With so many humorous comics and illustrations, punny jokes and all kinds of comedy accounts to suit everyone’s interests surfing around the internet these days, you can’t help but wonder what it is that makes particular things funny. Think of the cringy dad jokes or computer humor like System32Comics. This kind of humor is super specific and revolves around one particular area, making it appealing for a fraction of people who share the same interests. Or at least, we think of it that way.

But things we find funny are not only relatable and speak to us directly, but they really have to do with our ability to have a sense of humor altogether. In this way, people who enjoy dad humor will most likely find computer humor just as funny, because they’re simply prone to finding funny things funny. Sounds simple, but it’s a bit more complex than that.

So in order to find out what it actually takes to get a joke and what certain types of jokes tell us about our personalities, we spoke to prof. Paige Davis, a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, Language and Psychology in York St John University, with expertise in developmental psychopathology and developmental psychology.

Paige shared some very interesting insights on the topic from a developmental perspective. “For a joke to be funny, the person who is listening needs some higher-level cognitive skills, so to be able to think flexibly, understand that there are double meanings for things, and in many cases the person needs an understanding of how their social world works.”

The professor said that one study just published this month looked at practical jokes and found that “there was a relationship between age, false belief understanding (the ability to understand someone can hold a belief that is false while another person knows the truth), inhibitory control (so being able to control your actions or inhibit thoughts or actions that you would want to do), and language ability related to the ability to understand and engage in practical jokes (Wang & Wang, 2021).”

Interestingly, “Siblings also make a child more likely to get a joke,” Paige added and concluded that in reality, it takes a lot of cognitive skills to be able to get a joke.

When asked what the jokes we like reveal about our personalities, Paige said that this goes back to the old born with it or blank slate argument. “So are we born with this personality that develops and therefore we are geared toward certain types of jokes? What I would argue is that life experience and social interaction will intimately shape how we respond to jokes and what jokes we like later.”

Paige continued: “I'm a Vygotskian and what Vygotsky theorized was that when we learn words, we associate other words and feelings with the word we are learning, so this would mean that certain jokes would be more funny to a person because they would be associated with that person's experiences.” That suggests that words or scenarios that are more familiar or meaningful to a person will resonate more with them. “It might not tell us about personalities, but it certainly tells us about experiences,” she added.