Volume 31, Issue 3 -

The present set of studies employs two cognitive interviewing techniques (thinking aloud and online cognitive probing) of the scale assessing the self-defeating humor style, aiming at delineating the role that self-defeating humor plays in self-esteem and emotions. The self-defeating humor style comprises humor to enhance one’s relationships with others at the expense of oneself, and has often been related to lower well-being. The analyses are based on 392 item responses of a typical sample (Study 1) and 104 item responses of high scorers on the self-defeating scale (Study 2). Content analyses revealed that higher scores on the self-defeating scale went along with humor (Study 1), with higher state self-esteem, with an improvement of one’s interpersonal relationships, and with more facial displays of positive emotions (Study 2). Additionally, the more humor was entailed in the item responses, the higher the state self-esteem and the improvement of relationships was and the more positive emotion words were employed. Thus, the humor entailed in the self-defeating humor style seemed rather beneficial both for oneself and others. These findings call for a reevaluation of past findings with this humor style and provide opportunities for future research and applications of humor interventions to improve well-being.

We tested the hypothesis that group norms would have an effect on humor appreciation, specifically on ingroup disparaging humor. In this study ( N =195), participants were exposed to two humor conditions (neutral or ingroup disparaging humor) and to two group norms regarding humor appreciation (favoring or rejecting). Favoring group norm had a direct effect on the funniness scores. Moreover, an interaction effect of group norm and type of humor was found on the humor appreciation. When the group norm was rejecting, appreciation of the two different types of humor was different, whereas in the favoring group norm, no statistically significant differences were observed. Additionally, for the disparaging humor exposure, a favoring group norm promoted a greater acceptation of the stereotypical characteristics presented in the disparaging humor as realistic and representative of the ingroup. These results suggest that group norms act as important contextual information that influences disparaging humor appreciation.

There is a widely held belief that humor contributes to better health, but the research on this topic yields mixed results. To assess the relationship between humor and health, we compared the susceptibility to various infectious diseases of 511 comedy performers (amateur improvisational artists) and a control group of 795 non-performers that were matched to the comedy performers sample in age and sex. Subjects reported the number of episodes and the total days they had had various infectious diseases. Contrary to the prevailing sentiment that humor boosts health, results showed that the comedy performer group reported more frequent contagious diseases and more days having these infections diseases, compared to the control group. Improv artists had significantly more infections and reported more days infected than the control group on respiratory infections, head colds, stomach or intestinal flu, skin infections, and autoimmune diseases. The control group had significantly more bladder infections with non-significant difference on days infected. Results held after controlling for BMI, age, number of antibiotics used and neuroticism. We found no evidence that humor positively contributes to health, and a career in a humor-related profession may be detrimental to one’s health. Our research highlights the complex relationship between humor and health outcomes.

While the appeal of humor lies, typically, in its very spontaneity and original contextual incongruity, there is also the chance of an ‘afterlife’ for the humorous text. In most cases, the humorist seeks an immediate response for what is an ephemeral, fleeting, linguistic transaction. A permanent place in humor culture is probably the least of the humorist’s goals- after all, the immediate, positive response is prioritized as an evidence of skill. Thus, most humor studies focus on the first instantiation of humor, as being generative of the act of humor. This prioritization of the immediate surprise, over the ‘echoes’ of an instance of humor, does not address the fact that many people enjoy revisiting a familiar joke, or comic film, or an entire TV comedy series, and that these revisited texts become incorporated into group and cultural artefacts. These recontextualizations in themselves are potentially funny, but they are also important in sustaining the original instance of humor as a type of ongoing conversation: a very distinctive feature of humor’s social importance. This paper will present a theorization of an interdependency between author, text, and interlocutors for the ‘afterlife’ of texts, and will furnish high-profile examples to support this concept.

In the paper, we propose a new focus in qualitative organization studies, which we call organizational anecdotal evidence. The novelty of our method is in linking storytelling, studies of organizational anecdotes, and humor studies. We claim that organizational anecdotes, jokes, and short fictional stories should become a core object of organizational culture analysis, rather than be refuted as unimportant. This is so because the study of organizational anecdotes and fictional stories shared by the social actors is more meaningful and gives more insight into their culture than establishing mere facts. In the article, we briefly relate the limitations of factual studies in many areas of organizational research, describe the theoretical background of our method (coming from humor studies, storytelling, and organizational anecdotes analysis), and propose their combination as a new approach for organization scholars, namely, organizational anecdotal evidence research. The utility of the proposed methodological approach is demonstrated based on original research conducted in a public administration organization.