on correlational research.

However, I would tend to see the comedy videos and other humorous materials in these types of experimental studies as being a sort of “stand-in” for the conversational humor that occurs in everyday life. If an experiment shows that watching a comedy video causes participants to be less adversely affected by some sort of laboratory stressor, I wouldn’t think the take-home message is that people should spend more time watching television comedy in order to cope better with stress in their lives. Instead, I’d extrapolate the findings to the kinds of humor that people can generate and enjoy in their everyday social interactions. This gets back to my earlier comment that experimental approaches can often be somewhat artificial. It would be good for experimental researchers to develop more realistic ways of manipulating humor in the laboratory besides videos, in order to increase the external validity. But greater external validity often comes with less control over the variables being manipulated. So again, there’s always a trade-off with different research approaches, and we need to use multiple approaches to triangulate on the truth.

Nick Kuiper: To what degree do you think it is possible to teach individuals how to use humor in a positive adaptive manner to manage stress? Similarly, can individuals also be taught to stop using maladaptive humor that is detrimental to their well-being? Along the same lines, what is your take on the current state of empirically-based research on humor-based interventions for improving psychological well-being?

Rod Martin: I think it’s probably more difficult to teach people to improve their ability to create humor than to teach them to use the humor they already have in a more adaptive way. If someone is not very funny to begin with, it’s very hard for them to learn to be more witty. But someone who is already constantly cracking jokes, but doing it in a maladaptive way, might be able to learn more adaptive ways of being funny.

Overall, if we’re trying to help people with psychological difficulties and disorders, I think it’s more beneficial to target broader psychological issues rather than to try to modify humor directly. This is why I’m not very keen on the idea of humor-based therapies. I think that more established approaches like cognitive-behavioral therapy can be very beneficial for helping people to modify their maladaptive cognitions, behaviors, and emotions. More healthy styles of humor are likely to come along with the resulting improvements in mental health, without necessarily needing to target them directly.

At the same time, though, I think many psychotherapists could benefit from being more aware of the functions of humor in their clients’ lives and in the client-therapist relationship, and more alert to ways in which maladaptive humor may play a role in their clients’ psychological dysfunctions. So some targeting of humor styles in therapy could be beneficial, as an adjunct to other therapeutic techniques.

On the other hand, for people who are already reasonably healthy psychologically, some sort of humor training might potentially be useful for enhancing their well-being further. I think it might be worthwhile for researchers to investigate these sorts of interventions more as a way of enhancing well-being rather than treating disorders. This is in line with a positive psychology approach, where the focus is on developing simple exercises that can enhance happiness and life satisfaction in generally healthy people. One of my recent graduate students, Kim Edwards, focused her research on the role of humor in positive psychology. As part of her PhD, she developed a humor-based intervention for enhancing well-being based on the humor styles framework, and found that it produced significantly greater improvements in positive mood compared with a no-treatment control group, but no reduction in negative moods ( Edwards, 2013 ).

A few other studies have come out recently showing fairly promising results with some of these types of humor-training programs (e.g., Falkenberg, Buchkremer, Bartels, & Wild, 2011 ), but I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we can have much confidence in their effectiveness. More research is needed to identify which components of the interventions are most effective, what types of people are most likely to benefit, and to compare them with other non-humor interventions. I’ve always frowned on those who jump on what I call the “humor promotion bandwagon” and run far ahead of the research evidence, making unsubstantiated claims about benefits of humor. I think they risk doing more harm than good.

Nick Kuiper : Humor is also quite relevant to close interpersonal and social relationships. In your research you have conducted a number of studies that have looked at various aspects of close interpersonal and social relationships that bear on humor. Can you tell us a bit about this research and what you consider the major findings to be?

Rod Martin: I’ve always viewed healthy personal relationships as being an essential component of overall psychological health. I think of humans as fundamentally social animals. We evolved in small groups, and to function well we need to be able to get along well with others, both in our close relationships and in more casual interactions. There is a lot of research supporting these ideas. Also, as I said earlier, I see humor as being essentially a social phenomenon. So in studying potential benefits of humor for mental health, it was quite a natural step for me to look at interpersonal relationships in addition to emotional well-being.

Quite a lot of the research that I’ve done with my graduate students over the past 10 or 15 years has focused on relationships using the humor styles framework. We’ve looked particularly at the role of humor in dating relationships and in close friendships. A lot of this research made use of daily diary techniques to get at within-person, day-to-day changes in humor styles in relation to relationship satisfaction and related variables. Not surprisingly, these studies have shown that, on days when people engage in more positive humor styles with their partners, particularly affiliative humor, they tend to have higher levels of satisfaction in their relationships, whereas negative humor styles on a given day, particularly aggressive humor, are associated with more dissatisfaction that day ( Caird & Martin, 2014 ). Recent research by my student Sara Caird was designed to examine potential mediators of these effects ( Caird, 2015 ). She found that these day-to-day associations between humor styles and relationship satisfaction were mediated by changes in intimacy and positive and negative moods. In other words, when individuals engage in more adaptive forms of humor with their partners, they experience an increased sense of intimacy and more positive and less negative moods, which in turn lead to greater satisfaction with the relationship.

Other research on interpersonal relationships made use of observational methods. Another one of my graduate students, Jennie Ward, had pairs of close friends come into the lab and engage in a videotaped conversation in which one of them (the “discloser”) talked about some stressful situation that he or she was currently dealing with, while the other (the “supporter”) was to respond supportively ( Ward, 2008 ). We then coded the humor styles of both friendship partners in each dyad, and looked at how these were related to their moods and perceptions of how helpful the conversation was. Interestingly, we found that different styles of humor were important, depending on which role the individual was playing. For the disclosers, their expressions of affiliative and self-enhancing humor were particularly related to how well they felt afterwards. On the other hand, for the supporters, the absence of aggressive humor was more important than the presence of the positive humor styles.

Another one of my recent graduate students, Dave Podnar, investigated the role of friendly teasing in relationships ( Podnar, 2013 ). He found that even friendly teasing is not as benign as commonly thought. People who engage in a lot of this sort of kidding tend to be less well liked by others, and tend to have aggressive, non-empathic personalities.

Nick Kuiper : In closing, I would like to thank you once again for sharing your comments and views with us. I would also like to note that you have just recently retired this summer, and I was wondering if you would share with us some of your plans for retirement.

Rod Martin: I’m looking forward to having some time to relax, read, travel, and pursue other hobbies. My wife, Myra, and I now have eight grandchildren, so that’s enough to keep us busy! We also just bought a motorhome and are looking forward to doing some traveling across Canada and the United States over the next few years. We plan to take some trips overseas as well. I’m hoping also to have some time for hobbies like oil painting and woodworking. However, I also hope to have some ongoing involvement in humor research. The publisher of my book, The Psychology of Humor (2007), has been encouraging me to write a revised edition, so I expect to be working on that in coming months. I also hope to continue attending the annual conferences of the International Society for Humor Studies, which meets in different countries each year. Looking back over the years, I value the many good friendships I’ve made with humor scholars from various disciplines all over the world, and I hope to keep in touch with them and keep up on developments in their research.

Nick Kuiper: Any last words?

Rod Martin: I’d just like to thank you, Nick, for editing this special journal issue on humor research. It’s a real honor for me. I appreciate also the opportunities you and I have had to collaborate on research together over the years. I’ve enjoyed having you as a colleague.

Acknowledgments

The authors have no support to report.

Biographies

Dr. Rod Martin completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo in 1984. Since then, he has been a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. He retired in July, 2016, and is now a Professor Emeritus. A major focus of his research has been on the psychology of humor, particularly as it relates to psychological health and well-being. He has authored more than 100 scholarly journal articles, books, and book chapters, including a book entitled The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach . He has developed several tests for measuring aspects of the sense of humor, which have been translated into numerous languages and have been used by researchers around the world. In recent years, his research has focused on the distinction between beneficial and detrimental styles of humor and their association with well-being and interpersonal relationships. He has served as President of the International Society for Humor Studies and is on the editorial board of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research . He and his wife have three adult children and eight grandchildren.

Dr. Nick Kuiper has been a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario since 1978. During this time, he has published numerous articles and chapters on the self-reference effect, depression and anxiety, psychological well-being, humor, and several other topics of interest. Most of his current research pertains to various facets and implications of humor. This interest in studying humor began in the early 1990’s, with a special emphasis on personality and social psychological aspects of laughter and humor. Much of this work has focused on individual differences in sense of humor, with implications for stress, coping, psychological well-being, physical health, and social interactions. Further work has examined humor use in romantic relationships, the potential links between humor use and bullying in middle childhood, cross-cultural patterns in humor, the implicit theories of humor that individuals develop about themselves and others, and the potential links between various humor styles and different forms of anxiety.

The authors have no funding to report.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Article contents

Humor in language.

• Salvatore Attardo Salvatore Attardo Texas A&M University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.342
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Interest in the linguistics of humor is widespread and dates since classical times. Several theoretical models have been proposed to describe and explain the function of humor in language. The most widely adopted one, the semantic-script theory of humor, was presented by Victor Raskin, in 1985. Its expansion, to incorporate a broader gamut of information, is known as the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Other approaches are emerging, especially in cognitive and corpus linguistics. Within applied linguistics, the predominant approach is analysis of conversation and discourse, with a focus on the disparate functions of humor in conversation. Speakers may use humor pro-socially, to build in-group solidarity, or anti-socially, to exclude and denigrate the targets of the humor. Most of the research has focused on how humor is co-constructed and used among friends, and how speakers support it. Increasingly, corpus-supported research is beginning to reshape the field, introducing quantitative concerns, as well as multimodal data and analyses. Overall, the linguistics of humor is a dynamic and rapidly changing field.

1. Humor in Language

Scholarly research on humor goes back to Plato and Aristotle and extends to practically all fields of inquiry, including mathematics and medicine. There exist several scholarly societies for the study of humor, and numerous journals and book series are dedicated entirely to humor research. Linguistics has had a privileged role in humorology (or gelotology), both because of its contributions, which this entry will review, and because language is the medium of much humor. Even humor that is produced entirely outside of language (for example, visually or musically) needs to be discussed and explained in language by scholars wanting to analyze it. In what follows, only humor expressed linguistically will be considered. Likewise, irony and sarcasm will be given only a very cursory treatment (Section 2.3.1), despite their obvious connections to humor, due to the exceedingly large literature on the subject and its complexity.

2. Critical Analysis of Scholarship

One of the earliest linguistic discussions of humor is found in Cicero, who distinguishes between humor “de re” and “de dicto.” The distinction is fundamental and matches precisely modern-day differentiations between “referential” and “verbal” humor: the former is purely semantic/pragmatic and does not depend on the linguistic form (the signifier), whereas the latter crucially does. In practical terms and simplifying a little, verbal humor is comprised of puns, ambiguity-based humor, or humor that is based on repetition of parts of the signifier (for example, alliteration). All these forms of humor exploit characteristics of the signifier to bring together incongruous semantic or pragmatic meanings. Referential humor on the contrary is based only on semantic/pragmatic incongruity. Consider the following riddle:

Example (1) exploits the homophony between the morphemes [red] and [read], which brings together (overlaps) the incompatible meanings of the color “red” and the past participle of “read.” In psychological terms, this is called an incongruity. The incongruity is also “resolved” because the homophony allows the text to playfully “claim” that the coincidental phonetic overlap of the two different morphemes justifies the presence of the two meanings in the text. It should be noted that all discussions of the “resolution” of humor point out that it is only a playful, non-serious, para-logical resolution.

Linguistic humor research initially focused on puns, which are obviously a linguistic problem. Most of the research was taxonomic, building elaborate classifications of phenomena, primarily based on the linguistic factors at play—for example puns are often classified as paradigmatic or syntagmatic, depending on whether the two strings involved are co-present in the text or not. Other classifications focus on distinctions such as homonymy (homophones and homographs), paronimy (partial homonymy), etc. The semantic aspect of humor was neglected until two approaches, one developed in Europe and one in the United States, brought attention to linguistically based humor research on meaning.

2.1 The Semantic Turn: The Isotopy-Disjunction Model

In the 1960s, renewed interest in lexical semantics led numerous semanticists to postulate the existence of meaning units “smaller” than morphemes. A morpheme such as /dog/ could be analyzed in semantic features, such as [+animal][+adult] [+canine], etc. A. J. Greimas, a French structural linguist, in the context of proposing to differentiate between types of features, proposed the idea of isotopy, which would account for the selection of the feature [+animal] or [-human] in the lexeme “bark” (consider the contrastive pair: “the dog barked” vs. “the sergeant barked [at the recruits],” which would select [+animal] and [-animal], respectively). In passing, and without any serious discussion, Greimas ( 1966 ) mentioned that some jokes functioned by switching isotopies. Several European scholars adopted this model, which was soon enriched by the use of narrative functions, such as the idea that jokes consisted of three functions: the first one setting up the story, the second one introducing an incongruity, and the third one resolving it with the punch line.

Despite broad adoption in Europe, the model suffered from a lack of clear definition of the core concept of isotopy (see Attardo, 1994 for discussion) and was largely abandoned in favor of script-based models that were richer and more flexible, semantically and pragmatically. However, a recent synthesis (Al-Jared, 2017 ) shows that there is still some vitality attached to the model.

2.2 The Semantic-Script Theory of Humor

Lexical semantics in the United States, under the stimulus of research in Artificial Intelligence, and following research in psychology, particularly in the area of memory, moved away from feature-based representations and adopted more sophisticated representations that allowed researchers to incorporate encyclopedic information. The terminology varied significantly ( frames , schemata , memory organization packets , scripts , situations ), but the fundamental concept was that the structures were complex semantic units that incorporated large amount of information on how to “do things,” and importantly, were connected in a large semantic network.

Within the context of this research, the semantic-script theory of humor (SSTH) emerged, proposed by Victor Raskin, in 1985 . Raskin’s book was extremely successful, for two main reasons: first, it was the first coherent, book-length treatment of the semantics of humor; second, it linked the linguistic treatment of humor to the broader field of humor research, by providing a thorough review of the literature and a clear epistemological position within the field of linguistics. Humor studies provide the questions, and linguistics provides the answers (when it can).

Another contributing factor to the success of Raskin’s SSTH is that it can be summarized in two pithy conditions. The necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny are:

The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts.

The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense. (Raskin, 1985 , p. 99)

The two conditions, in their simplicity, hide the complex underlying semantic theory. This has led to numerous misunderstandings. For example, Raskin’s theory is, very explicitly, a theory of a speaker’s competence, not of their performance. Hence, whether a given person in a given situation does not find a given joke text humorous, for whatever reason, is entirely irrelevant, much like a mispronunciation of a sound by a speaker is entirely irrelevant to the phonemic status of the phoneme /p/ in English. In other words, the SSTH predicts whether a given joke text has the potential to be perceived as humorous by speakers.

2.3 Pragmatics of Humor

Another aspect of Raskin’s theory that is extremely significant, and has been misunderstood, is that Raskin denies the usefulness of the semantics/pragmatics boundary. Hence, his theory should properly be defined as a semantic/pragmatic theory. Raskin observes, as many had before, that jokes do not follow the Principle of Cooperation (Grice, 1989 ). Raskin introduces the idea of non-bona-fide communication to characterize non-cooperative exchanges (cooperative exchanges are bona-fide).

As mentioned, the idea that jokes and humor at large are a violation of the cooperative principles, or of one of the maxims, is not new, but Raskin, and later Attardo ( 1994 ), integrated it within the linguistics of humor. There has been some scattered opposition to this view, essentially attempting to deny the reality of the violation. The most significant of these is by Goatly ( 2012 , p. 235), who suggests considering humor as a short-term violation (or as he puts it, “a flout delayed by violation”).

2.3.1 Irony and Sarcasm

Flouting the Principle of Cooperation is, of course, one of the ways of generating irony, as Grice himself noted. In this section, irony and sarcasm are briefly discussed. The first problem one encounters when addressing the subject is that the terms irony and sarcasm are folk categories, which moreover have undergone, in certain varieties of English, a recent semantic shift: it used to be that, generally speaking, irony was intended as the broad category of “saying one thing and meaning its opposite,” with sarcasm reserved for particularly aggressive or biting forms thereof. However, beginning in the early 1990s, the term irony shifted for young American English speakers, to mean “something unexpected and unpleasant” and sarcasm became the unmarked term covering the field of irony/sarcasm. To what extent this affects research based on questionnaires and on corpora has not been determined. Needless to say, this does not affect other languages and varieties of English.

There have been many pragmatic approaches to irony. Among the most followed are listed here:

The so-called standard pragmatic model , proposed by Grice ( 1989 ) and Searle ( 1969 ), which sees irony as a flout of the maxim of quality, within Grice’s “Cooperative” principle. Later, the claim was broadened to the flout of any of the maxims.

The direct access theory (Gibbs, 1994 ), based on psycholinguistic evidence, which denies that the speakers must first access the literal meaning of the utterance, as implied by the standard pragmatic model. In the direct access model, speakers directly access the ironical meaning.

The graded salience theory, which claims that speakers access the most salient meaning first and the less salient one second (Giora, 2002 ). Between the two meanings, there holds a relationship of negation.

The mention theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1981 ) claimed that irony is the mention of a previous utterance with a critical stance toward the original utterance. Later, the theory was weakened to require only an echo of a belief that could be attributed to someone, and eventually to a reminder of a common belief or social norm, to accommodate the fact that many ironies do not explicitly refer to prior utterances.

The pretense theory argues that the speaker pretends to be another speaker who would say the utterance, also with a critical stance toward the utterance and/or the speaker thereof.

There are many other theories, and new accounts are frequently added (for a synthesis, see Gibbs & Colston, 2007 ). For example, there have been proposals to see irony as a prototypical phenomenon, rather than as a categorical one, as assumed by all the theories reviewed here, as well as approaches that tie irony to embodied cognition. Space limitations prevent a full review; however, a consensus seems to be gathering around the idea of contrast (Colston, 2000 ). Contrast subsumes the pretense and mention theories, as well as the standard pragmatic model, as it assumes that a violation of any maxim may generate irony if it is in a situation in which the expected or preferred state of the world is in contrast with the observed one. The concept of contrast can also be usefully connected with Giora’s negation. Under this view, mention, echo, reminder, pretense, etc., would be ways in which the contrast between expectations and reality is highlighted. This in turn connects back to the similarity between the contrast account of irony and the accounts of humor as “opposition” between two scripts.

2.4 The GTVH

Attardo and Raskin ( 1991 ) presented an expansion of the SSTH, called the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The GTVH addressed two limitations of the STTH: first, the SSTH did not distinguish between referential and verbal humor, unsurprisingly, because they are semantically indistinguishable; second and most significantly, the SSTH could not account for the fact that some jokes are perceived as being more similar to one another. The GTVH accounts for these facts by postulating six knowledge resources (parameters or options to be selected): the script opposition , from the original SSTH; the logical mechanism , which handles the resolution of the incongruity introduced in the script opposition; the situation , essentially the environment in which the narrative takes place; the target , that is, the butt of the joke; the narrative strategy , which is how the text is organized (for example, many jokes have series structure in which, after two occurrences of an event, a third occurrence is different); and finally the language , the linguistic choices with which the previous components are verbalized.

The major claim of the GTVH was that the six knowledge resources are hierarchically organized, so that choices in the most abstract, higher knowledge resources affect the choices in the lower knowledge resources. These differences are reflected in the judgments of similarity of speakers, with jokes based on higher knowledge resources being perceived as more different (Ruch, Attardo, & Raskin, 1993 ). Thus, for example, two jokes with different script oppositions (for example, stupid vs. sex joke) would be felt to be more dissimilar than two jokes with different targets (say, Polish and Belgian jokes). It should be noted that most jokes rely on mythical regional stereotypes, thus both Polish people and Belgian people are supposed to be “stupid,” in the United States and France, respectively.

A further expansion of the GTVH (Attardo, 2001 ) expanded the SSTH/GTVH, which had been originally developed using a corpus of jokes and had remained focused on jokes in the 1991 iteration, to all kinds of humor conveyed by language. In particular, long texts such as short stories were analyzed. The main difference between short humorous texts, such as jokes, and longer ones, was found to be that the occurrence of the script opposition in jokes tends to occur at the end of the text (technically, in the last phrase of the last sentence of the text), while script oppositions occur throughout in longer texts, albeit not randomly (Corduas, Attardo, & Eggleston, 2008 ). To distinguish between text-final punch lines and other occurrences of humor, Attardo ( 2001 ) introduced the term jab line . Further research (Tsakona, 2003 ) showed that jab lines may also occur in jokes.

Despite the widespread recognition of the SSTH and the GTVH as the “two most influential linguistic humor theories of the last two decades” (Brône, Feyaerts, & Veale, 2006 , p. 203), they were not intended as and could not possibly have been the final word on the linguistic research on humor.

3. Current Trends in the Linguistics of Humor

3.1 theoretical approaches.

Cognitive linguistics deployed its theoretical apparatus in the analysis of humor only fairly recently. Given the central role of semantics in cognitive linguistics, it is not surprising that it has provided interesting analyses of phenomena such as forced reinterpretation (dubbed “trumping”) in examples such as:

In this sample, the modifier “bloody good” forces a literal reinterpretation of the idiom. Just as predictably, cognitive linguistics has shown an interest in the role of metaphors, metonymy, mental spaces, conceptual blending, and grammatical constructions in humor (Brône, Feyaerts, & Veale, 2015 ). However, as Brône ( 2017 , p. 262) concludes, in summing up the state-of-the-art cognitive-linguistics approaches to humor, “the studies presented thus far have been largely programmatic.”

In many ways, cognitive linguistics offers great promise to solve genuine problems in humor research. For example, it has been repeatedly noted that the literalization of metaphors can be humorous. There have been several studies on metaphors and humor (see Brône, 2017 for a review of some of them). However, none has answered the seemingly basic question of why some metaphors are humorous and some are not. Obviously, this kind of question can be tackled best from within a cognitive approach. The strong emphasis on embodiment and on the psychological reality of the theoretical models should also favor interdisciplinary research straddling psycholinguistics and cognitive approaches (e.g., Coulson & Kutas, 2001 ).

Relevance theory has had to wait until Yus ( 2016 ) for a full-fledged treatment of humor, despite some early unconvincing attempts (Curcò, 1995 ; Jodlowiec, 1991 ). Because relevance theory takes the principle of relevance to be inviolable (unlike Grice’s cooperative principle), relevance-theoretic accounts stress that relevance guides the inferential process both before and after the incongruity is found.

Corpus linguistics has had a very significant impact on the field of linguistics, unmatched in humor studies, where corpus-based studies are rare. Those are considered in Section 3.2.1.2.

3.2 Applied Linguistics

Even within the theoretical linguistics side, calls appeared for a theory of humor performance (e.g., Carrell, 1997 ), as opposed to the competence-based approach of the SSTH/GTVH. These have continued, including arguments within the GTVH (e.g., Tsakona, 2013 ). However, more significant contributions to the analysis of humor performance have come from several subfields of applied linguistics.

3.2.1 Conversation, Discourse, and Corpus Analyses

Probably the most significant contributions to the study of humor have come from the fields of conversation and discourse analysis, if for no other reason than from sheer amount of contributions.

Conversation analysis showed an early interest in the performance of humor and jokes in particular, as Sacks ( 1989 ) used a sexual joke as an example in one of the foundational articles of conversation analysis. Jefferson ( 1979 ) found that the role of laughter in conversation was far from being a passive reaction to humor, but that it was, in fact, used to invite laughter and to affect the structure of the conversation. A full review of the conversation analytical approach, with updates and contemporary contributions can be found in Glenn ( 2003 ) and Glenn and Holt ( 2013 ). Conversation analyses focus primarily on recorded discursive data and use close transcriptions of the conversations.

The study of laughter has since become its own field (Chafe, 2007 ; Trouvain & Truong, 2017 ), with scholars touching on such widespread topics as its acoustic description, its distribution within and around speech, and its complex relationship with humor: laughter may occur without humor and humor may occur with laughter, but the two are far from being an adjacency pair, as early speculation maintained (Norrick, 1993 ).

Discourse analysis broadened the perspective to how the humorous status of the exchange is negotiated (Davies, 1984 ) among the participants, to their different styles (Tannen, 1984 ), and to the social functions of the humor (see Attardo, 2015 for a review of the numerous strands of research).

3.2.1.1 The Social Functions of Humor

Before discussing how humor is integrated in the socialization process, it is crucial to note, as Holmes ( 2000 ) does, that “all utterances are multifunctional (…) Hence, a humorous utterance may, and typically does, serve several functions at once” (p. 166). In fact, as Priego-Valverde ( 2003 ) argues, humor can be used to “do” almost anything. Obviously, the functions of humor vary in relation to the setting. Studies have focused primarily on workplace humor (especially the Language in the Workplace project, by Janet Holmes and her associates), conversations among friends, and classroom discourse.

The most obvious function of humor is to create solidarity among the participants. As Davies ( 1984 ) showed, humorous exchanges are co-constructed, with participants taking up the humor produced by another speaker, elaborating on it, repeating it, commenting on it, or merely signaling their appreciation, thereby reinforcing it. Extreme forms of this phenomenon have been dubbed “joint fantasizing” (Kotthoff, 2009 ). The longest reported sequence of joint fantasizing extends to 13 turns. However, conversations do not generally evolve into non-stop joking. Attardo ( 2015 ) reviews studies that show that a majority of humorous exchanges are under 3 turns, and many instances are single turn. Obviously, participating in a shared activity produces solidarity.

Another way of showing solidarity with the speaker is to engage in humor support (Hay, 2001 ). Humor support consists of discursive strategies meant to acknowledge and support humorous turns. Obviously, laughter and the production of more humor are supportive, but so are echoing (repeating the humorous turn or parts of it), increased backchannel activity, and in the case of self-deprecating humor, expressions of incredulity and/or sympathy. An extreme form of humor support is mode adoption, which, for the hearer of a humorous remark, consists of engaging in the same kind of humor (i.e., adopting the speaker’s mode of communication). Thus an ironical response to an ironical statement would count as mode adoption, whereas laughter or saying “That’s funny!” would be support but not adoption (Attardo, 2002 ; Whalen & Pexman, 2010 ). Support and mode adoption must be seen in a broader framework, as presented in Hay ( 2001 ). Hay notes that, when faced with a humorous utterance, the hearer must undergo four different processes, which bear an implicational relationship among them. First, the hearer must recognize the intention to produce humor, then he/she must understand the humor stimulus. Only after the humor stimulus has been recognized and understood may the hearer engage in the appreciation of the humor and, eventually, react to it. As is clear, appreciation of humor presupposes that the humor has been recognized and understood. The study of failed humor shows that humor may fail at each of these levels. For example, a speaker may recognize the intention to be humorous but not understand the joke (Bell, 2015 ).

Moreover, humor often creates an in-group vs. out-group division. For example Haugh and Bousfield ( 2012 ) found that jocular mockery (humorous teasing) created solidarity by building an in-group of friends: one could not mock a stranger without risking serious offence, hence if A mocks B, A and B must be friends. Plester and Sayers ( 2007 ) find the same dynamic on the workplace, where employees of an IT company bonded over humor touching on taboo and sensitive topics. Everts ( 2003 ) documents the use of aggressive humor to create solidarity within a family. See Haugh ( 2017 ) for an overview on teasing.

Within the workplace, the issue of connections between humor and power becomes very significant. Humor “cuts both ways” when it comes to relationships with a clear power differential. It can be used to reinforce and uphold the power imbalance (e.g., employees laughing at the boss’ jokes) or simply to “get things done,” or it can be used in a “subversive” fashion to challenge authority and undermine it (Schnurr & Plester, 2017 ).

Crucially, humor may function as a tool to challenge authority because of one of its features, namely retractability. Essentially, this consists of the ability to discount one’s remarks as having been uttered non-seriously (“just kidding”). This option is called decommitment (Attardo, 1994 , p. 325–326; Kane, Suls, & Tedeschi, 1977 ) and provides the opportunity to test behavior that might be socially or interactionally “risky” (Emerson, 1969 ). For example, Walle ( 1976 ) reports that customers trying to pick up waitresses in a bar couched the request in humorous terms, to avoid embarrassment if they were turned down.

The relationship between humor and politeness is also an interesting issue. Early approaches (Brown & Levinson, 1978 ) saw humor as a face-saving strategy. More recent work (e.g., Culpeper, 2005 ) shows that both humor and impoliteness violate social norms. For a discussion of the connection between humor and politeness, see Simpson and Bousfield ( 2017 ) and references therein.

Initially, researchers focused almost exclusively on the affiliative aspects of humor, but subsequent research (Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997 ; Priego-Valverde, 2003 ) was extended to include the disaffiliative aspects as well. Failed humor is another example of a topic long ignored by discourse and conversation analysis but that has undergone a recent efflorescence of research, summarized in Bell ( 2015 ). Failed humor presents an obvious difficulty to conversation and discourse analysts, since by definition it cannot be identified by the presence of laughter or smiling. Despite these problems, methodologically, failed humor is crucial because analyzing only successful humor would arbitrarily restrict the landscape of humorous interactions only to those that succeed. Bell shows that the reactions to failed humor range significantly, from ignoring the event to strong criticism. Causes of failure range across the communicative gamut and can be likened to misunderstandings.

3.2.1.2 Corpus-Assisted Approaches

In recent years, corpus linguistics has had a renaissance, which has been reflected, to some extent, in the linguistics of humor. Several of the studies on the social functions of humor, reviewed in Section 3.2.1.1, rely on (very small) corpora of a few conversations. However, in the case of Holmes’ Language in the Workplace study, a reasonably sized corpus of conversations was created and utilized for the project. Other research, based on corpora created not directly for the purpose of studying humor, include Günther ( 2003 ), based on the British National Corpus, the Corpus of American and British Office Talk (ABOT; Koester, 2006 , 2010 ), and Chafe ( 2007 ), which uses the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (about 250,000 words). Nesi ( 2012 ) examines laughter in lectures within the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. She finds significant differences in frequency of laughter among lectures.

Corpora offer the advantage of allowing the researcher to make generalizations based on relative frequencies. However, these sorts of conclusions are warranted only insofar as the corpus is representative of the population that one wishes to generalize to. Obviously, size tends to be a good predictor of validity in this sense. Limitations of size may be overcome by using a balanced corpus. Some of the results that have emerged from these studies have significantly challenged the status quo of humor research in some areas. For example, Holmes found that: “the overall amount of humour produced by the women is greater than that produced by the men” (Holmes, 2001 , p. 93). Likewise, Günther finds that women laugh more, but do not support humor more, and that there is no difference in the number of canned jokes they tell. These results are antithetical to previous studies on gender and humor, which assigned women a passive role in humor production and reception (see below). Other results, such as that single-sex settings are more conducive to humor, are not novel, but they receive statistical confirmation.

Partington ( 2006 ) sidesteps the issue of identifying humor by focusing on laughter talk , defined as speech adjacent to or interspersed by laughter. He uses a corpus of White House briefings. He finds that speakers at the briefings need to project both competence and congeniality. He finds that talk that leads to laughter tends to be performed with those purposes in mind (Partington, 2006 , pp. 97–98). A new approach to stylistics includes the use of corpora (Partington, Duguid, & Taylor, 2013 ). Partington et al. ( 2013 ) find that Wodehouse’s humorous style can be differentiated from other non-humorous samples, and that some stylistic traits typical to the author emerge: for example, the mixture of formal and colloquial style and the use of hyperbole.

Finally, a progressive broadening of corpora to include audiovisual data and multimodal analyses can be noted. Obviously, technological progress has lowered the price-point of audio and video recording devices and storage media, so that increasingly scholars can afford to build multimodal corpora. This trend has manifested itself in humor research in the beginning of corpus-assisted multimodal studies (Attardo, Eisterhold, Hay, & Poggi, 2003 ; Attardo, Pickering, & Baker, 2011 ; Attardo, Pickering, Lomotey, & Menjo, 2013 ; Feyaerts, 2013 ; Feyaerts, Brône, & Oben, 2017 ; Pickering, Corduas, Eisterhold, Seifried, Eggleston, & Attardo, 2009 ).

The results of studies on the multimodal aspects of humor have been rather unexpected. Whereas a considerable literature predicted that humor should be marked in discourse (see a review in Attardo & Pickering, 2011 ), the analysis of elicited canned jokes and of naturalistic conversations shows that speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines at all, neither by higher pitch or volume, nor by pauses or slower/faster speech rate. Laughter does not reliably occur near humor: in one conversation, analyzed in Attardo et al. ( 2011 ), laughter occurred in only 5 out of 26 possible instances. Conversely, early results seem to show that an increase in smiling intensity correlates with the presence of humor (Gironzetti, 2017 ).

3.2.2 Variationist Approaches

The research on variation in humor is uneven. Some areas, such as gender differences, have attracted significant research, whereas other areas, such as ethnicity, age, class, national differences, etc. have seen considerably less work. On gender differences, see Crawford ( 2003 ) and Kotthoff ( 2006 ), who present a synthesis of work focusing on gender differences. Martin ( 2014 ), in an authoritative review of the psychological literature, concludes that the similarities outweigh the differences. The recent corpus-assisted work reviewed above seems to indicate that a re-evaluation of the field is overdue. Finally, Davies ( 2017 ) presents an exhaustive review of variationist research on humor in language.

3.3 Methodological Issues

The increased use of corpora in discourse analysis has raised some methodological and theoretical issues that had been heretofore relegated to the background. These issues are addressed below.

3.3.1. Identification of Humor

As long as researchers used participant observer data, such as Tannen’s ( 1984 ) famous Thanksgiving conversation, they could reasonably claim expertise on which parts of the conversations were humorous, since they were part of the in-group to whom the humor was addressed. However, when researchers start using corpora that have not been collected with humor research in mind and to which they have no special affinity, determining which parts are humorous becomes a significant issue. De facto, the presence of laughter was taken as the criterion for the presence of humor. However, it is a well-established fact that laughter and humor are not coextensive, and that the use of laughter as the sole criterion will lead both to false positives (laughter when there is no humor) and false negatives (missed humor). Within conversation analysis, some have attempted to sidestep the issue by using the term laughable (Glenn, 2003 ) and by completely omitting humor as a category. However, the existence of phenomena such as failed humor requires that the intentionality of the speakers be taken into account (for something to “fail” someone must have been trying to do it).

A better approach is taken by Holmes ( 2000 , p. 163), who defines humor as “utterances which are identified by the analyst, on the basis of paralinguistic, prosodic and discoursal clues, as intended by the speaker(s) to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by at least some participants.” Holmes acknowledges that this definition still fails to account for failed humor. Attardo ( 2012 ) has suggested adding the insights of theoretical models such as the GTVH, which can account for the presence of unacknowledged or undetected humor in an exchange by identifying an incongruity or a violation of the cooperative principle. By triangulating with all the available contextual information described by Holmes, plus the semantic and pragmatic information of the GTVH, plus any metalinguistic cues in the text, it becomes relatively easy to identify the presence of the humor, regardless of its having been reacted to or acknowledged by the participants. The use of the semantic and pragmatic cues is also useful to resolve problematic cases in which the paralinguistic and contextual cues are ambiguous.

3.3.2. Keying of Humor

It is a widespread idea that the participants of a humorous exchange, will frame (Goffman, 1974 , pp. 43–44) or key (Hymes, 1972 , p. 62) a situation, conversation, etc. as humorous (e.g., Hay, 2000 ; Norrick, 1993 ). The concept is problematic, for several reasons. First, it is obvious that keying or framing and humor are independent. One can produce un-keyed or un-framed humor: the popular term for this is “deadpan humor.” Moreover, serious content may be keyed or framed for play (for example, Sesame Street educational songs). Furthermore, a situation may be keyed or framed a posteriori for humor, in that, after the occurrence of otherwise un-framed and un-keyed humor that is recognized and accepted by the participants, the situation may become keyed or framed for humor. However, it is obvious that the detection, recognition, and acceptance of the first instance of humor were not helped by the keying and framing that occurred after the fact.

The mechanisms of keying and framing are almost entirely unexplored, beyond vague references to “tone of voice,” particularly in reference to irony and sarcasm, and the above-mentioned use of laughter as a tool to invite laughter. The studies listed above, about multimodal markers of humor, as well as studies on multimodal markers of irony (Burgers & van Mulken, 2017 ) will probably address at least some of these issues.

Links to Digital Materials

• International Society for Humor Studies .
• HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Studies .

Freely available corpora cited in the text:

• Language in the Workplace .
• Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English .
• British National Corpus .

Further Reading

• Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic theories of humor . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Attardo, S. (2014). Encyclopedia of humor studies . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Attardo, S. (2017). Handbook of language and humor . New York: Routledge.
• Bell, N. (2015). We are not amused: Failed humor in interaction . Berlin: Mouton DeGruyter.
• Chafe, W. L. (2007). The importance of not being earnest: The feeling behind laughter and humor . New York: John Benjamins.
• Gibbs, R. W. , & Colston, H. L. (Eds.). (2007). Irony in language and thought: A cognitive science reader . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Glenn, P. (2003). Laughter in interaction . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Priego-Valverde, B. (2003). L’humour dans la conversation familière: Description et analyse linguistiques . Paris: L’Harmattan.
• Raskin, V. (1985). Semantic mechanisms of humor . Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.
• Raskin, V. (Ed.). (2008). The primer of humor research . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Al-Jared, A. (2017). The Isotopy Disjunction Model. In S. Attardo (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and humor (pp. 64–79). New York: Routledge.
• Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous texts . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Attardo, S. (2002). Humor and irony in interaction: From mode adoption to failure of detection. In L. Anolli , R. Ciceri , & G. Riva (Eds.), Say not to say: New perspectives on miscommunication (pp. 159–179). Amsterdam: IOS Press.
• Attardo, S. (2012). Smiling, laughter, and humor. In P. Santangelo (Ed.), Laughing in Chinese (pp. 421–436). Rome: Aracne.
• Attardo, S. (2015). Humor and laughter. In D. Tannen , H. E. Hamilton , & D. Schiffrin (Eds.). The handbook of discourse analysis (2d ed., pp. 168–188). Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley.
• Attardo, S. , & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research , 4 (3–4), 293–347.
• Attardo, S. , Eisterhold, J. , Hay, J. , & Poggi, I. (2003). Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research , 16 (2), 243–260.
• Attardo, S. , & Pickering, L. (2011). Timing in the performance of jokes. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research , 24 (2), 233–250.
• Attardo, S. , Pickering, L. , & A. Baker . (2011). Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation. Pragmatics and Cognition , 19 (2), 224–247.
• Attardo, S. , Pickering, L. , Lomotey, F. , & Menjo, S. (2013). Multimodality in conversational humor. Review of Cognitive Linguistics , 11 (2), 400–414.
• Boxer, D. , & Cortés-Conde, F. (1997). From bonding to biting: Conversational joking and identity display. Journal of Pragmatics , 27 , 275–295.
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The very serious science of humor

How studying what tickles our funny bone can help explain who we are.

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To find mirth in the world is to be human.

No culture is unfamiliar with humor, according to Joseph Polimeni , an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba. For someone who analyzes humor, Polimeni tells me he’s still surprised by its complexity: How words and phrases and jokes have different meanings to everyone, but we all have the instinct to laugh. Just as humans have an innate ability to understand language, Polimeni says, so, too, do they have a reflex for comprehending everyday comedy. Sure, there are people who are better suited at making others laugh, but “almost everybody,” Polimeni tells me, can appreciate a quip.

As much as humor is universal, how it works is, to most people, a mystery. We seek out laughs in nearly every form of media, from film and TV to memes and TikToks. At the box office, popular comedies rake in big bucks . Funny people are idolized in pop culture.

A desire for hilarity influences who we choose to spend time with, too. Why else, when scrolling through profiles on dating apps, would so many say they hope to date someone who’s funny (or at least claim to be “ fluent in sarcasm ”)? According to the 2022 Singles in America survey from online dating service Match, 92 percent of singles seek a partner who can make them laugh. (Does this explain Pete Davidson’s appeal ?)

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The things that make us laugh today, from knock-knock jokes to satire, don’t quite resemble our ancestors’ version of humor. “Play is probably one of the original building blocks of humor,” Polimeni says. Many animals partake in it — dogs, otters, monkeys, rats , horses, fish, kangaroos — and humans’ early predecessors, similar to modern-day chimpanzees and primates, likely engaged in play, too, like mock fighting and tickling .

Over time, laughter-inducing play transformed into practical uses: Laughter and amusement signified a situation was safe , and positive emotions could be used to help cheer others up . Then, around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, Polimeni says, humor evolved to serve more modern applications: to smooth over awkward social situations, to laugh at others’ mishaps. Humor would have aided early humans in having difficult or contentious conversations — topics like “Are you helping me enough?” “Do you like me?” “Why did you accidentally hit me? Or was it on purpose?” — without getting angry at one another, Polimeni says.

If softening the blow of a potentially sticky conversation with a chuckle and a smile could help people deal with conflict, then it makes sense that humor and laughter matured for the purposes of social cooperation, as Polimeni and others suggest . Having an audience appreciate your humor has profound social benefits. Successfully landing a joke raises a person’s status while also lowering the status of anyone who’s the butt of a joke. Those in on the joke feel a greater sense of camaraderie, too.

Still, few people would find data and the minute dissection of jokes amusing. Yet an entire field of research exists aiming to analyze and quantify humor and how we use it. Scholars are trying to demystify something intangible and crucial to relationships and well-being, even as what we find funny is always evolving and taking new forms. Humor is an omnipresent chameleon, a misunderstood shape-shifter, and to figure out how it works is to take the temperature of society, culture, and our psychology.

In the modern world, research strongly suggests that the social functions of humor are considerable. Laughter, itself more likely to occur when we’re around others, boosts cooperation and cohesiveness in groups. People who are funnier tend to have higher levels of both cognitive and emotional intelligence and creativity . Genuine laughter (not fake polite chuckles), known as Duchenne laughter, improves mood and tempers negative impacts of stress , and shared laughter promotes social bonding . French scientist Guillaume Duchenne coined his namesake expression in 1862 after performing a series of experiments in which he identified the facial muscles used in genuine smiles and laughter. A true grin or chuckle manifests in the eyes — the bit of squinting and wrinkles that form on our faces when something actually tickles us can’t be faked. It’s, as Tyra Banks would say, smizing . That’s Duchenne.

But how does humor actually work? What makes things funny? For centuries, scholars and great thinkers attempted to clarify the conundrum that is humor. Philosophers and humor academics largely subscribed to three schools of thought when explaining why we find amusement in life: the superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory. The superiority theory , explained by the likes of Plato and Aristotle, is one of the oldest. It posits that things are funny when we feel superior to others or to prior, lowly versions of ourselves. Think: mocking humor or self-deprecating humor. Sigmund Freud’s interpretation, known as the relief theory , is that the act of laughter releases pent-up nervous energy or tension, such as when laughing at taboo or sexual topics . The third, and most widely accepted, explanation of humor is the incongruity theory . Philosophers James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and others postulated that we find amusement in things that are at odds with our expectations, a contradiction between the setup and the punchline. In contemporary humor, the joke teller sets the scene in the buildup; the part that makes us laugh is often a pivot away from the path we thought we were on.

These arguments don’t mean we’d find humor in “accidentally killing your mother-in-law,” Peter McGraw , a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his coauthor Joel Warner wrote in their 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny . Unintended murder “would be incongruous, assert superiority, and release pent-up aggressive tensions, but it’s hardly a gut-buster.”

Gore, however, does garner a few laughs in the right context. I’m in the audience of a Denver theater watching improv comedians craft a layered and detailed narrative about vulnerability and love and gaping flesh wounds. Next to me, in the dark, mostly empty house of RISE Comedy , Caleb Warren is laughing. (As with some things that are funny, you really did have to be there.)

Warren, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, studies what makes us laugh for a living. He, along with his collaborator, Peter McGraw, convened this performance so I can see their work in action. The pair think they’ve got humor down to a science, and with volunteer improvisers as kind and willing test subjects, Warren and McGraw attempted to take the magic out of comedy: to describe to me, in painstaking detail, why the comedians’ jokes — why talk of flesh wounds — might make us laugh.

McGraw, who is trained in quantitative psychology, focusing on judgment and decision-making, teaches courses including undergraduate consumer behavior, MBA-level marketing management, and behavioral economics to PhD students. Warren was one of those PhD students during the latter part of the early aughts — one who struggled academically, but was one of the smartest in the room, McGraw says. Warren remembers McGraw teaching a lesson about moral violations: “ victimless yet offensive actions (such as eating one’s dead pet dog), ” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it. While reading Haidt’s paper, Warren mostly thought the scenarios were funny. Around the same time, McGraw was giving a talk on moral violations and an audience member posed a question: If moral violations are supposed to elicit disgust, why are we laughing? McGraw didn’t really have an answer. He also couldn’t stop thinking about it. McGraw brought the puzzle to Warren and the pair quickly began exploring why we laugh at things that are morally wrong.

The theories of superiority, relief, and incongruity did an okay job at explaining humor, they thought. But it would make much more sense if there were one framework, one bow to neatly wrap around the humor experience. McGraw and Warren say they believed another theory , by linguist Thomas Veatch, got closer to solving the puzzle. Take the joke that inspired Veatch’s line of thinking as McGraw later recounted to me: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead. Veatch claimed “that humor occurs when someone perceives a situation is a violation of a ‘subjective moral principle’ while simultaneously realizing that the situation is normal,” McGraw and Warner wrote. The violation? The dead monkey. The “normal” situation? Any dead creature would tumble from a tree, as gravity is wont to do. The major issue with Veatch’s proposition: The word “normal” hardly applies to some situations we find funny — absurd, surreal humor, for example. Tweaking Veatch’s theory, McGraw and Warren devised their own: They called it the Benign Violation Theory .

“We were looking to apply another theory at first,” Warren says. Reserved and cautious when choosing his words, Warren is not quite an unlikely candidate to be an expert on humor, but he toes the line. “We weren’t really looking to create our own.”

“Not at all,” McGraw says. McGraw is boisterous and chatty, a natural presenter with a boyish verve, fortunate qualities to have considering the sheer volume of interviews and talks he’s given on humor.

“There’s plenty of models out there to choose from,” he says. “We were struggling finding one that was good enough to answer the question [of what makes things funny], plus all these other questions that were popping into our head as we went.”

The pair co-authored a 2010 paper that explained their framework: For people to find things funny, three boxes must be checked: A situation (anything from someone falling down the stairs, a story, someone flubbing their words) is a violation of society’s mores, the situation is benign, and both happen simultaneously. One of the studies included in their paper asked participants — University of Colorado students — whether certain statements made them laugh. “Before he passed away, Keith’s father told his son to cremate his body. Then he told Keith to do whatever he wished with the remains. Keith decided to snort his dead father’s ashes,” was one passage respondents found both wrong and funny. The violation in this scenario is clearly the snorting of the ashes. The benign part is that the snorting was technically okay since Keith’s dad said he could do whatever he wanted with the ashes. Over the years of studying humor, Warren tells me, his sense of humor has progressively skewed darker and become borderline disturbing. In one study, for example, he asked participants to watch drug awareness PSAs because he got a kick out of them. The subjects did not agree.

McGraw launched the Humor Research Lab in 2009. The lab itself is hardly funny; it’s a bland office space in the University of Colorado Boulder’s business school, with fluorescent lights and a series of cubicles and Dell desktops, and no beakers full of red clown noses or whoopee cushions to speak of. On the day of my visit, the lab was empty, but during times of research and data collection, student volunteers were shepherded into the room to take surveys, watch videos, or observe other potentially humorous media on the screens.

Prior to the early 2010s, humor research was scattershot and largely based in philosophy or linguistics. Rod Martin , a now-retired professor of clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario, stood alone in applying scientific rigor to the field. Martin, literally, wrote the book on the psychology of humor, appropriately titled The Psychology of Humor , a copy of which sits on the bookshelf in McGraw’s office. (Martin declined to be interviewed for this story.)

From the 1980s until he retired in 2016, Martin studied aspects of humor, like the effects of humor on physical health and stress (in short, humor is good for the mind and the body and helps us cope). In 2003, Martin and a graduate student developed the Humor Styles Questionnaire to account for individual differences in sense of humor. Just as some people use humor to tease or belittle, others may take amusement in the weirdness of the mundane and can often make themselves laugh.

To learn a bit more about how I approach humor in my life — how I use humor to amuse myself, relate to other people, tear myself down — I took the Humor Styles Questionnaire. The assessment asks participants to rank how much they agree with statements such as, “If I am feeling upset or unhappy I usually try to think of something funny about the situation to make myself feel better” and “I let people laugh at me or make fun at my expense more than I should.” The results are a series of scores in four different types of humor: affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor. Those with high levels of affiliative humor tell jokes to make others laugh. Self-enhancing humor is the skill of staying upbeat and humorous even when stressed. People with an aggressive humor style use comedy to tease and manipulate others. Finally, self-defeating humorists make themselves the butt of the joke.

I scored extremely high in self-defeating and affiliative humor, quite high in aggressive humor, and below average in self-enhancing humor. I shared my results with Gil Greengross , a lecturer in psychology at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University in Wales whose dissertation adviser was Martin, the guy who created the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Greengross became enthralled with humor as an academic subject matter when he realized how little is understood about what makes us laugh. If aliens were to touch down on Earth and examine how humans communicate, he tells me, “but then, every minute or two someone burst out laughing,” the aliens might wonder what that expression means and what it signals. So he decided to find out. Over Zoom, when Greengross hears how highly I score in self-defeating humor, a nervous smile creeps across his bespectacled face.

“Oh really? Self-defeating your highest?” he says. “That’s not very good for your mental health, to make fun of yourself. But again, it depends how you use it. Self-deprecating humor can be very useful for people if you use it in moderation. So it all depends on how often. Do you feel that you joke a lot about yourself?”

I tell him that I do. “Because I am often talking to people I don’t know for my job. So I find that it’s a way to ingratiate myself. And I often am talking to like, way smarter people, like you, and so I’m like, ‘Tell it to me like I’m a dumb person because I am dumb.’”

“I mean, you don’t have to demean yourself,” Greengross tells me, sounding a little like a disappointed father. “I don’t think that you’re less intelligent than me.”

The person I feel most qualified to joke about is myself. Perhaps incorrectly, I believe belittling myself may make people like me more, but that’s a conversation best reserved for my therapist, not Greengross. He tells me to use self-deprecating humor as a way to make me appear more romantically attractive to outsiders, which works, his studies have found .

Because everyone varies in their approaches to comedy — and some people seem preternaturally gifted in the laugh department — what accounts for such differences? What makes one person funnier than another?

It’s partly hereditary, says Greengross, who is currently studying humor in twins to see how genetics play a role. “Basically all psychological traits have some heritable component,” he says. But it’s also our environment: peers, friends, family. Humor is a thing that is subliminally studied simply by living and adapting to culture. We observe those around us and infer clues about what is appropriate based on what others laugh about, their reactions to jokes.

Take movies or comedy specials that haven’t aged particularly well. These media speak to a time and a culture that may have found the violations benign enough to laugh about. “We probably are learning what we find funny, but we’re learning about what is socially acceptable,” says Shelia Kennison , a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University. “What are the funniest kinds of jokes? What should you laugh at? What should you not laugh at? And maybe you still find things funny that you shouldn’t laugh at. But you learn how to appear to be socially following the norms.”

When these broad social norms aren’t adhered to, that’s when jokes fall flat — or worse, offend. Think: racist, sexist, and ableist humor. However, the cultural perspectives and mores influencing joke appropriateness are never fixed. As time and tastes progress, so do audiences and what they consider acceptable to laugh at. Comedians like Dave Chappelle, who once had broad appeal, are maligned for their regressive material today. According to Kennison, audiences have moved beyond what Chappelle thinks is appropriate. “Dave Chappelle is a very cerebral comedian and I think he purposely wants people to think in ways they’re not comfortable thinking,” she says. “So I think he knew he probably was going to lose people.” But for the audience members who stay with him, they may feel more permission to parrot his ideologies. The more people hear racist or sexist jokes, the more comfortable they are with expressing these thoughts in other forums . Because the internet constantly exposes people to harmful humor — through memes, trolling, anonymous posting — bad actors only have more opportunities.

To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart, Greengross says. Because humorousness is associated with higher levels of emotional and cognitive intelligence , effective comedians understand the right context in which to tell jokes. “You wouldn’t go [to] a feminist conference and start telling sexist jokes, right?” Greengross says. “That would be poor emotional intelligence.” A funny person is also a bit of a risk taker, accepting that a quip might rub people the wrong way. Natural comedians tend to be more open to new experiences, too, Greengross says.

Some believe that standups are tortured souls who found an outlet for their dark thoughts in comedy, but Greengross and Martin found professional comics were more successful if they had higher levels of affiliative humor (the kind of humor people use to share with and to delight others).

There are plenty of comedic questions still left unanswered. One of the most puzzling mysteries, according to McGraw and Warren, is how to make people funnier. “That’s so difficult,” McGraw says, “I spent a year on [it] and then quit.” Teaching everyone to be more amusing would be great for the people who are already naturally comedic — they’d be hilarious — and increasingly awkward for everyone else since they’d just be offensive instead. The pair attempted to bring the conundrum of improving humor capabilities to Humor Research Lab but ended up with two papers on entirely different subjects and dropped the idea.

Warren is also interested in why some things that the Benign Violation Theory says should amuse people don’t, like riding a roller coaster, engaging in kinky sex, or eating spicy food — thrilling experiences that, for the most part, aren’t life-threatening, meaning they’re benign violations. Why, for some people, are these adventures titillating, or horrifying, but for others laughter-inducing? Currently, Warren is studying why people use jokes when they’re accused of wrongdoing and why people may find posts describing severe violations funny but won’t share that content with others.

Much of the research into humor attempts to dive into people’s minds, questioning participants about their perception of what is funny, or how they conjure witticisms. Neuroscientist Ori Amir took a different approach. Growing up in Israel, Amir’s father was a comedian and would critique his jokes, he tells me over Zoom, tufts of curly auburn hair poking out from underneath a flat-brimmed baseball hat. “Only one of my jokes ever got an A-plus,” says Amir, who, in addition to his scholarly career, is a standup comedian. “Unfortunately, that joke is very heavily reliant on understanding of Hebrew expressions.”

When Amir was a doctoral student at the University of Southern California he successfully took a peek under comedy’s hood, examining the brains of professional and amateur comedians using fMRI scans. The goal: Figure out what parts of the brain are used when coming up with and appreciating humor. What he found, published in a 2016 study , was that two areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe, are active while making a joke. The temporal lobe plays double duty; it lights up both when a person hears and processes a joke and when they make a joke. Understanding a joke is a quicker process in the brain — illustrated by a quick spike of brain activation — than the process of conceiving one, which appears as a gradual increase of activity. (It’s important to note that while fMRI scans can easily determine parts of the brain where activity occurs, interpreting the function of said areas is decidedly less clear .)

What was surprising to Amir was the funnier the joke (as rated by independent graders), the less activity there was in the prefrontal cortex of the person who created it. What Amir determined was the neuroscience equivalent to “get out of your head” — that we’re funniest when we’re not trying so hard to be funny. Amir suspects some people might be predisposed to have less activity in this area, but practice in the art of comedy can help further quiet the noise in the prefrontal cortex. In Amir’s study, the professional comedian participants had less going on in the prefrontal cortex than non-comics.

The magical thing about humor in everyday life is its ease, its ubiquitousness. The more you think about being the funniest person in the room, the more likely you’ll fail. It’s the effortlessness at which the funniest of us can fire off witticisms, the ways in which we intuit how to amuse those we know best.

Pages and pages of scientific literature are dedicated to uncomfortable experiences, such as regret, McGraw tells me, and not something uplifting, like humor. For McGraw, dedicating a decade of his career to a phenomenon that is all at once joyful, entertaining, status-enhancing, artistic, bond-building, and communicative is to shed light on an essential part of human existence we all know is there. From Warren’s perspective, humor is the guiding hand teaching us what’s right, what’s wrong, how to navigate the world. “Someone who jokes a lot as a child, or even as an adult,” Warren says, “they tend to have a better sense of the culture, a better sense of social norms, a better sense of how to understand people.”

I tell Warren this is my exact experience with humor. As an awkward and shy kid, I began to test the boundaries of friendship, of social appropriateness, through silly jokes. Every laugh was permission to proceed. Illogical or hurtful quips were learning moments. The symbiotic relationship between humor and ourselves is endlessly fascinating; as individuals grow, culture shifts, and so does the way we talk and joke about the world around us.

At the risk of turning something sexy into a chapter in a science book, humor research helps explain who we are, the forces that shape us, and the ways we move culture. It’s the reason why McGraw and Warren included a section in many of their papers titled “Humor Is Important.” McGraw lists some of the reasons why: Humor is a huge facet of the entertainment industry, an important coping mechanism, a driver of who our friends and romantic partners are, a weapon to bully and belittle, a vehicle to promote and destroy ideas.

“So, like, yeah, this is incredibly important,” he says wryly. “It’s a fascinating puzzle.”

• What’s So Funny?
• Science of Humor
• Millennial Cringe
• Political Divide
• Funny Money
• Emotional Armor

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Humor in Psychology: Coping and Laughing Your Woes Away

Humor just feels good; it distracts us from our problems and promotes a lighter perspective. For this reason, many famous quotes have been penned about the benefits of humor, such as:

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Twain had a point, as the research literature supports a relationship between humor and a wide range of positive psychosocial outcomes. This article will provide readers with an abundance of information regarding the theoretical foundations of humor within the field of psychology, as well as empirical studies linking humor to various favorable outcomes.

Meaningful quotes and additional resources are also included, along with a bit of humor sprinkled throughout.

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This Article Contains:

Theories of humor in psychology, humor as a character strength.

• Coping or Defense Mechanisms?

18 Examples of Humor as a Strength

Humor’s role in stress, 6 ways to explore and maximize this strength, a brief look at dark humor, 8 quotes on the subject, 10 relevant books, positivepsychology.com humor resources, a take-home message.

Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle have been trying to explain humor since ancient times. Recent scholars have proposed several theories explaining the underlying mechanisms of humor.

Martin and Ford (2018) describe the three top humor theories. First, relief theory focuses primarily on the motivational mechanisms of interpersonal needs, positing that humor provides relief of tension. The authors describe this as akin to a hydraulic engine, with laughter serving the function of a steam pipe pressure valve. In this way, pent-up pressure is relieved through laughter.

More specifically, the muscular and respiratory processes involved in laugher serve the important role of releasing pent-up nervous energy (Martin & Ford, 2018).

Many of us may relate to high-anxiety situations where a joke feels like a much-needed outlet. For example, in a famous scene on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary is distressed by the death of Chuckles the Clown, who, while dressed as a peanut, was killed by an elephant in a circus parade.

Mary is deeply offended by office jokes following the parade incident. However, she finds herself overwhelmed with an anxious energy that finally reaches its peak at the clown’s funeral, where she is mortified by her inability to stop her pressure valve of nervous laughter.

The second theory described by Martin and Ford (2018) is the superiority theory , which focuses on interpersonal motivational mechanisms, with humor resulting as a function of self-esteem enhancement. In this way, humor results from feelings of triumph over the errors or misfortune of others, which promotes self-enhancement and feelings of superiority.

Incongruity theory , which focuses on the cognitive mechanisms of perception and interpretation, posits that it is the perceptions of incongruity that explain humor (Martin & Ford, 2018). In other words, laughter is a function of anticipating a different outcome than what was expected.

Incongruity theory is believed to be the most influential humor theory, with some proposing that “ incongruity is at the core of all humor” (Zhan, 2012, p. 95). This theory is intuitive, as a joke with an expected or obvious punchline is simply not funny. Instead, laughter occurs in response to unexpected punchlines or those that go against usual patterns (Wilkins & Eisenbraun, 2009).

I was raised as an only child. My siblings took it pretty hard.

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Positive psychologists have a keen interest in the role of character strengths, which have been described as virtues that are crucial to human thriving (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

Peterson and Seligman (2004) propose six virtues and 24 character strengths that fall within each virtue category (a few examples below):

• Wisdom and knowledge — Creativity & curiosity
• Humanity — Kindness & love
• Justice — Fairness & leadership
• Transcendence — Gratitude & humor

Proposed links between humor and positive wellbeing are intuitive; it makes sense that those with a good sense of humor will be in a better position to weather difficult situations, enjoy more cohesive relationships, find humor in all sorts of experiences, and benefit from more positive mental and physical health (Martin, 2019).

These ideas are supported by empirical research, and here are several examples:

• Engaging in a humor exercise is associated with a positive mood (Edwards, 2013) and positive cognitive appraisals (Maiolino & Kuiper, 2016).
• A sense of humor is associated with increased life satisfaction and a pleasurable and engaged life (Ruch, Proyer, & Weber, 2010).
• Humor has been reported as among the top eight of 24 character strengths and is associated with increased life satisfaction, life engagement, and life pleasure (Samson & Antonelli, 2013).
• Adaptive humor is linked with increased stable positive mood and decreased stable negative mood (Cann & Collette, 2014).

An important caveat to the above findings is that the type of humor a person exhibits also plays a key role in determining its impact. This idea is evident in Cann and Collette’s study (2014), as positive outcomes were associated with self-enhancing humor.

Detrimental humor (e.g., sarcasm and self-disparaging humor), on the other hand, is believed to have potentially negative ramifications such as reduced relationship quality and low self-esteem (Martin, 2019). Therefore, it is suggested that the absence of detrimental humor is equally important to the presence of prosocial humor styles (Martin, 2019).

These findings have been supported by other research studies, such as that by Maiolino and Kuiper (2016), who investigated the ability of humor to predict positive outcomes.

The researchers found that greater wellbeing was related to affiliative and self-enhancing humor, whereas reduced wellbeing was linked to aggressive and self-defeating humor (Maiolino & Kuiper, 2016).

Similarly, in their review, Stieger, Formann, and Burger (2011) reported that self-defeating humor was linked to depression and loneliness, whereas self-enhancing humor was related to beneficial outcomes.

A sandwich walks into a bar. The barman says “Sorry we don’t serve food in here.”

The psychology of humor – Princeton University

Coping or Defense Mechanisms

When is a coping technique seen as a way to manage, and when is it seen as a defense mechanism?

What is a defense mechanism?

The concept of defense mechanisms originated in psychoanalytic theory. Defense mechanisms are believed to protect the ego from emotional pain through the unconscious mind’s distortion of reality.

The use of defense mechanisms may have positive or negative ramifications depending upon the particular mechanism and how it is used. For example, the mechanism of denial, when used by addicts, serves as a barrier to accepting the addiction and seeking help. In contrast, a person who is not yet ready to face trauma may use mechanisms such as regression or suppression as protective mechanisms until ready to face the situation.

Humor also may function as an adaptive ego defense by enabling people to perceive the comical absurdity in highly challenging situations. In this respect, humor serves as both a defense mechanism and a way of coping with adversity .

Research has supported this idea. For example, in a study by Samson, Glassco, Lee, and Gross (2014), humorous coping applied after viewing negative pictures was found to increase positive emotions at both short- and longer term follow-up.

Want to know more about defense mechanisms? Here we share defense mechanism worksheets as tools for practitioners.

Using humor to cope with medical problems

However, most evidence proposing a link between humor and improved health is anecdotal. For example, among physicians who do the exceedingly difficult work of treating cancer patients, humor has been reported as beneficial for patients, doctors, and relationships between the two (Joshua, Cotroneo, & Clarke, 2005).

Hope may represent a powerful mechanism through which humor brings relief to patients, as evidenced in research addressing the impact of humor on terminally ill patients (Herth, 1990). The results of this study indicated that 85% of patients believed that humor helped them to deal with reality by empowering hope.

The use of humor in medicine has also been studied from the perspective of healthcare workers. For example, among physicians who work with dying patients, humor has been reported as one of eight coping mechanisms used to handle the extreme stress involved in doing this type of work (Schulman-Green, 2003).

Similarly, other researchers have suggested that gallows humor is beneficial for emergency personnel by providing an outlet for painful emotions and by enhancing support via group cohesion (Rowe & Regehr, 2010).

Among nurses, humor has been related to lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, increased personal accomplishment (Talbot & Lumden, 2000), as well as greater coping efficacy and emotional expressivity (Wanzer, Booth-Butterfield, & Booth-Butterfield, 2005).

Using humor to cope with mental illness

As with other forms of illness, it is logical to propose that humor enhances coping among individuals dealing with mental health issues. The substantive literature is again lacking; however, some studies do show that humor serves as an important coping mechanism for psychiatric patients.

For example, one study examined the impact of humorous films on various psychological symptoms among schizophrenia inpatients. The researchers found reductions in anger, anxiety, psychopathology, and depression among participants (Gelkopf, Gonen, Kurs, Melamed, & Bleich, 2006).

In another study examining the effectiveness of humor among individuals with mental illness, a humor-based activity involving clowns (i.e., the “therapeutic clown approach”) was implemented among psychiatric ward inpatients. During the humor activity period, patients were reported as having significant decreases in multiple disruptive behaviors including self-injury, fighting, and attempted escapes (Higueras et al., 2006).

‘What are you allergic to?’ queried a stressed nurse as a gunshot victim was rushed into the ER. Patient: ‘Bullets!’

It also is advantageous for both elderly and child populations. Here are 18 examples of studies showing evidence of humor as a strength.

Humor and psychological strengths

There is something to be said for not taking everything too seriously. Internalizing criticism erodes self-esteem, a process that may be inhibited by a good sense of humor. This idea is borne out by research such as that by Liu (2012), who conducted a study with undergraduate students in Hong Kong. The results indicated that adaptive humor was linked to higher levels of self-esteem and happiness.

Similarly, Vaughan, Zeigler-Hill, and Arnau (2014) addressed stable and unstable self-esteem among college students and found that participants with stable high self-esteem were lower in less adaptive forms of humor (i.e., self-defeating humor). Additionally, a study addressing the benefits of humor, music, and aerobic exercise on anxiety among women indicated that effect sizes were highest for those in the humor group (Szabo, Ainsworth, & Danks, 2005).

Humor on the job

There is good reason to believe that humor at work leads to many positive outcomes, such as increased work performance and enhanced relationships with coworkers (Cooper, 2008). Additionally, in their comprehensive review, Cooper and Sosik (2012) reported that humor at the workplace was linked to enhanced relationships, more creative thinking, more collaborative negotiations, and better customer relations.

Similarly, Mesmer‐Magnus, Glew, and Viswesvaran (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of 49 studies focusing on the impact of humor in the workplace. Positive humor was found to buffer the impact of work stress on mental health, as well as to promote more effective functioning on the job.

More specific workplace benefits of humor included lower stress, burnout, and subordinate work withdrawal, and increased coping effectiveness, health, team cohesion, and job performance and satisfaction.

Humor and education

Not only does humor have the ability to make school more enjoyable, but it is beneficial in various meaningful ways. For example, among college students enrolled in language courses, 72% noted that humor enhanced their interest in the subject matter, 82% reported that the instructor’s use of humor made them more approachable, and 82% indicated that humor created an environment more conducive to learning (Askildson, 2005).

The humor students bring to the classroom is also essential. For example, in a study exploring humor among undergraduate students, a sense of humor was positively related to both sociability and creativity (Ghayas & Malik, 2013). The intentional use of classroom humor also has been linked to enhanced learning among nursing students (Ulloth, 2002).

Humor in the classroom also is believed to promote social and emotional development among children (Lovorn, 2008), and we share a few ideas in our article – Activities to Stimulate Emotional Development .

Humor as a strength among the elderly

While there is a paucity of research addressing humor among older people, there is some evidence of its potential to enhance the quality of life within this group. For example, research by Ganz and Jacobs (2014) indicated that attending a humor therapy workshop was associated with positive mental health outcomes among seniors.

In a similar study, following a 10-week ‘happiness and humor group’ within an urban senior center, participants reported significant improvements in life satisfaction (Mathieu, 2008).

Coping humor also has been associated with increased social support and self-efficacy among older community-dwelling adults (Marziali, McDonald, & Donahue, 2008). Lastly, following humor therapy sessions, elderly nursing home residents showed a reduced duration of agitation and an increased duration of happiness (Low et al., 2014).

Humor as a strength among children

Among humans, laughter begins as early as four months of age (Lovorn, 2008). A child with a well-developed sense of humor has been described as “ becoming a joy tracker or humor spotter in everyday life… a point of view that will be carried into adulthood” (Franzini, 2002, p. 11).

Indeed, by nurturing their sense of humor, adults equip children with important coping skills (Martin, 1989). Children have reported such benefits, noting that humor increases their ability to cope with stressors associated with relationships, school-related activities, and life at home (Dowling, 2014).

Additionally, humor may represent a vital strength during middle childhood by helping kids to gain the support of a peer group and by enhancing self-esteem (Klein & Kuiper, 2006).

A comprehensive look at how children are impacted by the experience of humor is described by Hogan (2003), who noted that humor benefits children in terms of enhanced social bonding, stress relief, and pain coping. Growing up with humor sets children on a more positive pathway. Once they begin college, humor is predictive of better college adjustment (Hickman & Crossland, 2004).

Sign on a repair shop door: We Can Repair Anything. (Please knock hard on the door, the bell doesn’t work.)

There is little doubt that humor enables people to cope better with stress. It has long been believed that “ humor and laughter play an important role in the maintenance of both psychological and physiological health and wellbeing in the face of stress” (Lefcourt & Martin, 1986).

Research supports this connection. For example, in a study by Abel (2002), coping strategies were examined concerning humor and various types of stress. Participants were categorized into either high or low sense of humor groups. It was found that those within the high sense of humor category appraised relatively lower amounts of stress and anxiety.

The impact of humor on stress also was investigated in a medical study using humor as a complementary therapy among cancer patients (Bennett, Zeller, Rosenberg, & McCann, 2003). After watching a funny video, cancer patients reported significantly less stress, and a negative correlation was found between stress and amount of mirthful laughter.

Interestingly, those who were higher in humor scores were also found to have increased immune functioning (Bennett et al., 2003). In general, research reviews have documented that positive styles of humor are related to lower perceptions of stress (Mauriello & McConatha, 2007).

I went to buy some camouflage pants the other day but I couldn’t find any.

If you don’t find yourself laughing nearly enough, here are six things you can do:

• Watch or listen to stand-up comedy. Many comedians have filmed their shows and made them widely available. Additionally, listening to comedians while walking or jogging creates a far more enjoyable experience, especially for those who don’t enjoy exercising.
• Spend more time around funny people. This idea is simple: if you have amusing people in your life, hanging around them is sure to make you feel better.
• Don’t allow others to dictate what you find amusing. If you have a dark sense of humor or enjoy potty jokes, that’s okay. As long as humor is not aggressive or offensive to groups of people, go ahead and laugh.
• Read funny books. Plenty of reading material is available for bookworms who love to laugh (please see the list of books below).
• Play with a pet. It’s tough to feel blue when playing with a puppy or kitten. If you have access to animals, they may do wonders to make your heart smile.
• Don’t be afraid to embrace your inner child.  Adults often feel that they must always behave in an “age-appropriate” way. However, if being silly and playful made you happy at age 12, it probably still will. Don’t deprive yourself of happiness because of perceived pressure to act a certain way.

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other: “Does this taste funny to you?”

Dark or twisted humor is an acquired taste, as not everyone appreciates the taboo humor others find in disturbing subject matter. But, for people who experience stressful jobs or complicated family dynamics, dark humor often serves as an important protective mechanism.

This concept is exemplified by the ability of healthcare workers to employ dark humor as a way of coping with chronic job stress (e.g., Schulman-Green, 2003; Talbot & Lumden, 2000; Wanzer et al., 2005).

Importantly, gallows humor used in this way is not aggressive or hurtful to others. This idea is explained by Wanzer et al. (2005) in their aptly titled article If We Didn’t Use Humor, We’d Cry .

The authors note that nurses use humor to deal with specific situations such as daily medical routines, difficult patients/families, and even death. And while approaching such situations with humor may not make sense to others, humor helps nurses deal with their distress when encountering extremely difficult situations regularly (Wanzer et al., 2005).

Dark humor has also been found to enhance resilience during some of the most horrible events in human history. For example, during the Holocaust, victims reported using humor in ghettos, concentration, and death camps to better cope with extreme trauma and adversity (Ostrower, 2015).

Ostrower (2015, p. 184) describes humor coping within this context as a defense mechanism that “ under the nightmare circumstances of living in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust, laughter was a form of rebellion against reality. Humor was the weapon of those whose lives were utterly in the hands of the executioners, those who were powerless to rebel or resist in any other way.”

Along with the Holocaust, dark humor has been used as a coping and survival mechanism across a broad range of life-threatening situations.

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

Steve Martin

The earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Mahatma Gandhi

People with a sense of humor tend to be less egocentric and more realistic in their view of the world and more humble in moments of success and less defeated in times of travail.

Bob Newhart

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Thomas Mann

I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.

If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.

Robert Frost

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.

Washington Irving

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

Whether you are interested in learning more about the psychology of humor or in finding material that will make you laugh, plenty of books are available. Here are 10 examples:

• Humor at Work in Teams, Leadership, Negotiations, Learning and Health by Tabea Scheel and ‎Christine Gockel ( Amazon )
• Engaging Humor by Elliott Oring ( Amazon )
• Humor Theory: Formula of Laughter by Igor Krichtafovitch ( Amazon )
• Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor by William Fry ( Amazon )
• Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor by John Morreall ( Amazon )
• Laugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Celebrate Then and Now… Before We Forget by Allia Zobel Nolan ( Amazon )
• Gallows Humor by Carolyn Elizabeth ( Amazon )
• Calypso by David Sedaris ( Amazon )
• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson ( Amazon )
• I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron ( Amazon )

So many books, so little time.

Frank Zappa

17 Exercises For Grief & Bereavement

Apply these 17 Grief & Bereavement Exercises [PDF] to help others process difficult emotions, leverage self-compassion, and find balance following painful loss.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

As humor represents an important aspect of positive psychology, here at PositivePsychology.com, we have described several ways in which humor contributes to positive wellbeing. Here are a few examples:

• Humor is an effective way to find and build happiness . For example, laughing has a similar emotional impact to being hugged.
• Humor is related to resilience . For example, research suggests that resilient people have many qualities in common, including humor.
• Humor is an essential tool for enhancing teen resilience . For example, specific phrases have been identified that help kids to see the humor in stressful situations.
• Humor may be applied as part of resilience-building activities in the classroom. For example, Helen McGrath’s Bounce Back! Program (McGrath & Noble, 2003) includes lesson plans and suggestions for resilience-building in young children . Humor is included among the resilience-promoting principles.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others move through grief in a compassionate way, this collection contains 17 validated grief and bereavement exercises . Use them to help others find balance as they attempt to make sense of a life that has been irrevocably changed.

Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.

This article provides readers with a comprehensive look at humor as an important concept in positive psychology. Top humor theories are described, along with the role of humor as both a defense mechanism and character strength. Some key takeaways are as follows:

• Self-enhancing humor is an invaluable strength that supports human thriving.
• There are numerous positive benefits of humor, such as enhanced positive mood, life satisfaction, self-esteem, job performance, creativity, social bonding, and emotional resilience .
• Humor plays an essential role in buffering the impact of stress and is important for positive wellbeing among both children and seniors.

Doable techniques for adding more humor to one’s life, meaningful quotes , useful books , and resources from PositivePsychology.com are also included. With this collection of information, it is the hope that readers will better understand humor and its many benefits, while maybe even enjoying a few chuckles along the way.

And so, with laughter and love, we lived happily ever after.

Gail Carson Levine

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Grief Exercises [PDF] for free .

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What our readers think.

As the world is transcending toward the unchartered waters–marked by more pandemics, more economic hardships, and more automation at work–Dr Lonczak has written a very useful piece of article to spread positivity across domains in places of work and life. Thank you very much, for your good work!

Hi Heather, I’m writing an essay entitled “Are Comedians an endangered species”? for an online course and found your article really helpful.Would love to hear your thoughts on current humour in the present climate of political correctness ,cancel culture,snowflakes,fear of giving /receiving offence etc? I am based in the UK and just at a time when we need more laughter it seems we are being gagged and guilt tripped into a kind of self-censorship at every turn which is not funny. Thank ,

That’s a really interesting topic you’re exploring. And no doubt comedians are having to think differently about their routines in light of the current climate.

Honestly, I hadn’t given this much thought before — perhaps other commenters can share their views — but I’ll point you toward an interesting read I just found by Nwankwọ (2021) , which explores this trend toward self-censorship with reference to the comedians Trevor Noah and Basket Mouth.

Hope this offers some food for thought!

– Nicole | Community Manager

Hi Heather, thank you for the insight and information. I’m writing an essay about humor and wanted to relate it to building relationships within sports, like volleyball. This was a great help 🙂

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The cicada invasion has begun. Experts recommend greeting it with awe, curiosity and humor

Much of the middle and southern part of the country is bracing for a rare dual-emergence of two gigantic cicada broods, Brood XIX and Brood XIII, some which have already been spotted by people in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee , Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri.

While some fear or dread the insect invasion , scientists say it's a fascinating, spectacular occurrence that shows the great dance of nature at its most exceptional.

The two broods appear at different intervals: every 13 and every 17 years and overlap between them is rare. Cicadas are short-lived and will only be around for about six weeks. And they only emerge from underground when the soil surface temperatures reach 64 degrees , which is happening now.

Scientists are greeting the phenomenon with a mix of awe, curiosity and humor – and they hope Americans will too.

“They're sort of goofy. They’re not super great flyers and they’re kind of awkward when they land. They don’t bite, they’re not poisonous. If your pet eats one it’s not going to harm them. They’re totally harmless to humans and domestic animals,” said Floyd Shockley, co-lead of the entomology department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Shockley said the next few weeks will be “a natural phenomenon that other people in the world would be jealous to see."

Here's a look at why scientists are so in awe of cicadas, and what you can do to enjoy this noisy natural phenomenon.

A mind-boggling number of bugs

The sheer volume of cicadas that will emerge will be enormous, experts say.

“The total number of cicadas that will emerge in the United States between the two broods will be in the many billions," said Gene Kritsky, an emeritus professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Ohio and the author of “A Tale of Two Broods: The 2024 Emergence of Periodical Cicada Broods XIII and XIX.”

It could go as high as a trillion, said Shockley.

When will cicadas come back? You're asking the wrong question. Their pee will 'rain' down

“It is certainly conceivable,” he said. “But remember that’s spread across about 19 states. In areas of local abundance, it will be millions to billions and then there will be other areas where there’s been habitat destruction from agriculture and urban spread it could be lower.”

For those who live in cicada-dense areas, it will be a lot of insects. “There could be thousands in your backyard,” Shockley said.

Evolution offers a fascinating reason for the hordes of cicadas

It's a survival tactic called "predator satiation." There are so many of them that even the hungriest predators can't eat them all.

“They’re eaten by mammals, birds, insects, and even a few people. But you’re never going to be able to impact the entire population because they come out in such large numbers,” said Shockley.

Sometimes a few cicadas in a brood hatch at the wrong time, known in the scientific literature as "stragglers," but they usually don't survive to reproduce.

A genetics experiment that will take a decade to unfold

Because the two broods exist on different timetables, every 13 and every 17 years, they don’t overlap very often – 221 years ago to be precise.

“It’s an exciting thing – the last was in 1803,” said Kritsky.

Will these different broods interbreed? Today's grad students are gearing up to study the answer, which probably won't come until at least 2037.

The area of overlap between the broods is very small, only a few counties in Illinois, so there won’t be a huge opportunity.

In general, broods don’t interbreed. While they can be forced to do so in the lab, in nature they don’t, mostly because they’re mating at different times. But with two broods emerging at the same time and with a small overlap, some interbreeding could possibly occur – scientists are curious to see what happens but resigned to waiting to find out.

“If you’ve got one 13-year cicada and one 17-year cicada and they mate, what are they going to be? We just won’t know until at least 13 years,” said Shockley.

“We’ve got the opportunity for either a new brood altogether, which is very rare, or they could join with an existing brood,” he said.

Two nearly identical species with real differences

To tell the difference between the two types of cicadas, you need a special tool called an oscilloscope.

Both 13- and 17-year cicadas look pretty much the same and to most people they sound the same, even producing the same volume of sound.

But the frequency, pitch and tone of the males' mating song (females do not sing) can be slightly different, something scientists who study them can often identify on recordings.

To really make an identification requires an oscilloscope, a scientific instrument that graphically shows the intensity of sound, measuring frequency, wavelength and amplitude.

"That’s the most accurate way to tell the species apart,” said Shockley.

Are humans harming cicadas?

Humans are definitely cutting into the areas where cicadas can live, said Kritsky.

“Their distribution becomes very patchy because of clear-cutting (of trees) for agriculture and urban development,” he said.

It's also not immediately visible because of their long time underground.

“A lot can change over 13 or 17 years in a particular area,” said Shockley. “Cicadas aren’t very good at digging through concrete – you lay a parking lot down and they’re not coming back.”

Kritsky started studying cicadas in the 1970s and has seen up close and personal what can happen when the trees the insects rely on disappear.

“I studied a development in the 1990s where they clear-cut all the trees. Then in 2004, when brood X emerged, not a single cicada emerged in that area,” he said.

Cicadas boost the ecosystem after they die (and won't harm your garden)

Cicadas offer a wonderful example of a beneficial ecological system. For 13 or 17 years the juvenile cicadas, called nymphs, live underground, feeding off the sap of tree roots. They can burrow as much as 2 feet underground to find a good place to eat and go through the majority of their life cycle.

“That's why they only emerge from under trees,” said Kritsky.

Once the cicadas die, about six weeks after emerging, there will be “a substantial amount of corpses laying around,” said Shockley. These decompose quickly, a natural process that's good for vegetation.

“The trees feed the cicadas when they’re nymphs and then when the cicadas break down they give back nutrients to nourish the next generation. It’s a really beautiful system,” said Shockley.

Beware the cicada killer: 2024 broods will need to watch out for this murderous wasp

Experts say your garden has nothing to fear from cicadas either.

The cicadas “prune” mature trees but don’t harm them. They don’t eat flowers or vegetables. Pretty much the only part of the yard that could possibly hurt would be young, new trees, said Kritsky.

For those with newly planted trees, garden stores sell mesh that can go over them to protect them.

“As long as the cicadas can’t get their mouth parts over the surface of the stems, they can’t harm them,” said Shockley.

Experts say trying to poison cicadas will backfire

There’s no reason to be scared of cicadas and no need to overreact, say experts who spend lots of time with them.

Most importantly, don’t buy pesticides and spray your backyard to get rid of them.

“First because they’re harmless and second because it’s not going to work,” said Shockley. “You could spray every inch of your yard and it wouldn’t matter because they’ll be back the next day."

Not only that, but animals will eat the dead cicadas, so you’d be poisoning a lot more than just cicadas.

Studying cicadas links generations of researchers

You can’t have a short attention span if you research cicadas. “I‘ve waited as long as 17 years for an experiment to come to fruition,” said Kritsky.

Any researcher who studies them has to have patience. There's a reason many researchers work with fruit flies, because with a lifespan that can be as little as two weeks, it's possible to breed hundreds of generations over the course of an experiment.

Cicadas are an entirely different story.

“You get one or two cycles in and then you’re done with your career. It’s got to be intergenerational study,” Shockley said.

How the romantic institution props-up a racialized dating landscape

In 2020, a Pew Research Center report found that nearly 50% of U.S. adults said that dating had gotten harder in recent years, with participants noting dissatisfaction with their relationship history as well as their prospects for the future. So what’s happening? Is it the end of romantic “love”? 

As it turns out, yep, it sure is. That's according to UC Santa Barbara Professor of Black studies Sabrina Strings, whose new book “The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance” (Beacon Press, 2024) addresses the growing trend of “situationships” and why it hurts Black women and other non-elite and non-white women most.    

“Romance had a beginning,” said Strings. “Romance is an old white cultural institution that began in the Middle Ages.” One of the very first examples of a romantic story is Lancelot and Guinevere, she pointed out, which is about the trials of a man from a lower station who sets out to prove he is worthy of a higher class European Christian woman. “Love is very much about generosity but romance is very much about what you can get from somebody, especially if you’re a man who is social climbing,” Strings said.

In “The End of Love,” Strings blends historical research, personal anecdotes and cultural criticism to consider the demise of romantic partnerships, emphasizing how racism and anti-feminist ideology have been the driving forces behind it. By interrogating how ideas about contemporary love came about, Strings shows how the romance narrative served as a blueprint for a racialized dating landscape. 

Sabrina Strings

Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. is Professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and Department of Sociology.

From romance’s origins to its contemporary impact on women — especially Black and “insufficiently white” women — Strings, the North Hall Chair of Black Studies, traces its evolution from slavery to pornography. “Romance is white supremist,” she asserted. “The promise of romance is that women who are not peak white or are 'insufficiently white' are subject deservedly to deceit, manipulation, assault and rape.”   

Offering a wide-spanning cultural critique, Strings covers questions from how colonization and slavery conspired to prevent Black women from being considered viable long term romantic partners to how changes brought forward during the Civil Rights era resulted in Black men distancing themselves from Black and “insufficiently white” women and aligning themselves with white men in order to pursue a rise in personal status. From the rise and fall of the Black is Beautiful movement to how Black music, including hip hop, abandoned its message about Black beauty and love once it took on a more white, more male fanbase. 

In the book, Strings also examines the rise of coded negative language for Black women, including terms like “ho’s” and “Golddiggers;” the invention of the “Fuckboy” and the whorification of Black women, which, she notes, grew in part out of the backlash against the growing feminist movement in the mid-to-late 20th century; how men’s media counseled its audience to be wary of women’s intentions, narrowly selective in their choice of partners or to avoid marriage all together; the influence of white male media creators on Black male artists, from Playboy to Jay Z; the problematic portrayal of Black women in popular culture; and how the widespread availability of porn online has influenced sexual relationships and men’s expectations for partners.

In addition to her intellectual exploration of these issues, Strings also brings her personal experiences into play, sharing difficult stories of her own challenges, abuses and disappointments in romance. “I am only one of the millions of Gen X-to-Gen Z women who have endured a seemingly endless array of miserable relationships with men,” she writes in her book, challenging readers to accept the end of love as they know it and to embrace more queer and feminist ideas of love, equity and partnership.

Debra Herrick Associate Editorial Director (805) 893-2191 [email protected]

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Psychopharmacology

Whistleblowers and medical fraud: a book review, a new book on the history—and price—of exposing corruption in medical research..

Updated May 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

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• In medicine, whistleblowers face institutional denial, stonewalling, retaliation, and other kinds of reprisal.
• They expose coercive recruitment practices, conflicts of interest, weak protocols, and missing consent.
• In revisiting some of medicine’s worst scandals, a new book details the efforts taken to block accountability.

“Nobody should indulge in the fantasy that they will be celebrated for blowing the whistle,” warns Carl Elliott in his riveting new book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, published today by Norton. “It is more likely that they will be vilified, forgotten, or both.”

The more than half-dozen cases detailed in his investigation bear out that message with telling regularity. Whether from institutional denial , stonewalling, protection, retaliation, or other kinds of reprisal, whistleblowing in medicine is shown to carry a high risk of failure. Those seeking accountability are often the only ones to face any consequences, and they can be severe: demotion or job loss, hefty legal fees, unwanted notoriety, and a strong risk of being disowned by one’s coworkers.

“It's a demoralizing book,” Elliott tells me when I request an advance copy, “but, well, that’s what the subject demanded.” It does. The scale of injury detailed in each chapter—coupled with extensive evidence from archives and local media—is as daunting as are the many efforts by institutions to deny error and responsibility.

Even more tawdry are examples where the culpable feign unjust persecution, claiming that they are the real victim—of a witch-hunt or smear campaign. On several occasions, the fervor of denial is enough to persuade oddly incurious review boards and regulatory agencies that the malpractice is sound, even that the work merits praise and prizes (in one case, a Nobel).

Meanwhile, those driven to expose the fraud—whether of coercive recruitment practices, glaring conflicts of interest, failure to establish informed consent, or vague protocols and missing control groups—can end up fired, discredited, and rejected. “What we do essentially,” a manager concedes, “is put [the colleague] in a little boat, tow it out to sea, and cut the rope. We never think about [them] again.”

“I felt an antipathy against me,” one employee recalls after a well-considered decision to take his findings to the agency empowered to investigate them. “They feared I was opening my mouth too wide.”

Another is berated for confirming that two patients had recently died on the study protocol, a harbinger of dozens more: “Who the hell are you to question what we do around here?” A third remembers, “Everyone at work looked at me like I was a cobra. I couldn’t have been more alone if they put me in the toilet.”

While revisiting some of medicine’s worst scandals—examples include four decades of intentionally untreated syphilis in hundreds of African-American men, a hepatitis experiment on dozens of intellectually disabled children, a years-long series of deadly total body irradiation experiments involving the federal government, even a cover-up of egregious fraud at the same institute in Sweden that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine—Elliott provides nuanced portraits of each whistleblower, including their motivation and psychology.

Invaluably, Elliott ends up amplifying a larger theme of institutional cowardice in the face of well-evidenced corruption. One whistleblower marvels of his former coworkers, “It was astounding that nobody gave a damn,” even about a study associated with high rates of death. Others are baffled that so many peers and reviewers uncover the fraud but do nothing about it, asking: “How do you stand by and let these things happen?”

Atypical Antipsychotics and Forced Consent

Prefacing each example of medical malpractice is Elliott’s gripping account of his own seven-year ordeal after reporting on a research scandal at his home university, where for 11 years he had taught ethics in its medical school. In May 2003, the university’s Department of Psychiatry oversaw the study of second-generation antipsychotics that included a shockingly violent suicide . As reported by “Side Effects” in 2009 after further details were reported by a local newspaper, the patient had been enrolled in the study over the stated objections of his mother, since he was then in the midst of a full-blown episode and might pose a risk to himself or others. Elliott elaborates:

The study in which Markingson died was funded by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and designed to test its antipsychotic drug Seroquel. The study was marked by alarming red flags: conflicts of interest, financial pressures to get subjects into the study, a locked psychiatric unit where severely ill patients were targeted for recruitment. Most disturbing of all were the conditions under which Markingson was enrolled.… Not only was [he] psychotic when he signed the consent form, he was under a civil commitment order that legally required him to obey the recommendations of his psychiatrist. His mother wanted him to have nothing to do with the study. [The study leader ] enrolled Markingson anyway.

Further investigation unearths a disturbing number of malpractice cases in the same department: a nonconsensual addiction experiment on illiterate Hmong opium addicts, the injuries or deaths of 46 mentally ill patients under the care of a different faculty member. The professor leading the study in which Markingson died previously led a study on an experimental antipsychotic that, too, became associated with intense suicide ideation, previously unremarked. In that case, the patient managed to drop out of the trial, avoiding further risk of self-harm .

The reporting and investigation that Elliott felt compelled to pursue end up involving years of university stonewalling. Relations with even supportive colleagues sour. The intervention leads, eventually, to Senate hearings, an external review that faults the university’s oversight program and the passage of a new law in Minnesota meant to raise standards in medical research. But it generates no formal apology to Markingson’s mother. What she receives instead is a bill for legal fees sent by the same university that failed to sanction the forced participation of her son in a problematic clinical trial, even as it resulted in his death.

When Whistleblowing Backfires

This is the type of maddening pattern that repeats throughout The Occasional Human Sacrifice . Publicly stated concerns about misconduct are shown to backfire, sometimes spectacularly, leading to the demotion and discrediting of previously valued colleagues. In the process, review boards and sponsoring departments end up sullied and compromised—silent accomplices to malpractice—even as they may spend years fighting the charges and proclaiming the exposure to be the only cardinal sin.

The brilliance of Elliott’s book lies in the lessons it draws from overlooked detail. In the infamous Tuskegee, Alabama, experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service on hundreds of poor Black men with syphilis, where the agency “used free meals and burial insurance to lure them into an experiment in which they would receive no treatment for [the] potentially deadly disease,” the detail is that “ very few employees of the health service … saw anything wrong with this .”

The experiment ran for 40 years and took another seven to bring fully to light: “The public health establishment fought [discovery] at every turn. When the study was finally exposed, the federal government resisted paying for medical treatment for the victims. Another twenty-five years passed before the government apologized.”

“I think there is a ‘there’ there that we just maybe didn’t want to see,” an investigator tells Elliott of the staggering institutional blindspots that recur throughout, especially when reputations and significant funds are at stake. Concerning efforts to shield yet another study from investigation, Elliott adds: “It wasn’t just that they were unhappy to see their dirty laundry aired in public. Many of them didn’t think the laundry was dirty.”

“The force of social conformity is especially powerful in institutions that are driven by a sense of moral purpose,” notes Yale social psychologist Irving Janis, who is quoted in the book. “In academic health centers, that moral purpose is embedded in the dogma that medical research saves lives.”

“Since our groups’ objectives are good,” Janis continues, characterizing what the participants are said to feel, “any means we decide to use must be good.”

Elliott, C. (2024). The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. New York: Norton.

Christopher Lane, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of Medical Humanities at Northwestern University.

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Research on Young Children’s Humor

Theoretical and Practical Implications for Early Childhood Education

• © 2019
• Eleni Loizou 0 ,
• Susan L. Recchia 1

Department of Education, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

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Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA

• Is the first book to focus on humor expression and development in young children
• Provides a rich array of methods for exploring humor’s impact on early learning
• Offers practical ideas for better accessing young children’s humor in research and teaching

Part of the book series: Educating the Young Child (EDYC, volume 15)

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

Front matter, young children’s humor.

• Eleni Loizou, Susan L. Recchia

Development and Learning

Young children’s play and humor development: a close theoretical partnership.

• Doris Bergen

Humor, Social Laughing, and Pleasure to Function: Three Sources of Laughter That Are Intrinsically Connected in Early Childhood

• Elly Singer

Humor Styles in Younger Children

• Lucy Amelia James, Claire Louise Fox

The Development of 3 to 5-Year-Old-Children’s Sense of Humor and the Relationships Among Children’s Temperament and Parents’ Humor Style in China

Teaching and classroom experiences, humor in the ece classroom: a neglected form of play whose time has come.

• Paul McGhee

Children’s Visual and Verbal Humorous Productions After Participating in a Series of Creative Activities, Framed by the Theory of the Absurd and the Empowerment Theory

• Eleni Loizou, Evi K. Loizou

The Place of Humor in the Classroom

• Nikolaos Chaniotakis, Magdalini Papazoglou

Cartoons as an Educational Tool to Fight Disability Stereotypes

• Eleni Loizou, Simoni Symeonidou

Linguistic Gymnastics: Humor and Wordplay in Children’s and Adolescent Literature

• Lisa Maxwell Arter

Other Perspectives and Contexts

Humour as culture in infancy.

• Vasudevi Reddy

‘Let the Wild Rumpus Start!’. Using Carnival as a Metaphor to Highlight the Pedagogical Significance of Young Children’s Humor

• Laura Jennings-Tallant

Exploring Connections Between Humor and Children’s Spirituality

• Jennifer Mata-McMahon

Research Connections and Implications for Practice to Further Support Young Children’s Humor

• Susan L. Recchia, Eleni Loizou
• humor theories
• children's humor development
• sense of humor young children
• social laughter
• visual humor
• humor and word play in children's literature
• connections between humor and children's spirituality
• humor styles in young children
• comics as an educational tool
• spirituality and humor
• humor in a childcare setting
• humor production in the first year of life
• teacher-child interactions
• carnivalesque cartoons young children
• children's temperament and parents' humor in China
• learning and instruction

About this book

This book provides a wide spectrum of research on young children’s humor and illuminates the depth and complexity of humor development in children from birth through age 8 and beyond. It highlights the work of pioneers in young children’s humor research including Paul McGhee, Doris Bergen, and Vasu Reddy. Presenting a variety of new perspectives, the book examines such issues as play, humor, laughing and pleasure within the context of learning and development. It looks at humor, wordplay and cartoons that can be used as educational tools in the classroom. Finally, it provides explorations of humor within a cultural and spiritual context. The book presents diverse and creative methods to study humor and provides practical implications for adults working with children. The book offers a powerful springboard for moving research and practice toward a deeper understanding of young children’s humor as an integral and meaningful component of early development and learning. 

“.. It draws together both known researchers who have been studying children’s humor development and also presents the research and views of some new humor scholars.” (Doris Bergen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA)

“.. Paul McGhee is a paragon of research in this field and having him on board further strengthens the book. It is a timely topic and I can see the need for more research in the field. This may be a starting point encouraging more research and eliciting interest among researchers and practitioners in the field.” (René Proyer, Professor, Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany)

“.. I also liked the idea to include suggestions for teachers on the usage of humor and think that they can be helpful to those interested in using humor in their classroom.” (René Proyer, Professor, Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany)

Editors and Affiliations

Eleni Loizou

Susan L. Recchia

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Research on Young Children’s Humor

Book Subtitle : Theoretical and Practical Implications for Early Childhood Education

Editors : Eleni Loizou, Susan L. Recchia

Series Title : Educating the Young Child

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15202-4

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Education , Education (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-15201-7 Published: 02 August 2019

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-15204-8 Published: 14 August 2020

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-15202-4 Published: 24 July 2019

Series ISSN : 2543-0610

Series E-ISSN : 2543-0629

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 250

Number of Illustrations : 31 b/w illustrations

Topics : Early Childhood Education , Learning & Instruction , Teaching and Teacher Education , Creativity and Arts Education , Infancy and Early Childhood Development

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In Memoriam: William Noel, the John T. Maltsberger III '55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections

William (Will) Noel, the John T. Maltsberger III '55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University Library (PUL), passed away on April 29, following a tragic accident in Edinburgh, Scotland earlier in the month. Will helped shape the field of early book history and brought the subject of medieval manuscripts to hundreds of thousands of people. His immense impact on the world of special collections grew with each day’s energetic work. A visionary leader and scholar, and champion for open access, Will's influence on his colleagues and on Princeton's special and distinctive collections will continue to shape the way scholars and the public interact with Princeton's treasures for generations. 

Will Noel. Photo credit: Brandon Johnson

Born in the UK, Will received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in art history from Cambridge University. His dissertation, “The Making of BL. Harley Mss. 2506 and 603,” examined scriptorium practice and illustrated textual transmission in the Middle Ages. He then spent three years as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow before he moved to the United States to take up the post of Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. He held a number of posts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, including Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Partnerships, Director of their Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, and Founding Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. 

Will designed and led a major project to retrieve overwritten texts in the Archimedes Palimpsest that led to groundbreaking scientific research across numerous fields in both the humanities and sciences. This project culminated in Will delivering a TED talk in 2012 “Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes,” which has been viewed by over a million people.  Many of the protocols and methods developed during this project continue to advance research in the retrieval of overwritten texts. Will was also recognized as a White House Open Science Champion of Change by the Obama Administration in 2013. He was chair of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) from 2018-2022. His expertise was also recognized when he was invited to give the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library in 2019, which he gave on the topic of “The Medieval Manuscript and Its Digital Image.”

Photo credit: Brandon Johnson

Will joined Princeton in March 2020 and his commitment to the reshaping of Special Collections was transformational. Ever present at library gatherings, public programs, and online events, Will led from within. As the infectiously welcoming host of the biweekly MARBAS (Manuscript, Rare Book and Archive Studies) talks, dazzling co-instructor of the Rare Book School’s course on ‘Fifteenth-Century Books in Print & Manuscript,’ or developing a close relationship with the Friends of PUL and acting as shepherd of the Student Friends of PUL, he offered himself entirely and selflessly, providing others with the necessary tools and voice to make their own impact. With Will, despite all of his administrative responsibilities, no time was a bad time to teach someone more about medieval manuscripts, contemporary archives, or new ways to make digital resources accessible. While his energy, warmth, and generosity will be profoundly missed, we take some comfort in the fact that he instilled the same spirit in many of his colleagues.

Ever a champion for innovative ideas and approaches that leveraged technology to transform access to medieval culture for the academy and beyond, Will partnered with colleagues across the library to advance digital access and approaches to special collections, leading to the digitization of approximately 1,700 codices from the Islamic world as well as numerous other digital projects. In particular, he increased the visibility and accessibility of the library’s collections through its digital library platform (DPUL) and championed the development of sustainable approaches to ensuring that the diversity within our collections continues to be celebrated and shared widely and openly. Will also advocated for new ways to engage digitally with collections, leading the Library’s expansion into multispectral and other advanced imaging techniques.

Will successfully defined and championed major acquisitions that also reflected his strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These included a Hebrew-Arabic dictionary (11th century), one of only four existing manuscripts of this important text by Ali ben Israel; African American History in Newspapers – a uniquely comprehensive collection of 300+ full issues covering essential historical events from the 17th to the 21st century; a complete run of the National Era (1851-52), featuring the entire serialized text of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the Theodotu Collection of Byzantine coins; ‘The Four Kings,’ 17th-century engravings portraying four Native American leaders; and an ink drawing by Jacob Lawrence for Westchester Graduation Ball program, 1951.

Photo credit: Shelley Szwast

As Head of Exhibitions at PUL, Will played a central role in shaping the programming and development of exhibitions for the Milberg Gallery. Utilizing his subject expertise, stewardship, and diplomatic approach he shaped and led the production of highly successful exhibitions including “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” “In the Company of Good Books: Shakespeare to Morrison,” and “Records of Resistance: Documenting Global Activism 1933 to 2021.” Furthering his dedication to democratize access to information, these exhibitions were designed to not only display treasures but to serve as opportunities to teach with collections, which he did with great enthusiasm, and promote access to a wider audience.

Will made such an incredible impact on those of us who were fortunate enough to work with him. Even with his many talents and accomplishments, Will carried himself lightly and was quick to laugh and see the humor in situations. He was a joyous and caring person whose boundless curiosity and kindness made all of us better people for having had him in our lives. The impact of his vision, energy, and leadership for Special Collections at Princeton and beyond will be felt for years to come. 

Will was very proud of his family, and we offer our heartfelt condolences to Lynn Ransom and Henry Noel, his wife and son, and to his brother Robert Noel, his sister Emma Kennerley, and other members of his extended family. 

Written by: Anne Jarvis, Dean of Libraries and Robert H. Taylor 1930 University Librarian Jon Stroop, Deputy Dean of Libraries Wind Cowles, Associate Dean for Data, Research, and Teaching Eric White, Scheide Librarian and Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

Published May 8, 2024.

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Vanderbilt computer scientist shares personal story of resilience and strength in new book from the Women of Association for Computing Machinery

Brenda Ellis

May 13, 2024, 7:04 PM

Vanderbilt computer scientist Pamela Wisniewski has contributed significantly to the human-computer interaction research field and is a leading scholar in adolescent online safety. Her personal journey is prominently featured in a recently published book, “ Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W ” that celebrates the 30 th birthday of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W).

“I am excited to share my personal story  as a woman in computing. It is shared alongside other amazing and high-profile women—deans, directors, department chairs, authors and editors—in computing,” said Wisniewski, Flowers Family Fellow in Engineering and associate professor of computer science. “ I am extremely honored and humbled to be included in this compilation.”

Many of the 38 women profiled share intimate details of their personal and professional lives. They come from North and South America, Europe and Asia and reveal the motivations, struggles, and triumphs in their transformative work that has reshaped the computing landscape for women and young girls. The main theme of the book is the organization’s maturation from a US-centric organization to a global leader in supporting the advancement of women in computer science. Many of the women have been pioneers in computing and its roles in society, and in ACM-W.

“I built my research career around promoting the online safety and well-being of youth. This includes helping teens be more resilient against cyberbullying and sexual predation risks online,” said Wisniewski, who  reflects that technology is a double-edged sword that can serve both to harm and protect young people.

Wisniewski’s work on adolescent online safety has been recognized nationally and internationally by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Netherland’s Down to Zero Alliance on combatting the online sexual exploitation of children, and most recently, by the White House’s Biden-Harris Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety. She is an ACM Senior Member, Computing Research Association CCC Council Member, and a non-resident fellow of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Wisniewski  has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and won multiple best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at ACM SIGCHI conferences. Her research has been featured by popular news media outlets, including  Scientific American , ABC News ,  NPR ,  Psychology Today , and  U.S. News and World Report . She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER Award for her innovative, teen-centric approach to adolescent online safety, and was the first computer scientist to ever be selected as a William T. Grant Scholar for her work on reducing digital inequality in youth outcomes.

“Given my tumultuous childhood, resilience-based approaches that help youth thrive in the face of adversity are near and dear to my heart. I frame my research through a lens of social-ecological resilience—the support systems like family, friends, and community in which youth are embedded—rather than viewing resilience as an immutable trait of certain individuals.”

In that way, Wisniewski says if individuals fail to thrive, it isn’t necessarily a personal failure as much as a failure of the systems of support surrounding them. “Resilience is building stronger support systems and communities around people to protect and empower them.”

The book is edited by Gloria Townsend, an author, computer scientist, and DePauw University professor internationally known for her support of women in computing. The book was published April 10, 2024, by the Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY.

Contact: [email protected]

Explore Story Topics

• Computer Science
• Uncategorized
• Association for Computing Machinery
• Pamela Wisniewski
• Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W