What Is Your Humour Style?
Four ways of being funny, and two of them cost you
Being funny is not one thing. In 2003 researchers separated four distinct uses of humour and found that they relate to wellbeing in opposite directions - two of them go with better mood and closer relationships, and two go with the reverse, even though all four get laughs. The difference is not whether you are funny but what the joke is for: to bring people in, to lift yourself, to put someone down, or to put yourself down before anyone else can.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Sixteen questions, four per style. Answer about what you actually do, not what you find funny in other people.
What it measures
The four humour styles from the original questionnaire: affiliative (humour that brings people together), self-enhancing (humour that keeps your own spirits up), aggressive (humour at someone's expense) and self-defeating (humour at your own). The first two are called adaptive and the last two maladaptive, and the research broadly bears that out.
Based on: Humor Styles Questionnaire (Martin et al., 2003)
Possible results
Bringing people in
Jokes that make the room warmer.
Keeping yourself up
Finding the funny side when nobody is watching.
At someone's expense
The laugh that lands on a person.
At your own
Getting there before anyone else can.
Common questions
Is self-deprecating humour bad?
It depends on which of two things it is, and they get the same laugh. Laughing at yourself from a position of security - you know you are fine and the mistake was funny - goes with the second bar and is healthy. Making yourself small so that others will accept you, or getting the criticism in before anyone else can, is the fourth bar and tracks with lower self-esteem. The distinguishing question is whether you would still find it funny if nobody else were there.
Can you change your humour style?
More easily than most traits, because it is a habit of use rather than a capacity. The material is the same - the same observations, the same timing - and what changes is the direction you point it. The most useful shift in the research is from the third bar to the first: the observation that would have been a dig can almost always be made about the situation instead of the person, and it gets the same laugh without anyone checking whether they are next.
Sources
- Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Humor Styles Questionnaire, which has thirty-two items and has been reproduced across many languages - the four-factor structure is one of the better replicated findings in this area. Two honest limits. The link between the two adaptive styles and wellbeing is correlational, and it is entirely plausible that happier people simply joke more warmly rather than the other way round. And humour is judged by its audience, which means the same joke is affiliative in one room and aggressive in another; a self-report can only capture your intention, not how it landed. Later research has also argued that the self-defeating scale partly measures low self-esteem rather than a humour style as such, which is worth bearing in mind if that bar is your high one.