Humor ≠ Laughter

tl;dr — a surface primer on humor, laughter and their functions

[Let me entertain you]

Joselyn: Once in a while when I tell people about my research, they have a telling reaction. That reaction assumes frivolity and triviality. It’s unsurprising that people see humor as purely an entertainment device. We’re surrounded by new and different types of entertainment all the time. I mean, we are in the 👏 golden 👏 age 👏 of 👏 television 👏 people.

But my interest is not solely in creating entertaining experiences. Humor can be a way to develop more meaningful relationships between people and with technology itself. That’s something Asha and I have been digging into more in the last couple of months.

Asha: And we’re going to share some of what we’ve learned with you (hold on to your hats!). But one important assumption we had going into this literature review was that humor is the primary way to provoke laughter. This turned out to be wrong!

Joselyn: And now we have fed you that tantalizing tidbit of information, time to dive in.

[What can humor do for you?]

Asha: One of the realms in which humor has been studied fairly extensively is advertising. Unsurprising, considering a huge amount of advertising includes some kind of humorous device (consult this Wall Street journal article from the 2017 Super Bowl for examples).

Advertising is also a compelling area for research because advertisers want to know what is and is not working. In other words, does humor give me more bang for the buck?

While there is a massive amount of literature on this topic, one piece we felt summarized things very well was a review by Weinberger and Gulas: The Impact of Humor in Advertising: A Review (this review also contains references to other studies which on their own are also great reading). Some of the main insights we took from this review, in terms of what humor can and cannot achieve:

• Humor attracts attention.
• Humor does not harm comprehension.
• Humor by itself may or may not be more persuasive than other methods (seems to be dependent on a variety of other factors in concert with humor).
• Humor does not enhance source credibility but it can enhance source liking.

Joselyn: The idea that humor can increase likeability is also borne out in one of my all time favorite Human Computer Interaction studies by Morkes et al. (read their paper here), who performed two experiments that facilitated participants interacting with a system that was preprogrammed to produce comments (humorous or straight-forward). Ultimately, this work showed that humor did not distract the worker from the task or reduce their efficiency. In fact, humor was shown to be beneficial in increasing the likability of an interface.

Asha: Humor related research is also related to the field of Communication. One particular framework that resonated with Joselyn and I comes from John Meyers (Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication), who details the four functions of humor:

Identification: One valuable function humor serves is to build support by identifying communicators with their audiences, enhancing speaker credibility (Chang & Gruner, 1987; Gruner, 1967,1985; Malone, 1980) and building group cohesiveness (Graham, Papa, & Brooks, 1992).

Clarification: Communicators also employ humor to encapsulate their views into memorable phrases or short anecdotes, resulting in the clarification of issues or positions.

Enforcement: Humor allows a communicator to enforce norms delicately by leveling criticism while maintaining some degree of identification with an audience (Graham et al., 1992). Reagan used humor to speak against what he believed was an oppressive federal government without casting himself as a “negative” politician.

Differentiation: Differentiation. As a final function, communicators use differentiation quite often, contrasting themselves with their opponents, their views with an opponent’s views, their own social group with others, and so on. Humor is invoked to make both alliances and distinctions.

Joselyn: Notice something missing here? Nothing about laughter! (Okay we sort of primed you for that). While humor is linked to laughter, remember that our hypothesis was about humor being the primary cause of laughter. What we found instead was something else….

Asha: (Dun dun dun….)

[Are they laughing with me or at me?]

Asha: There is a ton of great work out there about laughter (check out Robert Provine’s book!), but Joselyn shared one particularly awesome segment from Studio 360 with me on laughter (listen to it for yourself here). Basically we both now have a professional crush on Sophie Scott, who is a neuroscience professor at University College London, researching laughter (among other topics). Here’s her Ted Talk from 2015 too:

Joselyn: To spare you any more suspense, here were the main points we learned from Sophie’s work:

• Most of laughter is actually voluntary. So we are proactively laughing instead of reacting in an involuntary way to a humorous prompt.
• Most of laughter is voluntary because it is socially motivated. We will laugh at things to show liking and social alignment with others, regardless of whether their content is “humorous” per se.
• One of Scott’s most illustrative findings: people are 30 times more likely to laugh if they are with other people than if they are on their own, and they will laugh more if they know those people.

Asha: Does this explain why I sometimes find myself nervously (and awkwardly) laughing at a completely serious exchange when I meet someone new and am trying to make a good impression?

Joselyn: The jury is still out on your particular case... But regardless it is probably a good thing because a great deal of research suggests laughter can strengthen the immune system (read one such study here)— which is what we all need this flu season!

[For your ponderance]

Asha: Of course this wouldn’t truly be one of our medium posts unless we ended with a list of questions (you should see the crazy tangents we go on in our 1:1 meetings). Here are some things we are thinking about:

Should laughter be an experience that we try and facilitate using technology? If so how could we do achieve that leveraging what we know about voluntary laughter and social ties?

How do the four functions of humor play out in digital spaces?

If humor can increase source likeability, how does this play out in media like memes — is the author the “source” or is it the subject on the meme template?

Bits and Giggles is a design research series featuring conversations between Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction researchers Asha Toulmin and Joselyn McDonald.