Laugh A Little: Why We All Should Be Telling More Jokes

Where’s the Funny?
Despite the abundant benefits of levity, somehow most of us forget or hesitate to use this tool. Just as we don’t ask questions as often as we could, we don’t use levity enough. At age twenty-three, 84 percent of people report smiling and laughing a lot the day before. By age fifty, that percentage drops to 68 percent. It bottoms out at 61 percent around age eighty. Then we make a tiny rebound in very old age—because the aged are happier, or because happier people live past the age of eighty (or both).

As we age, we get less practiced at playfulness, perhaps because it’s harder to practice. It’s difficult to monitor which emotional quadrant we are in when our brains are busy doing so many other things, like listening, planning what to say next, and coping with the harsh realities of adult life. The noise! The traffic! Toilet paper! Global warming! Life insurance! Not to mention that a lot of adult contexts (read: workplaces) seem to disallow levity.

So levity plays an increasingly shrinking role in our lives as we get older, but people at every age underestimate its benefits, which causes us to underdeploy it in our conversations. When we feel focused, bored, and serious, we struggle to muster the cognitive energy to break out of the doldrums. And even when we want to lift the mood, we worry that others will see our attempts at levity as frivolous, incompetent, or disrespectful. In a discussion of serious topics in a serious context, jokesters might not be taken seriously, we think. Even people who think they use plenty of levity (or worry they use it too much) probably aren’t using it as much as they think.

The thing about levity is, well, it’s fun. It doesn’t just make our conversations come alive, it makes us come alive. In the rapturous date between Tom (Florida guy) and Cassie (North Carolina girl), we can see reciprocal loops of happiness, disclosure, acceptance, and trust unfold before our eyes. Their transcript leaves a trail of personal breadcrumbs that’s joyful to follow. Their behavior aligns with psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden and build” theory, which asserts that positive emotions evolved as psychological adaptations that increased human ancestors’ odds of survival and reproduction.

While negative emotions narrow people’s focus toward specific, urgent actions that are life-preserving (fight or flight), positive emotions widen the array of thoughts and actions called forth (to play, experiment, and explore), inspiring more ideas, more flexibility, more interpersonal attraction, and longer life. Improv comedians live by a “Yes, and” mantra—a phrase that reflects a mindset to always broaden and build on what their fellow performers say and do. “No, but” and even “Yes, but” can shut down conversations, fast. These principles—broaden and build, “Yes, and”—underpin our daters’ flirty games. And they are exactly the things we need for good conversation.

So You Want to Be a Comedian
It’s halfway through the semester in my TALK class. The students have practiced preparing and managing topics, asking and answering hard questions, and avoiding the dreaded boomerask. Today is the first day of a new section: Levity. Given my decidedly unserious teaching style, they appear in class excited for a humor workshop or some other shenanigans I’ve surely planned. They, like everyone, would like to be funnier. I know they’re hoping for some secret humor formulas.

I open the class, arms wide. “Good morning!”

“Good morning.” They smile back at me.

“I need to say something important up front: I can’t make you funny.”

They laugh. Surely I must be joking. Right?

Unfortunately, I’m not joking. It’s really hard to give any kind of specific lessons on how to be funnier. The issue is that good humor is acutely context-sensitive. How many jokes would you be equally comfortable cracking in front of your parents, your old high school friends, your colleagues, your doctor, and your new flame? In a small intimate group over dinner, in front of a boardroom, in a public conversation with a bunch of strangers? Would any of the jokes you told last week, or last year, be funny today?

The context-sensitive nature of humor is what gives it power, sparkle, and electricity. In fact, the sociologist Erving Goffman singled out humor that is context-sensitive and thus unrepeatable (“you had to be there”) as a bespoke gift to the people present. “Since the witticism will never again be as telling, a sacrifice has been offered up to the conversation…by an act that shows how thoroughly the actor is alive to the interaction.” How noble! But I can’t give my students universal advice about how to become alive to each unique moment in each unique interaction. This, I tell the students in class, would go against the nature of humor.

Humor’s highly context-dependent nature makes landing jokes difficult and daunting. Nobody wants to hurt people—or get themselves fired. Nobody wants to be the one to make a joke that isn’t funny. Again, this is partly why we underuse levity in our conversations.

But here’s the good news: people’s anxiety about conversational humor is overblown. My research with behavioral scientists Maurice Schweitzer and Brad Bitterly found that people overestimate how often and egregiously humor goes poorly—we conjure comedians who got canceled and poignant conversational moments in which humor went awry. And people underestimate how often attempts at humor go well—leavening the mood, drawing people closer, boosting perceptions of competence and status.

In my own research, I found that managers who were randomly assigned to make one joke in one conversation were over 9 percent more likely to be voted into leadership positions by their teammates. And bosses with any sense of humor whatsoever have been shown to be 27 percent more motivating and admired than bosses with none at all, and their employees 15 percent more engaged. We forget how good even minor humor can feel. My point to you is this: the incremental risk that one-off jokes will flop is much smaller than the aggregated risk of a lifetime of boring, disengaged conversation that leaves you (and those around you) miserable.

But our worries aren’t totally irrational. The trick with humor is getting it right. And as we know, success depends on what we’re aiming for—our goals. In the case of humor, it may be more beneficial to aim for finding the fun rather than being funny.

Take It Easy
I can’t necessarily teach people to be funnier, but I can show them what kinds of humor work in pursuit of important goals like enjoyment and connection. In class, I tell my students that we’ll work on learning helpful frameworks for levity—we’ll come to understand the mindsets that funny people inhabit. When I say this, the hopefulness returns to their faces.

Psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren suggest a logical framework—the Benign Violation Theory of Humor—to help us understand the risks (and sweet spot) of humor. Their theory suggests that people find things funny when they are neither too benign (boring, mundane) nor too violating (scary, sensitive, raw, aggressive, inappropriate), but somewhere in between. For example, simply walking down the stairs would be benign; falling down the stairs and breaking an arm would be a violation; and pretending to fall down the stairs, limbs akimbo, and landing gently, uninjured, in a silly dance pose would be a benign violation.

Finding the benign violation sweet spot can be quite difficult in conversation because it unfolds so quickly, and because the sweet spot is a moving target. It’s further complicated by the fact that we all have different humor styles. So a remark that might seem like a benign violation coming from sweet-most-of-the-time Olivia could seem completely mundane coming from sarcastic-most-of-the-time Jimmy. What might seem funny to slapstick-loving Sam might seem completely ludicrous to political-satire-loving Jane.

Research on humor styles suggests that we all have tendencies and levels of comfort along several dimensions of humor, starting with how we position ourselves. Some people like to feign arrogance for comedic effect and use humor to signal their greatness (“Gosh, I’m good at this”), while others use self-deprecating humor brilliantly to seem humble or disarming (“This babydoll dress makes me look like an actual toddler”). Likewise, some people are outspoken and gregarious, lighting up the room like the sun (“What’s up, party people?!”), while others are more understated—adding barely noticeable glimmers here and there. You can probably think of examples of each type in your life.

But what’s really key about conversational humor isn’t so much its style as its intended goals when it comes to our partners. Whether our style is mock-arrogance or mock-humility, over-the-top or sly-and-subtle, we can use humor to build others up or to pull people down. This distinction is tightly linked to thinking about humor, broadly, as affiliative versus aggressive. Affiliative humor is meant to be funny to everyone, to bring people together (rather than tear them apart or fragment them into categories). Aggressive humor, by contrast, involves put-downs or insults targeted toward one or a few individuals. Affiliative humor increases psychological safety (an antecedent to, well, everything good), while aggressive humor decreases psychological safety. The advice here is clear: when in doubt, be gentle.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves by Alison Wood Brooks. Copyright © 2025 by Alison Wood Brooks. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Excerpted with permission. All rights reserved.