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A person who jokes all the time. I am a clown, or why am I no longer funny

If you ask a person if he has a good sense of humor, then most likely you will hear a positive answer that will not be so easy to challenge. The fact is that the ability to joke and perceive jokes individually, for the same reason, a great joke for one will seem miserable and obscene to another, and both will be right in their own way. Of course, there are unbearable bores who can only laugh at someone else's failure. Fortunately, they are a minority, so we will not focus on them.

Sigmund Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a joke is not always just a joke." He implied that there are several different types of sense of humor and that they are related to our personality.

In 2003, psychology researcher Rod Martin conducted a survey that revealed four types of sense of humor:

Affiliative
self-destructive
optimistic
Aggressive

1. Affiliative sense of humor

It is common for people who like to tell jokes and funny stories without offending other people. Let's call it humor for the sake of humor. As a rule, people with an affiliative sense of humor use it to strengthen social bonds, and all their attempts to joke come from a desire to establish communication with other people.

Who is joking like this?
Usually people who prefer to joke in this manner are harmonious and social personalities who attach great importance to their relationships and friendships. They are emotionally stable, able to establish close bonds with other people, but do not think that such good people do not have a core. They are characterized by such qualities as stress resistance and sociability, given unique adaptive skills.

2. Self-destructive sense of humor

This type of humor occurs when people make fun of their shortcomings in order to make others laugh. As a rule, we can joke in this way only when surrounded by friends, or speaking in front of a large audience, where the goal is to amuse the masses. Usually it's stand-up.

Who is joking like this?
Those who choose this sense of humor as their signature style tend to be gullible people. They are able to form close social bonds. At the same time, these individuals tend to become depressed for any reason. In addition, they show signs of neurotic behavior, lack of self-confidence - this is the reason that they try to joke with themselves, thereby receiving the approval of others.

3. An optimistic sense of humor

This type of humor is characteristic of those people who are always in a good mood. Even if Kim Jong Un pushes the red button and chaos reigns in the world, these guys will find a positive side in this. They always strive to see the good in everything, and their jokes are aimed at raising everyone's mood.

Who is joking like this?
As a rule, these people are very adaptable and able to cope with almost any changes in the world. They can laugh both at themselves and at the events of the surrounding reality, for this reason they cope with stress very easily. Such people have very high self-esteem and try to be optimistic in life. Despite self-irony, they respect themselves too much to stoop to self-deprecating humor, and clearly understand the boundaries of what is permitted. Perhaps, of all types, they understand the essence of humor best of all and use it to deal with stress.

4. Aggressive sense of humor

An aggressive sense of humor, in other words, black humor, is characterized by ridiculing the shortcomings of other people, exposing their weaknesses, it is characterized by sarcasm. People who prefer to manipulate and control others often use black humor.

Who is joking like this?
Usually men are endowed with this sense of humor, in rare cases - women. People who prefer to joke in this way, like to criticize, while hiding behind jokes, they are often rather nervous individuals who experience some problems in communicating with people. This is a certain way of limiting their social circle, but it is important to note that despite all the cynicism inherent in them, these people are kind to their friends, of which there are usually not so many.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman in his research argues that the sense of humor in men and women is different. Women laugh twice as much at men's jokes as men at women's, but who would doubt it. Men like to joke more and calmly relate to the fact that they are laughed at, at the same time, women often perceive jokes addressed to them very painfully.

Perhaps the ideal sense of humor can be called a harmonious combination of all four types. You should always be able to laugh at yourself, but at the same time feel that line where the joke develops into humiliation. A good anecdote can set the tone for a conversation or reduce tension. In any case, it will be very difficult to live in the modern world without a sense of humor - it is too contradictory.

Silly jokes and anecdotes of black humor, scary stories - today the Internet is simply littered with all this "good". Some of this is really funny. However, it often happens that the jokes in which we are looking for humor have the opposite effect on us - they repel, depress and even offend. Surprisingly, there are people who still find them funny. Why is it so? Obviously, in order to understand the answer, it is necessary to understand the nature of humor, its purpose, as well as the relationship with morality and morality, accepted in society as the norm.

What is humor? How does it arise?
Why do some people joke rudely and unpleasantly? Are their jokes silly and anecdotes vulgar?
Why are there always people who are amused by stupid humor and black jokes?
How can one easily see the psychology of a person, both the narrator and the listener, through humor?

Any of us knows that humor can be different. It can be very funny when you laugh and can't stop. It happens and not very much when someone says vulgarity or rudeness.

Obviously, humor, its mood and construction, are connected not only with the creator of this very humor, but also with our own perception and feeling of it. That is why humor is so diverse in all its manifestations - because how many people, so many topics that can be ridiculed. And formats - how to do it.

To understand the whole variety of humor, it is best to start from human psychology, then all types of humor, even the most repulsive and terrible, are easily understood and explained. The easiest way to do this is with the help of Yuri Burlan's system-vector psychology, which for the first time determines a person's psychotypes through a system of eight vectors.

What is humor for?

Initially, humor has a very important and necessary purpose for human society. With the help of sincere laughter, tension is relieved, relaxation occurs, we begin to feel less hostility, hatred, anger, resentment. Having laughed heartily, it becomes easier for us to live and complacency appears. This is where all these practices and trainings come from, which invite people to laugh more in order to prolong life and improve health. However, their creators completely forgot the folk wisdom: "laughter for no reason is a sign of foolishness." And indeed, just laughter, like muscle contraction and the sound of laughter, does not matter - the main semantic content is what makes us smile.

The owners of the oral vector are always considered the soul of the company, everyone loves them - cheerful, always in high spirits, they constantly chat and joke. But in fact, the reason for our love for them is that they can very aptly and easily tell a joke that makes us see the funny even in the worst. Zhvanetsky and Khazanov belong to this type of people - they don’t come up with humor on purpose, they just think in such forms and pass them on to society in order to relieve tension.

Why is humor sometimes funny and not funny?

But oralist's humor has always, since ancient times, always been built on vulgarity: because the only thing that is really funny in this world is sexual or ridiculed through sexuality. This kind of humor is often called black humor by us because it deals with what causes tension in us. For example, an oral speaker will joke about death and funerals, about war and cataclysms, in order to remove the feeling of tragedy, to relieve stress through laughter. Please note - this kind of humor is actually very funny for most people.

However, there are exceptions, these are two categories of people - the owners of visual and sound vectors in certain states. It is very difficult for a sound engineer in depression to hear a swear word, for him it is an expression of special hatred. A developed visual person will never laugh at primitive humor, they need a very subtle joke just to smile. Sound engineers and spectators often shy away from the oral jester, and his jokes are called stupid, anecdotes are not funny.

At the same time, the spectators and sound engineers themselves can create worthy humor - light banter, subtle snobbery, intellectual jokes. There is no vulgar beginning in such humor and it attracts its audience - after all, if oral humor attracts everyone in the world, even with its vulgarity, then this humor will be of interest only to a limited audience.

Vulgar and stupid jokes that cause disgust

As mentioned above, very often the jokes of an oral person are perceived negatively by sound and visual people. Humor makes it difficult for a sound engineer to concentrate. The spectator of laughter about nothing relieves sensual tension and becomes emotionally devastated. Therefore, it is absolutely natural to build on such humor and simply not listen to it.

But there is humor that is repulsive to everyone, except for very narrow categories of people. The brightest of them are people with an anal vector in a state of frustration. The humor of such people is always black - dirty, built on the toilet and all the disgusting details of it. Their humor is designed to defame, humiliate, smear dirty. It is of no interest to anyone, except for people in the same conditions, who in their communities on the Internet multiply such black jokes, from which any healthy person's hair will stand on end.

Another type of people who create unpleasant and repulsive black and stupid humor are sound people in certain states. Such people enjoy common suffering. They smile when they see death, accidents, cataclysms. Just as with anal frustrants, this kind of humor is just as disgusting for everyone except the miserable ones like themselves.

Due to the fact that the oral word is a verbal tool for laughter, it is practically non-existent on the Internet. After all, stupid humor, scary and black jokes here belong to the pen of sound engineers and spectators, often with an anal vector. That is why there is such a large proportion of negativity and dirt on the Internet. Moreover, doing it anonymously is as easy as shelling pears, because no punishment, even in the form of public censure, will follow.

Some people joke easily and funny, which means they immediately become their own in any company. Others hardly show themselves and rarely give out witty remarks. It is believed that wit is an innate quality, but from time to time schools open in Moscow that undertake to teach even the most unfunny people to joke. The Village, with the help of experts, decided to figure out what our sense of humor depends on and why we need it.

Sergei Korovkin

PhD in Psychology, Associate Professor, Department of General Psychology, Yaroslavl State University

In fact, it all starts with a simple question: “Why do we need humor?” It has different functions - for example, gender. Say, when a man jokes in the company of a woman, he wants to please.

My colleagues and I explored the sense of humor in terms of intelligence. I must say right away that the connection between education and humor is not so rigid. Very smart people may not know how to joke. But we made a comparison: how people, after watching funny videos, solve mathematical problems - with an obvious algorithm, and the so-called creative ones, where there is no definite solution scheme. As a result, all the subjects managed to solve creative tasks faster with a non-standard approach. The principle of creating a joke and the principle of finding a solution are similar. In any complex mathematical problem, the way out lies in the form of an unexpected combination of moves, and in a joke - in the form of an unexpected combination of words. It turns out that in a sense, people with developed creative thinking are more successful pranksters.

There is another version. In fact, the human smile that accompanies the joke is displaced unrealized aggression, even outwardly resembling a grin. If we smile at a stray dog on the street, it is unlikely that he will regard this as a sign of friendliness. The word "humor" appeared only at the end of the 18th century, and before that time, even in English, the word "ridicule" was used. In French, it means "ridiculous, ridiculous", and in English - "mockery". Accordingly, humor was considered a sudden manifestation of a sense of superiority, aggressive dominance. Hence the jokes about the banana peel: he, the fool, slipped and fell, and I, well done, stand over it all and watch.

Humor is a universal acquisition, but each nation has it in its own way. There is such a separate phenomenon as British humor: it is built on a subtle combination of words, on a linguistic game. This is how almost any joke works from a verbal point of view - a person says aloud a sentence with an unexpected meaning, often formed due to ambiguity. Here's an example: "At the Biathlon World Championships, the German team conquered Poland." There are two meanings here: according to the first, the German team won medals, and according to the second, the Germans with rifles on skis conquered Poland. Such a transition from one meaning to another often causes a smile.

Recent studies in the field of MRI have shown that the same zones are responsible for the perception of humor that are responsible for the manifestation of pain. These are areas of the frontal lobes that react when something goes wrong. Any joke is a product of the reaction of our nervous system to paradoxes. If something does not fit into the worldview scheme, you laugh, unconsciously defending yourself from complexity and incomprehensibility.

I don't think it's been proven, but it's believed that people who are prone to feelings and depression are the best comedians. It's not uncommon for people known for their good sense of humor to take their own lives unexpectedly - like actor Robin Williams, for example. Under the guise of humor and clowning, it is easy for a person with severe depression to hide. But in the case of, say, an introvert, it is difficult to say what is the reason for his isolation, and what is the consequence. Maybe he closes himself from society precisely because it is difficult for him to communicate and joke, as well as to show emotions. But this is not a vice or a disease - a person can live without a sense of humor.

Vladimir Dashevsky

psychotherapist, business coach

Personally, I like the theory that humor is a human way of adapting to reality. For example, in order to quickly get used to a new company, a person seeks to defuse the situation with a good joke.

Humor is a property primarily of intellectually developed people. People who are not very smart most often do not know how to joke and do not understand jokes. To successfully joke, a person must be able to distance himself from the situation and from himself: this is a kind of opposite to selfishness. It is important to have self-irony and the ability to laugh at yourself. It all comes down to experience and upbringing. My ex-wife constantly tells me that she cannot understand: either our son is talking to her seriously, or ironically, like dad. But this, at first glance, a wonderful ability can turn out to be harmful to everyone, when a joke and irony turn into gloating. Then a person becomes, according to Nietzsche, like an evil dog that, by biting, has learned to laugh.

If we take primitive forms of humor (cake in the face, mockery of the name and surname or skin color), then it is precisely such a joke that turns into a method of suppression. Therefore, they joke so poorly in the army, prisons and other closed communities with a primitive hierarchy. My son is now in the army, and he told me that his unfortunate colleague, who was unfortunate enough to break the toilet lid - I don’t know how - instantly became the object of all the army jokes.

It is important to recall Freud's study of wit as a kind of sublimation. In other words, humor is a way to redirect impulses that are unacceptable to the subject. When a person comes across a taboo topic, they joke to start interacting with it. Anything can be related to such topics, but most often these are things that are not customary to talk about in the so-called polite society or mention men and women in a conversation. In such a situation, a good joke, as it were, removes an unspoken ban.

In addition, a joke is a quick way to attract attention and choose a partner. A sense of humor comes in different levels, and a highly intelligent joke is a great way to stand out from the crowd and earn the attention of the subject you like without lengthy courtship. Women, as a rule, choose men who know how to joke. Such people often stand out for their ability to quickly adapt and, importantly, quickly relieve general tension, return a sense of security and comfort to those around them.

It is important to separate the concepts of “wit” and “sense of humor”. Wit is the ability to show a sense of humor, to "produce" jokes. Most often, even the most melancholic and withdrawn people understand jokes perfectly - they just are not used to revealing their sense of humor.

At first glance, it's fun. A patient with a neurological disorder with the German name witzelsucht is a godsend for a boring company! He laughs, sparklingly jokes, ironically, beats words with puns, and ... all this goes on endlessly.

This disorder is associated with damage to the orbitofrontal region on the right side of the brain. The orbitofrontal region is responsible for personality and behavior: injure it on the left and you will get an irritable, gloomy and depressive character. Damage to the right will give society the "soul of the company" - a person who is constantly in high spirits, cheerful and funny.

But, unfortunately, witzelsucht brings more problems than joy, especially to others. A 56-year-old man developed this disorder as a result of a stroke. In addition to the euphoria of life, witzelsucht also gave him hypersexuality. Jokes and puns of obsessive-erotic content quickly dispersed all potential sexual partners from him.

A 57-year-old woman after a brain injury decided to change her life: every day she threw parties at which she joked inappropriately about personal hygiene. Soon the guests stopped coming to her.

But we are already talking about this man. Agree, there is no particular joy from such a joyful husband (sorry for the pun) on the face of the hostess.

Among other things, witzelsucht deprives the patient of the ability to perceive someone else's humor. In comedy films, he sits stone-faced and waits for the movie to end so he can make a good joke about it.

Witzelsucht cannot be cured by modern medicine. You can only alleviate the condition with the help of behavioral therapy or mood stabilizing drugs.

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