Four humor styles: when a joke brings people closer and when it costs you

Two people at the same table can both get a laugh for very different reasons. One teases a friend in a way the friend enjoys, and the whole group relaxes. The other makes fun of themselves before anyone else can, every time. In the moment the two look alike. Over years, the first habit tends to go with closer relationships, and the second with feeling worse about yourself.

That difference is the basis of the humor styles model, published in 2003 by the Canadian psychologist Rod Martin and colleagues. Our Humor Styles test uses its four styles.

Two questions behind four styles

Martin sorted habits of humor along two lines. The first is whom the humor serves: your relationships with other people, or yourself. The second is whether it is kind or does damage. Crossing the two gives four styles:

• Affiliative: telling jokes and funny stories that put others at ease and bring people together.
• Self-enhancing: keeping an amused view of life, which helps you cope when things go wrong.
• Aggressive: sarcasm, teasing and ridicule, humor at someone else's expense.
• Self-defeating: making yourself the target to be liked, or laughing along when it hurts.

The first two are usually described as the benign styles, the last two as the harmful ones.

What the research found

In the 2003 paper, Martin's team built a 32-item questionnaire and compared its scores with other measures. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor went with higher self-esteem and better psychological wellbeing, and self-enhancing humor also went with less depression and anxiety. Self-defeating humor went the other way, with more depression and anxiety and lower self-esteem. Aggressive humor was linked to hostility and aggression, and to lower agreeableness and conscientiousness.

These are correlations from questionnaires, so they cannot show which comes first. Someone who already feels low may start turning humor against themselves, rather than the jokes causing the low mood.

What our version asks

We wrote the 16 statements ourselves based on Martin's four styles, so this is a self-reflection tool, not the original questionnaire and not a validated one. Each style has four statements, and you answer on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Examples: "I use jokes to ease the atmosphere and bring people closer together" (affiliative), "Humour is my way of coping with stress" (self-enhancing), "When someone slips up, I cannot resist a comment that makes them look silly" (aggressive) and "I laugh along at jokes about me even when they hurt inside" (self-defeating).

The original questionnaire uses a seven-point scale and includes statements worded in reverse. Ours has none. If you tend to agree with most statements you read, all four of your scores rise together, so compare the styles with each other rather than reading each number on its own.

Reading your result

Most people use more than one style. A high affiliative score next to a high aggressive one is common in close groups where teasing is how people show affection. Whether it works depends on whether the person being teased laughs too. A useful question is who usually pays for the joke.

A high self-defeating score deserves the most attention. Laughing at your own mistakes can be healthy, and one self-enhancing statement describes exactly that: "I can laugh at my own mistakes without putting myself down." The difference lies in the last part. Self-defeating humor puts you down so that others will accept you. If that pattern feels familiar and comes with weeks of low mood, it is worth talking about with a psychologist.

Humor is a large part of how you talk to people. The communication style test and the post on assertive, passive and aggressive communication look at the same habits from another side, and the empathy test shows how well you read the people you joke with.