How Good Is Your Sense of Humor?

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Does humor have any importance in our lives, beyond just giving us a fun laugh once in a while?

One possible benefit of humor might be increased longevity. Comedians George Burns and Bob Hope both lived to be 100. Comedy double-talk specialist Professor Irwin Corey also reached 100. And funnymen Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke are still alive (at this writing) at age 98. So humor might turn out to be a secret longevity elixir.

Dr. Benjamin Levi, professor of pediatrics and humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, suggests another important value of humor. His research shows that humor is a highly effective parenting tool. “Humor is a valuable resource " he explains, " that can teach people cognitive flexibility, relieve stress, and promote creative problem-solving and resilience.”

There have been extensive studies on the relationship between humor and play, Dr. Levi notes, but none on the importance of humor as a parenting tool, so he set up a research project in which he was joined by Dr. Lucy Emery, pediatrics resident at Boston Children's Hospital.

Parenting, like business, is a hierarchical enterprise, Dr. Emery observes, and "data have shown that the use of humor is very effective in reducing the divisions created by hierarchies. It is also a very effective way to encourage an environment of collaboration and creativity." Most important, humor helps to reduce tension in the many stressful situations that typically arise

At the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, psychologist Peter Mcgraw is looking not so much at the outward effects of humor as at the internal structure of humor. His team is aiming to understand the fundamental humor molecule.

"Consider that elemental unit of humor, the joke," Dr Mcgraw says. "Jokes exist in a staggering variety of guises, but their fundamental structure always consists of the same three elements. The first is the setup, the arena in which the joke occurs. The second is the expectation toward which the joke narrative is moving. By careful prodding, we are led to predict where the joke is heading. And the third is the surprise shift at the end. The payoff. We were going along and thought we would be turning right. But instead, the joke turned left! We’re surprised and we laugh."

Those are the three elements that make up the canonic joke molecule: setup; expectation; and switch.

Because the switch moves us into areas of thought we weren’t planning on, humor tends to expand our thinking. We not only go places we weren’t expecting, we see connections we were’t anticipating.

Beyond a shot of longevity, better parenting, and cognitive flexibiliy, a good sense of humor packs another punch. It just may be that the greatest gift of humor is laughter itself. We get to guffaw at the sheer absurdity of the human condition.