In dating ads, among other requirements for a partner, both men and women often indicate a sense of humor. This fact makes us think about the colossal importance that people attach to this personal quality.
In its most general form, a sense of humor can be defined as the ability to notice something funny, comic in the phenomena of the surrounding world, emotionally responding to this side of being.
The place of a sense of humor in the emotional sphere
Sense of humor belongs to the sphere of higher feelings, which are associated with social phenomena. These are genuinely human feelings, while primitive emotional responses are also present in animals. Higher senses are divided into moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.
Sense of humor cannot be categorized unequivocally. It reflects a person's attitude to the world, himself and other people, as moral feelings. There is an intellectual beginning in it, because any joke is a deliberate violation of logical connections. The category of the comic plays a large role in art, which links humor with aesthetic feelings.
The external manifestation of a sense of humor is laughter. This reaction developed from the specific sounds that great apes make during games. Such sounds are a signal that notifies playmates that all of their actions - even aggressive ones - are not really performed by the animal.
The mental and social life of a person is incommensurably more complex than the relationship of monkeys, but the role of laughter and humor is similar to the role of a monkey's "proto-laugh".
The role of a sense of humor
Manifestations of a sense of humor are akin to a game - a special kind of human activity in which the goal is activity as such, the game does not pursue any other goals. Making any phenomenon the subject of a joke, a person transfers it to the plane of the game, where there can be no “serious” goals, relationships and achievements, where everything is “for fun”. Having become the subject of such a game, the object loses its significance. Thus, the main function of a sense of humor is to devalue the phenomena of the surrounding world.
This is what K. Chapek speaks about, noting that there is "gallows humor", but nowhere and never was there a coronation humor, because if the king joked about his reign, he would understand that it is not so great and glorious.
A sense of humor is a "medicine" not only for excessive pride, but also for fear: what has lost its significance cannot be scary. That is why people compose funny jokes about bloody dictators, and child psychologists help children get rid of fears, finding something funny in frightening images.
A sense of humor is a good tool for building social contacts, breaking down communication barriers by reducing their importance. In any social community, humor acts as one of the cementing principles: ridiculing “others” (people who do not belong to a given nation, profession or other social group) help a person to feel more deeply that they belong to a group.
