Finding Humor

Another unique attribute of human beings is our sense of humor. Laughter transcends all human beings. Its’ positive effects on psychological functions include a drop in the pulse rate, the secretion of endorphins, an increased oxygen in the blood. It has been found to liberate creativity and provoke such higher level thinking skills as anticipation, finding novel relationships, visual imagery, and making analogies. People who engage in the mystery of humor have the ability to perceive situations from an original and often interesting vantagepoint. They tend to initiate humor more often, to place greater value on having a sense of humor, to appreciate and understand others' humor and to be verbally playful when interacting with others. Having a whimsical frame of mind, they thrive on finding incongruity and perceiving absurdities, ironies and satire; finding discontinuities and being able to laugh at situations and themselves. Some students find humor in all the "wrong places"--human differences, ineptitude, injurious behavior, vulgarity, violence and profanity. They laugh at others yet are unable to laugh at themselves. We want our student to acquire the characteristic of creative problem solvers, they can distinguish between situations of human frailty and fallibility which are in need of compassion and those which are truly funny. (Dyer, 1997).