Humour as shield and strategy – when the joke helps and when it hides

Four ways of using humour

In 2003 the psychologist Rod Martin and his colleagues developed a questionnaire, the Humor Styles Questionnaire, which measures how people use humour in everyday life. It has 32 statements, eight for each of four styles:

• Affiliative humour – amusing others and making it easier to be together. The joke invites people in.
• Self-enhancing humour – keeping a humorous outlook on life when it is hard, and using it to cope with stress.
• Aggressive humour – sarcasm, digs and jokes at someone else's expense.
• Self-defeating humour – joking excessively at your own expense, to be liked or to avoid what you feel.

The styles differ in two ways. The humour can be aimed at relationships or at yourself, and it can be kind or harmful. The affiliative and self-enhancing styles are the kind versions. The aggressive and self-defeating styles are the harmful ones – one harms others, the other harms yourself.

The interesting one is the fourth. Self-defeating humour can look like being able to laugh at yourself, and it often makes others laugh. But Martin's description also includes what he calls defensive denial: joking to avoid admitting what you really feel.

When humour helps

The psychiatrist George Vaillant, who for many years led the Grant Study at Harvard – a study that has followed a group of men through adult life – counted humour among the mature defences. These are the ways of coping with difficulty that the psychiatric diagnostic manual DSM-IV places at the highest, most adaptive level, alongside altruism, sublimation and anticipation, among others. The idea is that humour lets you look at what is hard without being overwhelmed by it.

There is experimental support for the kind of humour mattering. In 2012 Andrea Samson and James Gross had participants look at unpleasant pictures and respond to them with either good-natured or mean-spirited humour. Good-natured humour reduced negative feelings and increased positive ones more than mean-spirited humour did.

And when the researchers Martin Schneider, Martin Voracek and Ulrich Tran pooled 37 studies with just over 12,700 participants in 2018, the pattern was the same. They measured four aspects of mental health: self-esteem, life satisfaction, optimism and depression. The kind styles went together with better mental health overall, with small to moderate associations. Self-defeating humour went together with poorer mental health. Aggressive humour showed no association at all, taken across all the studies.

Two things are worth keeping in mind. The review is based on associations, so it does not show that humour causes mental health – it may just as well run the other way. And the associations were small to moderate. Humour is a resource, not a treatment.

When humour hides

In the chapter Humour as shield and strategy in my book I write about hearing yourself laugh in the middle of telling someone about something painful. That laugh doesn't have to be a problem. It can be a way of managing to say it at all.

But the same laugh can also do something else. When you joke about what is hard, you signal to others that it isn't so serious, and others often take the hint. They laugh along, and nobody asks any further. If that is what you wanted, the humour is a strategy. If you actually wanted to be asked, it is a shield that worked too well.

That is what makes self-defeating humour hard to see in yourself. It earns praise, it makes you liked, and it costs nothing in the moment. The cost comes later, when nobody knows how you are, because you yourself have made sure nobody needs to know.

Aggressive humour hides in a different way. Sarcasm keeps others at a distance and lets you say something critical without standing behind it. “It was only a joke” is a sentence that protects the person saying it more than the person on the receiving end.

Why the shield is tempting

Saying something vulnerable straight out carries a risk: being rejected, seeming weak, getting nothing back. A joke takes the edge off that risk. If it goes down badly, it was only a bit of fun. How research views that risk – and why we judge our own vulnerability more harshly than others do – is covered in the article on daring to be vulnerable.

For someone who is afraid of other people's judgement, the joke can have one more function. You say the disparaging thing about yourself first, so that nobody else gets the chance. If that fear rules much of your everyday life, it may be social anxiety, which can be treated.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, described humour as one of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. That quotation opens the chapter in my book, and it is a reminder that the shield is not wrong in itself. Sometimes you need one. The question is whether you can put it down when you no longer need it.

How to look at your own humour

The aim is not to become less funny. It is to notice what your humour does, so that you can choose. The chapter in the book has an exercise with a humour log. Here is a version that turns the attention towards the shield.

1. Keep a log for a week. Write down the times you joked about something to do with yourself. One line is enough: what the conversation was about and what you said.

2. Ask four questions about each time:

• What happened just before I joked? Was there something I didn't want to say, or something I didn't want to hear?
• Who laughed – did I laugh myself, or only the others?
• Did the conversation carry on afterwards, or did it end?
• Was the joke at someone's expense, my own or someone else's?

3. Look for the pattern. Do the jokes come up around certain topics, with certain people, or when someone gets too close? That says more than the individual jokes.

4. Try saying it straight once. Choose someone you trust and a moment where you would normally joke something away. Joke first if that makes it easier – and then add one sentence without a joke: “But honestly, it's pretty hard.” Notice what happens in the conversation.

5. Keep what helps. The humour that makes a heavy day lighter, that you share with others and that isn't at anyone's expense, is not something to train away. It is something to look after.

When it is more than that

Gallows humour about the dark side of life is one thing. But if the jokes have become the only way of talking about how you feel, or if what you joke about is that you can't cope, it may be a sign of something that needs more than a log. Then healthcare is the right first step.

How I work with it

In coaching humour is welcome – it is often a good way of talking about what is hard. But we can also look at when it takes over, when a joke comes instead of something you really wanted to say. We look for those moments, and try out what happens when you don't joke them away.

The most important thing

If you take just one thing with you: look at what happens after the joke. If the conversation carries on and becomes more honest, the humour has helped. If it ends, and you feel relieved to have got away with it, it has protected you from something.

Both kinds have their place. But only the first is the one you need to keep once you are no longer afraid.

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, 37(1), 48–75.
• Schneider, M., Voracek, M. & Tran, U. S. (2018). “A joke a day keeps the doctor away?” Meta-analytical evidence of differential associations of habitual humor styles with mental health. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 59(3), 289–300.
• Samson, A. C. & Gross, J. J. (2012). Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour. Cognition and Emotion, 26(2), 375–384.
• Vaillant, G. E. (2000). Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, 55(1), 89–98.
• Martin, R. A. (2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. Elsevier Academic Press.
• Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man's search for meaning. Simon & Schuster. (Originally published 1946.)
• Glännström, M. Välmåendecoach — För en ljusare framtid ("The Wellbeing Coach"), chapter 33: Humour as shield and strategy.

Best wishes, Mikael GlännströmWellbeing coach, author and father of two