The Psychology of Comedy

Am I healthier because I laugh frequently? What parts of my brain respond to humor—the amygdala or the frontal cortex? Which personality type is most likely to become the class clown? These preoccupations drive G. Neil Martin’s The Psychology of Comedy, part of Routledge’s the Psychology of Everything series. A better title would have been The Psychology of Humor, as the book deals strictly with the psychological fields that study humor rather than the genre of comedy. Because it is a survey of psychological humor studies, the book reads as a long literature review, an engaging one at that. Martin shares the results of hypotheses that we intuitively feel to be true and that now have been verified. Are extroverted and agreeable people more prone to enjoying humor? Yes. Do advertisements ridiculing a particular societal group make consumers feel less inclined to buy a product? Yes. Do women generally prefer sentimental comedy more so than men, use self-deprecatory comedy more frequently than men, and enjoy disparaging humor less than men? Yes, yes, and yes again—and there are studies to prove it. As Martin maps the vast terrain of psychological research in humor, he does not hypothesize about the uses of humor or provide new theories; instead, he usefully traces the various psychological fields and explains the major interests, data, and trends in ways that are purposeful and clear.

The introduction situates the origins of psychological humor studies in Aristotle and Socrates, although it would be more precise to begin with the nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume Duchenne and his namesake smile, as well as psychologist Sigmund Freud, who identified tendentious humor and lexical ambiguity and developed the relief theory. Martin not only includes a section describing humor theories that are now perfunctory for any book on humor (i.e., superiority, incongruity, and relief) but also adds two new theories pertinent to psychology: arousal theory (captured in Daniel Berlyne’s research about individual displays of curiosity) and reversal theory (reflected in Michael Apter’s account of paratelic, or playful, states of mind).

Almost every field of psychology has taken an interest in humor. The physiology of laughter is relevant to cognitive neuroscience; the question of how older people lose their sense of humor is a topic in developmental life stages studies; gender, education and learning, memory, and personality play a role in humor questionnaires, and the contagious nature of laughter is an aspect of social psychology. Rod A. Martin’s The Psychology of Humor (2006), over five hundred pages long, is generally considered to be the quintessential psychological textbook on humor studies. Thus Martin’s charting of such wide-ranging fields of research in under two hundred pages is an impressive feat, even if at times he oddly groups together certain studies. For example, one unfocused yet interesting chapter on comedians ranges from stand-up comedian personalities to traditional clowns and fools (i.e., jesters), professional clowns, comedy writers, and “class clowns.” In another chapter on swearing and humor, Martin discusses risk and humor, explaining how people are more risk averse after watching comedy. (If being in a happy mood makes us more cautious, then GEICO and Liberty Mutual certainly know what they are doing.)

Another section questions the laughter therapy field inaugurated by Norman Cousins and Patch Adams. Martin writes that there is “very little empirical evidence” of a relationship between humor and health, despite numerous practitioners arguing otherwise. Most of the connections drawn between health and happiness are correlational and not causal. Martin nevertheless summarizes the more relevant findings, such as how humor can be used as a way to decrease stress, to foster muscle relaxation, to improve respiration (e.g., laughter yoga), and to increase pain tolerance. One 1980s experiment—seemingly lacking institutional oversight—involved attaching undergraduates to shock-delivering electrodes to determine whether they experienced less anxiety about the impending shock if they listened to comedians, to a geology lesson, or to no stimulus (you can guess the result). Other studies examine whether people who make humor their profession (i.e...