Character strength · Transcendence
Humor as a character strength: meaning and examples
The short answer: humor, also called playfulness, is liking to laugh and to make others smile, and seeing the lighter side of life, including in difficult moments. It is one of the 24 character strengths of the VIA classification, in the Transcendence family: the strengths that connect you to something larger than yourself.
What humor looks like
People with a lot of humor tend to:
- find something funny in most situations
- use jokes to ease tension or welcome someone new
- enjoy games, teasing and wordplay
- laugh at themselves easily
- can lift a group's mood in a hard week
In everyday life
At work, humor is the colleague whose well-timed joke breaks the tension in a stressful meeting. At home, it is the parent who turns a spilled drink into a game, or the friend whose messages always make you laugh.
Humor can be a serious tool: it helps people cope with stress, bond with others, and keep problems in proportion.
Humor and the strengths close to it
- Zest and humor both bring energy and lightness to a group.
- Creativity and humor both depend on seeing an unexpected connection.
- Social intelligence tells you when a joke will help, and when it will hurt.
When humor is overdone, or underused
Like every strength, humor works best in the right amount. Overdone, humor can deflect from serious topics, make someone feel mocked, or hide what you really feel. Underused, life can feel heavier than it needs to, and stress has fewer outlets.
The aim is lightness that brings people together.
Is humor one of your top strengths?
Ask yourself:
- Do people say you make them laugh?
- In a tense moment, do you instinctively look for something funny?
- Can you laugh at your own mistakes?
If you answered yes to most of these, humor may be one of your signature strengths. The only way to know how it compares with your other 23 is to rank them.
Find your top strengths with the free test
Where this comes from
The 24 character strengths were described by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool and is not affiliated with the VIA Institute.