Individuals are fairly consistent in the ways they use humor over time.
People of all ages and backgrounds engage in humor and it can vary greatly. Humor styles can also vary depending on the situation.
Humor can be used to enhance one's self or enhance the relationship with others or be benevolent or detrimental.
The combination of these four factors creates distinct humor styles: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating.
Affiliative humor is defined as the style of humor used to enhance one’s relationships with others in a benevolent, positive manner.
Self-enhancing humor is a style of humor related to having a good-natured attitude toward life, having the ability to laugh at yourself, your circumstances and the idiosyncrasies of life in constructive, non-detrimental manner.
Aggressive humor is a style of humor that is potentially detrimental towards others. This type of humor is characterized by the use of sarcasm, put-downs, teasing, criticism, ridicule, and other types of humor used at the expense of others.
Self-defeating humor is the style of humor characterized by the use of potentially detrimental humor towards the self in order to gain approval from others. Individuals high in this dimension engage in self-disparaging humor in which laughter is often at their own expense.
For examples of each type and additional explanations goto:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humor_styles
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