Humor

Humor [playfulness]: Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes. Personified for example by Mark Twain (Source: VIA Institute)

The Noel Strengths Academy defines it this way:

  • Those with the strengths of humor like to laugh, tease, joke but not in  ways harmful to others 
  • Brings smiles to other people’s faces 
  • Are able to seeing the lighter side of difficult issues 
  • Can laugh at themselves; don’t take themselves too seriously 
  • Playful 


Yes, strengths can be overused…or underused

  • Underuse: Over-seriousness
  • Overuse: Giddiness

Key Research:

  • Rank order of Humor in populations from:
    • US : 8;
    • European:  7
    • Asia: 17
    • Latin America: 17
    • Sub-Saharan Africa: 14
    • Middle east: 12
  • In a study of character strengths and adolescent peer relationships, the strengths deemed most desirable/important in a friend were honesty, humor, kindness, and fairness, and those most connected with higher peer acceptance were perspective, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, leadership, and humor (Wagner, 2018).
  • The most prevalent character strengths in very young children are love, kindness, creativity, curiosity, and humor (Park & Peterson, 2006a).
  • In a study of character strengths and adolescent peer relationships, the strengths deemed most desirable/important in a friend were honesty, humor, kindness, and fairness, and those most connected with higher peer acceptance were perspective, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, leadership, and humor (Wagner, 2018).

Tayyab Rashid and Afroze Anjum offer 340 Ways to Use VIA Character Strengths including these four for Humor:

Learn more on Humor

New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly shares a portfolio of her wise and funny cartoons about modern life — and talks about how humor can empower women to change the rules.

Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But what happens when you reply? Follow along as writer and comedian James Veitch narrates a hilarious, weeks-long exchange with a spammer who offered to cut him in on a hot deal.

Did you know that you’re 30 times more likely to laugh if you’re with somebody else than if you’re alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of cracking up.

“I have cerebral palsy. I shake all the time,” Maysoon Zayid announces at the beginning of this exhilarating, hilarious talk. (Really, it’s hilarious.) “I’m like Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.” With grace and wit, the Arab-American comedian takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her adventures as an actress, stand-up comic, philanthropist and advocate for the disabled.

Pete McGraw is a leading researcher at the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In this talk he not only discusses what is funny, but what makes something funny as well.
Humor is something that transcends most barriers. It is a common unification; a concept understood by all. Despite this, there exists a large portion of the population that does not think they can utilize humor. Andrew Tarvin will show you that everyone can use humor. Andrew Tarvin is the world’s first Humor Engineer teaching people how to get better results while having more fun. He has worked with thousands of people at 200+ organizations, including P&G, GE, and Microsoft. Combining his background as a project manager at Procter & Gamble with his experience as an international comedian, Andrew’s program are engaging, entertaining, and most important, effective. He is a best-selling author, has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and TEDx, and has delivered programs in 50 states, 18 countries, and 3 continents. He loves the color orange and is obsessed with chocolate.

Podcasts to feed your Humor

  • The conceit of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend is simple and a bit genius. O’Brien welcomes on guests for a 30-ish minute chat. The guests are all celebrities that have been on one of O’Brien’s late-night shows. There’s a bit of catching up and story-telling but the thrust of the show is whether O’Brien and his guest can or are friends even though the work in the same industry and are around each other professionally, seemingly, all the time. It’s a hilarious listen every damn time.
  • Bertcast is a great listen. Each episode finds Kreischer sitting down with a fellow comedian to shot-the-shit for about two hours. It’s goddamn hilarious and you’ll find yourself laughing out loud while you’re on your run or in your car. Kreischer also does smaller episodes called ‘Open Tabs’ where he riffles through all the open tabs on his computer from the night before. It’s always a delight.
  • Joe Rogan’s podcast is one of the most popular in the world. Sometimes this is a dead serious podcast that touches on huge ideas, science, and societal debates. Sometimes it’s a podcast where the biggest names in comedy gather to talk the industry and/or just spend three hours doing their comedy thing.

Meditation for humor

Read more on meditation and kindness:

 

 

 

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