Humour plays a key psychological role in relationships, not just in sparking attraction but in keeping the flame alive. By Paul Little.
Is humour important in a relationship? Are you kidding? In every relationship deserving the name there are at least two stages: getting together and staying together. In some there is a third: splitting up. But whichever of the stages a couple is at, research and most lived experience tell us that humour plays an important part. It may be worth remembering as we ponder whether to give in to the crass commercialism of Valentine’s Day or put up with a week of silent treatment.
1. Getting together: Jokes will find a way
Although your lovingly polished opening zinger may be great for getting someone’s attention at a party, it is not necessarily the most productive way to initiate contact. Keith Weber, professor of communications at Chapman University in Orange, California, acknowledges this is contrary to popular belief, but says it’s all due to something called uncertainty reduction theory. This states that at first contact, we need to build trust quickly. A direct approach at the party – “Hi, I’m Chip. I saw you here and thought I’d come and say hello” – is honest and direct and builds certainty. A joke, on the other hand, feels a bit calculated. Reducing uncertainty takes about 90 seconds. Then you can let your wit take wing and fly. Or at least try to.
“Once you start using humour … it helps to build trust, and it helps to build affinity and all of those positive outcomes that we typically associate with it.”
Unsurprisingly (we’re still at the party here), positive humour is more effective than negative. In fact, this is more important than just how funny you are being.
“Despite what they’re willing to admit, many people probably are not great at making jokes and are not very funny. But they still can fall in love,” says Jeffrey A Hall, professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.
That said, negative, critical and even self-denigrating humour are not good options.
However, notes Theresa DiDonato, co-author of Strategically Funny: Romantic motives affect humour style in relationship initiation, the difference between positive and negative humour is only relevant if you’re looking for a long-term relationship. “Humour style made no difference when participants evaluated prospects for short-term encounters,” she writes. This is consistent with evidence that cheesy pick-up lines are just as effective as more sincere overtures when initiating short-term relationships.
Disconcertingly, from a feminist point of view, researchers have found age-old scripts still being played out.
Hall speaks with considerable authority on these matters, not only because of his own studies but because he conducted a benchmark meta-analysis of the correlation between humour and relationship satisfaction, looking at studies involving more than 15,000 subjects.
“Men make jokes to make women laugh, and women laugh to show that they’re saying they are receptive to flirtatious advances,” says Hall, aware he’s asking for trouble. “When I did research on courtship, I was very careful to say, ‘This is not to say that women aren’t funny. This is not to say that men are funnier than women.’ I’m not not not not saying this.” (He really did say “not” four times.) “What I’m saying is, it’s part of the script.”
He adds that there may be a performance element on both sides: “Women will laugh harder, because they’re trying to get across the message, ‘I’m agreeable to what you’re saying, let’s keep playing,’ which is what flirting is. And men are trying their damnedest to be funny and looking for any cue of responsiveness to it to keep going.”
More depressing results, according to DiDonato: “Some evidence suggests that humour will help your chances only when you are already physically attractive.
“Initial status may also matter: high-status people can increase their attractiveness using self-deprecating humour, but this will not necessarily work for low-status people.”
Yes, as has long been suspected, good-looking and successful people find it easier to hook up.
Hall says humour works because it indicates “a sociable and agreeable personality”. In the getting-together stages at least, it’s a sign of interest. “The more times a man tries to be funny, and the more a woman laughs at those attempts, the more likely it is for the woman to be interested in dating. However, an even better indicator of romantic connection is if the two are spotted laughing together.”
This may be a good moment to ask how different these results are for same-sex couples. Short answer: hardly at all.
Researchers John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman found that relationship satisfaction and quality were about the same for couples whether gay, lesbian or straight. However, gay and lesbian couples were more likely to use humour in dealing with a disagreement and the humour was likely to be better received.
In another study, when people were asked what traits they considered most important in a partner, differences showed up by gender rather than by orientation. Men in general prioritised looks more than women did. Women in general prioritised honesty and humour more than men did. Whether they were gay or straight did not matter much.
2. Jokes will keep us together
So, it all went well at the party, but will it go the distance? Humour will be important, but that doesn’t mean you have to be the funniest person in the room. In fact, if you’re not funny, have no sense of humour and wouldn’t recognise a joke if it ran over you in a double-decker bus, don’t worry. You just need to find another misery guts to hook up with.
For most people, however, laughing and making each other laugh are central and works to maintain the relationship in many ways.
“There is some consensus that the primary value of humour in relationships is for promoting intimacy and connection,” according to Hall. “Limiting humour’s value to bonding, however, would diminish the diversity of ways in which it is used … between partners, which can offer clues as to why it promotes intimacy.
“These diverse ways include, but are not confined to, fun, affection and playfulness, coping, stress reduction and expressing attitudes.”
There is a likely evolutionary purpose to the whole thing, which is why we’re not the only animals that attempt to amuse each other. “Interpretations guided by theories of natural selection suggest that humour is advantageous for the survival of primates inasmuch as it enhances pair bonding, eases social interactions, increases group cohesion and engenders an approach response with other primates,” says Hall. “Bonding through constructive play is commonplace among many mammals, and laughter among primates signals playful intent.”
In short, humour is functional in a relationship – it helps people do some of the things we need to do.
Hall credits Israeli researcher Avner Ziv with doing some of the earliest work on this. Among other things, Ziv theorised that humour allowed you to express inappropriate or taboo subjects in a relationship, says Hall. “You could apologise, you could manage conflict. All of these things were occurring, and the humour was a vehicle.”
But in general, humour won’t work if both parties aren’t on the same page of the joke book. “There are probably lots of situations where one member of a couple tries to get something going and the other person isn’t playing along. You have to be open to playing around, to goofing off.”
This is the keeping-it-rolling aspect of joking, where two people take a gag and run with it. Hall speaks from experience: “I have very strong memories where my wife and I were joking around [and] we were both contributing to what was funny, and we kept it rolling. Some of those jokes I still remember to this day. If you’re never open to laughing, it doesn’t matter. You can be with the funniest comedian in the world, and they’re probably not very funny if you won’t let them be.”
Co-creation builds traditions and a relationship’s culture. “You and your partner can have hundreds of things to laugh about: memories, shows you saw together, shared inside things, mispronouncing a word, how you respond to things or the way that you make mistakes. Couples create an entire internal communication system … and when they create it together, that matters the most.”
What about cases where what the couple share is the lack of a sense of humour? Are they doomed? “The answer to that is tricky, because most scales that measure humour don’t find a lot of people who admit to saying they don’t have one.”
Such evidence as there is suggests that as long as both parties have the same humour profile they will probably be okay. Both humourless? Fine. A shared penchant for negative and aggressive humour? It’s great you found each other. The mean couple in the corner making fun of everyone else at the party? They’re probably rock solid.
Other research findings reported on by Hall include the way in which humour “enhances relationships by magnifying the enjoyment of shared interactions … humour is a potent anti-boredom device because of the pleasure of novelty and introduction of fun in the mundane.” It’s fun to have fun, you might say.
Shared humour reflects shared values and perspectives. You have to see things the same way in order to find the same thing funny, so finding out the other person shares your sense of humour is a good indication you will align in other areas.
Keith Weber contributed to a paper ominously titled Humorous Communication and Its Effectiveness in Coping With Interpersonal Transgressions, which looked at how practical it is to joke your way through a relationship sticky spot. He notes first up that relationships don’t break down when people start fighting, but “start to break down when you can’t come back from that fight … Coming back from the transgression has a lot more to do with the person who was transgressed against and the way that they deal with it.” If you’re the guilty party, joking about it isn’t going to help.
Although humour is an aid to communicating – sometimes – in cases of transgression, using humour can be interpreted as not taking the situation seriously.
If we’re not sure about the way our partner jokes, we become unsure about our relationship in general. “The most important variable seems to be not so much your perception of your own use of humour, but your perception of how your partner uses humour,” says Nathan Miczo, professor of communication at Western Illinois University. “So, if my partner uses positive humour, I’m more certain about the relationship. And that makes me more satisfied. If they use negative forms of humour, I’m less certain about the relationship, and I’m less happy with it.”
All these complicated – and, admittedly, not very funny – findings lead to the question: why does a non-rational, ambiguous form of communication prove so versatile in managing relationships? Why do we use it the way we do?
Miczo doesn’t claim to know, but he has an intriguing theory: “I think we overvalue rationality and efficiency, especially culturally. There’s survival skills that human beings need – hunting and so on – but for a creature that spends so much of its time around its fellows, people need close relationships, and without those, you see dysfunction. That means that one of the most important skills we need to have is being able to enjoy being around others, and I think humour, playfulness and those types of things are critical for sustaining that enjoyment.”
3. Jokes will tear us apart
And then, one day, one of you wakes up, looks at the other and thinks: “I just don’t find you funny anymore.” And sooner or later, it’s officially over.
What has it taken to get to this point? How much can the practice of humour be implicated in a break-up?
Although any single joke would be unlikely to end relationships that weren’t already at death’s door, certain kinds of jokes can do them a nasty injury.
Hall quotes Ziv again: “He said that people use aggressive humour to diminish the other person, but also to go, ‘It was just a joke.’ So it was a veiled attack. People who tend to find aggressive humour very funny also use it in their relationships to take their partner down a notch. It has all the tools of creating distance with a partner, and none of the ways of bringing someone closer to you. It’s really destructive.”
Miczo: “As people start to potentially become dissatisfied with their relationship, they may start wanting to be critical or contemptuous of their partners.” Humour allows for confusion and dissimulation here. “People need to make it clear when they’re trying to be humorous. Some people are better at it than others. And sometimes people say, ‘Oh, I was just kidding.’ But a lot of times nobody’s fooled by that.”
Humour, as well as being an aid to communication, can also be used to block it. It is a great way to avoid a topic. When people do this, says Miczo, it is probably an indicator of unhappiness in the relationship.
“They don’t want to get into issues with their partner, but they can’t avoid making some kind of response.” So they use humour. “The way in which [a topic is] avoided matters in relation to how satisfied you are with your partner. Are you doing it because you’re unhappy, and you don’t want to bother?” Starting to pull back from a partner in this way is a classic stage on winding down a relationship.
Hall says that self-deprecating humour can also damage a relationship. “One of my projects was on couples’ embarrassment and humour styles and it found that self-defeating [self-deprecating] humour was almost as embarrassing to the partner as aggressive humour, which was kind of surprising.” The explanation seems to be that when someone puts themself down in front of others and their partner, it implies the partner has made a bad relationship choice.
“Both parties are responsible for protecting the ‘team face’. When you’re [self-deprecating], you diminish the couple, not just yourself.”
Keith Weber says jokes have an important role in establishing what he calls the power differential. “If you’re making jokes about the other person, that’s undermining what’s supposed to be an equal relationship.
“That power differential changes in every dynamic. If we’re out to dinner with my wife’s friends and my wife makes a negative joke about me, that’s not funny, because I’m already in the power-down position. There’s a lot of different aspects to it. And that’s why I always tell my students: when in doubt, don’t even tell the joke.”
But do buy a card and some flowers. Seriously.
Swipe left
If humour is so important in relationships, why isn’t there a dating app for it? There nearly was, and Professor Jeffrey Hall was part of it.
“In the last year and a half, I was part of a start-up called Smile,” says Hall. “It was a dating app to match people based on their humour style. The CEO contacted me years before because she had found my research, and I advised the company as it got started.”
Founded by software engineer Melissa Mullen, the app would let users scroll through and react to funny content to create a humour profile, which it then matched to people with the same profile. It also had a blind date aspect, in that it didn’t let you see the prospective date until a few steps into the process.
However, success often requires a whole lot of different things to go right at once, and in this case, they didn’t quite do that. “It was going really well. And then they couldn’t keep up with the technology and the money they had and the user base. [For a project to succeed] there’s this magic sauce of enough people with enough money in your company and enough people to do the work to keep it running, and they couldn’t do it. But it was a blast to work with them.”
They’re a funny couple
She is a busy, successful comedian. He is director of integrated services at a kaupapa Māori mental health NGO. And yet, somehow it works. Justine Smith and Dan Crozier have been married since 2015 and have a relationship story that is a textbook reflection of everything the research shows about how humour works – or doesn’t – in relationships.
“We were friends for quite a while before we got together,” says Smith, who used to perform at a bar where Crozier worked. “We always had huge laughs. I always thought Dan was really funny.” And vice versa: “If I can make Dan laugh, I just feel so good about myself.”
Which is just as well, because people expect it: “People say it all the time,” reports Crozier. “‘Oh my god, you live with a comedian. You must laugh all the time?’ And the answer is, yes, we do. I don’t know if other couples laugh as much as we do.”
Common topics of humour include other couples, especially those who take themselves too seriously. “This is going to sound really mean,” says Smith, “but we laugh at other people a lot.”
This reflects the research finding that it’s okay to indulge in humour that’s a bit mean if that’s something you share. If one person is of a hellishly satirical bent and the other finds amusement in whimsical wordplay, that can be a problem.
Humour for Crozier and Smith is part of the relationship toolkit. “If one or the other is feeling a bit down, we use humour to kind of lift each other’s spirits a little bit,” says Crozier.
Unless you’re the Joker, the connection between the fields of humour and mental health can be a very positive one.
“The cliché when we first started getting together was that all kinds of comedians have a little bit of mental health issues,” says Crozier. “That would be a thing that people would bring up.”
Smith says it’s something she’s always fought back over. “I grew up with a mum who had quite bad depression. I don’t have depression. It’s a serious label to chuck at a group.”
But even for such a thoughtful, empathetic pair, there must be times when one makes a joke that the other doesn’t like, which can be a danger signal for relationships?
“Just before we were married, I would tend to make fun of Dan a little bit with my girl mates when he was there. And I didn’t really think anything of it. And then one day, after people left, Dan went, ‘It makes me feel a bit shit when you do that,’ and I felt really bad. And hopefully I’ve never done that again. Punching down in comedy is the worst, and punching down on your husband … So I nipped that in the bud pretty quickly, because we’re a team and teams don’t do that.”
More insights into relationships, and presumably pets, can be expected in Smith’s solo show, Actually I’m a Cat Person, at this year’s NZ International Comedy Festival in May.