ABSTRACT
Interest in the psychological aspects of humor has a long history. There is, for example, Freud’s (1905/1960) psychoanalytic theory of jokes and their relation to the unconscious, and Henri Bergson’s (1950) theory of laughter as affirming the human values of spontaneity and freedom in the face of behavior that is rigid or mechanical. Apart from these and other influential theoretical accounts, there is by now a large body of empirical scholarship on humor (see Martin, 2010, for a review). Differences in the experience of humor have been studied in relation to the content or form of humor, and also in relation to individual differences in personality, character strengths (Ruch & Heintz, 2016), age, gender (Vaid & Hull, 1998), language, and culture (Vaid, 2006). Research has also considered functional aspects of humor, such as its role in creativity (Koestler, 1964; Vaid, 2014), emotion regulation (Samson & Gross, 2012), and group cohesion (Vaid, 1999; Billig, 2005).
