LOL Your Way to Better Mental Health

WAYNE FEDERMAN IS a veteran stand-up comedian who has written late-night monologue jokes for Jimmy Fallon and appeared on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Silicon Valley. But his ability to find humor in just about any situation helped him cope particularly well in quarantine. “During the pandemic, I’m shut down. All my gigs are canceled,” he says. “I’m alone in the house, and I find out my ID is stolen. I’m like, ‘Yes! This could be the best day I’ve had in years.’ ”

The more he thought about it, the funnier the situation seemed. “Sometimes you think you don’t matter in life, and you wake up and think, Hey, somebody wants to be me,” he says. “That’s awesome.”

Many of us probably felt equally desperate to find something to laugh about amid the darkness of the past year and a half. No wonder the pandemic has been a hothouse for the humor-as-self-care industry, with podcasts, books, and Netflix comedy specials all promoting the idea that you can feel more upbeat, confident, vital, and/or successful by taking life a little less seriously.

“You’re happy when you’re laughing,” says Joseph Vazquez, N.D., the associate dean of clinical education at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine & Health Sciences. That’s because laughter generates oxytocin (what some call the “love hormone”) in the hypothalamus while suppressing the brain’s release of cortisol; together, these processes can cue feelings of relaxation and trust, explains Naomi Bagdonas, an executive coach, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer, and coauthor of the recent life-optimizing book Humor, Seriously. Laughter “improves our mental health,” she says.

When you laugh, you’re also tapping into the same chemical that’s “released during sex and childbirth—moments when, evolutionarily, we feel bonded,” adds Bagdonas’s coauthor, Jennifer Aaker, Ph.D., a Stanford marketing professor. So how can more of us laugh more often?

Making Better Sense of Humor

AS THE SAYING goes, the best way to kill a joke is to explain it. But if you take a step back, what makes Federman’s quips so great is that they’re both absurd and hopeful. That’s different from teasing others or making yourself the butt of the joke, which can actually take a toll on your mental health. “There’s a distinction between ‘Oops, I made a mistake, ha-ha’ and ‘I’m garbage, ha-ha,’ ” says Andrew Olah, a research consultant who studies humor and tracks the impact of humorous messaging.

But it turns out it’s pretty easy to evaluate how healthy your own sense of humor is and then fine-tune it. The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) is a test created nearly 20 years ago by researchers at the University of Western Ontario to explore how your style of humor might predict and affect certain aspects of your mental health. It still resonates today because the HSQ doesn’t tell you how funny you are; it tells you how you try to be funny.

Respondents are asked to rate 32 statements, such as “I will often get carried away in putting myself down if it makes my family or friends laugh.” Based on their responses, they receive scores in four widely recognized categories of mirth: aggressive (sarcasm and teasing), self-defeating(making fun of yourself for others’ amusement), affiliative (telling jokes and bantering with others), and self-enhancing (a general humorous outlook, able to see the comedy in most situations).

The researchers noted that an individual’s style of humor is associated with certain personality traits. Most toxically, aggressive humor can tip from gentle teasing into hostility or racist and sexist jokes, while self-defeating humor is linked to neediness and anxiety. Affiliative humor builds relationships but also relies on other people, so it’s difficult to do during, say, a global pandemic. “The best one by far is self-enhancing humor,” says Julie Aitken Schermer, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, because you can improve your mood without anybody else’s help.

That style is associated with mental-toughness skills like optimism, independence, and confidence. “You may be doing your dishes and reflect back on a funny scene, and you can actually cheer yourself up,” Schermer says. “You’re less likely to be depressed, feel lonely, or engage in self-harm.”

Mark Shatz, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of psychology at Ohio University Zanesville and author of Comedy Writing Secrets, knows how important the right kind of humor can be. Seventeen years ago, he learned a disturbing fact about his wife: He thought he was her second husband, but it turned out he was actually her fourth.

They’d been together for ten years and, somehow, he never knew this. “How did I deal with it? My lovely friends gave me every article of clothing with the number four on it: ‘I couldn’t even place in the top three!’ ” he says. His response began as self-defeating (beating himself up as he tried to figure out what the hell happened), then took an affiliative turn (looking to friends for distracting banter). Finally, he became more self-enhancing by adopting a new spin: He started wearing the number-four apparel. He wasn’t just in on the joke—he’d taken ownership of it.

These ideas come naturally to professionals. “Even when I feel like crap, when I get to the show, onstage, it lifts me up,” says Stacy Kendro, a veteran New York comic. “I don’t want to call it a coping mechanism, because that makes it sound so clinical. But there are times when stand-up pretty much saved me.” She still loves laughing by herself at home, though, like when rewatching Tootsie. “That’s like a healing,” she says, “a moment when you needed that release.”

How Your Own Act Might Bomb

FOR HIS PART, Federman’s flip-the-script, self-enhancing mentality dates back to high school, when, after reading the best-selling self-help book Your Erroneous Zones, he decided he alone was responsible for his feelings. He gave himself the power to reframe a stressful situation into something funny. While isolated during quarantine, for example, he started shooting baskets and playing horse—against himself. “One game was so intense, I had to go into a concussion protocol,” he says, before pausing to reflect on his self-enhancing humor. “Comedians just look at life slightly askew,” he says, “and that makes it fun, all the time.”

The problem is that it’s easy to shift into self-defeating mode, which correlates with low self-esteem, avoidance, and even depression. (In fact, when I took the HSQ, I crushed this category, scoring in the 99th percentile with a 51. It was my highest score.) Schermer says this sort of thinking—“Hey, guys, laugh at me; maybe you’ll like me”—may develop in early childhood, perhaps when kids are trying to find ways to relate to one another on sports teams.

“Comedians just look at life slightly askew, and that makes it fun all the time.”

Peter McGraw, Ph.D., the director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Humor Research Lab (HuRL for short) and author of 2020’s Shtick to Business, a book about using humor to get ahead, says the HSQ is a tool to “help the introspective person make some positive steps.” Are you keeping your humor to yourself? Do you need to bring in other people? You can make this change to improve your mental health. “You don’t have to learn music theory in order to become a better pianist, but it helps,” he says.

The best comedians, McGraw adds, are tinkerers who tell jokes to audiences big and small, then assess the reaction and adjust accordingly. You can do this in your personal life. Thomas Ford, Ph.D., a Western Carolina University psychology professor, suggests keeping a humor diary, where you write down everything you find funny, then study it later. “Maybe you hit someone with a wisecrack—the humor log would allow you to think, Why did I do that? Is this something I did when I was insecure or nervous and this kind of reaction comes out? Sometimes I get impulsive or pushy.” Adds Olah, the research consultant: “This is something you work at intentionally. It’s a specific skill, just like woodworking or mountain climbing.”

My own HSQ scores explained a few nagging feelings that I’ve had. I realized that the jokes I tell most frequently, and those I find funniest, are on me. (I have no sense of direction, so friends call me “Maps.”) And I have been known to say dumb things that lead to repeated roastings. The experts say this is self-defeating humor—healthy only in small doses. So I decided to try rebooting my sense of humor.

Getting The Laughter You Deserve

MY QUEST TO BE the kind of guy who laughs easily—with others or at virtually anything—without being the punchline began with writing down what amused me on social media. There was that map of Italian words for “vagina” on Twitter and Monty Python’s fish-slapping dance on YouTube. In addition to self-defeating humor, I found that I have a tendency toward self-enhancing humor, which includes laughing by myself at stupid, silly things. (Sarcasm can be self-enhancing, too, so long as it’s not used in a hurtful way.) Then I took an extra step by calling friends and asking them to describe what they notice I find funny. My sense of humor is, well, repetitive, one said: “Your jokes are like every five seconds! It’s the constant search for the pun.”

I also took some advice from Bagdonas, who suggests you can use funny TV shows or movies to enhance your world-view in general. “When we’re making time to watch something comedic before bed instead of a horror movie, we are feeding our brains,” she says. (For me, that meant rewatching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure for the 11th time instead of doom scrolling.)

Gradually I began to feel more upbeat. The more I focused on being open to laughter, the less bummed out I felt. But to McGraw’s point about how comedians constantly try out new lines and assess audience reaction, at some point you’ll want to test your material and concentrate on making it inclusive.

For instance, one day, during a writing class I teach via Zoom, a student named Cat referred to a story she might write about her lifelong trouble finding the right dog. I’m more of a cat person, so I could have been gently self-defeating and recalled how a couple of dogs bit me when I was a kid, or I could have been aggressive by making fun of dogs to the group, which would have embarrassed the student. Instead, the dad joke that came to me hinged on wordplay. “I hear Cats and dogs don’t get along,” I said. It wasn’t the funniest joke, but it brought the class together. They laughed. Affiliative humor! Another healthy style.

Next, my daughter sent me two photos from college, one of some pretty trees on campus and one with some friends sitting around smoking a joint. I could have told her she must’ve been high to send me that second picture, but that would have been aggressive and not what I was looking to do. Instead, I verified that the trees were indeed pretty but admonished her not to smoke them. She totally ignored me, but that’s the beauty of a self-enhancing joke. If she liked it, she laughed. If she didn’t, no one got hurt. Either way, I was starting to amuse myself.

This story appears in the September 2021 issue of Men’s Health.

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