Humor

I've been on the subject of studying exactly what humor is for a few months now. It began with a fascination with laughing. While we consider language to be a superior form of communication from guttural noises, the phenomena of laughter shows that true communication is often without acknowledgeable bounds. Even though we adhere carefully to grammatical prescriptions in language, laughter is still often considered to be a more genuine communication of humor than merely stating "that's funny." Additionally, like most things, humor has both a constructive and another orientation. I find that most common humor is not funny to me because it comes at the expense of another. However, in my Personality Psychology textbook today, I found a rather eloquent description of constructive humor:

"Another distinguishing characteristic of self-actualizing people is their philosophical, nonhostile sense of humor. Most of what passes for humor or comedy is basically hostile, sexual, or scatological. The laugh is usually at someone else’s expense. Healthy people see little humor in put-down jokes. They may poke fun at themselves, but not masochistically so. They make fewer tries at humor than others, but their attempts serve a purpose beyond making people laugh. They amuse, inform, point out ambiguities, provoke a smile rather than a guffaw."

Feist, J. (2018). Theories of Personality, 9th Ed. Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill Education.