Personality, Humor and

Humor is often thought of as being a personal characteristic of an individual. Thus, some individuals have a “good sense of humor,” whereas others do not. This personality approach to humor assumes that humor is a relatively stable attribute within the individual and that it is expressed across numerous events and situations. Over the years, personality psychologists have expended considerable energy investigating what “sense of humor” actually consists of and then determining how to best measure this construct. This has led to the development of a number of different measures of sense of humor, [Page 561]ranging from actual behavioral tests (e.g., construct a funny monologue on a given topic, engage in a creative humorous task) to a wide variety of self-report measures (e.g., rate oneself ...