My patience is often short with motivational speakers. They may tell interesting stories but often their techniques only work for themselves. I listen to one who was humorous enough to get a chuckle out of his audience. However, afterward in a personal conversation he bemoaned the problems he had with a translator when presenting in China. “I was using the same jokes and puns that always get a laugh, but the just people sat there deadpan.” He shook his head, seriously disturbed.

At first I wondered if the silence was a cultural response. Perhaps the audience thought laughing at the speaker was rude. I inquired if they responded with laughter to other speakers. He assured me that they did. Then, he told me that he asked the translator if she was translating his speech word for word or restating the meaning in her own words. The accusation in his voice was obvious as he noted the translator confessed that she was restating the meaning. He assumed that is why the Chinese audience didn’t perceive him as being funny.

He failed to comprehend that his favorite puns and malapropisms were based on words sounding similar with different meanings. This kind of humor relies on comprehending a particular language. So, I tried to explain that a word for word translation from English wouldn’t have been funny to the Chinese audience and might even have sounded nonsensical. However, he continued to whine about how the translator ruined his humor, which eventually got a chuckle out of me.

There are advantages to being considered humorous, even if you do not want to spend your life in front of an audience or use humor to gain attention at business conferences. People communicating with humor are often perceive as being more socially attractive and more competent speakers. Students feel that teachers who appropriately use humor are in touch with them. Workers view joke cracking bosses as having a great immediacy.

So, how do you know if you are funny? The Humor Orientation Scale has been developed by a pair of West Virginia University researchers to can rate Humor Orientation or HO. But there is a caveat, your peers must also think you are funny, so recruit a couple of acquaintance that will honestly rate you according to this scale. Humor is not just the content of what you say, but also the manner of delivery. People who have high HO scores are perceived as being funnier than those with low HO scores, even when delivering the same jokes.

However, there are other dimensions to this humor rating. For example, instructors who had the ability to raise a laugh were considered more humorous by students also had high HO scores. Basically they shared a cultural sense of what is funny. The students with low HO scores did not perceive jokes in the same manner. They had different requirements for humor. The Humor Orientation Scale is still a way to measure how funny another person is. Instructors with low HO scores were not considered funny by any students.

A study from Baldwin Wallace University has linked conversation decoding ability with humor orientation. This decoding ability involves three parts: conversational sensitivity, nonverbal sensitivity, and receiver apprehension. The more sensitive the person was to both verbal and non-verbal cues, the higher the person’s humor orientation tended to be. However, sometimes this sensitivity resulted in apprehension and apprehension made people seem less funny. The content of humor definitely matters. When people invoked laughter at the expense of others this did not always cause a lower perception of their humor ability. Instead their “likeability” ratings plummeted.

So, before you gather your collection of puns and one-liners remember that believing you are funny doesn’t necessarily make a person humorous. Traits found in people who are considered humorous include: adaptability in communication, desire to make a positive impressions, orientation towards feeling/emotions, and being able to see the irony in a situation. There is a skill involved.

Booth-Butterfield, S., & Booth-Butterfield, M. (1991). Individual differences in the communication of humorous messages. Southern Communication Journal, 56, 205–218.

Merolla, Andy J. Decoding Ability and Humor Production, Communication Quarterly 05/2006; 54(2):175-189.

Wanzer, M., Booth-Butterfield, M., & Booth-Butterfield, S. (1995). The funny people: A source-orientation to the communication of humor. Communication Quarterly, 43, 142–154.

Wanzer, M. B., Booth-Butterfield, M., & Booth-Butterfield, S. (1996). Are funny people more popular: The relationship of humor orientation, loneliness, and social attraction. Communication Quarterly, 44, 42–52.

Illustration Rembrandt Laughing by Rembrandt Van Rjin