Four Humor Styles

General academic literature has found support for four styles of humor that are relevant to the field of Communication. Those four styles include affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor. These styles can further be divided up into two categories know as adaptive humor styles and maladaptive humor styles. Though all four humor styles share some similar traits, each can be identified by their own defining characteristics. A plethora of previous research has been conducted on humor styles and has found that humor styles correlate to various other factors of human communication. The information accumulated in this paper on this topic attempts to explain the four styles of humor, what each style entails, and what aspects of …show more content…
These four styles of humor include affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor. Two of those humor styles are often known as positive, or adaptive styles of humor (affiliative and self-enhancing), while the other two are known as negative, or maladaptive styles of humor (aggressive humor and self-defeating humor). Though the study of humor may seem like a frivolous subject to invest research in, there is actually a plethora of literature that supports the notion that studying humor is worthwhile and that it offers benefits to the academic realm. This idea is especially relevant to the niche field of Humor Communication. Each individual humor style is believed to reveal more about the ways humans communicate than previously thought. For example, humor styles have been found to correlate with the ways humans form impressions of other individuals (Kuiper & Leite, 2010). Even still, certain humor styles, such as aggressive humor styles, have been found to correlate with patterns of bullying in kids (Fox, Hunter, &