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Defenses

Humor

Humor, as a defense, is seeing what is funny or ironic in a hard situation without looking away from it. The joke doesn’t make the problem disappear. It makes the problem bearable, and often it does that for everyone in the room at once.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by emphasizing the amusing or ironic aspects of the conflict or stressor” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). It relieves tension “in a way that allows everyone to share in it, rather than being at one person’s expense, as in derisive or cutting remarks.” And “an element of self-observation or truth is often involved.”

Humor lets feelings and wishes that a conflict blocks find some symbolic expression. The frustration is “transiently relieved in a way that both self and others can smile or laugh at,” which the DMRS notes is especially evident around the parts of the human condition that can’t be escaped. What it gains is relief without distortion: the problem stays in view, and so do the feelings.

Where It Sits

Humor belongs to Level 7, the High-Adaptive Defense Level, within the Mature Defensive Category. At this level, stressors are “fully perceived without distortion,” which is what separates humor from simply laughing a problem off. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places humor at the same high adaptive level.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify humor:

Examples

Monday at the gallows

Sigmund Freud’s central illustration of humor was a grim one: a man on his way to the gallows on a Monday remarks, “Well, the week’s beginning nicely.” Freud used the story both at the end of his 1905 book on jokes and at the start of his 1927 paper “Humour.” In it he saw a person refusing to be crushed: “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality.” The situation isn’t denied. The man knows exactly where he is going. He simply won’t let it have the last word.

Sigmund Freud, “Humour” (1927)

Laughing with, not at

In Adaptation to Life, George Vaillant compared the humor of two men from his long-term study, whom he called Goodhart and Dr. Tarrytown. His summary: “the tragedy of the clown is that others must laugh at him. Goodhart was able to induce others to laugh with him.” The difference between being laughed at and being laughed with is the line the DMRS draws between humor that everyone can share and humor at one person’s expense.

George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977; Harvard reprint 1995), pp. 25–26

Laughter in grief

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and George Bonanno studied laughter in bereaved adults about six months after their loss. Genuine laughter, the kind that engages the muscles around the eyes (called Duchenne laughter), went with less anger, more enjoyment, more distance from distress, better relationships, and warmer responses from strangers. Laughter without that eye-muscle action didn’t show the same links. The authors saw this kind of laughter as part of an adaptive response to stress, putting some distance between people and their distress while strengthening their ties to others.

Dacher Keltner and George A. Bonanno, “A Study of Laughter and Dissociation” (1997), pp. 687–702

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Sarcasm and put-downs
Jokes that wound are closer to devaluation of other’s image. The DMRS rules out “derisive or cutting remarks”: mature humor relieves tension for everyone, not at one person’s expense.
Clowning
Constant self-mockery can shade into devaluation of self-image. A self-deprecating aside that eases tension can be humor; the clown who must always be the butt of the joke is, in Vaillant’s phrase, laughed at rather than with.
Denial
Laughing a problem off so that it never has to be faced is not humor. Vaillant acknowledged that humor can look like denial, but in humor the problem stays in view; the joke is about it, not a way around it.
Humor styles
Personality researchers measure four everyday humor styles: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating (Martin et al., 2003). The defense described here sits closest to the first two.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count humor among their characteristic defenses:

It also appears as a strength or a healthier expression in the depressive, paranoid, and sadistic styles.

History

Sigmund Freud wrote about humor at the end of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), setting it apart from jokes and the comic, and returned to it in a short 1927 paper, “Humour.” There he described humor as a way of refusing to suffer that works “without overstepping the bounds of mental health,” unlike other ways people escape pain. He traced it to a kindly side of the conscience that comforts the self the way a parent comforts a child, saying in effect: “Look! here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children.” “Humour,” he wrote, “is not resigned; it is rebellious.”

George Vaillant placed humor among the mature defenses, and in 2000 linked it, along with altruism, suppression, anticipation, and sublimation, to positive psychology. In 2011 he noted that “although humor appears to reflect denial and dissociation,” it calms the body much as meditation does, and he pointed to the black humor of the battlefield and the operating theater as examples of terror being turned into relaxation.

Humor was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which define it by what it shares: relief that everyone can join in, with some truth about the situation intact.

Outside the defense literature, research has looked at which kinds of humor help. Keltner and Bonanno (1997) linked genuine laughter during bereavement to less anger and better social relations. Martin and colleagues (2003) developed the Humor Styles Questionnaire, which separates two relatively benign styles (affiliative humor, used to strengthen relationships, and self-enhancing humor, used to bolster oneself) from two that do harm, either to others (aggressive) or to oneself (self-defeating).

Sources