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Key points
- Perspective is everything: laughing instead of crying can aid us as we age.
- Sharing humorous or light reminiscences about the past is life-affirming.
- “Good” humor reduces the tension in uncomfortable situations, enabling us to laugh at our own faults.
In a loving relationship, the right kind of playfulness can figure prominently in the satisfaction levels we experience as couples. Especially as we age, life either gets funnier or more sobering, and that adage about laughing instead of crying begins to make real sense. As we walk along life’s path, chuckling over the changes that take place in our lives and our bodies can offer a sense of camaraderie as opposed to a fear of the unknown. Oh. And everything else is pretty funny too.
Having been married twice, I know the difference between kind, playful, life-affirming humor over a shared remark, incident, or memory, and a gaslighting, cynical, or caustic remark that on its surface might sound humorous, but if turned around on the person making it, it doesn’t fly so well. Thankfully, I graduated to the good (first) version the second time around.
Humor can come in really handy as you get older. We boomers grew up in what I call the “era of great relief” just after WWII ended. Massive neighborhoods and suburbs were built in the 1950s. The populace was eager for press-button cooking, flying cars, and plush wall-to-wall carpeting to cover out-of-date hardwood floors (that are now all the rage). In elementary school, many of us spent time watching “newsreels” to excite us about what the future might look like. So by the time we glued ourselves to our TV sets to watch rockets enter space, it was the thrilling fulfillment of what we expected. Songs about the moon and the stars stopped being written, as our fascination with the skies turned from romance to scientific discovery. To joke about any of this with succeeding generations usually falls on deaf ears. With our peers, however? Still reason to spill your beer reminiscing and joking about all of it.
“Going online” quickly changed from hearing a modem make ugly sounds as “You’ve Got Mail” transformed communication to relying on the internet (now no longer a capitalized word) for our news, entertainment, and connections with friends and family. Our kids poked fun at how we thought of all this as a complex new frontier to cross, while in their eyes computers were no more complicated than refrigerators. Our fear of thinking one wrong keystroke could ruin our lives is far behind us now, but there was plenty to laugh about along the way.
Trivia is, simply put, the best kind of chuckle-provoking humor shared by my spouse and me. We are avid movie/TV buffs, valuing both old and new cinema while marveling about the latest in movie plots and brilliantly-written TV series that seemed to have graduated overnight to cinema-worthy status. We readily recognize faces from movies and shows past and can’t even imagine how current generations live without the context and (sometimes inappropriate) reapplications of lines from The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, or Harry Met Sally.
Psychology Today contributor Gil Greenhouse takes this topic into the realm of science, referring to studies of how a sense of humor serves relationships. “For dating couples, the use of positive humor (for example, using humor to cheer up your date) can positively contribute to relationship satisfaction. The use of aggressive humor, on the other hand (teasing and making fun of your partner) has the opposite effect. These feelings can fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, depending on each partner’s use of humor,” he says.
While married couples often have a similar sense of humor, it surprised me that the research Greenhouse used did not find shared humor to result in greater marital satisfaction. I did have to laugh at this, though: “Perhaps not surprisingly, the research that resulted in this finding also found that couples with fewer children laugh more, compared to couples with a larger number of children.” The greater the number of kids, the higher the buzz-kill? Somehow I would have imagined the opposite.
Thing is, a sense of humor is not something easily taught if you don’t grow up having one. In both my family as well as my husband’s, joking was heard and cherished often—at the dinner table, at gatherings, and within any interpersonal relationships we came to value. There was little you couldn’t laugh at. Whether you loved or hated a sitting president, we laughed together about his foibles and inconsistencies without the hate and toxicity we hear today. And while we may have been of differing political beliefs, it was rare that we became adamant about them. We somehow knew, without even thinking about it, it would kill the fun.
My husband and I are often on the opposite side of the fence with political views. Discovering this early on, however, we viewed it as a reason to come to an agreement that could last the rest of our years together. Rather than argue about or poke fun at the other’s beliefs, we agreed that we would simply go to the polls where one vote would no doubt cancel out the other—that zero-sum equation with a little humor thrown in. To make any of this a point of seriousness might kill the wonderful “soul mate” feeling we feel toward one another otherwise. And when we tell others about it in mixed company, it’s definitely cause for laughter.
Louise Dobson’s “Crack Me Up” blog makes a clear distinction between good humor and bad humor. “Put-down humor is an aggressive type of humor used to criticize and manipulate others through teasing, sarcasm, and ridicule,” she says. "Such as telling friends an embarrassing story about another friend, [it] is a socially acceptable way to deploy aggression and make others look bad so you look good.”
Bonding humor, on the other hand, is just plain fun. “People who are adept at it say amusing things, tell jokes, engage in witty banter, and generally lighten the mood,” says Dobson. “These are the people who give humor a good name. They're perceived as warm, down-to-earth and kind, good at reducing the tension in uncomfortable situations and able to laugh at their own faults.”
And then there is the humor of aging. No one told us that when we hit our 50s we would have to work at getting older. My parents’ generation never spoke of walking for health reasons, or eliminating carbs for heart health and longer life. The “food pyramid” and height/weight charts were all we knew. Those, and that eggs were full of cholesterol.
Because science and medicine have made such great discoveries about exercise and diet, however, to turn a blind eye to it now is to watch as our bodies morph into shapes and movements that feel foreign. If getting up off the floor requires grabbing onto a nearby piece of furniture, you’re probably getting old. If you have to sit down to pull on a pair of jeans for fear of falling over, you’re probably getting old. If you can’t crane your neck to see who is coming up in the lane next to you as you move your car into it, age and/or fitness may be part of the problem.
We can joke about all this to break the tension we feel about getting older, or we can take baby steps to hold off the effects of aging so that we have the time to laugh even longer. My husband gets good-feeling endorphins from exercise. I don’t. He knows I hate exercise, but also knows that the idea of being healthy with him as long as possible is of more importance to me. So we don’t “leave the gun; bring the cannoli.” We joke about it lovingly while just doing it. And it’s the laughter that makes all the difference.
