All posts tagged: humor

The Value of Literal Humor

The Value of Literal Humor

Published by Jenni Sidey

Recently, my 9-year-old son noticed that I was pouring cashew milk in my coffee. With a curious look, he asked, “Mom, how do you milk a cashew?” “With tiny fingers!” I replied. This evoked a burst of laughter and more importantly, a bonding moment. Creating humor is a mood-lifting activity, even when I keep my jokes to myself. In fact, not having the pressure to perform to others’ expectations is part of what makes humor therapeutic for me. Not long ago, I read Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected and Happy, by comedic writer Chris Duffy. Duffy presents research as well as interviews with physicians, psychologists, and activists that converge to reveal the power of humor in promoting health, well-being, and social connection. He also draws from his own experiences, which are the funniest parts of the book. Literal Thinking and Its Impact on Humor Duffy’s work inspired me to reflect on how humor has helped me cope with literal thinking. Literal thinking is a neurodivergent trait that can emerge …

Schopenhauer: The Philosopher of Pessimism and Humor

Schopenhauer: The Philosopher of Pessimism and Humor

Published by Jenni Sidey

Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists (people who think that human life will improve), Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism. But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.” Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.” Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams To give you a flavour, here are a few of Schopenhauer’s many epigrams: Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius …

The Humor of Miscommunication

The Humor of Miscommunication

Published by Jenni Sidey

Verbal humor is a common subcategory in the pantheon of laughter stimuli; it joins behaviors including slapstick, pranks, and various forms of performance humor. Over the decades, scholars have followed numerous paths to understand why people find certain words or phrases amusing, and one of these is based on Grice’s four maxims. H. Paul Grice made the case that effective verbal communication possesses four basic properties—quantity, quality, relation, and manner—each category is described by one or more “maxims.” (Grice, 1975.) Briefly, quantity refers to making one’s input no less informative than required, but not more than necessary to avoid inefficiency. Quality relates to one’s input being truthful and supported by evidence. Relation (relevance) requires one’s contribution to be on topic until the subject has organically changed. Good manner ensures one’s speech is clear, orderly, and avoids ambiguity. Some humor scholars have used these Gricean maxims to explain why verbal humor results in laughter (Dia, 2023; Novebry and Rosa, 2019). Exchanges between two or more individuals in which these rules are violated represent a breach of …

The Possibility of Humor | Cathleen Schine

The Possibility of Humor | Cathleen Schine

Published by José Betancourt

Steve Stern’s new novel, A Fool’s Kabbalah, is a comedy about tragedy and a tragedy about comedy. It is a mystical fable of real events and a realistic account of mysticism. There are Jewish jokes and Jewish jokesters and Nazis who torture and kill the jokesters. Kafka, Kabbalah, Zionism, and the shtetl of Zyldzce (pronounced, perhaps, as “zilch”); Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, love for a rabbi’s beautiful daughter, and an occult midnight marriage to an unearthly albino girl in a white gauze dress; shit jokes, fart jokes, raw misery, deep philosophy, brutal history and brutal fantasy, broken hearts and heartfelt joy—these exuberantly disparate topics are somehow, improbably, made to cohere. This is Stern’s seventh novel. His previous book, The Village Idiot (2022), explored the historical reality of the early-twentieth-century School of Paris artists from the dreamlike perspective of the expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, who trudges beneath the Seine in a diving suit. Stern has also published four collections of stories, four novellas, and two children’s books, all of them steeped in Jewish folklore. He is, …

How Humor Can Improve Your Life

How Humor Can Improve Your Life

Published by Jenni Sidey

The late actress Catherine O’Hara had advised, “There is nothing sexier than laughing together.” Her recommendation is risk-free and financially free, yet worth hundreds of dollars. Our country is increasingly learning the value of adding more humor to our lives. Psychologists are touting the benefits of the practice and appreciation of humor to a person’s self-esteem, internal confidence, and the ease of making new friends. Physicians have proven that laughter can reduce a person’s blood pressure, decrease the toxic hormones in your bloodstreams, and can even lower muscle tensions for up to 45 minutes. Morticians and public health statisticians have noted the increasing longevity of those who are humor aficionados. Garden & Gun magazine, in their February-March 2026 issue, published their first-ever humor issue, featuring popular comedian Nate Bargatze on the cover. It is about time, instead of focusing so much on ultimate Southern sandwiches, tropical dream homes, and the bourbon boom, not to mention gardens and guns themselves. It is all a clear sign that everyone is increasing their increasing attention to adding more …