Things strike us as funny, the researchers concluded, when they make us uncomfortable but do so in a way that is acceptable or not overly threatening. Because telling jokes that violate our psychological safety can be seen as risky, it can make people appear more confident and more competent. In one of our studies, we found that regardless of whether a joke was considered successful or inappropriate, participants viewed joke tellers as more confident—because they had the courage to attempt a joke at all.
Projecting confidence in this way leads to higher status provided the audience has no information that suggests a lack of competence. We also found that people who violate expectations and norms in a socially appropriate way are seen as more competent and more intelligent. This finding confirms our feelings about funny conversationalists: We admire and respect their wit, which raises their prestige. But the violating nature of humor is also what makes it risky.
Although tellers of inappropriate jokes are still seen as confident, the low competence signaled by unsuccessful attempts at humor can lead to a loss of status. Finding the balance between a benign violation and an extreme violation can be tricky—even professional comedians routinely face criticism for overstepping—and it takes skill to get it right. When we converse with others, we need to balance multiple motives simultaneously.
We may aim to exchange information clearly and accurately, make a positive impression on one another, navigate conflict, have fun, and so on. The degree to which each motive is viewed as normative and socially acceptable varies from setting to setting.
A certain joke may work dazzlingly well with one group of people but completely flop with another—or even with the same group in a different context. Inside jokes are extremely common—our data suggests that almost everyone has engaged in or witnessed one. But how does insider talk, especially inside jokes, affect the dynamics within a group? We asked people to engage in a brainstorming task on instant messenger.
Each participant was teamed up with two of our research assistants posing as fellow participants. Did it matter whether what they missed was funny? Participants were more likely to believe that their partners thought of themselves as superior in the inside-joke condition than in the inside-information condition, and they reported lower group identification and cohesion when the secret exchange involved a joke.
Although levity is typically thought of as a behavior that binds people together, it can draw fault lines in a group, making some people feel awkward and excluded. Inside jokes have their place, of course.
They can signal closeness or camaraderie, making people feel pleased to be in the loop. But the research on this kind of humor is clear: When group cohesion is important, tell jokes that everyone can understand. In their study, participants either made or received sarcastic comments or made or received sincere ones. Participants in the sarcasm condition were significantly more likely to solve a creativity task assigned later in the experiment than those in the sincere condition.
In a subsequent study, participants were asked to merely recall a time when they either said or heard something sarcastic or a time they said or heard something sincere.
Once again, creativity on the subsequent task was higher in the sarcasm condition. Why does this happen? Sarcasm involves saying one thing and meaning the opposite, so using and interpreting it requires higher-level abstract thinking compared with straightforward statements , which boosts creativity.
The downside is that sarcasm can produce higher levels of perceived conflict, particularly when trust is low between the expresser and the recipient. During his presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy faced accusations that his wealthy father was attempting to buy the election. Self-deprecating humor can be an effective method of neutralizing negative information about oneself. Research by one of us Brad and Maurice Schweitzer found that individuals are seen as warmer and more competent when they disclose negative information about themselves using humor than when they disclose it in a serious manner.
When they add humor to a disclosure, counterparts view the negative information as less true and less important. There are limits to the benefits of self-deprecating humor, however. Among lower-status people it can backfire if the trait or skill in question is an essential area of competence. For instance, a statistician can more safely make self-deprecating jokes about her spelling than about her statistical skills.
So when discussing core competences, another form of humor might serve the purpose better. An exception worth mentioning is when being self-deprecating about a core competence is the only alternative to disclosing the information in a serious way.
You should also avoid using humor to reveal your failures in situations where levity would be seen as inappropriate such as if you are testifying in court or when the failure is perceived as so serious that joking about it would be in poor taste.
Nope, no weapons over there…maybe under here? In verbal jokes, the second schema is often activated at the end, in a punchline. First, the punchline must create a different mental representation that conflicts with the one set up by the joke; timing and laugh tracks help signal the listener that a different representation of the punchline is possible. Second, you must be able to inhibit the initial mental representation. When jokes perpetuate a stereotype that we find offensive as in ethnic, racist, or sexist jokes , we may refuse to inhibit the offensive representation.
Violence in cartoons is another example; in Roadrunner cartoons, when an anvil hits the coyote, animal lovers may be unable to see the humor. This incongruity model can explain why older adults do not comprehend jokes as frequently as younger adults. Due to declines tied to the aging process, older adults may not have the cognitive resources needed to create multiple representations, to simultaneously hold them in their minds in order to detect the incongruity, or to inhibit the first one that was activated.
Getting the joke relies on working memory capacity and control functions. There may be other aspects to humor, though, where older adults hold the advantage.
Wisdom is a form of reasoning that increases with age and is correlated with subjective well-being. Humor is linked with wisdom —a wise person knows how to use humor or when to laugh at oneself. Additionally, intuition is a form of decision-making that may develop with the expertise and experience that come with aging. Intuition aids humor in schema formation and incongruity resolution, and we perceive and appreciate humor more through speedy first impressions rather than logical analysis.
As with humor, time perspective is fundamental to human experience. Our ability to enjoy humor is enmeshed with this mental capacity for time travel and subjective well-being. People vary greatly in the ability to detail their mental representations of the past, present, and future. Time perspective is related to feelings of well-being.
People report a greater sense of well-being depending on the quality of the details of their past or present recollections. For example, when remembering a failed relationship, those focusing on events that led to the breakup were more satisfied than those dwelling on abstract causal explanations concerning love and intimacy.
One study found that people who use humor in positive ways held positive past time perspectives, and those using self-defeating humor held negative past time perspectives.
This kind of study contributes to our understanding of how we think about and interpret social interactions. Such research also suggests that attempts to use humor in a positive way may improve the emotional tone of details in our thoughts and thereby our moods. Hobbes and Plato took the playground perspective, suggesting that making fun helps us feel superior to others.
Kant and later psychologists though it was about a cognitive shift that moves a serious situation into playful territory. In , Freud suggested that humor was the fun-loving id making itself known despite the protestations of the conformist superego. A few years ago, psychologist Daniela S. Hugelshofer suggested that humor acts as a buffer against depression and hopelessness. And evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humor is a way to subtly outshine our competitors for mates.
Do they enjoy wielding that kind of power? There is no humor in heaven. We call those violations. Our caveman ancestors lived in a world rife with physical threats. There was relief in discovering that a rustling in the darkness was a mouse rather than a saber-toothed tiger. Today, our threats are less likely to be four-legged, but humor still serves as a way to overcome them. Some cultures avoid these types of blatant transgressions by restricting the topics that can be fodder for jokes.
When they were in Japan, for example, they noticed that the comedy in clubs was as raunchy as it gets, but certain settings were entirely off-limits to joking:. But in bars and karaoke theaters, anything goes. Likewise, p articipants found a picture of a man with a frozen beard mishap funnier than a man with his finger stuck through his own eye socket tragedy.
Eventually, however, distance decreases humor by making the event seem completely benign. Last year, the comedian Stephen Fry publicly discussed his bipolar disorder and suicide attempt. In the s, the psychologist Lewis Terman found that children rated as having a good sense of humor by their parents and teachers died younger as adults. A longitudinal study of Finnish police officers found that the funniest among them were more likely to be obese and to smoke.
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