Humor in Corporate Work Place Interactions: It\u27s Not What You Can Do for Humor, but What Humor Can Do for You

This review examines the role of humor in work place interactions through the social constructionist perspective (Hatch 1997). That is, this review explores the ways in which people construct their interactions through humor, and the effects that has on their performance in the work place. However, according to Robinson, “any attempt to analyze humor risks taking all the fun out of the subject,” but this review is going to do just that (2001:123). Humor is often defined as being in the eye of the beholder. However, there are a few theories as to what constitutes humor. Humor is generally known as a verbal or written incongruity, or inconsistency with a societal norm, and communicated with the intention of being amusing (O’Quin 1981). This review focuses on that humor which is intended to be humorous, regardless of the outcome. Humor is a diverse and complex creature that has been scrutinized by some of the most learned scholars over the years, as shown in this review, which has sources dating back to 1951. The wealth of knowledge gathered on humor over the years shows that humor can be used in just about any way imaginable. Humor can be used to alienate people (Emerson 1969; Fine and De Soucey 2005; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001; Stephenson 1951), to create conflict (Hatch 1997; Stephenson 1951), to ease conflict (Rose 2007; Romero and Cruthirds 2006; Stephenson 1951), to broach taboo topics (Emerson 1969; Sanford and Elder 1984; Stephenson 1951), or even to explore one’s own identity (Rose 2007; Sanford and Elder 1984). This review will briefly touch on all of these things, but the main focus of this review is the use of humor in the workplace, and how it is used to the benefit of the company and its employees. The review explores how and why humor builds group cohesion, facilitates communication, relieves stress, and (spark) sparks creativity (Romero and Cruthirds 2006; Romero and Pescosolido 2008). Managers and employees who use humor in a productive manner can create an atmosphere that stimulates many desirable aspects of the corporate workplace. However, humor is not entirely a bag full of chuckles, as there are some serious implications that are associated with humor (Emerson 1969). Humor can be used in a variety of unpleasant ways(;), both intentionally and unintentionally, such as to create boundaries between people, and can cause hurt feelings. This is important because it is entirely counterproductive to humor that enhances work place productivity. Productivity in the work place is essential, especially to managers, as this generation of employees increasingly expect work to be fun (Romero and Pescosolido 2008). This is highly relevant in this day and age, as employers must look for innovative ways to motivate their employees

11. Objectively Funny Jokes: Comedy’s El Dorado or a Simple MacGuffin?

Could there ever be an objectively funny joke or bit of humor? With the popularity of certain forms of humor, with the appearance of puns as consistent stages in the development of humor in children, this seems a reasonable query. Further, give recent developments in humor theory, and depending on what stance you take on what is essential to the funny or humorous your answer could be yes or no. [excerpt

La intervención humor en la interacción enfermero-paciente

Objective: To describe the factors influencing the use of humor in nursing care, its applicability and benefits. Method: A scoping review was performed using the Arksey and O’Mally methodology. A search for articles published between 2008 and 2018 was performed using the platforms EBSCO Host, Virtual Health Library and Google Scholar. Results: From the initial 465 articles found, 17 were included for final revision. Data allowed to retrieve information on humor definition; its applicability as a nursing intervention; humor as a tool to improve nurse-patient communication and relationship; influence factors; type of humor interventions; humor benefits in health care context and; limitations and precautions of humor intervention. Conclusion: The use of humor promotes both communication and human interaction; it promotes well-being; helps deal/cope with difficult and unpleasant situations, reduces tension, discomfort and stress; and strengthens the immune system. This intervention should be used with caution

GAMBARAN SENSE OF HUMOR PADA MAHASISWA BARU YANG MERANTAU

Banyak mahasiswa baru setiap tahun melakukan perjalanan jauh dari daerah asal mereka untuk kuliah ke perguruan tinggi. Hal ini akan menimbulkan masalah dalam kehidupan mahasiswa yang merantau. Mahasiswa baru yang merantau dapat menggunakan humor sebagai mekanisme koping untuk membantu mereka melewati situasi sulit. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menggambarkan bagaimana sense of humor mahasiswa merantau berkembang dan berubah seiring waktu. Pendekatan kuantitatif dalam penelitian ini mempunyai orientasi deskriptif. Sebanyak 314 mahasiswa yang masuk disurvei secara isidental sampling. Skala yang digynkaan adalah Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale (MSHS). Pada peneitian ini ditemukan hasil bahwa mahasiswa baru yang merantau di Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang memiliki Sense of Humor yang tinggi. Artinya rata-rata mahasiswa baru yang merantau di Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang memiliki kemampuan merasakan sebuah humor atau Sense of Humor yang baik. sehingga, diharapkan dengan adanya Sense of Humor yang bagus dan efektif maka perilaku dalam bersosialisasi mahasiswa baru yang merantau di lingkungan yang baru lebih mudah dilakukan

A Preliminary Investigation into the Use of Humor in Sport Psychology Practice

‘Creative efforts’, such as the use of humor,have been found to be beneficial to the nurse-patient, teacher-student , and psychologist-patient alliance. Potentially humoruse might benefit the working alliance in applied sport psychology, yet to datethere is limited research. Sportpsychology consultants (n = 55) completedan online survey that explored humor use within their practice. Statisticalanalyses revealed most participants used humor for adaptive purposes such as tofacilitate the working alliance, reinforce knowledge, and create healthylearning environments. Therefore, possible client change is likely to befacilitated by practitioners’ personal qualities and skills such as humor useand humor style. Recommendations are made for sport psychology practitioners inrelation to humor use and further research.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted Despite Making Serious Advances"

Humor is an essential human trait. Efforts to understand humor have called out links between humor and the foundations of cognition, as well as the importance of humor in social engagement. As such, it is a promising and important subject of study, with relevance for artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Previous computational work on humor has mostly operated at a coarse level of granularity, e.g., predicting whether an entire sentence, paragraph, document, etc., is humorous. As a step toward deep understanding of humor, we seek fine-grained models of attributes that make a given text humorous. Starting from the observation that satirical news headlines tend to resemble serious news headlines, we build and analyze a corpus of satirical headlines paired with nearly identical but serious headlines. The corpus is constructed via Unfun.me, an online game that incentivizes players to make minimal edits to satirical headlines with the goal of making other players believe the results are serious headlines. The edit operations used to successfully remove humor pinpoint the words and concepts that play a key role in making the original, satirical headline funny. Our analysis reveals that the humor tends to reside toward the end of headlines, and primarily in noun phrases, and that most satirical headlines follow a certain logical pattern, which we term false analogy. Overall, this paper deepens our understanding of the syntactic and semantic structure of satirical news headlines and provides insights for building humor-producing systems.Comment: Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 201

Laughing Out Loud: Humor Usage in Young Childhood Classrooms

The purpose of this honors thesis is to document the types of humorous occurrences among 2-3-yearold children and then to describe the relationship between children’s humor during circle time and teacher-child interactions, noting how teachers respond to these humorous occurrences. I conducted my observations at the Child Study Development Center in the Nursery II classroom, which included one head teacher and 19 children. I audiotaped and photographed my observations and took notes on two tables. One table included recording linguistic humor and non-linguistic humor occurrences, or humor involving words and humor involving movement, and the other table included teacher responses to humorous occurrences (Craig-Unkefer & Fitzgerald, 2008). My findings show that the majority of humorous occurrences stem from children’s incongruent body movements and group discussion during story time. Furthermore, when the teacher extends or scaffolds a humorous occurrence, there is whole-group discussion with attentive listening from children. When a teacher rejects or ignores humor, the humor either stops or the behavior is labeled as inappropriate by the teacher and the children are redirected to what is expected of them. I discuss why humor in the classroom is important for educators to use to enhance young children’s learning

05. Aesthetics, Humor, and Virtue: Reflections on Richards and the Good Life

In A Philosopher Looks at the Sense of Humor, Richard C. Richards discusses how one\u27s appreciation of and ability to create incongruities is a necessary condition for developing a sense of humor. One\u27s sense of humor, according to Richards, can be a component of happiness. In this paper, I will build on Richards\u27s concept of the sense of humor. I will argue that Richards account is consistent with an Aristotelian picture of happiness as holistic well-being. Specifically, I will suggest that the attitude underlying the aesthetic and/or the humorous is a kind of pro-attitude that must be cultivated (i.e., one is not simply born with a developed sense of humor). I argue that a sense of humor, as an Aristotelian virtue, is consistent with Richards’s developmental account of a sense of humor. However, I am making a stronger claim than Richards; I will argue that the sense of humor is necessary for happiness. In this way, I am filling out Richards’s account of the role one\u27s sense of humor plays in one\u27s long-term happiness. Since a good Aristotelian will offer examples to elucidate the intermediate position between the extremes, I offer an analysis of Richards own writings and behavior as exemplifying an excellent sense of humor, one that has served as a model for others to emulate the kind of play necessary to transform a simple incongruity into the stuff of humor . [excerpt

It’s the way he tells them (and who is listening):men’s dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men

While much research has explored humorous exchange in relation to mate choice, recent perspectives have emphasized the importance of humor for monitoring interest within social partnerships more generally. Indeed, given that similarity is thought to be important in the maintenance of social partnerships, we may expect humor appreciation to vary according to the degree of similarity between humor producers and recipients. In the current study we report evidence for such variation that is specific to men’s judgments of other men’s humor. Here we manipulated voice pitch in a set of ‘one-liner’ jokes to create low-pitched and high-pitched versions of men and women telling jokes. A composite measure of men’s own dominance was positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by other men with lowered voice pitch (a vocal cue to dominance). A follow-up study demonstrated that self-reported dominance was positively related to men’s choice of low-pitch men as friends when judging humorous audio clips but not when judging neutral control audio clips, suggesting that humor may be important in mediating the effect of dominance on friendship choice. These studies indicate systematic variation in humor appreciation related to friendship choices which may function to promote cohesion within male partnerships based on status

The Role of Coping Humour in the Physical and Mental Health of Older Adults

Objectives - This study examined the associations among coping humor, other personal/social factors, and the health status of community-dwelling older adults. Method - Survey questionnaires were completed with 73 community dwelling older adults. Included were measures of coping humor, spirituality, self-efficacy, social support and physical and mental health status. Results - Correlations across all variables showed coping humor to be significantly associated with social support, self-efficacy, depression, and anxiety. Forward stepwise regression analyses showed that coping humor and self-efficacy contributed to outcome variance in measures of mental health status. Contrary to expectation, neither social support nor spirituality contributed to the total outcome variance on any of the dependant measures. Conclusion - The importance of spirituality, self-efficacy and social support in determining the quality of life of older adults is well supported in the literature. Coping humor as a mechanism for managing the inevitable health stresses of aging has received less attention. This study shows that coping humor and self efficacy are important factors for explaining health status in older adults. Correlations among coping humor, self efficacy, and social support suggest that a sense of humor may play an important role in reinforcing self-efficacious approaches to the management of health issues.coping humor, aging, health status