What makes humor work

A few years ago, we conducted a research study in which we asked people to help us create an ad campaign for a travel service called VisitSwitzerland. The scenery is truly breathtaking! But we used it to test a simple question: Can one joke make a meaningful difference in how people are viewed by others?

In our study, the answer was unequivocally yes. Participants who heard the second presenter make the joke rated him as more confident and more competent than those who heard his joke-free delivery. The jokey presenter was also more likely to be voted as the leader for subsequent group tasks.

This finding may not be surprising—many of us intuit that humor matters. We tend to view humor as an ancillary leadership behavior. One good laugh—or better still, a workplace culture that encourages levity—facilitates interpersonal communication and builds social cohesion.

But these numbers can and should be larger. It also influences critical behaviors and attitudes that matter to leadership effectiveness, including employee job performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, citizenship behaviors, creativity, psychological safety in groups, and desire to interact again in the future.

They can lower status and in extreme cases cost people their jobs. One good laugh—or better still, a workplace that encourages levity—builds cohesion. Humor and laughter are intricately tied to status and power. People in lower ranks who wield them well can climb the status hierarchy in their departments and organizations. As we saw in the Swiss advertising study conducted with our colleague Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School , individuals who make funny and appropriate jokes are more likely to be nominated for leadership positions by their peers.

In the same research project, we ran an experiment in which we asked people to recall moments when a colleague was funny. Humor not only helps individuals ascend to positions of authority but also helps them lead more effectively once they are there.

Professors Cecily Cooper University of Miami , Tony Kong University of South Florida , and Craig Crossley University of Central Florida found that when leaders used humor as an interpersonal tool, their employees were happier, which fostered better communication and resulted in an uptick in citizenship behaviors—voluntary actions that facilitate organizational effectiveness.

That is, when leaders used humor, their employees were more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty. Why is humor so powerful? In a study to understand what makes things funny, researchers Caleb Warren University of Arizona and Peter McGraw University of Colorado at Boulder found that humor most often occurs when something is perceived as a benign violation. They conducted studies in which participants were presented with scenarios depicting someone doing something that was benign for example, a pole-vaulter successfully completing a jump , a violation a pole-vaulter failing a jump and getting seriously injured , or both a pole-vaulter failing a jump but not getting seriously injured.

Participants who saw the third kind of scenario simultaneously a violation and benign were more likely to laugh than those who saw the scenarios that were either strictly benign or strictly violations. Things strike us as funny, the researchers concluded, when they make us uncomfortable but do so in a way that is acceptable or not overly threatening. Because telling jokes that violate our psychological safety can be seen as risky, it can make people appear more confident and more competent.

In one of our studies, we found that regardless of whether a joke was considered successful or inappropriate, participants viewed joke tellers as more confident—because they had the courage to attempt a joke at all. Projecting confidence in this way leads to higher status provided the audience has no information that suggests a lack of competence. We also found that people who violate expectations and norms in a socially appropriate way are seen as more competent and more intelligent.

This finding confirms our feelings about funny conversationalists: We admire and respect their wit, which raises their prestige.

But the violating nature of humor is also what makes it risky. Spontaneous, emotional, impulsive and involuntary laughter is a genuine expression of amusement and joy and is a reaction to playing and joking around; it shows up in the smiles of a child or during roughhousing or tickling. This display of amusement is called Duchenne laughter, after scholar Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who first described it in the midth century. Conversely, non-Duchenne laughter is a studied and not very emotional imitation of spontaneous laughter.

People employ it as a voluntary social strategy—for example, when their smiles and laughter punctuate ordinary conversations, even when those chats are not particularly funny. Facial expressions and the neural pathways that control them differ between the two kinds of laughter, the authors say.

Duchenne laughter arises in the brain stem and the limbic system responsible for emotions , whereas non-Duchenne laughter is controlled by the voluntary premotor areas thought to participate in planning movements of the frontal cortex.

The neural mechanisms are so distinct that just one pathway or the other is affected in some forms of facial paralysis. According to Wilson and Gervais, the two forms of laughter, and the neural mechanisms behind them, evolved at different times. Spontaneous laughter has its roots in the games of early primates and in fact has features in common with animal vocalizations.

Controlled laughter may have evolved later, with the development of casual conversation, denigration and derision in social interactions. Ultimately, the authors suggest, primate laughter was gradually co-opted and elaborated through human biological and cultural evolution in several stages. Between four and two million years ago Duchenne laughter became a medium of emotional contagion, a social glue, in long-extinct human ancestors; it promoted interactions among members of a group in periods of safety and satiation.

Laughter by group members in response to what Wilson and Gervais call protohumor—nonserious violations of social norms—was a reliable indicator of such relaxed, safe times and paved the way to playful emotions.

When later ancestors acquired more sophisticated cognitive and social skills, Duchenne laughter and protohumor became the basis for humor in all its most complex facets and for new functions.

Now non-Duchenne laughter, along with its dark side, appeared: strategic, calculated, and even derisory and aggressive. The book grew out of ideas proposed by Hurley. Hurley was interested, he wrote on his website, in a contradiction.

The idea is that humor evolved from this constant process of confirmation: people derive amusement from finding discrepancies between expectations and reality when the discrepancies are harmless, and this pleasure keeps us looking for such discrepancies. It is a sign that elevates our social status and allows us to attract reproductive partners.

In other words, a joke is to the sense of humor what a cannoli loaded with fat and sugar is to the sense of taste. And because grasping the incongruities requires a store of knowledge and beliefs, shared laughter signals a commonality of worldviews, preferences and convictions, which reinforces social ties and the sense of belonging to the same group. As Hurly told psychologist Jarrett in , the theory goes beyond predicting what makes people laugh. And yet, as Greengross noted in a review of Inside Jokes, even this theory is incomplete.

Other questions remain. For instance, how can the sometimes opposite functions of humor, such as promoting social bonding and excluding others with derision, be reconciled? And when laughter enhances feelings of social connectedness, is that effect a fundamental function of the laughter or a mere by-product of some other primary role much as eating with people has undeniable social value even though eating is primarily motivated by the need for nourishment?

This claim seems falsified by professional humorists who approach the creation of jokes and cartoons with conscious strategies. If Freud is right that the energy released in laughing at a joke is the energy normally used to repress hostile and sexual feelings, then it seems that those who laugh hardest at aggressive and sexual jokes should be people who usually repress such feelings.

The difference between the two packets is surplus energy discharged in laughter. More generally, the Relief Theory is seldom used as a general explanation of laughter or humor. The second account of humor that arose in the 18 th century to challenge the Superiority Theory was the Incongruity Theory.

While the Superiority Theory says that the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority, and the Relief Theory says that it is the release of nervous energy, the Incongruity Theory says that it is the perception of something incongruous—something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. It is now the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology. Although Aristotle did not use the term incongruity , he hints that it is the basis for at least some humor.

In the Rhetoric 3, 2 , a handbook for speakers, he says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it. Cicero, in On the Orator ch. This approach to joking is similar to techniques of stand-up comedians today. They speak of the set-up and the punch line. The set-up is the first part of the joke: it creates the expectation. The punch line is the last part that violates that expectation.

The first philosopher to use the word incongruous to analyze humor was James Beattie Immanuel Kant [], First Part, sec. In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction.

Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind. An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations.

A joke amuses us by evoking, shifting, and dissipating our thoughts, but we do not learn anything through these mental gymnastics. In humor generally, according to Kant, our reason finds nothing of worth. The jostling of ideas, however, produces a physical jostling of our internal organs and we enjoy that physical stimulation. For if we admit that with all our thoughts is harmonically combined a movement in the organs of the body, we will easily comprehend how to this sudden transposition of the mind, now to one now to another standpoint in order to contemplate its object, may correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our intestines which communicates itself to the diaphragm like that which ticklish people feel.

In connection with this the lungs expel the air at rapidly succeeding intervals, and thus bring about a movement beneficial to health; which alone, and not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at bottom represents nothing. On this point, Kant compares the enjoyment of joking and wit to the enjoyment of games of chance and the enjoyment of music. Music and that which excites laughter are two different kinds of play with aesthetical ideas, or of representations of the understanding through which ultimately nothing is thought, which can give lively gratification merely by their changes.

Thus we recognize pretty clearly that the animation in both cases is merely bodily, although it is excited by ideas of the mind; and that the feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines corresponding to the play in question makes up that whole gratification of a gay party. While Kant located the lack of fit in humor between our expectations and our experience, Schopenhauer locates it between our sense perceptions of things and our abstract rational knowledge of those same things.

We perceive unique individual things with many properties. But when we group our sense perceptions under abstract concepts, we focus on just one or a few properties of any individual thing.

Thus we lump quite different things under one concept and one word. Think, for example, of a Chihuahua and a St. Bernard categorized under dog.

For Schopenhauer, humor arises when we suddenly notice the incongruity between a concept and a perception that are supposed to be of the same thing. Many human actions can only be performed by the help of reason and deliberation, and yet there are some which are better performed without its assistance.

This very incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge, on account of which the latter always merely approximates to the former, as mosaic approximates to painting, is the cause of a very remarkable phenomenon which, like reason itself, is peculiar to human nature, and of which the explanations that have ever anew been attempted, as insufficient: I mean laughter….

As an example, Schopenhauer tells of the prison guards who allowed a convict to play cards with them, but when they caught him cheating, they kicked him out. He also comments on an Austrian joke the equivalent of a Polish joke in the U.

Creating jokes like these requires the ability to think of an abstract idea under which very different things can be subsumed. With this theory of humor as based on the discrepancy between abstract ideas and real things, Schopenhauer explains the offensiveness of being laughed at, the kind of laughter at the heart of the Superiority Theory. That the laughter of others at what we do or say seriously offends us so keenly depends on the fact that it asserts that there is a great incongruity between our conceptions and the objective realities.

The laugh of scorn announces with triumph to the baffled adversary how incongruous were the conceptions he cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself to him Supplement to Book I, Ch. In every suddenly appearing conflict between what is perceived and what is thought, what is perceived is always unquestionably right; for it is not subject to error at all, requires no confirmation from without, but answers for itself. For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself.

It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion. With thinking the opposite is the case: it is the second power of knowledge, the exercise of which always demands some, and often considerable exertion. Besides, it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicles of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares.

It must therefore be diverting to us to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that of joy Supplement to Book I, Ch. Irony marks the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, while humor marks the boundary between the ethical and religious spheres. The person with a religious view of life is likely to cultivate humor, he says, and Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history [JP], Entries — There was another here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything, too: we cannot give to everybody.

The violation of our expectations is at the heart of the tragic as well as the comic, Kierkegaard says. The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction…. The comic apprehension evokes the contradiction or makes it manifest by having in mind the way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. The tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps: for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles…. To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of the two! It is a tragedy or a comedy—sad or merry, as it happens….

Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere surprise or contrast in the absence of any more serious emotion , before it has time to reconcile its belief to contrary appearances Hazlitt [], 1.

If we are listening to a joke for the second time, of course, there is a sense in which we expect the incongruous punch line, but it still violates our ordinary expectations. Beyond that core meaning, various thinkers have added different details, many of which are incompatible with each other. In contemporary psychology, for example, theorists such as Thomas Schultz and Jerry Suls , have claimed that what we enjoy in humor is not incongruity itself, but the resolution of incongruity.

After age seven, Schultz says, we require the fitting of the apparently anomalous element into some conceptual schema. Amusement, according to this understanding of humor, is akin to puzzle-solving. Other theorists insist that incongruity-resolution figures in only some humor, and that the pleasure of amusement is not like puzzle-solving. As philosophers and psychologists refined the Incongruity Theory in the late 20 th century, one flaw in several older versions came to light: they said, or more often implied, that the perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor.

That is clearly false, since when our mental patterns and expectations are violated, we may well feel fear, disgust, or anger and not amusement.

James Beattie, the first philosopher to analyze humor as a response to incongruity, was careful to point out that laughter is only one such response.

One way to correct this flaw is to say that humorous amusement is not just any response to incongruity, but a way of enjoying incongruity. Michael Clark, for example, offers these three features as necessary and sufficient for humor:. This version of the Incongruity Theory is an improvement on theories which describe amusement as the perception of incongruity, but it still seems not specific enough.

Amusement is one way of enjoying incongruity, but not the only way. Mike W. Martin offers several examples from the arts in Morreall, , We in the audience, knowing that Oedipus is himself that killer, may enjoy the incongruity of a king threatening himself, but that enjoyment need not be humorous amusement.

John Morreall , — argues that a number of aesthetic categories— the grotesque, the macabre, the horrible, the bizarre, and the fantastic—involve a non-humorous enjoyment of some violation of our mental patterns and expectations. Whatever refinements the Incongruity Theory might require, it seems better able to account for laughter and humor than the scientifically obsolete Relief Theory.

It also seems more comprehensive than the Superiority Theory since it can account for kinds of humor that do not seem based on superiority, such as puns and other wordplay. Part of the continued bad reputation of humor comes from a new objection triggered by the Incongruity Theory: If humor is enjoying the violation of our mental patterns and expectations, then it is irrational.

According to Kant, humor feels good in spite of, not because of, the way it frustrates our desire to understand. George Santayana , agreed, arguing that incongruity itself could not be enjoyed. We have a prosaic background of common sense and everyday reality; upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges.

But the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity, and man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he can like hunger or cold. If the widespread contemporary appreciation of humor is defensible, then this Irrationality Objection needs to be addressed.

To do that seems to require an explanation of how our higher mental functions can operate in a beneficial way that is different from theoretical and practical reasoning.

One way to construct that explanation is to analyze humor as a kind of play, and explain how such play can be beneficial. Remarkably few philosophers have even mentioned that humor is a kind of play, much less seen benefits in such play. One of the few to classify humor as play and see value in the mental side of humor was Thomas Aquinas.

He followed the lead of Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics Ch. As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased by resting the soul.

As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the tension of mental study and taking some pleasure….

Beyond providing rest for the soul, Aquinas suggests that humor has social benefits. Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment. In the last century an early play theory of humor was developed by Max Eastman , who found parallels to humor in the play of animals, particularly in the laughter of chimps during tickling.

In humor and play generally, according to Eastman, we take a disinterested attitude toward something that could instead be treated seriously. It can serve as a social lubricant, engendering trust and reducing conflict. In communications that tend to evoke negative emotions--announcing bad news, apologizing, complaining, warning, criticizing, commanding, evaluating--humor can provide delight that reduces or even blocks negative emotions. Consider this paragraph from a debt-collection letter:.

We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Your account is overdue ten months. Play activities such as humor are not usually pursued in order to achieve such benefits, of course; they are pursued, as Aquinas said, for pleasure.

A parallel with humor here is music, which we typically play and listen to for pleasure, but which can boost our manual dexterity and even mathematical abilities, reduce stress, and strengthen our social bonds.

Ethologists students of animal, including human, behavior point out that in play activities, young animals learn important skills they will need later on. Young lions, for example, play by going through actions that will be part of hunting. Humans have hunted with rocks and spears for tens of thousands of years, and so boys often play by throwing projectiles at targets.

Marek Spinka observes that in playing, young animals move in exaggerated ways. Young monkeys leap not just from branch to branch, but from trees into rivers. Children not only run, but skip and do cartwheels. Spinka suggests that in play young animals are testing the limits of their speed, balance, and coordination. In doing so, they learn to cope with unexpected situations such as being chased by a new kind of predator. Jokes are not so funny when told again, as there is no surprise or confusion the second time around.

When we make sense of something that formerly did not make sense, we are learning. Young children learn through play. Humor can be deliberately used as an integral part of education, making learning fun again. In another way, this is like creativity , where there is a delay between looking for an idea and the aha of discovery. The tension of seeking a solution prompts the brain to come up with a new idea. The closure of the 'aha' moment can feel a lot like humor and the person may well laugh.

Humor also leans on the fundamental principle of pain and pleasure. The discomfort of not understanding is a form of pain, while the sudden realization is a form of pleasure. As these rapidly sequence together, the resultant feeling can be a strange mingling of both pain and pleasure at the same time.

Good jokes make use of timing, aligning description by the teller with the thinking and understanding process of the listener. A bad joke either does not lead to confusion as the audience understands it easily, or else it just leaves them confused. Bad jokes make people irritatedly think 'hah' rather than the funny 'aha' or perhaps 'haha' of understanding. Tension principle , Closure principle , Pleasure-Pain Principle.