The Link Between Happiness and a Sense of Humor

Unravel the intriguing connection between happiness and humor. Discover how laughter can be more than just a response to a funny joke, but a key to unlocking a more joyful, fulfilling life.

Humor is a serious business for happiness, however, and cultivating the skill of finding humor in life, even during the darkest times, can be the secret to keeping us from despair.

Researchers have theorized that a sense of humor is made up of six basic variables: the cognitive ability to create or understand jokes, an appreciation and enjoyment of jokes, behavior patterns of joking and laughing, cheerful or humorous temperament, a bemused attitude about life, and a strategy of using humor in the face of adversity

• For humor to be effective in increasing happiness, timing is everything
• Positive humor is associated with self-esteem, optimism, and life satisfaction, and with decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress
• Negative humor follows the exact opposite pattern: While it can feel good in the moment, it exacerbates unhappiness

Stay positive

Negative, hurtful, or excessively dark jokes are a corrosive force on your and others’ well-being.

• The Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio finished The Decameron in about the year 1353 as the Black Death ravaged Europe, probably killing almost a third of the population. The book consisted of 100 comedic stories told by 10 fictional young friends-seven women and three men-quarantining together at a country estate to avoid the pestilence

Reject grimness

The most obvious piece of advice is not to be grim and humorless

• To be happier, don’t participate in the war on jokes
• Researchers have found that two particularly humorless ideologies are religious fundamentalism and militarism
• Therefore, I’m not surprised that the current fundamentalist and pugilistic ideological climate in the United States is also so humorless

Don’t worry about being funny

It’s better to consume humor than to supply it

• To get the happiness benefits of humor, let others tell the jokes and give yourself permission to laugh
• Funny people tend to have particular innate neurological characteristics, and unusually high intelligence
• People who enjoy funny things simply prioritize humor, cultivate a taste for it, and give themselves permission

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