Humour

Whatever your taste in humour, we all love people – and jokes – that make us laugh. Humour is such an elemental aspect of what it is to be human – and yet researchers are still making new discoveries about what makes a line funny (or flop), how humour affects us, and what a person's comic style can reveal about them. Some recent studies report intriguing findings.

What makes something, or someone, funny?

There are various theories. One popular idea holds that when an expectation, generated by our past experience of standard patterns of words, behaviour or concepts, is subverted in a non-threatening way (a way that doesn't alarm us), we can find this funny.

This idea firmly ties humour to pattern recognition, a critical human ability. Someone who can play with these patterns shows that they understand them, and by manipulating them, they can signal their intelligence and their creativity to others. Since intelligence and creativity are desirable traits, it's no wonder that we like funny people. But the 'non-threatening' element of this theory is important, too: it signals positive pro-sociality, rather than something darker. (Though more on this in a minute….)

Various studies have produced evidence in support of this theory. Recently, we reported on a study that found 'gangster pasta', for example, was rated as being funnier than 'insult nickname'. The researchers – Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore, along with Tomas Engelthaler and Thomas T. Hills at the University of Warwick – concluded that word pairs that most violated expectations (not just in terms of meaning, but also frequency of use, for example) were rated as funniest. I have to note though, that pairs in which at least one word referenced sex or bodily excretions generally got the top humour ratings. Exactly why we find this type of thing funny, and have for millennia, is debated. Perhaps it's because it subverts taboos, which is a form of subversion of expectations about what is acceptable to reference. A joke that dates back to 10th century Britain neatly combines both bawdiness and a subversion of expectations about what the teller is getting at: 'What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: a key.'

Dark and light humour

Some forms of humour are light and pleasant; others less so. Researchers have identified a variety of comic styles, and while some are generally positive, such as wit (the ability to play with words and create clever thoughts), others can be much more aggressive, like sarcasm(which involves being critical of others and conveying contempt).

In July 2022, a team led by Alberto Dionigi at Studio Psi.Co. in Italy reported links between certain comic styles and higher scores on the 'Dark Triad' of personality traits. Specifically, Machiavellianism was associated with greater use of irony and cynicism and psychopathy was associated with irony, sarcasm and cynicism. Narcissism was associated with fun and wit — which sounds good. But of course narcissists believe themselves to be superior to others, and the study used self-report measures — so it could be that narcissists think they are fun and witty, but aren't.

There's evidence that humour aids in everything from coping with stress and depression to boosting mood and attracting a mate.

One of the team's main conclusions was that people with psychopathic and Machiavellian traits may use 'dark' humour as a way to attack others without incurring the social cost of a direct verbal or physical assault, and in fact to enhance their own social status, as being a funny person.

This research focused on the use of humour. But a 2017 study led by Ulrike Willinger did find that people who scored higher on an intelligence test were not only more likely to 'get' black comedy, they were also more likely to enjoy it. The people who enjoyed these jokes the most also had the lowest aggression scores and the best mood scores. So enjoying dark humour is not (at least according to this small study) a sign of being anti-social.

When do we become funny?

According to recent research children start to appreciate humour from a very young age — as early as about one month old (according to some parents, at least*).

The team behind this study developed their 20-item parent-report humour survey to help plug a gap in research: a lack of knowledge about how humour typically develops in children. Parents from different countries (all English-speaking) and different socioeconomic backgrounds completed the survey. And they reported consistent age-related developments in their children.

Humor is a human universal which is important to coping with stress, making friends, learning, being creative and attracting mates.

One-year-olds found games such as peak-a-boo, tickling and pulling funny faces funny. Two-year-olds played with concepts (saying that dogs say moo, for example) for comedic effect. Three-year-olds, meanwhile, were already playing with taboos, saying naughty words to be funny (I have to say, my 11-year-old still does this), and they were starting to understand
puns.

'Humor is a human universal which is important to coping with stress, making friends, learning, being creative and attracting mates,' notes the team, led by Elena Hoicka at the University of Bristol. As well as making at start at establishing the norms of humour development in childhood, this work supports the idea that humour is fundamental to the human experience.

(*If you have a one-to-two-month-old who doesn't seem to be appreciating humour just yet, I wouldn't worry… this is the age at which some parents said that their infant started to laugh. But separate research on laughter suggests that most babies start laughing in response to a raspberry blown on the tummy, for example, around the age of three of four months.)

How much does humour help us?

There's evidence that humour aids in everything from coping with stress and depression to boosting mood and attracting a mate.

Research suggests that depressed people seem to enjoy memes with depression-related themes more than non-depressed individuals. Earlier work had found that positive humour can help people cope with emotional stress, but a study led by Umair Akram suggested that depressed people get something out of a negative style of humour, perhaps because the memes helped them to deal with their experiences. In 2021, the same team also reported that anxious people might have used funny memes about Covid-19 to help them cope during the pandemic.

Other work has also found that wielding (not just being exposed to) negative styles of humour can bring some benefits. In 2018, a team led by Jorge Torres Marín at the University of Granada, Spain, reported that people who were more likely to use self-defeating humour also scored higher on a measure of happiness. This finding contradicted the results of some earlier research. The mixed results in this field could be down to the fact that the studies were conducted in different cultures, Marin suggests. In Spain, being able to laugh at yourself is seen as a positive, he says, but this may not be the case everywhere. However, as the link was correlational, it's also possible that happier people are more willing to be self-deprecating.

A spoonful of humour…

Helps the medicine go down. A US study of more than 1,600 science students found that 99 per cent felt that when a class instructor used humour, this improved their learning experience. Many reported that classroom humour reduced their stress, improved their relationship with their instructor and helped them to remember what had been taught. However, male and female students had very different views on which topics should be joked about. When given a list of hypothetical jokes that might be made by an instructor, male students were more likely to find jokes about gender, sexual orientation, religious identity and race funny. (Seriously? This doesn't exactly reflect well on men studying at the school of life sciences at Arizona State University…) The female students, though, were more likely to find such jokes offensive. Also, 40 per cent of the students said that when a 'joke' was offensive and not funny, they found it harder to pay attention to the class. There were only three topics that the students as a whole generally found inoffensive and also potentially funny — and so which lecturers should probably stick to: science, college (university) and television.

Other research has found that young people are more likely to remember facts about government policy and politics when it is conveyed in a humorous way. Another study found that including humour in a message about climate change increased young adults' willingness to take part in activism and to recycle. All of this at least suggests that humour can boost engagement in some very serious subjects indeed.

Some researchers hope that it will be possible to develop a single unified theory of humour – an explanation for why anything that people find funny is funny. (Some, for example Peter McGraw, even claim to have developed one.) But while there's ongoing debate about whether this really is achievable, there certainly is abundant evidence that humour is universal to the human experience. We are also now getting a clearer idea of its benefits, as well as deeper insights into what our individual use of humour reveals about us.