Sense of humor, personality, and happiness

We are all interested in humor and happiness. We want to be happy and to have fun and to laugh. We know that life is more bearable if we can laugh, often at ourselves, and we can be more resilient with humor. But humor is a complex construct. We know that humor, happiness and personality attributes are some of the characteristics that are associated with resilience. But what is humor and how can it be defined? In the first section of this chapter, we define what sense of humor is and how it can be measured. The relationships between humor and happiness, and between humor and personality are also described. But again, what is happiness and how is it defined? In this chapter, we also define happiness and how it can be measured and, further, present the relationships between happiness and personality and expand on the relevance of these two aspects of being. Personality is also defined and current measurement approaches are discussed. Finally, this chapter then reports on findings about the relationships among humor, personality, and happiness from an Australian study of adult professional employees.