Five Ways to Laugh Together and Improve Your Relationship
Every year, Utrecht hosts an International Comedy Festival; last year, Julia and I discovered one of our new favorite comedians:
Dry, sardonic sense of humor. Random engagement with the audience. The absurdity of a grown man carrying a keyboard around his neck.
We laughed for days about Huge Davies, and include him with Trevor Noah, Kate McKinnon, Mohanad Elshieky, and Hari Kondabolu as our favorite comedians.
Who are people who make you laugh? Please leave your favorite funny people in the comment section:
When we think about healthy relationships, it’s important to distinguish between two terms:
Humor: The production and demonstration of funny content.
Laughter: The physiological process of expressing joy, playfulness, and satisfaction.
There’s quite a bit of overlap between the two ideas. For instance, I’ve watched Huge Davies’ comedy special The Carpark multiple times and I gutturally laugh every time.
However, humor has a performative effect to it. Professional comedy makes this dynamic clear. Huge Davies is on a stage, performing his bit, and I am a passive participant in the audience, even while I’m actively laughing my ass off from the comfort of my chair.
Whenever you or someone you know tells a funny story, they proverbially speaking have the microphone, and the other people in the interaction are listening and engaging. In an everyday interaction, each person plays these roles for a much shorter time than if I were to attend a comedy show; if I’m listening to someone tell a joke or funny anecdote, I have the capacity to respond, to compliment the joke, or to tell my own related anecdote.
Researchers have explored how humor has a net positive value in ongoing relationships. For instance, in 2006, Eric Bressler, professor of psychology at Westfield State, and colleagues suggested that women are attracted to men who make them laugh, and men are more likely to be attracted to women who laugh at their jokes. Last year, Kenneth Tan, professor of psychology at Singapore Management University, and his colleagues explored how relationship quality impacts how a person might perceive humor in a relationship; the higher the relationship quality the day before, the more likely a person was to laugh.
But research on humor, such as the two studies I alluded to, commonly focuses on the production of the individual. And while perhaps humor production can lead to a positive relational result, that doesn’t necessarily tell us how relationships work.
For one thing, there are plenty of times where humor can have a negative impact on a relationship, such as when humor puts down another person or group of people, deflects attention from an important conversation, or is rooted in contempt.
For another thing, this trend suggests that relational success is based on the personality traits and preferences of an individual, rather than how effectively two people work together to solve the daily challenges of life. While personality traits are certainly a factor for assessing successful relationships, the ways that two people communicate are much better markers for determining relational health.
Ten years ago, Dr. Laura Kurtz and Dr. Sara Algoe, professors of psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explored what are the dynamics that happen when couples laugh together, and how does that equate to a sense of relationship satisfaction, passion, and commitment. They asked 77 couples to have a 90 minute conversation, in which they utilized technology that assessed for facial expressions, verbal content, and vocal intonations. The technology specifically assessed for moments of shared laughter, unshared laughter, and interactions that followed and preceded the moments of laughter. They also gave couples a variety of questionnaires that assessed for the quality, passion, and commitment to the relationship.
They published the following results in the article “Putting Laughter in Context: Shared Laughter as Behavioral Indicator of Relational Wellbeing”, in the December, 2015 issue of Personal Relationships:
For starters, over the course of a 90 minute interaction, couples averaged 3.5 shared laughs together.
There’s are two important distinctions to make here:
Shared laughter and unshared laughter.
Ambiguous unshared laughter and “pure” unshared laughter (where a person’s entire body is involved in a more prolonged sense of laughter).
One of the most interesting parts of this research is that shared laughter, as an isolated experience, was positively associated with relationship satisfaction, passion, and commitment for men, but not as much for women. (All couples assessed were straight couples.) Likewise, men connected a higher volume of unshared laughter with lower levels of commitment, while unshared laughter had minimal effects on the impact of commitment, satisfaction, or passion for women. Kurtz and Algoe also note that very few of their research participants made any sorts of gender-based, race-based, or otherwise insensitive types of humor, which may be different with a different research sample.
Kurtz and Algoe surmise:
“Shared laughter may therefore serve as a stronger symbol of understanding and validation for men than for women—a signal that their partner “gets” them” (p. 587).
However, when shared laughter is connected with unshared laughter, all participants experienced higher levels of relationship satisfaction, passion, and commitment.
And that brings us to the second distinction. Ambiguous unshared laughter, which could come as the result of a misunderstanding, an insensitive comment, or navigating an anxious moment with laughter, led to less reported closeness and commitment, especially for men who observed their female partners engaging in ambiguous unshared laughter. On the other hand, experiences of pure unshared laughter, especially for couples who had higher experiences of shared laughter, were associated with higher experiences of passion and commitment.
So how can this research about shared laughter help us have more effective relationships?
Kurtz and Algoe name five “indicators of shared amusement”.
Good natured teasing. The “good natured” part of that is especially important. It’s important for couples to understand what their partners are willing to be teased about and what they aren’t, as well as how much and how long teasing can exist before the teasing loses its humor. As mentioned earlier, humor that puts another person down or is rooted in contempt or “gotcha” moments tends to backfire.
Wit and silliness. I love Dictionary.com’s definition of wit: “The keen perception (italics are mine) and cleverly apt expression of those connections between ideas that awaken amusement and pleasure.” Laughter requires a strong sense of presence, attention to details, and improvisation, characteristics that are important in many elements of connection. Silliness also refers to the ability to not take yourself to serious, to take risks and put yourself out there, and to appreciate the absurd, such as a droll grown man wearing a keyboard (see Youtube clip above).
Private jokes. What are the funny stories that you keep coming back to? What shorthand do you use to describe those stories? What are forms of media that you riff on? (Most of my intentional humor is stolen from Friends interactions.) One of the most common ways that shared laughter happens is through well-timed inside jokes, which represent a couple’s shared experience, preferences, and language.
Fun and exaggeration. Laughter and play are highly interconnected; play, sadly, is something that many folks stop doing during and after adolescence. When was the last time that you and your partner played on a playground? How often do you and your partner dance, tickle, and flirt with each other?
Nervous giggling. It’s important to note that there’s a pretty thin line between nervous giggling and ambiguous unshared laughter, particularly if the nervous giggling is a way to mitigate conflict or addressing difficult situations. But let’s say that nervous giggling happens in response to a couple both engaging with a taboo topic, like an elicit kiss or touch in public or one partner making a comment they typically wouldn’t make. In these cases of shared laughter, nervous giggling can be the window to an erotic experience.
This weekend, pay attention to the ways that you and your partner engage in each of these five things. How do these experiences get initiated? Does the humor of one person unlock these events, or do other characteristics, such as openness, creativity, or spontaneity, unlock the existence of these experiences? Let us know what you learn in the comments!
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia