Do You and Your Partner Laugh at the Same Things?

You and your partner switch on the TV to watch the latest rom-com to hit your streaming service. As the ridiculous plot unfolds, both of you share hearty laughter, and by the time the credits start rolling you feel a surge of inexplicable warmth toward your partner. It was fun spending the evening this way, but even more important, laughing at the same lines makes you feel that you and your partner truly are on the same wavelength.

Finding the same entertainment or experience to be funny is one component of a shared sense of humor with your partner. Another is whether you and your partner find each other’s jokes to be funny, or even whether the two of you make the same kinds of jokes.

There’s Good Humor and then There’s Bad Humor

According to Michigan State University’s Mariah Purol and William Chopik (2023), humor is “desirable in partners, [and] important for relationship initiation and maintenance” (p. 791). They go on to note that “people like funny partners and want to be in relationships with funny people” (p. 793). However, not all humor shares this positive quality. Self-deprecating and self-defeating humor, where you poke fun at yourself, have the opposite effects, as does humor that is unduly aggressive.

Perhaps you had a previous partner, now left behind, whose entire interpersonal style involved making fun of other people, including you. This ex may also have cracked more than their share of jokes based on negative stereotypes about entire groups of people, whether those of your own gender identity or of other nationalities or ethnicities. It is difficult to maintain a relationship with someone you find to be so boorish and insensitive.

Of course, humor has its subjective elements, and the way you perceive your partner’s humor may or may not correspond to its actual style. The Michigan State authors were curious to find out whether partners accurately perceived each other’s humor style or whether they tended to see their partners as similar to themselves. It’s possible that you see your partner as similar to you because you are so satisfied with your relationship. You therefore may see your partner as having a more “adaptive” (i.e. positive) sense of humor than they themselves admit to having.

Partner Perception in the Humor Department

The key model guiding the Purol and Chopik investigation is known as “truth and bias (T&B),” an approach useful in couples research. The “truth” part of the equation refers to whether Partner A sees Partner B the same way that Partner B does. The “bias” part would represent the degree to which Partner A sees Partner B as similar to themselves which, in turn, should reflect their levels of satisfaction.

Testing the T&B model, the Michigan State authors recruited a sample of 337 heterosexual couples between the ages of 19 and 89 (average age 66 years old). With an average relationship length of 37 years (though some were only together one year), the partners in these couples should have some pretty accurate insights into each other’s sense of humor.

The humor perception scale included ratings of the self and the partner in the following four categories, with sample items shown here (each is rated on a 7-point scale). To give yourself a feel for what the study asked participants to do, try rating yourself first and then rate your partner:

Adaptive:

Self-enhancing: “If I am feeling depressed, I can usually cheer myself up with humor.”

Affiliative: “I laugh and joke a lot with my closest friends.”

Maladaptive:

Self-defeating: “I let people laugh at me or make fun at my expense more than I should.”

Aggressive: “If someone makes a mistake, I will often tease them about it.”

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Now you can try out the next measure in the study, which is a scale of “funniness.” Simply rate yourself (1 to 7) on agreement with the statements “I am funny,” and “My partner is funny.”

To assess satisfaction, the authors used a standard relationship-quality questionnaire containing such items as “My relationship with my partner makes me happy.”

Putting these elements into the T&B model, Purol and Chopik examined “directional bias,” or a tendency to over- or underrate others, “truth force,” which is whether a participant is “drawn” to the truth, and “bias,” or a tendency to see one’s partner as similar to oneself.

Of all possible effects of T&B on relationship satisfaction, four emerged as significant:

1. People higher in relationship satisfaction were more likely to see themselves as similar in affiliative as well as self-enhancing humor. For self-deprecating humor, only the more highly satisfied showed a bias toward seeing their partner as similar to them.

2. Accuracy was lower in general on ratings of funniness, with the T&B model revealing effects of directional bias. As the authors concluded, this may reflect a combination of “global adoration,” meaning that if you love your partner, you’ll elevate your estimation of their positive qualities.

3. The more satisfied reported that their partners used more affiliative and self-enhancing humor and the less satisfied that their partners showed aggressive humor.

4. Overall accuracy was high in humor style ratings. Given that the couples had been together for such a long time, it’s possible that this finding reflects all those nights of TV or movie watching, not to mention the actual conversations that occur over the course of so many years.

How Humor Can Benefit Your Relationship

The findings from the Purol and Chopik study make it clear that people in close relationships pay attention to each other’s sense of humor. The more they are satisfied with each other, and perhaps vice versa, the more they see their partner as sharing their own style, at least in three of the four domains studied here. However, outweighing even this effect, they also have an ability to make an accurate assessment of their partner’s humor style.

Knowing that your partner may give you a “pass” on the occasional joke that falls flat, this study also suggests the value of emphasizing the positive in whatever humorous musings you happen to share. As tempting as it is to use humor as a weapon, especially when you’re not feeling particularly happy with life, you might consider keeping this to yourself. In a new relationship, it’s especially important to strive to use humor as a way to lighten, not darken, the mood.

To sum up, even recognizing the fact that laughing together can benefit your relationship is a first step toward using humor as a way to build romantic bonds. You might not always laugh at exactly the same joke, but if you can share a similar approach to life’s funny situations, your appreciation of each other will only improve across the years.

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