Sense of humor: what it says about personality

Nathan says Erin has no sense of humor. Erin thinks exactly the same about Nathan. He winds people up at the table, hands out nicknames and enjoys himself most when somebody fires a line back; she tells slow stories in which the starring role belongs to her own latest blunder, and Nathan's jabs strike her as pointless needling.

Neither of them is describing reality. The sentence "has no sense of humor" almost never means the person does not laugh. It means they do not laugh at what you laugh at, or that they laugh in a way you are not used to. People with no humor are rare. People with a different range are everywhere.

The laughter that has nothing to do with jokes

Part of the misunderstanding comes from how little we usually know about laughter itself. The psychologist Robert Provine and his team spent years eavesdropping on when people laugh in ordinary situations: on the sidewalk, in a shop, in the corridor before a lecture. He summed the results up in his book Laughter (2000), and one of them is worth remembering. The overwhelming majority of laughter does not follow a joke but a completely ordinary line along the lines of "see you next time" or "so where were you, anyway".

The second finding is even less intuitive. Laughing is roughly thirty times more likely in company than alone. Laughter works mainly as a social signal, then, not as a review of the material. Funny is whatever becomes funny between particular people at a particular moment.

Quite a lot follows from that. When you judge someone's sense of humor, you are not measuring the quality of their jokes but how far their way of handling humor overlaps with yours. And that leaves plenty of room for error, because there is more than one way.

Four registers instead of one trait

In 2003 the Canadian psychologist Rod Martin and his colleagues proposed a model that split humor along two independent questions. First: is the humor kind, or does it have an edge? Second: is it aimed outward at other people, or inward at you? Crossing the two questions produces four styles, and all four can be measured separately in the same person.

These are not four types of people. They are four independent scales, everyone sits somewhere on each of them, and only the proportion between them makes up what we can call a range. Some run one style high and the rest low, some switch between two, and some reach for all four depending on the situation. What each position looks like close up, and what it means to hold them in various combinations, is worked out in the piece on the four humor styles.

Now back to Nathan and Erin. He scores high on the sharp style, she on the self-mocking one. They both laugh just as readily and just as often, only at different material. Nathan expects Erin to fire the jab back; instead she tells the one about booking the wrong hotel. He reads that as a change of subject, she reads his teasing as an attack. Neither of them is unfunny, and neither knows it about the other.

Funny, or a good audience?

One term also covers two different abilities. The first is production: coming up with a funny line, timing it, telling a story so that it moves. The second is appreciation, meaning the ability to catch a reference, follow an exaggeration and laugh at what somebody else came up with. When you say a person has a sense of humor you usually mean the first half, while judging them mostly on the second.

That these are separate things has been shown by research on humor and attraction, among other places. Bressler and Balshine (2006) found that the two halves do not behave the same way in choosing a partner: for some people what matters is that the other one makes jokes, for others that they appreciate theirs. So it is not one trait you could line people up along from least to most.

In practice that means the quiet person who barely says a word at the table may have the second half beautifully developed. They did not laugh out loud and did not come up with anything, so the group writes them off as boring. Yet they caught every reference and may well have enjoyed the evening more than whoever held the floor all night.

What a sense of humor goes with

Once humor breaks into four scales, you can sensibly ask what each of them hangs together with. The tightest link is between the bonding style and sociability. Research repeatedly connects humor aimed at people with extraversion, meaning how much the presence of others charges someone up. It makes sense from the definition alone, because this style does not even come into being without an audience.

Self-enhancing humor, by contrast, is largely silent and its link to sociability is far looser. It can belong to a person who says five sentences all evening while narrating the absurdity of the situation to themselves the whole time. Which is exactly why this style almost never shows up in everyday verdicts on who is funny. There is nothing to see.

The second connection leads to agreeableness, meaning how automatically a person takes others into account. The kind styles go hand in hand with it; sharp humor is more common among people who score lower on it. That is not a verdict. Edge is a tool, and in a group where everyone trusts everyone and the jabs travel in both directions, it holds people together as reliably as anything else.

Martin's team in 2003 described one more connection, this time with overall well-being. Both kind styles relate to it positively, the self-mocking one negatively. It is a correlation, not a cause: putting yourself down often does not mean you are doing badly, or the reverse. It means rather that with this style it is worth watching how much room it takes up and whether it has not quietly become the only way you talk about yourself.

The connection people reach for most often, though, is intelligence. In a 2011 study, Greengross and Miller had around four hundred students write funny captions and replies, and the ability to come up with something genuinely funny correlated with general and verbal intelligence. The relationship between speed, language and laughter is worked through in a separate article on whether funny people are smarter.

Simple verdicts are spoiled by one more circumstance: the range shifts with the setting. The same person is noticeably more careful in a meeting than among three friends of twenty years, and runs a different register at home than in the pub. Anyone who knows someone from a single context sees one slice of their range and judges the whole from it. Hence the surprise when the silent colleague turns out at the office party to be somebody else entirely.

How much is temperament and how much is habit

This is where the biggest misunderstanding sits. A sense of humor is usually treated as something you are born with: either you have it or you do not. The truth is duller and more useful at the same time. Some share belongs to the dispositions that go with humor, but the range itself is largely learned, above all in the family and the crowd you grew up in.

At home, where everything gets handled through a wry remark, a child learns to make wry remarks. In a family where a sharper comment would have caused three days of frost, the child learns to put themselves down or to tell stories instead. By twenty a person has enough repetitions banked that the answer arrives before there is time to choose it. Hence the feeling that this must be temperament.

A humor style is therefore closer to a habit than to a sentence, and habits can be worked with. That does not mean a dry ironist turns into an entertainer. It means the range can be widened by a position you barely use so far, and that you can consciously choose when to reach for the edge and when to leave it alone. What can be trained here and what cannot is the subject of the piece on whether humor can be learned.

Nathan and Erin would need very little. If he knew that her story about the wrong hotel is an invitation to laugh together and not an evasive maneuver, he would join in instead of firing another jab. If she knew that in his family a jab is the way of saying "I am fond of you", she would not take it as a complaint. Neither of them would have to change their temperament, only read the other one's tone.

The change does not start with jokes, though, but with noticing. Most people have no idea what range they actually use, because humor runs on autopilot and hardly any feedback ever comes back. Whoever gets hit usually laughs along with everyone else even when it stung, and nobody is going to tell you that your story about your own stupidity sounded different the fifth time than the first.

What to watch in yourself

Your own range can be estimated from three things you can observe without any questionnaire. The first is when you actually laugh. In company, or alone over an email as well? When things are going well, or mainly when they are at their worst? Whoever laughs mostly in a mess probably has the self-enhancing position strongly developed, even if they would never call themselves funny.

The second thing is at whose expense the laughter happens. Try going back over one evening from yesterday and counting how many jokes were aimed at somebody present, how many at you and how many at nobody in particular. That last number tends to be the lowest for most people, which is an interesting finding in itself.

The third signal is the quietest and the most reliable: how you feel ten minutes afterwards. After a bonding joke people usually feel good and closer to everyone else. After a well aimed jab comes a short rush, sometimes followed by an unpleasant aftertaste. And after a run of jokes at your own expense there is occasionally a feeling best described as mild emptiness, even though everybody had a great time.

An honest question to close this part: when did you last make a joke you did not inwardly find funny, but said because it was expected of you? Most people remember quickly. Those are exactly the moments where the range has stopped being a choice and turned into a role.

If you want to sharpen the proportion of the four styles after this observing, a short humor styles test will give you a bearing. It asks about ordinary situations, the result is the ratio of all four scales, and it is worth taking as a starting point for your own noticing rather than as a label.

A week that will tell you more than any self-reflection

Try one exercise for seven days. Every time you genuinely laugh during the day, write two words in your notes: who was the target and who was there. Nothing more, no evaluation, just those two words. After a week you will have twenty to fifty lines.

Then go through the lines all at once. For most people one style clearly dominates and one does not appear even once. The missing one is more interesting than the dominant one, because that is precisely where your tools ran out in some situation and you did not notice. And then try thinking of Nathan and Erin the next time you hear that somebody has no sense of humor.