Does Growing Older Cause Your Sense Of Humor To Change?

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
If you’re watching a TV sitcom and find that you’re the only one in the room laughing at the jokes, it may be because you’re the only one young enough (or old enough) to appreciate the humor, according to research appearing in the September edition of the journal Psychology and Aging.
Jennifer Tehan Stanley, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Akron, and colleagues from Brandeis University and Northeastern University set out to determine whether or not young, middle-aged and older adults found video clips depicting inappropriate social behavior to be funny. They did this by showing footage of the shows The Office, Golden Girls, Mr. Bean and Curb Your Enthusiasm to adults of various ages.
According to Olga Khazan of The Atlantic, Stanley and her co-authors recruited 30 young adults, 22 middle-aged individuals, and 29 senior citizens to watch various comedy segments, then rate how funny and how socially appropriate they felt each one was. The researchers also used facial electromyography to measure the degree to which each of the clips caused the facial muscles responsible for forming a smile to move in each of the subjects.
The authors discovered that older adults were less likely to enjoy what is known as the aggressive style of humor, which involves laughing at the expense of others (a trademark of the Michael Scott character in The Office). People between the ages of 64 and 84 were about 23 percent less likely than middle-aged people to find a clip from that show funny, and 19 percent less than those in the 17- to 21-year-old category, Khazan said.
“Young adults were also more likely to smirk at the clips that showed self-deprecating humor, as exemplified in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry pumps his waiter for information about how much his friend left as a tip,” she added. “The older participants, meanwhile, liked affiliative humor – the kind of jokes that bring people together through a funny or awkward situation. Stanley says a Golden Girls clip in which the women try to buy condoms and suffer an embarrassing price check is a good example.”
As Michael K. McIntyre, a reporter with The Cleveland Plain Dealer, pointed out, the age-related differences in humor does not suggest that certain age groups don’t “get” certain types of jokes or fail to understand why something is supposed to be funny – just that older people tend to differ from younger adults in what they find humor in.
The study wasn’t just about determining what makes people of different ages laugh, however. Stanley, who conducted the research at Brandeis University before moving to Akron, told McIntyre that she hopes the research “helps us better understand how we perceive social and emotional events in young, middle-age and older adulthood.” She noted that it was the first study to demonstrate differences in the way generations perceive humor.
Stanley’s research, which could also help advertisers who are attempting to reach specific audiences, was inspired by a UK study that found that older adults had difficulty distinguishing between socially appropriate and inappropriate behavior in video clips from the British version of The Office. She said that she believed that the study was misguided, and that perhaps not finding humor in some material influences their ratings of appropriateness.
“The study raises some intriguing questions about our concept of what is funny,” the University of Akron said in a statement. “Is that concept based on factors peculiar to generations, or does it evolve over time as we age and, perhaps, mellow? Those possibilities will need to be explored in a future episode of humor research. Stay tuned.”