Humor in Families: A Crucible of Humor and Communication

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Families provide our first, earliest, and ongoing engagement with humorous communication. Some scholars (Martin, Anderson, Burant, & Weber, 1997; Vogl-Bauer, 2003) claim that teasing, for example, is part of the daily fabric of family members’ interactions. The family is a crucible for human socialization regarding the use of humor in close relationships. Although many theories and functional analyses of humor exist, generally these perspectives have seen limited application to humor in families. This underscores the necessity to use functional models (cf., Graham, Papa, & Brooks, 1992; De Koning & Weiss, 2002) in extending the examination of humor employed in families.