Developing a Sense of Humor - Lessons Learned Outside of School

I'm 65.  I wonder how many people who are approximately my age can recall the full commercials from the little bits reproduced here.

• I can't believe I ate the whole thing.  You ate it, Ralph.
• The next time you tell me the good news, call me up on the phone.
• No dice Nevada.  (This one is for folks who grew up in NYC.) 

It's 50 years or so after these commercials aired on TV.   If you can recall the full commercials, it might be interesting to ask why that is.  Was it purely that you saw them frequently?  Or was it something about the message itself?

My contention is that it was the latter.  The messages have comedic elements.  That's what makes them memorable, sometimes as memorable as the shows we watched, many of which also had comedic elements.  The popular culture seemed to embrace comedy.

Here's a different type of example.  Name the comedian and come up with the punchline.

• Doctor, doctor.  It hurts when I go like that.
• It was cold in New York, Ed.  How cold was it, Johnny?
• Show me a mule who dropped out of school....

If we remembered these lines soon after we heard them, did we take to repeating them to our friends?  Or did our friends repeat them to us?  I'm asking because I'm trying to understand how my own sense of humor developed, whether that was inevitable or if it required intentionality, mainly by my dad, to cultivate it.

As an adult, my sense of humor manifests mainly in a different way than by telling canned jokes, though I do that with some frequency as well.  Instead, it is mostly situational humor that comes from the context of the conversation, a pun or some other silliness that is a reaction to what the speaker has said.  It requires a kind of listening coupled with some bit of improvisation.   I also do this a fair amount in writing, quick hitter items that are aimed at getting a chuckle from the reader.  There is some compulsion on my part to produce those things.  And that is coupled with some minimal skill needed to evoke the right sort of reaction.  When done in Facebook, if it produces the HaHa response in a few friends, then it's an indicator the post hit the mark.

Chatting with a friend yesterday, she indicated that she had a good sense of humor, and attributed the cause to her dad who was pretty funny.  I can't really say for sure, but I'm under the impression that some people didn't have funny dads when they grew up.  Could their sense of humor develop nonetheless?  And, if so, why did it happen?  Having lived in Champaign, Illinois now for 40 years, I associate my sense of humor with Reform Judaism, at least as how that played out in New York City when I was a kid. When I do Zoom calls now with my siblings, it is evident in all of us, spouses and offspring too.  I do wonder how widespread it is outside the family and how one might determine that.

When I was still working, I developed some reputation for making wisecracks and for being creative.  Within the CIC Learning Technology Group, while all the members were highly competent and quite talented, in these areas I dare say that those who were also faculty members tended toward making the jokes more and, within that small sample, each of us were male.  I do think the world looks different for an educational technologist who used to be a full time faculty member versus one who is a career educational technologist, but the NYC versus Midwest thing might have prevailed as well.   I was the only one in that cell among all the group members.  It's probably not good social science to develop a hypothesis from a sample where n = 1.  Yet fairly frequently I generalize from my own experience, which begs the question, are situational humor and creativity in other things related?

Situational humor is itself a reaction to what others have said and, if in a video call, how they appear when they said it.  It requires taking some risk in the telling, because the line might fall flat.  (My siblings have recently taken to rating the spontaneous line, most of which get a low rating.  Batting average matters here.)  Beyond that, it requires some intuition about how the others will react.  In my opinion, that intuition is similar if not identical to the intuition one needs to demonstrate empathy to others.  I would guess that a sense of humor and empathy are two sides of the same coin.

Not having lived through it, I don't have a real understanding for why some people don't develop a good sense of humor, but that it happens I have no doubt.  As a professor, I have to say it's hard to detect this in students, who may be quite circumspect in the classroom but otherwise joke around with their friends a lot.  It would be be easier to determine this if the kids already let their guard down (with the professor absent) and then see how things play out.  Yet even then, some who are initially shy may take a longer time to warm up.  That doesn't mean their sense of humor is entirely absent.  But it likely means that they don't get into a playful mode as frequently as others do.

At issue is whether the kid feels implicitly that the sense of humor is something to cultivate.  I am ignorant of contemporary culture and if it provides sufficient cues on this score.  Ten to fifteen years ago, when I became aware that many students got their news from watching the Daily Show, apart from the lack of literacy that implied, I wondered if students were becoming too sarcastic in their views.  To me, sarcasm may be part of a sense of humor but it is far from a complete arsenal.

While I'm writing this post, I also have open in my browser this opinion piece on the mental health crisis engendered by the pandemic (and not just among college students).  Sarcasm is too easy a tone to embrace nowadays and under the circumstances I fear it contributes to a decline in mental health.  Other sorts of humor, however, might serve as a good tonic for lifting the mood and helping the person to become more upbeat.  If that's true, one would want to know whether those other types of humor are readily available to all and, if not, how they might be made available.

I haven't gotten too far in trying to answer that question, but I have a feeling that there is a developmental curve one must go through to have a mature sense of humor.  Telling canned jokes comes earlier.  Situational humor doesn't happen until the canned jokes part gets mastered.  If that's right, how about a non-credit online course available to one and all about canned jokes.  That might be a start.

Q: How many ears does Captain Kirk have?
A: Three, the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.