We are accustomed to treating humor as something insignificant. The value of this feeling was recognized primarily by the authors of dating ads, for whom a sense of humor (h / w) is the second most important wish for the partner’s personality, after the absence of bad habits (w / w). And among the classics of personality psychology — Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl — who called humor among the most important personality traits, criteria for its maturity.
Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Laughter has more to do with joy than humor itself. We laugh and smile when we feel good. Funny is always some kind of absurdity, a violation of the harmony of the world, when things turn out to be not what they should be. And we laugh at the world, because its obvious imperfection helps us to put up with our own imperfection. Understanding the absurdity helps to rise above the world, to look down on it, even for a minute. The favorite objects of jokes always and everywhere include the bearers of power — mothers-in-law, policemen — precisely because the opportunity to laugh at those on whom you depend is especially important for maintaining mental health.
Be able to laugh, rise above yourself, see your opportunity to be different
The readiness to laugh at the world is laid in early childhood, it is inherent in one degree or another in the vast majority of people. By the way, it’s best to laugh in a company — you can’t really laugh at a good joke alone. Laughter brings people together emotionally. But a genuine sense of humor, which characterizes personal maturity and correlates with the level of intelligence, is when a person is able to laugh at himself, at his own imperfection. This raises him above himself, allows him to see the prospect of his own development, the opportunity to be different.
He does not need clown tricks to smile — he is able to mentally transform anything with the power of his consciousness, to expose the stupidity and dubiousness of what seemed so important, pathos and unshakable, to show that behind words there is nothing but words. To show that everything is not quite what it seems, and, in any case, it can be different. This is not very funny — sometimes sad, sometimes scary, because we do not like to peer into life in detail, preferring comfortable myths.
Such humor gives more than mental health — it gives independence and depth of vision. And it insures against boundless confidence in one’s own rightness, the consequence of which is the imposition of this rightness on others by force. Humor is the best basis for a fruitful dialogue with yourself. Just do not confuse: «humorous» TV programs have nothing to do with it.