Funny Folks: Linking Sense of Humor to Personality

Not long after World War II, veteran psychologist Dr. Bertram Forer ran into a nightclub graphologist—a man who claimed to read people’s personalities from their handwriting. The entertainer offered to interpret Forer’s penmanship. The psychologist declined. The man persisted, emphasizing that his insights into the human psyche were uncannily accurate. “How do you know?” Forer asked. “My clients all tell me,” the performer reported. Dr. Forer sent him on his way. But their interaction started cogs turning. Dr. Forer had an intriguing idea for a demonstration for his Introductory Psychology class.
This chapter links facets of personality, and other individual differences among people, to aspects of their sense of humor, including the way that they use comedy in their lives and the kinds of jokes they generate and appreciate. The study of personality back in the 1940s had grown quite convoluted. It had started in ancient times, when Hippocrates, of the legendary oath, proposed four temperaments. Unfortunately, they were also called “four humors.” He thought that personality arose from different proportions of fluids in the body, creating a popular link between personality and physiology. A model with that kind of simplicity would be ideal, but these four temperaments failed to account for important aspects of the way people behave. Unfortunately, theorists went from the extremely simple to the extremely complicated. Famous philosophers, including Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, all elaborated on the Hippocratic humors in an attempt to explain human dispositions. By the late 1800s, Sir Francis Galton, brilliant half-cousin of Charles Darwin and noted polymath, reasoned that any important aspect of personality ought to make it into the language. He fashioned a taxonomy based on a dictionary (Caprara & Cervone, 2000).
Gordon Allport, the same guy who showed that we all think we’re funnier than average, identified almost 18,000 words in the English language that described people. At least 4,000 referred to personality traits (Allport & Odbert, 1936). Organizing all of these words into manageable groups was generating a ton of debate. One researcher’s mathematical wizardry condensed the thousands of terms into 16 factors that had the potential to describe everyone (Cattell, 1946). This feat has adherents today. Sadly, 16 factors lack the simplicity that would make them as helpful as possible. Further, the model doesn’t always fit data. It’s great for trait words, but when people report on their own behaviors, the 16 factors don’t quite fit. The quest for a simpler approach continued, but Dr. Forer and others could see trouble ahead.
Meanwhile, the thought that one’s sense of humor and personality must be related retained its intuitive appeal. It seems obvious that people who laugh often, tell jokes, and generate witty remarks must differ from those who don’t. Goethe (1920/2000) said, “Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.” A few theorists even suggested that asking clients about their favorite jokes or their interpretations of cartoons might help psychological diagnosis and treatment (Strother, Barnett, & Apostolakos, 1954; Zwerling, 1955). Fortunately, we have more reliable and valid techniques. A handful of researchers have done in-depth personality assessments of professional comedians, comedy writers, and humorists of various sorts. The most common personality profile for these successful comics appears below. It may seem remarkably detailed, but research of this type often consists of questionnaires and interviews that include hundreds of questions and hours of probing. As an experiment, see if this personality profile applies to you.
An Assessment Report for a Successful ComicYou tend to show a calm, self-assured, serene kind of stability. This often masks an inner tumult. You are prone to a certain cynicism about being a part of a group. You even show a mild dislike of people who seem to prefer following the crowd. These feelings can be particularly strong when you notice a close friend trying to gain other people’s approval. This inclination has led you to feel like an outsider in many situations, a role you find yourself taking more often than you had anticipated. On occasion, you defend this role even when it might not be in your best interest, sometimes leading you to consciously avoid being a part of groups, organizations, or institutions. At certain times, you have rebelled against authorities of one kind or another even when you knew they were correct. This role as an outsider can create long, private periods of self-examination.
These periods of self-examination and of having a strong sense for preferences have had an impact on your relationships. At times, you like to gossip a bit, but you are capable of keeping a secret. You are also an extremely attentive and sympathetic listener when you want to be. You are currently tempted by a dream that may not be very realistic, including fantasies about a perfect relationship, which can get in the way of your current happiness. It makes sense for you to acknowledge your attachment to a specific outcome. You can then work on making it less important by appreciating other domains where you are succeeding. Your relationships with your family can be conflicted and may be currently a bit strained.
You relish your time alone, despite moments of loneliness. This contrasts sharply with your remarkable ability to appear very engaged socially, which leads to times where you seem to be the life of the party, the person who keeps conversation flowing, or the one who holds a group together. This can sometimes feel like a façade. In fact, though you have many close acquaintances, the number of people whom you view as dear friends is relatively small. You have developed a dry sense of humor that seems to engage others and attract people. At times, this aspect of wit moves so quickly that you make jokes that go over other people’s heads. Either these people are unappreciative of nuance or they do not have sufficient background information to understand your broad range of references. Nevertheless, you take considerable pleasure in this ability and often find yourself rehearsing remarks in an effort to seem spontaneous in your entertainment of others. Although you occasionally feel awkward when you catch yourself doing this sort of thing, it is consistent with your desires and aims and you rarely let it get out of hand or interfere with more important pursuits.
Personality and the Forer EffectThis extensive, detailed comedic profile reveals just how accurate these assessments can be. I think that most comics would find that it captures them quite well. You may see yourself in the description, too. But before you enroll in Clown College (if you aren’t already in a clown college of sorts), the rest of Dr. Forer’s story might be relevant. The mental health professional and instructor ditched the nightclub graphologist, but left the club with an intriguing idea in his mind. He bounced into his next Introductory Psychology class and began the lecture with a tale of a new personality scale, the Diagnostic Interest Blank. He explained how he had been developing the test for years and years. He noted how instructive and enlightening the device was, emphasizing its astounding precision, insight, and comprehensiveness. He mentioned how the scale had helped clients turn their lives around. Of course the students begged him to let them take it. Dr. Forer balked until they begged some more. He then agreed reluctantly. The next lecture began with a written version of the personality test, a series of queries about hang-ups, hobbies, and hopes. Dr. Forer gathered the responses and promised an individualized personality vignette to each student.
Attendance must have been excellent at the next class, where Dr. Forer emphasized the confidentiality of the results and requested that each student respect the privacy of classmates by refraining from examining the personality profiles of others. He asked students to rate the profile for accuracy on a 5-point scale, with 5 meaning “perfect.” Most gave the description a 4; the average rating was between 4 and 5. Forer then unleashed his reveal. He read a line from one vignette aloud, and asked all whose profile contained the line to raise their hands. Every hand shot skyward with enthusiasm, until they saw how many others had also raised their hands. He read another line with the same request and got the same response. The students chuckled. Everyone had received the exact same profile (Forer, 1949). In fact, it was a lot like the one detailed above. Each sentence described everyone in the room, as all the students realized. I wish he had published his teacher ratings for the semester.
The assessment report discussed above does a good job of describing many of the most successful comics, comedy writers, and humorists. If it sounded like you, join the club. It sounds like virtually everybody. It’s a more elaborate version than the one that Forer gave to his class, but the key ideas are the same. Despite their appearance of specificity and uniqueness, lists of traits like these apply to almost anyone. It’s not that we’re all easy to hoodwink; we’re all just very much alike. The fact that these characteristics are nearly universal is misunderstood nearly universally. People especially like profiles that make them look great. When people receive assessments with common positive characteristics listed, they rate them as more accurate than when they receive profiles that contain equally common but negative traits. The bottom line is: Everyone loves to think they’re great (Dickson & Kelly, 1985). I guess we’re all impressed with the precision of a list of our positive personality traits, too, no matter how many other people share them. The Forer effect has been replicated numerous times, including data from years after the initial study. It’s not that people were simply more gullible in the 1940s (Claridge, Clark, Powney, & Hassan, 2008). Even in the 21st century, British mentalist and magician Derren Brown demonstrated this effect quite dramatically on his TV show.
Barnum StatementsPaul Meehl, the same guy who detailed the bootstrapping discussed in the Chapter 1, rechristened Forer’s results as the “The Barnum Effect.” Purportedly, P. T. Barnum hawked his circus as having something for everybody. Meehl (1956) stressed that many cookbook assessments of personality could make the same claim. The profile cited above certainly has something for us all. These sorts of Barnum statements are common in the work of various fortune-tellers, psychics, channelers, and mediums. The film noir classic Nightmare Alley shows Tyrone Power fooling a local cop with a spirited set of these statements as part of his psychic act.
In fact, Forer fashioned his feedback to students from lines he picked up in an astrology text. I can’t help wondering if Meehl actually chose the name because Barnum had allegedly said that there was a sucker born every minute. There was a time, when I lived in Los Angeles, when you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting someone who claimed to contact dead relatives, spirit guides, angels, or faeries. These charlatans, many of whom had convinced themselves of their own veracity, spewed one Barnum statement after another until someone in the audience burst into tears. They invariably said things that would apply to anyone, like “Someone close to you has recently experienced serious distress” and “Your life is about to take a major turn.” They also offered advice that had all the specificity of an IKEA shelving unit: “Your dead grandfather says it’s time to let go” or “The spirit guides say that you shouldn’t take life so seriously.” I shudder to think how many people shelled out hard-earned cash to hear this kind of malarkey. The fact that some of these hacks continue to tour the country and perform at prestigious events is mind-boggling.
Because so many statements apply to so many of us, I want to interpret any findings, about personality and about humor, with extreme caution. There really are detailed studies of the personality of comic performers, but we can’t make much sense of them without looking at the personalities of other people. We have to compare comics to a control group. It means nothing to say that those with a sense of humor have struggled with their identities or sometimes doubt their abilities—we’ve all done that. The only way to get unique insights into the comic personality, if there is such a thing, is to point out how it differs from the personality of the average person who lives comparably but has less of a sense of humor. Any results from this kind of work will have to be more than mere Barnum-type statements if it’s going to be informative.
In a detailed and entertaining project, Fisher and Fisher (1981) reported over 200 pages of material comparing stand-up comedians and circus clowns to other performers. Unfortunately, the temptation to lapse into Barnum-like statements might have been too great. They described comics as having “a style that resists demands to behave in a driven, methodical, machine-like fashion and instead focuses on the human side of life” (p. 203). Obviously, we all would resist demands to behave like machines. We all prefer to focus on our humanity, no matter how cheerful or sour we may be. Clearly, studies of one’s sense of humor and one’s personality will do better when we have accurate, informative measures of each. Like humor itself, both one’s personality and sense of humor have nuanced, multifaceted components. Let’s review relevant aspects of personality, then explore definitions of a sense of humor to see how they all fit together.
Personality: Swimming in the Big Five OceanThere are probably as many theories of personality as there are people. The list of human traits goes on and on, as Allport showed from our language’s multitude of terms. Reducing these to a reasonable number of clusters is no easy feat. Despite Cattell’s plug for 16 factors, a lot of research suggests that human characteristics comprise five factors. This Five-Factor Model—or the Big Five—includes: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Thus, the first letters of the five factors form the mnemonic OCEAN. “Openness to experience,” or simply openness, involves a person’s tendency to appreciate imaginative forms of art, a range of ideas, and novel adventures. People high in openness are intellectually curious, reflective, unconventional appreciators of beauty. Those who score low on the scale are often more traditional, straightforward, cautious types who prefer familiarity to novelty. Typical questions on an openness scale ask people if they see themselves as original, imaginative, and valuing the arts. A reverse-scored item (one that assesses the opposite of the trait) asks if they prefer work that is routine.
“Conscientiousness” is the domain of traits wherein a person is disciplined, dutiful, devoted. It’s the goody two-shoes of personality. High scorers keep their noses to the grindstone. They know that a stitch in time does save nine. They plan their work and work their plan. They also show great attention to detail. As you’d guess, employers love their persistent, scheduled approach to a job well done. But extreme scorers seem like obsessive, perfectionistic workaholics as they whip out their protractors to rearrange their sock drawers. Low scorers are in no danger of compulsive achievement; they can, in fact, seem haphazard in their work and personal lives. Typical items ask if people are reliable workers, avid planners, and attentive to details. Reversescored items ask if they are distractible, lazy, or disorganized.
“Extraversion” refers to the tendency to behave in outgoing, boisterous, talkative ways. Extraverts, those who score high on the extraversion scale, are often the energetic, outspoken, attention-seeking lives of the party. Those on the very high end can seem like crass, blabbering backslappers. Introverts, the low scorers, seem less exuberant, more low-key and deliberate. Extreme introverts might appear like plodding, aloof loners. Typical items ask if the individual generates enthusiasm, speaks frequently, and tends to be assertive. Reverse-scored items ask if an individual is reserved, shy, or inhibited.
“Agreeableness” refers to a person’s considerate, compassionate, friendly nature. Agreeable people get along with others, compromise, and make folks feel at ease. They tend to have a positive view of human nature and assume that most people are trusthworthy, honest, and decent. Low scorers—the disagreeable—are more suspicious, interested in themselves, and uncooperative. They are more concerned about doing well themselves than about getting along with others. Typical items ask about behaving in kind, considerate, and cooperative ways. Reverse-scored items query about rude, quarrelsome, and faultfinding tendencies. Finding faults just never gets old for some of the disagreeable. Believe me, they are no fun to date and hell to live with.
Neuroticism involves a predisposition to negative emotions and moodiness. Some researchers call this trait “emotional instability.” Their more optimistic colleagues focus on the flip side, “emotional stability.” High scorers are often distressed, anxious, irritable, and sad. Neurotics appear sensitive to stress; they frequently view events in their worst light. These poor worrywarts fret over the trivial and unlikely, often turning the smallest decisions into bouts of agonized hand wringing. Austrian psychological theorist Alfred Adler described the neurotic man aptly: “He is nailed to the cross of his own fiction” (Adler, 1924). Low scorers are much more calm, mellow, and stable. Typical items from the neurotocism scale might read: “I see myself as someone who worries a lot” and “I get upset easily.” Reverse-scored items might read: “I’m the kind of person who handles stress well” and “I’m seldom in a terrible mood.”
Note that none of these traits apply to everybody the way that Barnum statements do. We aren’t all open lovers of the arts, conscientious workaholics, extraverted loudmouths, agreeable well-wishers, or neurotic fussbuckets. Assessments of these traits are bound to reveal genuine differences among people, not uninformative universals. Links between these five traits and aspects of humor seem likely, but other personality characteristics are also important to many theories of the comic.
Beyond the OCEAN: Sensation Seekers, Authoritarians, and Religious FundamentalistsAlthough the Big Five model accounts for a great deal of the data on differences in individual characteristics, several, more specific aspects of personality seem particularly relevant to humor. These involve sensation seekers, authoritarians, and religious fundamentalists. Sensation seeking includes a love for novelty, thrills, and adventure. If you’ve ever waited in an extra-long line to stick your head in the mouth of a lion, you’re probably a sensation seeker. Variation in the trait may arise because some individuals are less aroused than others. In an effort to increase their arousal to an optimal level, these folks might prefer the complex, unfamiliar, and risky.
Sensation seekers like to taste exotic foods (Otis, 1984; Pliner & Melo, 1997), quaff alcohol by the liter (Earleywine, Finn, & Martin, 1990), and bring home lots of sexual partners (Kalichman, Simbayi, Jooste, Vermaak, & Cain, 2008). Typical items ask about a love of mountain climbing, shocking artwork, or visits to foreign lands. Reverse-scored items might ask participants about the joys of staying home at night, watching Aunt Gertrude’s slide show of her trip to the wax museum, and rereading Aristotle’s Nicomacean Ethics. As you might guess, many who score high in sensation seeking also score high on the extraversion factor of the Big Five. In a sense, sensation seeking may be one facet of extraversion (Aluja, Garcia, & Garcia, 2003). It’s very much like risk taking, impulsivity, and susceptibility to boredom. One facet of the openness scale (actions) gets at the same ideas. Sensation seeking is the flip side of traits that mean the opposite, like harm avoidance, neophobia (fear of novelty), and inhibition. Folks low on these traits end up high in sensation seeking.
Authoritarianism emphasizes the importance of obedience, hard work, tradition, convention, and stereotypical family values. Authoritarians know that the world could be a much better place if we’d all just do what they think that we’re supposed to. In their heart of hearts, they think that we should find courageous leaders and focus on productivity instead of frivolous pursuits like art, entertainment, and books about humor.
They believe that locking up the immoral, keeping a keen eye on the ill-bred, and silencing the rebellious will allow us all to thrive like never before. Obviously, try to avoid having an authoritarian for a boss. The originators of the idea of authoritarianism were no fan of it; they had all escaped Nazi Germany (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, & Levinson, 1950). High scorers show a rigid attachment to strict rules and devote a lot of time to keeping the lint off their brown shirts. The most typical items ask about trust in the proper authorities of government and religion. Other items on the original scale emphasized the import of productivity. A personal favorite reads: “The businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor.” Every time I see that item, I wonder if I should go back to selling ice cream.
There were no reverse-scored items in the original scale—a fact that generated considerable criticism. For each item, agreeing meant more authoritarianism; disagreeing meant less. There is something intriguing about the idea that agreeing with every item leads to a high score on a scale that’s supposed to measure obedience to authority. Perhaps high scorers were even obedient to the questions. But the lack of reverse-scored items confounded interpretations of the score. Did a high score mean you were an authoritarian, or just someone who agrees with everything? Researchers labeled this problem “acquiescence,” or “yeah-saying,” after the tendency simply to agree. Later versions of the scale remedied this acquiescence problem. Reversescored items ask participants to agree that atheists might be as good as churchgoers, or that the country benefits from free thinkers (Altemeyer, 2007).
Folks who score high in authoritarianism often score lower on the openness-to-experience scale from the Big Five and higher on the conscientiousness scale (Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). A number of comparable constructs remain popular in humor research. Measures of conservative attitudes overlap with authoritarianism. An index of religious fundamentalism taps some of the same ideas. Religious fundamentalism is more than just religiosity—delighting in a trip to a house of worship. High scorers on religious fundamentalism tend to think there is only one true religion. They also believe that those who behave immorally are more likely to act as lightning rods for heavenly rebuke. In fact, a big red guy with horns and a tail waits on every corner to tempt these folks into heinous crimes, too. These ideas tend to correlate highly with authoritarianism. One item reads: “When you get right down to it, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the righteous, who will be rewarded by God; and the rest, who will not.” You’d better make sure you’re in the good group, folks say. A reverse-scored item is: “It is more important to be a good person than to believe in God and the right religion.” Folks who agree with this item are missing the fundamentals of fundamentalism.
What People Sense about their Sense of HumorAlmost all of us claim that we have it, everyone believes it’s great, and nobody knows what it is—that’s a sense of humor. A majority of people think that their sense of humor is above average, which is nearly impossible (Allport, 1961; Lefcourt & Martin, 1986). In Allport’s (1961) data, 94% of the people thought that their sense of humor was average or above average. One survey found that only 2% of people thought that their sense of humor was below average (see Cann & Calhoun, 2001). It’s possible that definitions of humor vary enough that almost everyone is above average in one form or another, but it’s unlikely. Perhaps everyone’s idea of “average” is a little different. Or maybe we’re all just bad at math.
What do we mean by a “sense of humor”? It’s hard to tell, but apparently it isn’t a single trait so much as a constellation of a bunch of related characteristics. There’s no formal, scientific definition; it’s more of an expression. I tend to think that I can identify people with a good sense of humor pretty reliably; they laugh at my jokes. But having a sense of humor could mean appreciating gags, remembering funny stories, making up good one-liners on the spot, or having a light-hearted approach to life. With this many definitions of such a fashionable quality, we need to get more specific. Otherwise, a sense of humor simply becomes another one of those Barnum expressions that applies to everyone. More than 70 years of research have revealed that we equate a sense of humor with almost any good trait. We view those with a sense of humor as smart, easygoing, and likable (Cann & Calhoun, 2001; Omwake, 1939). Whatever a sense of humor is, it’s clearly good to have it.
Stereotypes About a Sense of HumorThere are plenty of things that you can’t define, but you know them when you see them. Take genuineness, empathy, warmth, or pornography. We all know when people are being genuine, but we can’t quite point to any specific behaviors that make them seem so. They might not be the same behaviors in the same people. Perhaps a sense of humor is comparable. If that’s the case, maybe we could understand personality correlates of a sense of humor by asking participants to describe those who have it and those who don’t. This approach could at least reveal what traits appear to go with our stereotypes about funny people. Cann and Calhoun (2001) asked undergraduates to think of three different sorts of people: a typical undergraduate; someone with a below-average sense of humor; and someone with a sense of humor well above average. Since almost all of us think we’re average or above on our sense of humor, they emphasized that they wanted people to think of someone well above average, rather than just above average.
Participants then rated the typical undergraduates, the wellabove-average ones, and the below-average ones on 36 different traits that varied in desirability. Some traits were the sorts of things that everyone would love to have—being reliable, clever, interesting. Others were the ones that no one wants to claim— being passive, vain, phony. The person with a sense of humor that was viewed as well above average was rated higher on all the good stuff. Participants considered them friendlier and smarter as well as more creative, intelligent, cooperative, pleasant, and even considerate. The funnier folks received lower ratings on all sorts of socially undesirable traits. Participants viewed them as less cold, complaining, shallow, passive, and troubled. They even thought that funny people would be less mean. In the only caveat, the funny folks were considered more boastful and restless—two traits that rarely make the list of the socially desirable. But positive traits tended to increase with having a sense of humor and negative traits tended to decrease.
Stereotypical Humor and the Big FiveCann and Calhoun (2001) had another group of participants complete a measure of the Big Five traits, rating the personalities of the well-above-average funny person and the below-average funny person. The results showed that stereotypes about a sense of humor related to all five of the Big Five traits. Compared to the below-average funny person, the well-above-average funny person was rated as higher in openness to experience, agreeableness, and extraversion. This person was also considered lower in neuroticism and conscientiousness. Our stereotypes of funny folks suggest that they are outgoing, appreciative of the arts, and easy to get along with. They’re not too moody, not particularly hardworking, or phenomenally attentive to detail. The sum of the two studies suggests that a sense of humor is a positive thing. But we know from the work on Barnum statements that simply saying that a sense of humor is positive is not enough. Fortunately, this work has results that are more specific. When people say that others have a good sense of humor, it implies a curious, unconventional, sociable type who rarely gets worked up but might not make the most meticulous accountant, for example. These traits don’t apply to everyone off the street. Nevertheless, these only provide personality traits that go with stereotypes of the comedic. Stereotypes are a far cry from defining what a sense of humor actually is.
Professional Funny FolksAny people whose paychecks depend on generating yucks essentially put their funny bits where their mouths are. Professional stand-up comedians, writers for television shows, circus clowns, and humorists ought to reveal a great deal about personality and sense of humor. Nevertheless, these jobs require a lot more than wit. The perseverance alone is astounding. Stand-up comics and circus clowns have no union and none of the specialized degree programs available to other artists, like the master of fine arts (MFA). Many spend years driving from one small town to the next, living hand to mouth. The jobs require a certain hardiness. A friend of mine who played the West Coast circuit had a gig at a hotel club that put up all its mainliners in a special suite. Not exactly the presidential suite; more like the janitor’s closet. He found a daunting bit of graffitti written beside the bed, which said, “Stand-up—nice career choice.”
Comedians and clowns also lack the bronze trophies and crystal statuettes common to their mainstream counterparts—no Grammys or Emmys for comics or Academy Awards really. Some of the honors that they do have are not all that they’re cracked up to be. One competitive contest in Hollywood boasts a first prize that includes a week as the opening comic at a well-known Las Vegas spot. A friend of mine whose quips and wisecracks earned her the coveted award braved the desert trek only to learn that she had to cut her act to 5 minutes. To add insult to injury, she also had to sell T-shirts and sweep up after the show. (I still wish I would have won.) Those who write regularly televised monologues for other performers often battle long hours and a capricious job market. A friend who was delighted when he received a 14-week deal writing for one of the late-night shows became deflated when the contract was not renewed. He was told: “You’re funny, but you’re not ‘Dave’ funny.”
If we keep the vagaries of these jobs in mind, data from comedy professionals may say a bit about one’s sense of humor and personality, but only if we compare them to people with equally grueling jobs that don’t require wit. Actors endure some of the same tribulations but don’t always need to generate laughs in the same way; they make a nice comparison group. Actors tend to score higher than average on extraversion, agreeableness, and openness (Nettle, 2006). Creative writers who are not explicitly humorists also have some of the same challenges as stand-up comics and humorists. These creative types often score higher in neuroticism and openness (Nowakowska, Strong, Santosa, Wang, & Ketter, 2005; Strong et al., 2007; also, see Kaufman, 2009).
Early Approaches to Research on ComediansSome of the first research on professional comedians (Janus, 1975; Janus, Bess, & Janus, 1978) relied on personality measures that have proven unreliable. Assessments and analyses of handwriting, dreams, and early memories don’t provide data consistent enough to meet scientific standards. Comparable studies focused on family dynamics or other aspects of personality that are hard to pinpoint. Many of these are barely more specific than Barnum statements. These studies suggested that funny folks had mothers who were colder and fathers who were more passive. I uniformly hate these “refrigerator mother” tales. The cold-mommy theories began as an explanation for autism in the 1940s (Kanner, 1943) and continue to cause needless distress, despite compelling evidence for the disorder’s strong genetic roots (Abrahams & Geschwind, 2008). The idea that kids start cracking jokes in an effort to pull a distant mommy closer always seemed a bit too pat. But a comparison of the parents of class clowns and controls suggests that the moms really are less kind and sympathetic and the dads more withdrawn (Fisher & Fisher, 1981). A comparable study had kids nominate the funniest student in the class. Those considered humorous had less cohesive families with greater conflict. They also appeared more distant from their dads (Prasinos & Tittler, 1981). It’s not entirely clear how this contributes to a comic’s personality and sense of humor, though. We needed better measures of personality.
Studying the Narcissistic ComicAn intriguing study from my old stomping grounds at the University of Southern California shed some light on personality in comedians by examining narcissism in celebrities. Though many stars live in a virtual fishbowl in this era of reality television, celebrities rarely provide systematic, anonymous data for research. About 200 Hollywood icons, including 20 comics, appeared on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s radio show Loveline and completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Young & Pinsky, 2006). “Narcissism,” named after the Greek mythological figure who fell in love with his own reflection, is a potentially pathological form of vanity, conceit, and selfishness. This scale is more reliable than the early interviews on refrigerator mothers and the like. The study confirmed a couple of truths: Reality TV personalities are unbearable megalomaniacs, and musicians are the coolest, least narcissistic of all the celebrities. I know—big surprise. Comics’ scores were higher than musicians’ scores on many of the subscales of the narcissism measure. Comics scored even higher than actors on two subscales: superiority (the sense that you are extraordinary) and exploitativeness (finding others easy to manipulate).
The researchers also compared the celebrities to MBA students. I can hardly call budding MBAs normal controls. Their narcissism is above average in several studies and this one was performed in Los Angeles. The business school at USC was notorious for its leather couches imported from Italy. When I was in the psychology department there, we had one Naugahyde couch imported from Burbank. A close look at the data reveals that the comics scored higher than the MBAs on exhibitionism, a love for showing off and getting attention. (My favorite item on this subscale reads, “Modesty does not become me.”) Narcissism appeared to be independent of the number of years that people had worked in entertainment professionally. This absence of a link with years in the business suggests that the comics might have been narcissistic before they hit it big, rather than growing more self-absorbed as their celebrity status increased. Given the demands of this profession, a glorified self-perception may be essential to success.
The Big Five in the Professionally FunnyThe lone study of comedians that focused on the Big Five compared small samples of professionals, amateurs, and humor writers to a large sample of college students. The professionals and amateurs did not differ significantly from each other, which might suggest that those willing to stand in front of a crowd and tell jokes have some consistent traits. Nevertheless, the number of amateurs in the study (nine) was so small that the researchers could only detect huge differences between these groups. The problems that come from studying a small sample like this arise because of their low degree of statistical power. Researchers always need as big a sample as possible if they want to assume it represents the whole population. (You wouldn’t want to draw conclusions about all men after dating only two of them, for example.) Personality scores from a couple of pro and amateur comics might say very little about every single pro and amateur in the world. But scores from thousands of pros and amateurs would probably average somewhere close to the average of every single pro and amateur around.
A bigger sample is thus more representative of the whole gang. When samples are small, one oddball can throw the average of the whole group off a lot. So researchers only consider small groups statistically different from each other if their average scores are tremendously disparate. That way the researchers seem less gullible—less likely to say that the groups differ when in reality they don’t. When samples are larger, researchers are indeed more confident that the average of the sample is pretty close to the average for the whole population. They give these huge samples the benefit of the doubt and consider smaller differences significant. So amateurs and pros didn’t differ, but it might be because there weren’t many amateurs included in this study.
Compared to the students, the pros were significantly higher on openness and significantly lower on conscientiousness. These results aren’t a huge surprise. We’d expect comics to be more appreciative of the arts and more open to travel and novel ideas. We’d also assume that they aren’t the best choice for alphabetizing your student loans by smell. The curious findings concerned neuroticism and extraversion. Despite the stereotypes of the overwrought kvetching common to many stage personae (think of Woody Allen or Richard Lewis), the comics were no more neurotic than anyone else. Let me repeat: Professional comics are no more neurotic than your average college student. The authors emphasize that a true neurotic would likely lack the emotional stability and courage to work diligently on material and perform it in front of a crowd. The extraversion results were also a surprise. Surely anybody who steps on a stage and gets a lot of laughs has to be more outgoing than your average undergraduate scholar, but that’s not how it turned out. Students scored higher than professional comedians. The authors of the study mention that perhaps the comic’s stage persona is a more extraverted mask to cover the person’s real, introverted personality. This situation is certainly possible, but I can’t help wondering if something else is going on.
I think that a professional comic might approach the personality questionnaire with a different perspective than would a college student. Professional comics, particularly those who know that they’ve been selected for the study because of their job, might answer questions about their extraversion relative to other professional comics rather than the population at large. When asked “Are you the life of the party?” or some comparable item, comedians might compare themselves to a different set of peers than the college students who answer the same questions. Sure, I’m an extravert, but compared to the screamer comics of the 1980s, like Sam Kinison, I’m a wallflower. Perhaps professional comics rate themselves as less extraverted because their reference group is not your average college sophomore, but Robin Williams on steroids. Although the study did not focus on comparisons between humor writers and college students, the writers were markedly higher on openness, a result that is common in creative people of all sorts (Greengross & Miller, 2009).
These studies shed some light on humor professionals. These folks might have grown up with distant moms and passive dads. Those who reach celebrity status have a touch of narcissism in them. One odd finding suggests that they may be lower in extraversion than the average college student. They also appear lower in conscientiousness and higher in openness to experience—results that are commonly found in artists and performers (Nowakowska et al., 2005). Links between these traits and other definitions of a sense of humor will help confirm which aspects of personality vary with what is whimsical.
Humor ProductionA comparable, intuitive approach to senses of humor that parallels looking at professionals involves the ability to generate funny material. Plenty of folks are capable of creating jokes and witticisms worthy of laughter. They’re still funny even if they don’t choose to go on a tour that takes them from Long Beach’s Chuckle Hut to The Amarillo Possum Pouch. Tests for this ability have a straightforward logic. Participants can make up captions for cartoons, create monologues, or design bumper stickers, slogans, or remarks. Coders can then rate these responses for their funniness. A comparable approach is popular in the research on creativity (see Kaufman, 2009), but it requires expert raters. Humor may lend itself to scoring by a wider range of researchers and their assistants. In a sense, we are all equally enlightened, or in the dark, about what’s funny. So we’re probably all comparably good at knowing it when we see it.
In one intriguing study participants made up jocular descriptions of photographs, answered serious questions in a funny way, and drew comical pictures of animals and people. Student coders showed a reasonable but imperfect degree of agreement on the humor ratings. The correlations among raters weren’t terrible, but they could have been better. Agreement among raters is a form of reliability. Low reliability can make it harder for measures to correlate with the personality indices. For example, if one judge’s ratings don’t correlate well with another judge’s ratings of the exact same cartoon, they’re certainly not going to correlate with the personality of the guy who drew it. Essentially, low reliability means more error in the measure, like more noise in the signal. Despite a lot of chaff in the wheat, the humor production measures still correlated significantly with extraversion and openness (Howrigan & MacDonald, 2008). These two facets of personality appear to be a recurring theme in humor research. Comparable studies also show that extraverts produce funnier material than introverts craft (Köhler & Ruch, 1996; Thorson & Powell, 1993). Another study shows strong correlations between openness and the number, wittiness, and originality of the punch lines people created for cartoons (Ruch & Köhler, 1998). In addition, humor production was significantly related to intelligence and gender. Smarter folks showed more wit and men’s answers were funnier than women’s. The authors reasoned that humor’s correlation with intelligence might explain why it’s valued in sexual partners (Howrigan & MacDonald, 2008)—I discussed all of that in Chapter 2. I asked my wife why men would seem funnier than women. She said it had something to do with the way men get out of trouble for not paying attention, but I didn’t quite follow the argument. But extraversion, openness, and IQ correlate with generating funny stuff.
Humor AppreciationAlthough an examination of humor production is one way to approach who is funny, alternative approaches offer different perspectives on a sense of humor. I cited a couple of promising approaches in Chapter 1. Perhaps a sense of humor could be as simple as an appreciation of jokes. Ruch’s (1995) work, where people rate different kinds of jokes for their funniness or aversiveness, relies on this perspective. People who like jokes must differ from those who don’t. Ruch’s series of studies found that jokes fell into categories based on their content or the way that they worked. The key content factor is sex. Sexual jokes all contain some sexy content—something about body parts or seduction or the act itself. For the structure of jokes, the way they worked tended to fall into the incongruity-resolution category or the nonsense category. The incongruity-resolution jokes had some kind of setup that created an ambiguity of sorts that the punch line resolved in a way that made sense. The nonsense jokes created an incongruity but didn’t quite resolve it in the most straightforward, sensible way. It seems only natural that some folks would appreciate one type of joke more than other types, or that certain people would rate all jokes as childish while others would find them sidesplitting. The aversiveness ratings seemed like they should also add important information, with some personality traits correlating with aversiveness in ways that might not show up in the ratings of a joke’s amusement.
As you might guess, extraverts generally liked all jokes more than introverts, and neurotics saw all jokes as more aversive (Ruch, 1992; Ruch & Hehl, 1998). Involvement in religious fundamentalism and in various forms of conservative orthodoxy also meant decreased overall ratings of humor (Ruch, McGhee & Hehl, 1990; Saroglou, 2003). Outgoing, nontraditional folks appear to see the world as a funnier place in general. Ruch and his colleagues hypothesized that the appreciation of different types of humor should relate differentially to these traits as well. First, sexual jokes aren’t for everybody. Just take a look at the distribution of my teacher ratings on ratemyprofessor.com. Consistent links between personality and attitudes about sex suggested that reactions to sexual humor should vary among people with different traits. As measures of sexual satisfaction, libido, permissiveness, pleasure, and experience increase, so does a love of sex jokes. I wouldn’t make too much of this finding, though. Sexually active people seem to like all sorts of humor, sexual or not, more than their less active peers (Prerost, 1984). Talk about putting a smile on your face. It could be that all of these sexually satisfied people are also extraverts. Extraverts like sexual humor more than their introverted pals do, a fact that previous work had established decades earlier (Eysenck, 1942). You’ll also be stunned to learn that folks high in conservatism, authoritarianism, and religious fundamentalism likely don’t want to learn jocular definitions of the word “penis.” And, yes, guys like sex jokes more than women do (see Ruch, 1992).
Personality and Joke StructureThe personality correlates for enjoyment of different joke structures are particularly intriguing. Since incongruity-resolution jokes actually make sense, Ruch reasoned that folks who need traditional forms of closure should like them best. Those who appreciate structured, unambiguous stability in their lives would also appreciate incongruity-resolution jokes a great deal. In contrast, this same gang should show a distaste for nonsense humor and its unsettled, absurd, incomplete resolution. Sure enough, as neuroticism increases, the preference for incongruity-resolution jokes over nonsense humor increases, too. The anxious and emotional may find the relief of incongruity-resolution jokes more entertaining. They might dislike the fret-inducing loose ends of nonsense humor. In addition, conservative, authoritarian, law-and-order types who value religious fundamentalism, stereotypical family ideologies, and orthodox views rate incongruity-resolution jokes as funnier and nonsense jokes as more aversive.
Also consistent with Ruch’s reasoning, as sensation seeking increases, funniness ratings for incongruity-resolution jokes decreased and ratings of nonsense increased. Those who love adventure, thrills, and excitement show less joyful appreciation for resolution jokes and more love for the novelty of nonsense humor. They appreciate the idea of the pope eating pizza with a monkey in diapers. Openness to experience, that index of appreciation for the unconventional and imaginative, also tends to decrease perceptions of funniness for incongruity resolution and increase them for nonsense. As an aside, a person’s exclusive love of incongruity resolution predicts a lower level of intelligence, whereas an appreciation of nonsense has a small but significant link to higher intelligence (Galloway & Chirico, 2008; Ruch, 1992; Ruch, Busse, & Hehl, 1996). I’m not saying that conventional, unimaginative, tedious people are dumb. I’m just curious why they always end up as university administrators. Links between joke preferences and personality appear in Table 3.1.
Focusing on Situational HumorTests that focus on appreciating jokes or generating wit aren’t the only approaches to the study of a sense of humor. Some of the best work on this topic varies its focus, depending upon relevant theories and phenomena of interest. Some researchers might focus more on the tendency to remember or reproduce funny material. Others might find a humorous approach to life more important. Researchers have examined people’s perceptions of their own funny experiences in different ways. Historically, these self-reports of humor experiences developed after the completion of research on the humor appreciation tests like rating jokes. Researchers reasoned that simply saying a joke is funny doesn’t tell enough about how much someone laughs in daily life. For example, scores on humor appreciation tests appear unrelated to how people or their peers rate what kind of appreciator, reproducer, or producer of humor they are (Babad, 1974). In an effort to understand comic aspects of everyday life and get a clear picture of how humor relates to personality, assessments had to have a different focus. Preferred Type of Humor For High Scorers On The Big Five and Other Personality TraitsIncongruity resolution + + + Nonsense + + +One form of a humor appreciation test focuses on hypothetical situations, instead of jokes or cartoons. Imagine that you stubbed your toe and inadvertently blurted out the “F” word at your niece’s christening. What if you accidentally e-mailed a professor from your alternative address, [email protected]? Would these events amuse you or irritate you? The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (Martin & Lefcourt, 1984) describes a range of predicaments and asks respondents if they would have laughed under the circumstances involved. The situations have quite a dramatic range and don’t fit most people’s stereotypes of the comic. One item describes losing a dating partner to a rival. Another mentions riding in a car that takes a spin on sleet. A third refers to injuring yourself so badly that you have to spend a few days in bed. An intriguing line of research supports the validity of the questionnaire; it seems to measure what it purports to measure. For example, scores correlated well with how much people smiled and chuckled during an interview about pleasant experiences. A peer’s rating of how much a person tended to laugh in a variety of situations also correlated with the situational humor responses. In addition, people with high scores generated funnier material in the laboratory when asked to make up a monologue or perform a creativity task (Martin, 1996).
These situational responses appear unrelated to the humor appreciation measures that focus on the funniness ratings of jokes, suggesting that they are tapping a different aspect of a sense of humor. People might enjoy all sorts of jokes and cartoons without necessarily finding humor in the events of their daily lives. A love for nonsense, sexual gags, or incongruityresolution jokes may say little about your tendency to see, or not see, the humor in waking up in a full body cast to greetings from your partner and your best friend, who want to tell you they’ve fallen in love. Scores tend to increase with sensationseeking scores (Deckers & Ruch, 1992). Who else would love driving doughnuts by the woods on a snowy evening? Extraverts also score higher, suggesting that the outgoing backslappers might find these awkward situations more of a chuckle (Ruch & Deckers, 1993).
Further work on the Situational Humor Questionnaire has stalled because of problems with the questions themselves. Like any other assessment device, this one is a product of its era. Some of the situations seem out of the ordinary. Others seem flagrantly unlikely for a broader audience of anyone but Canadian college students. For 14 years in Los Angeles, I never once skidded on the ice, so I might not have been able to say much about that situation. (Good thing I moved to Albany!) One bewhiskered item describes standing in line to get a computer problem fixed, a task that now would probably involve a phone call filled with accented English, rather than a walk to a software center.
Another item might show some gender bias that might have been worse in days of yore. It describes arriving at a party to find someone wearing a piece of clothing identical to the one you’re wearing. There apparently was a time when showing up in the same dress was considered shameful for women and for anyone in drag. I have to admit I never thought twice about turning up somewhere in the same T-shirt and jeans (or black tuxedo) that all the other guys were wearing. Obviously, this item might create gender differences on the scale that really have nothing to do with humor. In addition, the responses to each item all focus on chuckles and guffaws, asking if the situation would have made the respondent laugh. People laugh for lots of reasons—not simply because they think something is funny. These limitations inspired the work on other aspects of a sense of humor and on other assessment devices.
Cheerfulness and SeriousnessAnother approach to a person’s sense of humor involves a generally jolly outlook. Anyone who can stay buoyant and bright in the face of hassles must have an optimistic approach to life that could include a good perspective on the absurd. Aspects of this sort of cheerfulness have a big impact in many domains. For example, a person’s cheerfulness predicts what job satisfaction and salary will be 19 years later (Diener, Nickerson, Lucas, & Sandvik, 2002). That’s a pretty amazing finding. I can’t even predict what my height will be 19 years later. Ruch and his colleagues have looked at cheerfulness, bad mood, and seriousness in an effort to see how different states and traits might predict aspects of humor. Cheerful, happy, less serious conditions should enhance comedy, and those who are habitually in these states ought to enjoy, generate, and use humor. The most consistent results along these lines involve trait seriousness—the tendency to adopt a sober perspective. Serious people prefer to focus on the crucial and weighty, rather than on the lighthearted and entertaining. A revealing item from the trait seriousness scale reads, “One of my principles is: First work, then play.”
One aspect of trait seriousness that is particularly relevant concerns an appreciation for straightforward talk— conversations without irony, sarcasm, or hyperbole. An illustrative item states, “I prefer people who communicate with deliberation and objectivity.” Compared to those of us who prefer to communicate with cheeky fantasy, these folks don’t create, love, or use jokes very much. High scorers on trait seriousness rate all jokes as more aversive, see nonsense jokes as less funny, and prefer incongruity-resolution jokes. They also appear to know fewer jokes. I guess that if you don’t value jokes much, the riddles you learned as a kid will last a lifetime.
Cheerfulness and bad mood were unrelated to humor appreciation. In the production of humor, particularly tests that require making up a cartoon’s caption, seriousness correlated negatively with their number, wittiness, and originality. Serious folks fail to generate captions for cartoons that are numerous, novel, or funny. Cheerfulness predicted the generating of wittier captions and a bad mood predicted less witty ones (Ruch & Köhler, 1999). These results and this approach tend to blur the distinction between personality and a sense of humor. In a way, trait seriousness is a sort of humorlessness—an inability to appreciate or generate humor. But the approach is very much about a temperament that goes beyond the sense of humor, including a preference for work (over play), straightforward communication, and earnest topics. All of these things are important, but it sounds as if some folks need to lighten up.
The Coping Humor ScaleAs part of a large effort to examine humor’s impact on health, Martin and Lefcourt (1983) developed the Coping Humor Scale. Instead of attempting to assess all the facets of funny, this device focuses on how people use wit to handle stress. “I can usually find something to laugh or joke about even in trying situations” is a typical item on the seven-question scale. People’s reports on the scale correlate with what their friends say about them; the pals of those who score high say that they use humor in tough times and don’t take themselves too seriously. In a study that asked people to make up comical monologues while watching films, high scorers created funnier responses to the stressful flick than their low-scoring peers did, but they were no funnier in response to a mellow movie. These results support the idea that the scale is genuinely tapping something about handling stress, not simply being funnier in general. A supportive study that is intriguingly titled “Joking Under the Drill” shows that high scorers facing dental surgery are more likely to yuck it up and chortle than low scorers. The scale correlates with Big Five constructs in ways that you would expect. As coping humor gets higher, extraversion increases and neuroticism decreases (Korotkov & Hannah, 1994). Optimism (a tendency to anticipate good outcomes) and self-esteem also increase with coping humor (Martin, 1996). All of these correlates of the Big Five.
Humor Styles RevisitedWe saw in Chapter 2 that people use humor in different ways in the discussion of Martin’s work (Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir, 2003) on the four humor styles. Theses styles aren’t about the content or the structure of the jokes that someone likes. Instead, they involve the general negative or positive tone of the humor and how it relates to ourselves and others. As I noted, there’s the aggressive style—a biting, demeaning approach to jokes and teasing. The self-deprecating style makes one the butt of one’s own jokes in a consistently pejorative, critical way. The self-enhancing style includes a bemused outlook on life, the universe, and everything. And the affiliative style emphasizes the friendly banter that brings people together. Exciting new work with twins in North America suggests that the positive styles have a large heritable, genetic component while the negative styles appear to arise from environmental contributors. Some investigators view these heritability data with optimism, reasoning that if negative styles don’t seem genetic, they would likely prove easier to modify with an intervention (Vernon, Martin, Schermer, & Mackie, 2008). I assume they mean the use of psychotherapy, but perhaps they have something else in mind.

Elevated (↑) or Decreased (↓) Big Five Personality Traits in Professional Comics (PROS), Actors, and People With High Scores on Humor Production, Humor Appreciation, The Situational Humor Questionnaire, Trait Seriousness, and Coping Humor Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness NeuroticismPros ↑ ↓ ↓ Actors ↑ ↑ ↑ Production ↑ ↑ Appreciation ↑ ↑ ↓Situational ↓ Seriousness ↓ ↓ Coping ↑ An attempt to replicate this finding dampens the optimism about environmental contributors to negative styles while underlining key issues in humor and culture. Twins in the United Kingdom showed a high degree of heritability on all four humor styles, not just the positive ones (Vernon, Martin, Schermer, Cherkas, & Spector, 2008). These results may say more about cultural differences than about genetics. The authors point out that tolerance for aggressive humor seems greater among the citizens in the United Kingdom, where people aren’t as politically correct and don’t freak out the way United States citizens can. Perhaps changing negative styles will be more difficult for the Welsh, English, Northern Irish, and Scottish. At least they have Pot Noodles. Other links to humor styles are also revealing. Men consistently score higher on the aggressive style. This might stem from testosterone poisoning. The surgical intervention for them seems obvious. The self-enhancing and affiliative styles often correlate positively with psychological well-being; the self-deprecating style correlates negatively with well-being (Frewen, Brinker, Martin, & Dozois, 2008; Kazarian & Martin, 2004; Martin et al., 2003; Yip & Martin, 2006). At least one study suggests that folks of African or Caribbean descent report more affiliative humor (Romero, Alsua, Hinrichs, & Pearson, 2007). My experience with these folks suggests that they’re more affiliative about everything, though, not just humor. These styles seem likely to vary with different personality traits, too.
The Big Five and Humor StylesSome superb research on Big Five personality correlates of the humor styles has appeared recently. Although results differ a bit from study to study, several findings seem consistent. The negative styles, aggressive and self-defeating, tend to increase with neuroticism and decrease with agreeableness and conscientiousness. For the positive styles, the affiliative style increases as extraversion and openness increase. Self-enhancing increases with extraversion, openness, and agreeableness and it decreases with neuroticism. Folks who are more moody, uncooperative, and disorganized use cutting humor against themselves and others. Folks who are more outgoing, appreciative of new ideas, compassionate, and calm jest affably with pals and find the world amusing (Greven, Chamorro-Premuzic, Arteche, & Furnham, 2008; Martin et al., 2003; Vernon et al., 2008). The humor styles also relate to other traits in intuitively appealing ways. For the negative styles, the aggressive style increases with hostility. The self-defeating style increases with anxiety and hostility. The affiliative and selfenhancing styles decrease with anxiety and increase with self-esteem, social intimacy, and sociability. The selfenhancing style increases with optimism (Martin et al., 2003). These results suggest that personality traits can manifest themselves in the way that people use humor. The different styles actually relate to more of the Big Five traits than the humor appreciation and production measures do.
Links Between Personality and Sense of Humor: What’s it all for?The complicated links between one’s personality and sense of humor reveal a few recurring themes. First, if personality itself has anything to offer the study of behavior, the personality measures must do better than standard Barnum statements that describe practically anyone. If a trait applies equally to everybody, it can’t help us explain individual differences in humor or anything else interesting. In addition, “sense of humor” appears to be more of a folk concept than a scientific term. Everyone claims to have a sense of humor, even if no one can quite define it. Our stereotypes of those with a good sense of humor are all generally positive. In additon, one’s sense of humor, whatever it is, clearly has different components. The appreciation and production of jokes and gags may say a lot about someone’s sense of humor, but the two don’t correlate with each other. A dispositional tendency to see the funny sides of things or a propensity toward cheerfulness, good mood, and seriousness may contribute to our view of jokes and the world, too. These might not, however, relate to appreciating and generating punch line.