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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
Faith and laughter: Do atheists and practicing Christians have different senses of humor?
Beteiligte:
Schweizer, Bernard;
Ott, Karl-Heinz
Erschienen:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016
Erschienen in:HUMOR
Sprache:
Nicht zu entscheiden
DOI:
10.1515/humor-2015-0109
ISSN:
0933-1719;
1613-3722
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This study analyzes the reactions of practicing Christians and atheists to various kinds of humorous materials. The goal was to determine whether the presence or absence of Christian belief serves as a predictor for humor appreciation, specifically whether practicing Christians appreciate certain types of humor more (or less) than atheists do. Reactions by all study participants to 18 passages presenting various humor styles were dispersed from “not funny at all” to “very funny,” indicating the subjective nature of measuring humor appreciation. The results show almost no correlation between the presence or absence of Christian faith and the degree of humor appreciation. The only notable exceptions are that practicing Christians tend to react less favorably than atheists to the most blasphemous, disparaging kinds of humor, while atheists are somewhat less amused by good-natured religious jokes compared to practicing Christians. All other joke categories were judged similarly in terms of their perceived funniness by members of the two contrasting religious populations. The overriding determiner of funniness was found to be the inherent comical quality of individual jokes as well as, to some degree, the joke category from which humorous passages were drawn, rather than the presence or absence of Christian faith among the joke recipients. This finding contradicts a-priori claims about the supposed negative correlation between sense of humor and religiosity. The study further exemplifies adaptive statistical methods to extract significant trends and tendencies from empirical data obtained through an online survey.</jats:p>