What Your Humor Reveals About Your Personality, According to Experts
There are two kinds of women: “those who are young and pretty, and those who still find me good,” said Sacha Guitry. Perhaps you are, like him, a fan of self-deprecation. If so, it is rather positive, as underlined by a study from the University of Granada (Spain), published in 2018 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The ability to self-deprecate would be a sign of psychological well-being. As beneficial for morale as sociability.
« Self-deprecation reveals good self-esteemconfirms Marie-France Patti, psychologist and author of Humor, a challenge to certainties (InPress, 2017). It demonstrates that we have mourned the child idealized by our parents, who is only an inaccessible projection, and that we accept ourselves as we are. A very popular practice among comedians, moreover, who portray their own difficulties and failings. Self-deprecation also has a social dimension: it makes people sympathetic. Considered as an expression of humility and lucidity towards oneself, it is the form of humor most valued by society,” assures Marie Anaut, psychologist and author of Humor between laughter and tears, trauma and resilience (Odile Jacob, 2014).
It highlights our true nature
Eminently personal, our sense of humor reveals our personality, our way of seeing life : he is a kind of language that we share with somebut not with all. The more cerebral are, for example, fond of puns or “English” humor, which flirts with the limits of logic and pushes reasoning to the point of absurdity. Others have kept their childish soul and love the much more visual “situation comedy” (falls, misunderstandings, grimaces, etc.).
Like a child laughing at a clown or a puppet show, we then laugh with relief and thereby release our aggression. “Seeing someone fall in the street very often triggers laughter,” continues Marie-France Patti. The spectator identifies with the one who falls and rejoices at not being in his place. »
What our favorite type of humor says about us
According to a recent OnePoll survey for Babbel, 18-29 year olds are more won over by situational and observational humorwhile their elders (41-50 year olds) prefer black humor. High IQ sign according to researchers at the Medical University of Vienna (Revue Cognitive Processing, 2022).
The taste for jokes touching on tragic and taboo themes (death, illness, disability, etc.) would therefore increase with age, revealing a certain anxiety about death which increases the closer we get to it. . “As the Belgian poet Achille Chavée said, black humor is the politeness of despair. A sort of challenge to death, it also constantly reminds us of its proximity: it represents a way of warding off a certain pessimism about life and about humans,” analyzes Marie-France Patti.
Humor as a vector of social bonds
Because we rarely laugh alone, because we create bonds with others, humor also speaks to us of belonging. It is not the same depending on the times, cultures, social groups… “It not only expresses where we come from, it also allows us to integrate into a group, to build our identity”, assures sociologist Laure Flandrin, who devoted her doctoral thesis to it (Le Rire, investigation into the most socialized of all our emotions, La Découverte, 2021).
She says: “I interviewed a 17-year-old from the suburbs. He had begun to appreciate the comedian Dieudonné, to laugh at the Jews, even though nothing in his surroundings predisposed him to it. Adhering to this style of humor, giving himself targets for laughter allowed him to overcome unpleasant experiences of social life (racism, integration difficulties for children of immigrants, etc.), to feel like he belonged to a community different from the one in which he was born. »
He protects us from certain suffering
People that you like to make fun of — vegans, feminists, the powerful of this world… — probably say a lot about your beliefsyour way of life or your story… If you have a weakness for ribald jokes or provocative readings (Fluide Glacial, Charlie Hebdo…), perhaps for you they are a way of freeing yourself from the weight of morality, to distance ourselves from an education that is too strict, too religious…
Laure Flandrin continues: “I also met a woman who felt like she had missed out on her life: she would have liked to be a writer, which, in her time, in her environment, was rarely done. Her predilection for the humor of Jane Austen, featuring slightly ridiculous young women with literary pretensions similar to those she had had, was a way of transforming her bitterness into laughter, of suffering less from her life. » Formidable psychic resource, humor is sometimes a factor of resilience : it helps us to accept ourselves better, to see our life differently. A defense mechanism against the suffering imposed by reality, it informs us about what hinders and hurts us. In the article “An investigation into laughter”, published in the journal Annals, history, social sciences n° 31997, didn’t Jacques Le Goff, historian, write: “Tell me what you’re laughing at, and I’ll tell you who you are”?