research humor

January 26, 2016

A Scientific Theory of Humor

The “entropy” of nonsense words is linked to their funniness, research finds

By Cindi May

Given that humor is such a powerful tool for social success, it’s not surprising that scientists have sought to determine the perfect formula for funny.

©iStock

George W. Bush was not known for his cunning intellect, but he did have a good sense of humor. In a commencement address at Southern Methodist University, he famously told the graduates, “For those of you graduating with high honors and distinctions, I say well done. And as I like to tell the “C” students, you too can be president.” Like Bush, many of us use humor to diffuse difficult situations, mask nervousness, soften criticism, and cope with failure. Humor also serves the role of locksmith in both platonic and romantic social interactions, as it helps us break the ice, gain social acceptance, and initiate romantic overtures. Both men and women tend to seek mates who have a good sense of humor, and we perceive funny people as smarter, more attractive, and more personable.

Given that humor is such a powerful tool for social success, it’s not surprising that scientists have sought to determine the perfect formula for funny. Although there are many competing theories (and no definitive answers) about how humor functions, new research by Chris Westbury, Cyrus Shaoul, Gail Moroschan, and Michael Ranscar suggests that at least one key ingredient can be found in a 200 year-old theory proposed by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer .

In a nutshell, Schopenhauer suggested that humor derives from an incongruous outcome of an event for which there is a very specific expectation. It is the violation of the specific expectation that creates humor. Consider this pun: “ When the clock is hungry it goes back four seconds .” The notion of a clock eating is incongruous with our knowledge of the world, but that alone is insufficient to create humor. The statement, “ When the clock is hungry it eats a cheeseburger ,” is also incongruous, but “ eating a cheeseburger ” does not violate any

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specific expectation about a clock and so the statement is far less amusing. It is the ending, “ goes back four seconds ,” that elicits a humorous response (albeit an extremely mild one), and it does so because of our understanding of the dual meanings of the words “four” and “seconds,” and our expectation about which of those meanings apply to a clock.

In three experiments, Westbury and colleagues tested the idea that greater incongruity between expectations and outcomes produces a stronger feeling of humor. They did so by examining the humor in non-words, which are strings of letters (e.g., digifin) that form a pronounceable but meaningless unit. Non-words offer a unique advantage in the analysis of the role of expectation-violation in humor, as they are relatively devoid of meaning and thus allow a more pure assessment of influence of incongruency on funniness.

In their first study, Westbury et al. assessed whether there is any consistency in the funniness ratings of non-words. Although specific instances of humor are not always considered universally funny (consider for example popular skits from Saturday Night Live , which tickle many people but also offend others), something is objectively humorous only if there is some consensus about its hilarity. Thus Westbury and colleagues asked nearly 1000 students to rate a total of almost 6000 randomly-generated non-word strings (e.g., artorts ) on funniness. The results indicated that these random non-words had reliably consistent humor ratings. If one participant found a given non-word funny, it was likely that others found that same item funny as well, and vice versa.

Westbury et al. next tried to understand what made certain non-words funny (and others not so much). In two additional studies, they directly examined funniness ratings for non-words that varied with respect to entropy, that is, the extent to which the combination of letter strings was incongruous or unexpected. To understand incongruity in non-words, it is important to know that some letters are more likely than others in the English language (e.g., “E” is more frequent than “Q”), and furthermore that some letter combinations are more likely than others. Thus the entropy of a non-word is essentially a measure of the summed probabilities of the individual letters in each string. Non-words with unusual letters and/or combinations have low entropy and offer more surprise. In line with Schopenhauer’s theory, Westbury et al. predicted that items with low entropy would receive the highest humor ratings, as these items were most likely to violate expectations about letters and words.

In one study, participants saw two non-word strings (e.g., quarban, mestead ) that appeared simultaneously on a computer screen, and on each trial had to select the non-word that they perceived to be more humorous. Each participant made judgments for 50 pairs. In another study, participants saw non-word strings that appeared one at a time on a computer screen, and had to rate the humor of each item on a scale from “least humorous” to “most humorous.” Participants each rated the humor of 100 non-words. The findings from both of these studies supported the hypothesis that non-word strings with low entropy are perceived as more humorous. Strings with low entropy (e.g., himumma ) were reliably chosen as more humorous than paired strings with higher entropy (e.g., tessina) , and strings with lower entropy were judged to be funnier than strings with higher entropy. When we expect one thing, even something as simple as letter combinations, and that expectation is violated, we chuckle.

It is important to note, however, that at this point we cannot pinpoint low entropy as the definitive source of humor. While these studies demonstrate that expectation violation increases perceived humor, only one type of entropy (i.e., the probability associated with letter strings) was studied here, and with more complex stimuli other types of expectation violation may contribute to amusement. Even for non-words, many other layers of expectation violation are possible (e.g., how many double letters, such as “zz,” are included in a string, how unusual is the string’s phonology). Indeed, although Westbury et al. intentionally used non-word stimuli because non-words are fairly meaningless, they still found that a handful of the non-word items that were rated most humorous were not necessarily those with lowest entropy, bur rather those that were similar to or contained parts of dirty words (e.g., whong, nip, poo ). Of course one could argue that this finding demonstrates a different kind of expectation violation, as taboo words are arguably unexpected in a serious scientific study, and so are likely to be perceived as funny in that context.

Unfortunately, understanding that outcomes that violate expectations tend to be perceived as funny doesn’t necessarily make it easier to say or write something humorous. If creating humor involved a simple scientific calculation, more of us nerdy researchers would be out of the classroom and into the late night comedy circuit (or perhaps we too could be president). Instead, we’ll likely go back to the lab and tweak our non-word generators. Himumma!

Cindi May is a professor of psychology at the College of Charleston. She explores avenues for improving cognitive function and outcomes in college students, older adults and individuals who are neurodiverse.

Book Cover for Shtick To Business: What the masters of comedy can teach you about breaking rules, being fearless, and building a serious career.

What makes things funny? How does humor benefit well-being? When can comedy go wrong?

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International Journal of Humor Research

Online ISSN: 1613-3722
Print ISSN: 0933-1719
Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
First published: January 1, 1988
Publication Frequency: 4 Issues per Year
Audience: Researchers, students and practitioners with an interest in the scholarly study of humor and related phenomena

Conferences
Interest Groups

The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) is a scholarly and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of humor research. Many of the Society's members are university and college professors in the Arts and Humanities, Biological and Social Sciences, and Education. The Society also includes professionals in the fields of counseling, management, nursing, journalism, and theater. Our members research humor's many facets, including its role in business, entertainment, and health care as well as how humor varies according to culture, age, gender, purpose, and context. As part of our activities , we offer the quarterly journal, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research , publish a newsletter, and hold an annual international conference. The 34th ISHS Conference was held online in April 2024, hosted by Texas A & M University, Commerce. From May 11 through June 21, the Society will host a webinar series, spotlighting our Specialists Interest Groups. Click on the links here to learn more about the Society's journal, past and upcoming conferences, membership, and resources. Click on the button above to visit the Webinar Series page. Graduate students, interested in conference awards, should refer to the Awards Section of the Upcoming and Past ISHS Conference page.

Contact ISHS

International Society for Humor Studies P. O. Box 5185, Oakland, CA 94605 Internet: http://www.humorstudies.org E-mail: [email protected]

Quick Links

Journal Website Membership Form ISHS Forum ISHS Constitution

Cover Story

The science of humor is no laughing matter.

Communication
Interpersonal Communication
Nonverbal Communication
Psychological Science
Social Psychology

This is a photo of a pinky fingerwith drawn face, glasses, and tie.

In 1957, the BBC aired a short documentary about a mild winter leading to a bumper Swiss spaghetti crop in the town of Ticino. In a dry, distinguished tone, BBC broadcaster Richard Dimbleby narrates how even in the last few weeks of March, the spaghetti farmers worry about a late frost, which might not destroy the pasta crop but could damage the flavor and hurt prices. The narration accompanies film footage of a rural family harvesting long spaghetti noodles from trees and laying them out to dry “in the warm Alpine sun.”

Naturally, the hundreds of people who called the BBC asking where they could get their own spaghetti bushes hadn’t noticed the air date of the news clip: April 1st. The prank was so successful that even some BBC staff were taken in, leading to some criticism about using a serious news show for an April Fool’s Day joke.

Why April 1st became a holiday devoted to pranks and laughter remains a mystery, although some historians trace it back to the Roman holiday of Hilaria. Humans start developing a sense of humor as early as 6 weeks old, when babies begin to laugh and smile in response to stimuli. Laughter is universal across human cultures and even exists in some form in rats, chimps, and bonobos. Like other human emotions and expressions, laughter and humor provide psychological scientists with rich resources for studying human psychology, ranging from the developmental underpinnings of language to the neuroscience of social perception.

The Hidden Language of Laughter

Theories focusing on the evolution of laughter point to it as an important adaptation for social communication. Studies have shown that people are more likely to laugh in response to a video clip with canned laughter than to one without a laugh track, and that people are 30 times more likely to laugh in the presence of others than alone.

“The necessary stimulus for laughter is not a joke, but another person,” writes laughter expert and APS Fellow Robert R. Provine, professor emeritus at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science .

Just look at the canned laughter in TV sitcoms as an example: The laugh track has been a standard part of comedy almost from the birth of television. CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass hated dealing with the inappropriate laughter of live audiences, so in 1950 he started recording his own “laugh tracks.” These early laugh tracks were intended to help people sitting at home feel like they were in a more social situation, such as sitting at a crowded theater. Douglass even recorded varying types of laughter, including big laughs and small chuckles, as well as different mixtures of laughter from men, women, and children.

In doing so, Douglass picked up on one of the qualities of laughter that is now interesting researchers: A simple “ha ha ha” communicates an incredible amount of socially relevant information.

For example, a massive international study conducted in 2016 found that across the globe, people are able to pick up on the same subtle social cues from laughter. Samples of laughter were collected from pairs of English-speaking college students — some friends and some strangers — recorded in a lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An integrative team made up of more than 30 psychological scientists, anthropologists, and biologists then played audio snippets of this laughter to 966 listeners from 24 diverse societies spanning six continents, from indigenous tribes in New Guinea to urban working-class people in large cities in India and Europe. Participants then were asked whether they thought the two people laughing were friends or strangers.

On average, the results were remarkably consistent across all 24 cultures: People’s guesses about the relationship between the laughers were correct approximately 60% of the time.

Researchers also have found that different types of laughter can serve as codes to complex human social hierarchies. Across the course of two experiments, a team of psychological scientists led by Christopher Oveis of University of California, San Diego, found that high-status individuals had different laughs than low-status individuals, and that strangers’ judgments of an individual’s social status were influenced by the dominant or submissive quality of the person’s laughter.

“Laughing in the presence of others indicates the interaction is safe,” the researchers explain. “While the norms of most social groups prevent direct, unambiguous acts of aggression and dominance, the use of laughter may free individuals to display dominance because laughter renders the act less serious.”

In the first study, the researchers wanted to know whether high- and low-status individuals actually do laugh differently.

To test this, 48 male college students were randomly assigned to groups of four, with each group composed of two low-status members (“pledges” who had just joined a fraternity a month earlier) and two high-status members (older students who had been active in the fraternity for at least 2 years).

Laughter was recorded on video as the group members engaged in a teasing task. Each member of the group took a turn in the hot seat, receiving light teasing from his peers. The teasers came up with a nickname based on randomly generated sets of initials (e.g., L. I. became “Loser Idiot”) and then told joking stories about why they chose the nickname.

One team of coders (naïve to the study hypotheses) identified all of the instances of laughter in the video, and a second team of coders (also blind to the study hypotheses) watched the video and rated how submissive or dominant each laugh sounded using a scale of −3 (definitely submissive) to 3 (definitely dominant). Laughs receiving average ratings of 2 or higher were classified as dominant, whereas laughs receiving average ratings of −2 or lower were classified as submissive.

A third team of coders, also blind to the hypotheses, coded the audio of each laugh on specific sound characteristics — loudness, pitch, pitch range, pitch modulation, airiness, and burst speed — that are associated with disinhibited behavior.

“If dominant laughs are more disinhibited than submissive laughs, as we hypothesize, they should exhibit greater vocal intensity, more pitch range and modulation, and greater burst speed,” Oveis and colleagues explain.

The analysis revealed that, as predicted, high-status fraternity brothers produced more dominant laughs and fewer submissive laughs relative to the low-status pledges. Dominant laughter was higher in pitch, louder, and more variable in tone than submissive laughter. In this regard, dominant laughter appears to share some of the features researchers have identified in genuine (compared with fake) laughter: greater irregularities in pitch and loudness and faster bursts of sound.

Previous research published in Psychological Science demonstrated that holding a position of power can influence the acoustic cues of our speech. The voices of individuals primed with high-power roles tended to increase in pitch and were, at the same time, more monotone. Listeners who had no knowledge of the experiment were able to pick up on vocal cues signaling status: They correctly rated individuals in the high-power group as being more powerful with a surprising degree of accuracy — about 72% of the time.

Findings from the fraternity-brother experiment also showed that low-status individuals were more likely to change their laughter based on their position of power; that is, the pledges produced more dominant laughs when they were in the “powerful” role of teasers. High-status individuals, on the other hand, maintained a consistent pattern of dominant laughter throughout the teasing game regardless of whether they were doing the teasing or being teased themselves.

In another study, the research team tested out whether naïve observers could detect an individual’s social status based just on their laughter, and whether the type of laugh (dominant or submissive) could influence judgements of social status.

A group of 51 college students was randomly assigned to listen to a set of 20 of the laughs recorded from the fraternity brothers. Each participant listened to an equal number of dominant and submissive laughs from both high- and low-status individuals. Participants then estimated the social status of the laugher using a series of 9-point ratings scales. And indeed, laughers producing dominant laughs were perceived to be significantly higher in status than laughers producing submissive laughs.

“This was particularly true for low-status individuals, who were rated as significantly higher in status when displaying a dominant versus submissive laugh,” Oveis and colleagues note. “Thus, by strategically displaying more dominant laughter when the context allows, low-status individuals may achieve higher status in the eyes of others.”

However, regardless of whether raters heard a dominant or a submissive laugh from a high-status individual, they rated that person as being relatively high in status.

It’s unclear whether this was because high-status laughs include characteristics that were not measured in the current study or whether high-status fraternity brothers just didn’t have very convincing low-status laughs while being teased.

When it comes to comedy, it’s often a thin line between love and hate. What qualities make something funny (or not) is a question that philosophers have been attempting to answer for thousands of years. But a pair of psychological scientists have come up with a theory that explains why we might laugh at a dark joke about murder as well as a silly pun or play on words.

Psychological scientists Peter McGraw (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Caleb Warren (University of Arizona) propose that negativity is an intrinsic part of humor — without violating a norm or rule of some kind, a joke just isn’t funny. But violations can’t stray too far; otherwise, they become unappealing or even disgusting and upsetting. According to the researchers’ Benign Violation Theory, a violation is humorous when it breaks a rule or norm but is benign.

McGraw and Warren’s Humor Research Lab (HuRL) has conducted several studies examining the exact criteria that cause us to perceive a comedic situation as benign or not. Along with the severity of the norm violation, a sense of psychological distance from the violation — by space, time, relationships, or imagination — is a key ingredient for turning an unpleasant situation into a humorous one, they posit.

For example, in a study published in Psychological Science , the researchers looked at the effect of psychological distance in terms of time. Inspired by the classic Mark Twain quote, “Humor is tragedy plus time,” the research team investigated how the passage of time can influence one’s perception of an event as funny or painful.

“If distance increases the humor in severe violations (i.e., tragedies), but decreases the humor in mild violations (i.e., mishaps), then autobiographical events that get funnier over time should feature more severe violations than those that get less funny over time,” the researchers write.

One study found that the events from people’s lives that became funnier over time were more severe events (like a car accident), while events that lost their comedic effect over time were seen as minor violations (like stubbing a toe).

Another study examined distance by manipulating whether an image was seen as hypothetical or real. A group of 67 students was asked to rate the humor of images from a website. Those in the close condition were told they would be looking at real photos that “have not been altered using image design software”; participants in the distant condition were told they would be viewing “fake pictures” that “have been altered using image design software.”

One picture portrayed a severe abnormality: a Cronenbergian image of a man sticking a finger up through his nose out of his eye socket. The other portrayed a mild abnormality — a man with large icicles hanging from his frozen beard. Using a 6-point scale, participants rated how funny they thought the photos were.

The students rated the more disturbing image of the empty eye socket as more humorous when they were told it was fake, and they reported the less disturbing frozen-beard image as more humorous when they thought it was real.

“These findings suggest that there’s a real sweet spot in comedy — you have to get the right mix between how bad something is and how distant it is in order for it to be seen as a benign violation,” McGraw said.

The Energizing Effect of Humor

Having trouble finishing a project on deadline? Well, put down that Red Bull and head over to YouTube. No joke — watching funny cat videos at work may not be such a bad thing after all. A study conducted by Australian National University management professors David Cheng and Lu Wang suggests that exposure to humorous stimuli may actually help people persevere in completing tedious tasks.

Across two studies, Cheng and Wang found that people who watched a funny video clip before a task spent approximately twice as long on a tiresome task compared with people who watched neutral or positive (but not funny) videos.

Prior research has found that humor can help facilitate recovery from stressful situations, even prolonging people’s tolerance for physical pain. In the business world, many successful organizations such as Zappos, Virgin, and Google deliberately build play areas into their workspaces and organize fun events to ameliorate the stressful nature of work, boost morale, and increase productivity.

Indeed, in a 2007 article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science , APS William James Fellow Roy F. Baumeister (Florida State University), APS Fellow Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota), and APS Fellow Dianne M. Tice (Florida State University) point to humor as a factor that can moderate or counteract the effects of mental depletion.

In line with this idea, Cheng and Wang hypothesized that humor may provide a respite from tedious situations in the workplace. This “mental break” might not only prevent work-related depletion, but also might facilitate the replenishment of mental resources, ultimately allowing people to persist longer on difficult tasks.

To test this theory, for their first study the researchers recruited 74 students studying in a business class to come into the lab, ostensibly for an experiment on perception. First, the students performed a mentally depleting task in which they had to cross out every instance of the letter “e” contained in two pages of text. The students then were randomly assigned to watch a video clip eliciting either humor, contentment, or neutral emotions.

For the humorous video, students watched a clip of the BBC comedy “Mr. Bean.” In the contentment condition, participants watched a scene with dolphins swimming in the ocean. The students in the neutral condition were treated to an 8-minute video about the management profession designed for students studying business. Immediately after watching the videos, participants reported their responses to a list of 16 discrete emotions (e.g., amusement, anger, disgust) using a 7-point scale.

Then the students completed a persistence task in which they played what amounted to an unwinnable game. The students were asked to guess the potential performance of employees based on provided profiles and were told that making 10 correct assessments in a row would lead to a win. However, the computer software was programmed such that it was nearly impossible to achieve 10 consecutive correct answers. Participants were allowed to quit the task at any time.

Students who watched the humorous “Mr. Bean” video clip ended up spending significantly more time working on the task, making twice as many predictions as the other two groups.

Cheng and Wang then replicated these results in a second study, during which they had participants complete long multiplication questions by hand. Again, participants who watched the humorous video spent significantly more time working on the task and completed more questions correctly than did those who did not watch the funny video.

“Although humor has been found to help relieve stress and facilitate social relationships, the traditional view of task performance implies that individuals must concentrate all their effort on their endeavors and should avoid things such as humor that may distract them from the accomplishment of task goals,” Cheng and Wang conclude. “We suggest that humor is not only enjoyable but more importantly, energizing.”

Kathleen D. Vohs will speak at the 2017 APS Annual Convention, May 25–28, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Tice, D. M. (2007). The strength model of self-control. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16 , 351–355. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00534.x

Bryant, G. A., Fessler, D. M. T., Fusaroli, R., Clint, E., Aarøe, L., Apicella, C. L., … Zhou, Y. (2016). Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 113 , 4682–4687. doi:10.1073/pnas.1524993113

Cheng, D., & Wang, L. (2015). Examining the energizing effects of humor: The influence of humor on persistence behavior. Journal of Business and Psychology, 30 , 759–772. doi:10.1007/s10869-014-9396-z

Ko, S. J., Sadler, M. S., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). The sound of power: Conveying and detecting hierarchical rank through voice. Psychological Science, 26 , 3–14. doi:10.1177/0956797614553009

McGraw, A. P., & Warren, C. (2010). Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny. Psychological Science , 21 , 1141–1149. doi:10.1177/0956797610376073

McGraw, A. P., Warren, C., Williams, L. E., & Leonard, B. (2012). Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps. Psychological Science , 23 , 1215–1223. doi:10.1177/0956797612443831

Oveis, C., Spectre, A., Smith, P. K., Liu, M. Y., & Keltner, D. (2016). Laughter conveys status. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 65 , 109–115. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.04.005

Provine, R. R. (2004). Laughing, tickling, and the evolution of speech and self. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 13 , 215–218. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00311.x

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Privacy Overview

The European Journal of Humour Research

Current Issue

The EJHR is an open-access, academic journal published by Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies and endorsed by The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) . The EJHR publishes full research articles, shorter commentaries, which discuss ground-breaking or controversial areas, research notes, which provide details on the research project rationale, methodology and outcomes, as well as book reviews. The journal has a special focus on supporting PhD students and early career researchers by providing them with a forum within which to disseminate their work alongside established scholars and practitioners.

The EJHR welcomes submissions that combine research and relevant applications as well as empirical studies detailing their usefulness to the study of humour. All contributions received (apart from book reviews) undergo a double-blind, peer-review process. In addition to established scholars within humor research, we invite those as yet unfamiliar with (or wary of) humor research to enter the discussion, especially based on less known or less covered material. The elaboration of joint methodological frameworks is strongly encouraged. For further details or inquiries you may contact the Editors.

No charges are applied either for submitting, reviewing or processing articles for publication.

The journal is now listed in important international indexing bases including Scopus and Scimago ranking :

This publication is supported by the CEES and ELM Scholarly Press.

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Here is the updated list of papers published in EJHR in the years 2013-2024 that received most views. Below is also the list of most cited papers . Congratulations to the Authors.

The Importance of Humor Research

A serious non-serious research topic..

Posted September 14, 2011 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Humor has been around for as long as there has been humanity -- and considering that chimps and other primates laugh, humor has likely been around even longer than that. In comparison, psychological research on humor is just getting cracking.

Sure, Freud took a stab at it, but he didn't have the scientific tools to get the job done. We've been fortunate to have the International Society for Humor Studies working on the topic since late 80's. Yet despite several decades of determined effort on the part of this small cadre of humor researchers, the field is still fighting for respectability. The 2,000-page Handbook of Social Psychology mentions humor exactly once - the same number of times as it mentions cliques, Puerto Ricans, and the Gurin Index (whatever that is). Martin Seligman , the father of the positive psychology movement even deems a good sense of humor to be one of 24 characteristics associated with well-being, yet the hugely influential field of happiness research has largely ignored the topic.

"Humor research is seen as a non-serious topic," says Rod Martin , author of The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, one of the preeminent books in the field. "Scientists always want to make sure their work is respectable, and to be doing research on humor is seen as not respectable enough. People think there are a lot of other, really pressing problems we have to try to solve."

But when you think about it, humor may be one of the most important topics of all.

The ubiquity of humor

Humor is everywhere, for example. Laughter is one of the first things you do as a newborn, and, if all goes well, it will be one of the last things you do before you die. Try going through a day without so much as a chuckle, and you'll find that it's downright impossible. And those chuckles occur much more frequently than other commonly researched emotions like regret, pride, and shame .

People typically approach pleasure and avoid pain. Hence, the pursuit of humor influences many of our daily decisions - the websites, books and magazines we read, the television shows and movies we watch, and the people we decide to talk to (or not). And because humor is valued by consumers, businesses are constantly creating funny advertisements (e.g., Superbowl ads) and funny products (e.g., blockbuster comedic films) in order to get our attention and entertain us. The psychological study of humor may lead to an improvement in humor, in the same way that developing a better understanding of language comprehension has led to an improvement in language instruction.

Humor is (typically) good

By examining humor's antecedents, we will also better understand (and harness) humor's many benefits.

Humor appears to help people's psychological and physical well-being - for example, helping folks cope with stress and adversity. Humor even seems to help people grieve: Dacher Keltner and colleagues found that people who spontaneously experienced amusement and laughter when discussing a deceased spouse showed better emotional adjustment in the years following the spouse's death.

But humor has physical benefits, too. Laughter - especially a hearty laugh - has been shown to benefit your circulation, lungs and muscles (especially those around the belly area). Humor also helps people deal with pain and physical adversity. Hollywood even made a movie, Patch Adams , about the benefits of humor in clinical settings.

Let's not forget humor's social benefits. Not surprisingly, funny people receive positive attention and admiration. Your ability to create and appreciate humor also influences who wants to date, mate and befriend you. Most studies find humor to be a highly desirable attribute, which explains why the acronym GSOH (good sense of humor) finds its way into personal and online dating posts. And according to the work of Barb Frederickson and others who examine the benefits of positivity , humor is an excellent way to boost your creative prowess. Finally, humor smoothes potentially awkward social and cultural interactions. Think about how much easier an uncomfortable situation can be when you joke about it.

Consistent with historical accounts of the use of humor as a weapon of subversion, research being conducted in the Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL) finds that consumers can effectively use humor to criticize brands. The release of Dave Carroll's wildly popular, " United Breaks Guitars ," on YouTube coincided with a 10% decrease in United stock price, and has since garnered ten million plus views.

Not getting the joke

Finally, researching humor is important because it will help us understand why it doesn't always work. While successful humor leads to myriad benefits, failed humor can be downright destructive, from bruised egos and broken friendships to million-dollar marketing mistakes (think Groupon's failed Super Bowl commercial). If we can better figure out what makes things funny, we will end up far better equipped to handle it when we don't get the joke.

In sum, when done well, humor can have a significant positive effect on your life. Isn't it time we use a little more academic rigor to figure out how it works? By developing a better understanding of humor we believe we can then suggest ways that people can live better lives - from helping them cope with pain and stress to encouraging people to use humor to criticize brands that have done them wrong.

Professor Peter McGraw ( @PeterMcGraw ) and journalist Joel Warner ( @JoelmWarner ) have embarked on the Humor Code , an around-the-world exploration of what makes things funny. Follow the Humor Code on Facebook and Twitter.

Peter McGraw, Ph.D., a behavioral economist, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. He directs the Humor Research Lab, is the author of many books, and hosts a podcast on living single, Solo.

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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 .

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.

Before you continue reading, we thought you might like to download our three Grief Exercises [PDF] for free . These science-based tools will help you move yourself or others through grief in a compassionate way.

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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Zhan, L. (2012). Understanding humor based on the incongruity theory and the cooperative principle. Studies in Literature and Language , 4 , 94–98.
Zobel Nolan, A. (2018). Laugh out loud: 40 women humorists celebrate then and now… before we forget. Independently Published.

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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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101 Lab Jokes

In the world of science , where curiosity meets discovery, there’s a special place where laughter finds its way into the serious realm of research and experimentation. Welcome to the world of lab jokes, where scientists and researchers let their hair down and share a good laugh over the peculiarities of their work .

From biology to chemistry , from atoms to genes, these witty one-liners and puns lighten the atmosphere and remind us that even in the pursuit of knowledge, humor has its place. So, put on your lab coats and safety goggles as we delve into a collection of lab jokes that will tickle your scientific funny bone .

Top 101 Lab Jokes:

Why don’t biologists trust atoms? Because they make up everything!
Why did the microbiologist refuse to play cards with the leprosy bacteria? He heard they like to play with a full-deck of genes!
What did one cell say to his sister cell when she stepped on his foot ? Mitosis!
Why do chemists like high pressure? It’s the only time they can be under the weather and still be in their element.
Why was the biology book so full of itself? Because it had all the “organ”ization!
How does a biologist make a hormone ? They don’t pay it.
Why do chemists call helium, curium, and barium the healing elements? Because if you can’t helium or curium, you barium!
Why was the geneticist good at repairing his car ? He had the genes for it.
Why did the chemist go broke? Because he had no solutions.
What did the biologist wear to impress their date ? Designer genes.
Why don’t biologists have mid-life crises? They’re too busy with their cell-f reflection.
Why did the physicist break up with the biologist? There was no chemistry.
What do you call a tooth in a glass of water ? A one molar solution.
Why did the biology student get an A? Because he had all the organs down to a T.
Why are chemists so good at solving problems? They always have a solution.
Why did the lab tech go to therapy ? He had separation anxiety .
What did the DNA say to the other DNA? Do these genes make me look fat?
What did the biologist use to fix his jeans? A gene splicer.
What do chemists call a clown who inhaled helium? A noble gas .
Why did the biologist go to the party alone? He had no body to go with.
What’s a chemist’s favorite type of tree ? Chemistry.
What do you call a microbiologist that’s gone bad? A germ-inator.
Why was the microbiologist always calm? He always kept his cell-f control.
Why was the chemist’s report seven pages long ? He had a lot of elements to cover.
How did the biology student know he was going to do well on his test? He felt it in his bones.
What did the enzyme say to the substrate? I’ve got a crush on you.
Why was the biologist never lonely ? He always had his buds around.
What’s a chemist’s favorite type of dog ? A lab-rador.
Why did the DNA go to the party? Because he wanted to express himself.
How does a biochemist spice up their life ? They get into the proteins.
What did the biologist say when they found the missing link? “I’ve been looking for you gene-etically!”
What does a chemist put on their bed ? A periodic blanket.
Why don’t physicists trust particles? Because they can’t measure their position and momentum at the same time.
What did the scientist say when they found two isotopes of helium? HeHe.
Why was the DNA sequence so embarrassed? Because it was caught in the middle of replication.
What did the biologist say to the physicist? “Let’s combine our genes and make a theory of everything.”
Why do biologists hate statistics? Too many mean averages.
How can you spot a chemist in the restroom? They wash their hands before and after using the toilet.
What did the scientist say when he discovered a new species of bacteria? “I’ve got culture!”
Why are lab safety rules so strict? Because broken glass and chemicals mix like acid and base.
Why did the biologist become a gardener ? They wanted to branch out.
What do you call two atoms of helium laughing together? HeHe.
How do you know you’re speaking to an extroverted physicist? They look at your shoes when they’re talking to you.
Why do biologists go to the bar? To get a round of shots under the microscope.
How do you cut a sea in half? With a sea-saw.
Why don’t we tell secrets in labs? Because the walls have ears and the test tubes have eyes !
What did the chemist say after a failed experiment? “We’ll just have to go back to the drawing Bunsen.”
Why do biologists make bad comedians ? They have too many inside jokes.
What do you do with a sick chemist? If you can’t helium and you can’t curium, you might as well barium!
How do you know a physicist has been in your house? Your kids have lecture notes about their toys.
Why did the DNA go to therapy? It had too many issues to unwind.
Why don’t chemists make good chefs? They’re always over-reacting!
How do we know that atoms are generous? They always give away their electrons.
Why do biologists study fish ? They want to get to know their cells better.
What did the geneticist say after a successful experiment? “I’ve got the code!”
Why was the biologist always late? He took his time in the gene pool .
What do you call a biologist with a large brain ? An organ donor.
What’s the first rule of the Chemistry Club? Never mix acid with base.
Why do chemists like nitrates so much? They’re cheaper than day rates.
What do you call a biologist who studies their own body? Self-centered.
Why did the biologist go on a diet ? He wanted to reduce his mass.
Why do biologists go to school ? To get a degree in Celsius!
Why do chemists love coffee ? It’s all about the brew-tal reaction.
Why are chemists great at solving problems? They have all the solutions.
Why did the chemist sit on a cold bench? He wanted to test his reaction.
What’s the most relaxing thing for a biologist? Listening to some cell-o music .
What’s a physicist’s favorite food ? Fission chips.
Why did the lab mouse join a dating app? He heard there was a lot of chemistry.
Why do chemists make the best DJs ? They always drop the base.
Why did the biologist buy an extra microscope? He needed to double-check his work.
How do we know the moon isn’t made of cheese ? The mice haven’t left yet!
Why did the atom break up with his girlfriend ? He couldn’t bond with her anymore.
What did the RNA say to the DNA? “Stop being so negative!”
Why are chemists great for solving problems? They always have a solution!
Why was the computer cold in the lab? It left its Windows open!
Why was the physics book heavy? It had a lot of mass.
What do you call a nervous chemist? A shaky solution.
What’s a biologist’s favorite dessert ? Berry DNA-lato.
Why did the chemist start doing yoga ? He wanted to achieve a state of equilibrium.
Why was the microscope always unhappy? It had a tough time focusing.
What’s a biologist’s favorite gym equipment? The gene machine.
What do you call a swimming electron ? A Michael Phelpsicle.
Why was the photon arrested? For speeding .
What’s a biologist’s favorite band ? The Cell Out Boy .
How does a physicist exercise ? By doing quantum leaps.
Why did the DNA take antidepressants? It was feeling coiled up.
Why was the chemist sad ? He lost an electron.
What’s the first rule in a lab? Don’t trust atoms, they make up everything!
What does a microbiologist use to make a call? A cell phone .
What did the biologist say when her colleague found a new species? “Cell-a-brate good times, come on!”
Why do chemists always work in a team? Because they have good chemistry.
How do scientists freshen their breath? With experi-mints.
What did the virus say to the bacterium? “Stop copying me!”
Why do biologists hate math ? Because they can’t find the square root of a tree.
What did one charged atom say to the other? “I’ve got my ion you.”
Why was the protein always the life of the party? Because it knows how to unwind.
Why do biologists wear glasses? To improve their cell-vision.
What do you call a laughing test tube? A cracking good time.
Why did the lab tech feel safe in the lab? Because he was surrounded by glasses.
What’s a physicist’s favorite dance move? The Quantum Jump.
Why was the bio lab always so noisy? Because all the cells kept ringing!

From clever wordplay to hilarious situational humor, these lab jokes have offered a lighthearted glimpse into the world of scientists, biologists, chemists, and physicists. They showcase the ability of these dedicated professionals to find humor in their daily endeavors, even when faced with complex concepts and intricate experiments.

In the midst of their pursuit of understanding the mysteries of life and the universe, scientists embrace the power of laughter, reminding us that humor can be found in the most unexpected places.

So, the next time you find yourself in a laboratory or discussing scientific theories, remember to share a lab joke and bring a smile to the faces of those around you. After all, a little laughter can make the scientific journey all the more enjoyable.

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Jerry Seinfeld, award-winning comedian, actor, producer and author, delivered the commencement address during Duke's 2024 university-wide commencement ceremony in Wallace Wade Stadium on May 12, 2024.

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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.

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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.

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Biden Jokes Trump Should Have Injected Himself With Bleach

May 9, 2024. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

By Jeff Mason

PORTOLA VALLEY, California (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden joked on Friday that he wished former President Donald Trump had injected himself with a little bleach, resurrecting one of Trump's more head-scratching moments from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden, at a fundraising event south of San Francisco for his re-election campaign, said the presidency of his Republican opponent was chaotic and that voters should keep that in mind. Biden and Trump are locked in a close contest ahead of the November election.

"Remember him saying the best thing to do is just inject a little bleach in your arm? That’s what he said. And he meant it. I wish he had done a little bit himself," Biden said.

During the early months of the pandemic in 2020, Trump said that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help protect against the virus.

Biden also made light of what he called Trump's "love letters" from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, although Biden mistakenly referred to Kim as the president of South Korea.

Trump had met with Kim and exchanged a number of letters with him, copies of which he kept in a loose-leaf binder in the Oval Office.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Biden's remarks.

Biden has made light of Trump's bleach comment before, saying on April 24 in Washington that Trump had injected himself and "it all went to his hair."

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; Editing by David Gregorio)

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A thank you to sports moms everywhere. You masters of logistics and snacks. We see you.

Meet my friend, Dana Yoo.

Dana works full time as a cell biologist and vice president of research and development at a biotech company.

She has another role, one she jokes, that could be her actual full-time job.

From NFL plays to college sports scores, all the top sports news you need to know every day.

Dana is a sports mom. To my wife and me, Dana is the ideal sports mom. You might know someone like her, the mom from the team who gets everyone organized and wears a variety of hats.

She wipes noses and wipes away kids’ doubts, cheering like heck but also knowing when to stay quiet and offer her arm or shoulder for support. It seems ingrained in her DNA to not only multitask, but to make it look easy.

"She is doing so much that I really can’t keep up," says Dana’s husband, Chris Antolik. "Dana tells me where to go and when."

Dana has counted Little League board member, scorekeeper, team event coordinator, video streamer, first aid provider ("I always have my first aid kit ready to go!" she says) and assistant coach among her many unofficial positions.

Most of all, Dana is a rooter − for their sons, Caius, 15, and Marcus, 14, and for all of the boys on our Northern Virginia baseball teams.

"What makes me love being a sports mom isn’t just that I get to spend so much time with my kids," she says. "I love getting to know the teammates and their families. They are my community."

This weekend, as we honor what our wives and moms mean to us, we can also salute their roles in sports that can sometimes be underappreciated, if not unnoticed.

Sports moms are often the engines of our kids’ athletic pursuits, and their love endures whether those pursuits are realized or not. Whether they are biologists, teachers or national championship winning coaches, they are always moms first. Here are three reasons to celebrate them all.

1. Sports moms are omnipresent

Maryland head women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese has to miss a lot of her sons’ games, but she is always present in the minds of her 16-year-old twins, Tyler and Markus.

"When she does make it, the boys are excited to have mom in the stands watching," says Frese’s husband, Mark Thomas. "Then they always choose to ride home with her and not me.”

Tyler was diagnosed with leukemia at 2 years old. It was treatable, and any time his parents see him on the court or field, they cherish his health and just the ability to play. Frese sits quietly in the stands and takes careful notes on her sons' performances, only offering feedback if they come to her for it. They often do.

"You have your own opinions but I’m never gonna voice those to my son," she told USA TODAY Sports last year. "It needs to be their path."

The twins have also internalized what a well-organized program looks like, their father says, by hanging around Frese’s Maryland team, feeding players shots and their mom lineup advice.

"Brenda thrives in situations where there are a lot of moving parts," Thomas says. "I’m not ashamed to admit that a lot of times, women are better planners than men, and I think that’s a huge help with a sports team. When I’ve coached youth teams, my best team managers have been moms.

"Team managers handle things like communicating with parents, organizing who brings snacks, team party, etc. But they do well as head coaches, too. I think a lot of moms are a nurturing presence. Sometimes they see things a little differently than guys do. It can be a healthy balance to have moms and dads both involved."

Given the demands of Frese’s job, Thomas oversees their boys' activities. But when mom comes home, Thomas says, they forget about him.

"I become invisible," he says with a laugh. "But the dog still loves me."

Even if a sports mom isn't physically present, trust me, they're there. They may be in the athletes' minds, like Frese, or show up in the way they play. Or, their fingerprints could be on the fresh uniforms, bags of snacks and countless extras that go into maintaining a youth sports team.

Coach Steve: 'What are we doing to youth sports?' Brenda Frese asks

2. Masters of logistics

Like Frese, Kim Newsome, who lives with her family near Princeton, New Jersey, has been a constant reassuring presence for her sons. Unlike Frese, she hasn’t always been quiet. That’s usually the role of her husband, Leon, a former football player at Princeton who’s now chief security officer for the NBA.

"I’m there on the sidelines losing my mind and the former athlete (says), ‘That was an error. OK, get the next one,'" she says jokingly.

Kim, an educator by trade, and Leon have three boys: Grant, 27; Garrett, 22; and Gaines, 15. Garrett and Gaines have excelled at baseball. Grant played baseball extensively before he switched to football and wound up starting on the University of Michigan’s offensive line.

Kim wasn't a super competitive athlete growing up in the 1980s. Even when she met Leon at Princeton, she admits she never really thought about being a sports mom. She had no idea of the intricacies that went into it.

"You become a master of logistics," she says. "Practice or games for each child two to three times a week, weekends that often involve traveling far enough to need a hotel stay, figuring out who would take which children where. My husband traveled a lot for work, so that was always something we had to factor into the equation as well.

"Oh, and the laundry, my goodness it never ended with three boys. I was just telling a friend yesterday that the greatest surprise from our youngest son's school was that they wash their baseball uniforms."

Being a sports mom is something you grow into and learn to thrive. We’ve all had those dreaded 8 a.m. weekend games. Kim has always liked to find a bakery to make sure the boys on the team have early-morning donuts. The mental load of planning and making sports an experience above and beyond the basics is overwhelmingly handled by sports moms, in my experience.

"Really, just trying to keep it fun so it never felt like a grind for the kids being at a baseball tournament all weekend," she says. "Other moms made sure we always had wine for the hotel lobby at night, which was amazing. We all had our roles."

Being a sports mom, of course, runs much deeper. Grant seemed destined for the NFL when, in 2016, a devastating injury ended his career and threatened to take his leg.

When he was initially hurt, he wanted to walk off the field so that Kim, watching from the stands, wouldn’t worry.

"Of course, I was worried," she says.

After Grant retired from football, he got his bachelor's degree and then master’s from Michigan in public policy. He is now the Wolverines' offensive line coach.

As sports moms know, wins and losses, as important as they seem at the time, are secondary. They want our kids to emerge triumphantly from the sports experience.

"Grant’s injury was a point of real, profound adversity for him and for our family," Kim told me last spring, still getting emotional. "The way he navigated it, and the way our younger boys navigated it – I mean, for 38 days, when he was in the hospital, one of their parents was never home ‘cause we were tag-teaming being with Grant. And my parents and Leon’s mom stepped in.

"As a mom, I’m proud of the athletic accomplishments but most proud of that."

Coach Steve: How a Grant Newsome and his parents navigated unexpected change

3. They never stop being Mom ― to anyone who needs one

Three years ago, Kim and middle son Garrett awoke in the dark on the Friday after Thanksgiving to drive to Ann Arbor. They wanted to see Michigan play Ohio State, and to see Grant coach.

I recall a similarly early morning when I arrived at my friend Dana' house to pick up my older son, Connor. She let him and his brother sleep over so my wife and I could have a night out.

Connor had a baseball game. He told me Dana not only woke him up in time but made him a full breakfast to eat before his game.

Dana’s warmth has always shined through in her adopted role, which, as all sports moms know, extends far beyond your own children.

"I have been so lucky to see the kids and their friends and teammates grow up together," she says. "I love rooting for their friends and seeing their success as much as I do for my own kids. But I love that the kids, their families and coaches always know that I will be eager to help in any way I can."

My younger son, Liam, and I are with Dana at a tournament this weekend. Dana coordinates a carpool among several families on the team (“I have a detailed spreadsheet!” she says) and plans our lunch and evening activities.

There will likely come a moment after the boys’ last game on Mother's Day when our coach will ask them to walk over and hug their parents for taking them here.

If you’re at a game somewhere, make sure you embrace your favorite sports mom, too. For she is the true hero of the sidelines.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A thank you to sports moms everywhere. You masters of logistics and snacks. We see you.

Dana Yoo (center left) poses, left to right, with her son Caius, husband Chris, and son Marcus at a tournament in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 2022.

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What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of
Another instance of the confirmation bias in humor research is the tendency for researchers to claim that evidence supports one theory when it is consistent with multiple theories. We thus encourage researchers to identify situations in which humor theories—or at least the component antecedent conditions they propose—make different predictions.
Humor, laughter, learning, and health! A brief review
Ronald A. Berk, a pioneer of humor research, from Johns Hopkins University (1976-2006), has published more than 150 articles regarding humor, laughter, and learning. Berk taught biostatistics, a class often considered dry, difficult, and uninteresting by many students, creating a major challenge for inspiring and motivating his students.
A Scientific Theory of Humor
Although there are many competing theories (and no definitive answers) about how humor functions, new research by Chris Westbury, Cyrus Shaoul, Gail Moroschan, and Michael Ranscar suggests that at ...
The Humor Research Lab (HuRL)
The Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL) at the University of Colorado Boulder is dedicated to the scientific study of humor, its antecedents, and its consequences. The lab's theoretical and methodological base is in the interdisciplinary fields of emotion and judgment and decision making, with ...
HUMOR
Objective HUMOR was established as an international interdisciplinary forum for the publication of high-quality research papers on humor as an important and universal human faculty. Humor research draws upon a wide range of academic disciplines including anthropology, biology, cultural studies, computer science, education, communication, film and media studies, gender studies, history ...
The psychology of humor: Basic research and translation.
The centrality of humor to the human experience makes psychological research on humor naturally translational, applicable for practical interventions, and collective action for social change.For instance, although basic research on the relationship between humor and mental and physical health is relatively young (emerging as positive psychology gained prominence in the 1990s), mental health ...
ISHS Journal Page
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 ...
The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor
This study exposes one of the most formidable problems in humor cognitive research—that the integrity of humor perception is subservient to numerous cognitive skills such as working memory, long-term memory, executive functions, emotional expression and language skills.
ISHS
The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) is a scholarly and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of humor research. Many of the Society's members are university and college professors in the Arts and Humanities, Biological and Social Sciences, and Education. The Society also includes professionals in the fields of ...
Humor research
Humor research (also humor studies) is a multifaceted field which enters the domains of linguistics, history, and literature. Research in humor has been done to understand the psychological and physiological effects, both positive and negative, on a person or groups of people.
Cultural differences in humor: A systematic review and critique
Cultural differences in humor perception (Table 1)Much research suggests that compared to East Asians, North Americans tend to perceive humor more positively and rate themselves as more humorous (see Table 1).In a priming experiment, biculturals primed with Western cultural icons evaluated a humorous person more positively than biculturals primed with Chinese cultural icons [3].
Three Decades Investigating Humor and Laughter: An Interview With
Abstract. 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.
Humor in Workplace Leadership: A Systematic Search Scoping Review
The research synthesis using Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis approach identified four key themes: (1) the effect of humor style on individual and organizational outcomes; (2) humor as a communication tool and discursive resource; (3) the moderator and boundary conditions of effective humor use by leaders; and (4) cultural ...
(PDF) Explorations in Humor Studies: Humor Research Project
broad term with many a definition, for it may refer to " (…) a feeling of. amusement, a response of laughter, and a disposition to engage in a. humorous or good- humored manner. Therefore ...
Brain's Laughter Circuit: Unraveling Humor's Neural Pathways
The research team, comprised of neuroscientists specializing in cognitive processing and emotional responses, embarked on an exploration of the neural correlates of humor. Utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they delved into the brain's response to humorous stimuli in 26 healthy adults, comprising both males and females.
The Science of Humor Is No Laughing Matter
McGraw and Warren's Humor Research Lab (HuRL) has conducted several studies examining the exact criteria that cause us to perceive a comedic situation as benign or not. Along with the severity of the norm violation, a sense of psychological distance from the violation — by space, time, relationships, or imagination — is a key ingredient ...
The European Journal of Humour Research
The EJHR is an open-access, academic journal published by Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies and endorsed by The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS).The EJHR publishes full research articles, shorter commentaries, which discuss ground-breaking or controversial areas, research notes, which provide details on the research project rationale, methodology and ...
The Importance of Humor Research
In comparison, psychological research on humor is just getting cracking. Sure, Freud took a stab at it, but he didn't have the scientific tools to get the job done. We've been fortunate to have ...
(PDF) Humour Research: State of the Art
In: HUMOR, the International Journal of Humor Research, Mouton de Gruyter , volume 6 - 4 pages 385 - 402, 1993. [OAK94] Oaks, D. D. Creating structural ambiguities in humor: getting Enlish grammar to
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 ...
A Study on Instructional Humor: How Much Humor Is Used in Presentations
1.1. Definition and Theories of Humor. Researchers define humor in a variety of ways. According to Scheel [], superiority, incongruity, and arousal relief are the most popular theories in humor research.Superiority theory, which has been prevalent since the time of Plato and Aristotle, explains that laughter is an effect of a feeling of superiority due to the depreciation of other people [].
Humor in Psychology: Coping and Laughing Your Woes Away
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.
101 Lab Jokes
101 Lab Jokes. By Laughlore Team Updated on October 25, 2023. In the world of science, where curiosity meets discovery, there's a special place where laughter finds its way into the serious realm of research and experimentation. Welcome to the world of lab jokes, where scientists and researchers let their hair down and share a good laugh over ...
Advice from Jerry Seinfeld on Why Life Should be Navigated With Humor
Seinfeld urged graduates to remember to laugh and navigate life with humor. "All of you here, without question, are the best of the best. Just don't lose your humor. It's not an accessory. It's your Stanley Cup water bottle on the brutal, long hike of life," said Seinfeld. Relive Duke's 2024 Commencement by visiting commencement.duke.edu.
Fascinating cicada facts prompt awe, research from scientists
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 ...
Biden Jokes Trump Should Have Injected Himself With Bleach
US News is a recognized leader in college, grad school, hospital, mutual fund, and car rankings. Track elected officials, research health conditions, and find news you can use in politics ...
A thank you to sports moms everywhere. You masters of logistics and
Meet my friend, Dana Yoo. Dana works full time as a cell biologist and vice president of research and development at a biotech company. She has another role, one she jokes, that could be her ...