Humor and Message Production

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If laughter is the best medicine, then we ought to devote as much attention to the doctors and pharmacists of wit as we do to the ailments that give rise to the prescription. Interest in the sense of humor is longstanding, and investigations vis-à-vis the field of communication are no exception. Humor-related research ranges from the public communication setting (Gruner, 1985) to the interpersonal (Graham, Papa, & Brooks, 1992). The communication discipline also parallels other fields in the relative neglect of humor production compared to humor comprehension and appreciation. Evidence that this situation is changing, however, can be gleaned from research on humor orientation as an individual difference variable (Booth-Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield, 1991) and the security theory of humor (Miczo, 2004; Miczo, Averbeck, & Mariani, 2009), which attempts to explain underlying differences in humor production abilities. Concomitantly, the field of communication continues to witness advances in our understanding of message production, particularly with the development and refinement of the goals-plans-action (GPA) framework (Dillard, 1990, 1997). It is a propitious time, therefore, to pose the question: What can the field of communication bring to the study of humor production? The converse of this question is also of interest: What can a confrontation with humor bring to our understanding of how communicators produce messages? This chapter proceeds by first exploring issues in the conceptualization of humor and then addressing those issues with concepts and constructs from the area of message production. We can begin by conceptually disentangling three constructs: laughter, humor appreciation, and humor production.