Humor in Every Day Life
For my last blog I
was really unsure what to write about to be honest. After contemplating for a
while I decided to do another on humor, except this time it was not about my
favorite comedian it is simply about humor as it relates to life. Humor is
thought to be a fundamental, intrinsic part of human nature, experienced in
nearly every type of interpersonal relationship and having a far-reaching
impact on daily life (Lefcourt,
2001; Martin,
2007). Having said that, it seems as though it would be easy to relate it to
everyday life in more ways than one. Humor helps in times of stress and anxiety
by lightening the mood of different situations. Humor can bring individual
together in times of conflict or just difficult times in general. For example,
as discussed in class, the nonviolent movement used humor to combat its violent
opponent time and time again. Not only was the group successful in achieving
their goal they simultaneously made the aggressive bad guys look flat out
silly. The use of humor made it hard for their opponents to even reply much
less retaliate. I decided to do a survey amongst family and friends asking them
if they had ever used humor to lighten the mood of two different types of
situations. Of the 8 people that I surveyed all but one had said they used
humor to combat two totally different situations. Most of them even stated that
they reacted with humor without even thinking about it. This just goes to show
that this is something that comes natural to a lot of people. Sure everyone
might have a different sense of humor but in the end it always seems to have a
positive result on whatever the situation is at hand.
People Surveyed
Alex Solis, Phil Bradshaw,
Joe Bider, Debbie Bradshaw, Rachael Goebel, Sam Price, Justin Woodall and
Patrick Turner.
References
Lefcourt, H.
M. (2001). Humor: The psychology of living buoyantly. New York, NY:
Kluwer Academic. 10.1007/978-1-4615-4287-2
Martin, R.
(2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. New York,
NY: Academic Press.
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