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Creativity

The term creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something (such as a product, an artwork, a scientific theory, or a joke) that is regarded as both novel and valuable. Creativity and humor are closely related constructs, with humor usually being seen as a subset of creativity. Both involve some degree of unpredictability, novelty, incongruity, and surprise, and require playfulness, risk taking, and exploiting loose but meaningful associations between concepts. Within the context of humor research, the topic of creativity is mainly relevant to humor production, by which a person produces a novel joke, witticism, observation, or other creative product that is found funny by others. In this entry, several facets of the relation between creativity and humor are described. In the first section, some general background on how researchers conceptualize creativity is provided, with specific links to humor and humor theories. In the second section, several issues at the intersection of humor and creativity are explored. These include the relation between humor and the “A-ha!” phenomenon of insight, the relation of humor production to humor comprehension and appreciation, and an overview of recent research attributing the emergence of humorous and creative abilities to Darwinian sexual selection theory. In each case, some possible future research directions are outlined, to further develop these potentially fruitful but still under-studied topics.

Creativity Research and Its Relevance to Humor

Creativity is by nature a complex, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary phenomenon. Thus, the scientific study of creativity presents researchers with a number of conceptual and methodological challenges. While the subject of creativity has been of broad interest to researchers and laypersons for centuries, most discussions of this topic traditionally relied on a mix of armchair speculation and potentially idiosyncratic first-person accounts by great creators. Beginning in the mid-20th century, scientific psychology began to address creativity in a more systematic way. Researchers initially focused on the construct of divergent thinking, in which, for instance, a person generates multiple novel uses for everyday objects. In more recent decades, research and theorizing about the nature of creativity has accelerated, research questions on humor have broadened and deepened, and its methods have proliferated to encompass laboratory experiments, personality inventories and other survey instruments, cognitive-historical case studies, archival data analyses, computer simulations, and neuroscience techniques.

The Six P's of Creativity

Amidst the great variety of modern approaches to creativity, several sets of general principles guide contemporary research. One useful heuristic is the so-called six P's of creativity: the creative person, the creative product, the creative process, the creative place, creativity as persuasion, and creative potential. Different lines of research and creativity theories pursue varied subsets of these P's. Depending on a researcher's questions and approach, any of these P's can also be potentially relevant to the study of humor as well. For instance, researchers interested in different styles of humor or their relation to well-established personality dimensions will likely focus on the creative person. Those interested in the reliable and valid measurement of humor will tend to highlight the creative product. Cognitive theorists interested in understanding the mental processes associated with the genesis of a humorous thought will emphasize the creative process. More applied researchers interested in describing or designing environments to optimize humor or creative productivity will prioritize understanding the creative place. Sociologically minded researchers interested in how new forms of humor arise and take root, or in how humor can be used to facilitate social change, will probably stress creativity as persuasion. Educational researchers interested in identifying untapped creative or humorous ability will emphasize creative potential.

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