The importance of humor in communication and its effects

When we speak to a person or an audience, the communication process in which we engage is far from being a simple exchange of data and textual information, which can be reduced to words and numbers.

It is also an encounter between two or more beings with the capacity to feel emotions, and that determines how we express ourselves and how we interpret what others say. And precisely for this reason, humor is a key element in our way of communicating. Let's see how humor influences us when interacting with others and socializing in general.

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What is humor?

Humor is a set of psychological and social processes that leads us to interpret information with an emphasis on the comic side of what surrounds us (or even ourselves).

From an evolutionary perspective, humor is considered is strongly linked to a series of innate predispositions to laughter. This last phenomenon, the act of laughing, is a universal characteristic of the human being; the members of all societies, tribes and ethnic groups laugh, although the sense of humor that gives rise to it has many variations and depends a lot on each culture.

Why is it that practically everyone has the ability to laugh spontaneously and not deliberately? It is hypothesized that laughter is part of a psychobiological mechanism that allows us to communicate when we do things with an apparent and literal purpose, and when we are just “playing”; this would help lead to social learning situations. In fact, phenomena homologous to human laughter exist in animal species as diverse as killer whales, certain species of parrot and at least part of canids, among others. However, not all of these animals "laugh" through vocalizations.

Thus, humor is a derivation of this mechanism that has evolved to improve our ability to survive, until giving rise to a predisposition that allows us to create very diverse cultural products and enjoy life in new ways, among other things.

However, as we will see, humor does not only serve to experience immediate pleasure or to transcend through forms of artistic expression. It is also essential to communicate with others in a spoken or written way; let's see why.

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Why humor is essential in communication

Let's see what role humor plays in any communication process, whether face-to-face or in writing.

1. Can be used to show a spirit of harmony

The genuine laugh produced by humor is a pleasant experience, and that is why, when someone makes a joke or joke that does not serve to ridicule the interlocutor, It is implied that you intend to maintain a good relationship with this. It is a subtle and indirect way of bringing positions closer through these kinds of gifts.

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2. Helps to relativize the importance of emotionally painful situations

It has been shown that, in many cases, humor serves to reinterpret the experiences and memories that caused us emotional pain, causing us to begin to accept these events as a reality that does not always have to be morally judged or valued.

That is, humor can serve not only to deny that it has happened that it hurt us, but to accept that it happened, but that it does not always have to be seen as a drama. This is a process similar to that of emotional labeling, in which putting words to what makes us feel bad helps us overcome it.

What's more, these processes can lead to improvements both individually and collectivelyas these jokes can involve a wider audience.

In short, humor helps prevent us from making topics that we must tackle if we want to overcome them become taboo, and by doing so, we enrich the diversity of ways in which we can interpret these issues, rather than just having a purely "tragic" view of them facts.

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3. Allows you to create communication contexts

The humor allows us in seconds to make clear the more or less informal nature of a communicative context. This helps let others know how they can behave and what to expect from an encounter.

For example, the act of making a joke in a work meeting, while not completely denying the seriousness of the context, gives you nuances, noting that in that organization or company other human facets that go beyond the professional are taken into account; For this reason, the values ​​of the company and its philosophy of work and organization can be intuited if this is part of the normality in this class of events. In such cases, humor provides information about the "rules of the game" of a group or team.

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