Humor Works Best as Attention, Honesty, and Shared Relief

Chris Duffy describes humor less as a performance skill than as an attentional practice. The first of the three pillars in his book Humor Me is presence: noticing “the strange and unusual and absurd things in the world around you.” Without that attention, he says, laughter has little to work with.

That emphasis on presence is also why Duffy tells people to “think really small.” He is not arguing that the world is secretly fine if viewed correctly. In fact, he frames humor as almost the opposite of “toxic positivity.” The premise is not that every cloud has a silver lining, or that pain and violence can be rebranded as cheerful. Sometimes, he says, “that’s just not true at all.” The value of humor is that it can coexist with the negative thing without denying it.

The comic opening is usually not in the big picture, which may be overwhelming, frightening or simply not funny. It is in the tiny irregularity: the typo, the odd mannequin, the detail that is “just a little off or a little weird or a little unexpected.” Duffy’s suggested move is to pause over the detail and ask why it is that way.

His most practical recommendation is to keep a list of whatever genuinely makes you laugh. He means it literally: a physical list, a printed-out story, a saved meme, a digital note. The point is not to curate a public archive of taste. It is to keep the things that naturally got through to you before they disappear.

Duffy offered two recent entries from his own list. At a playground with his two-year-old, he noticed a very serious father following his child up a play structure. The father then had to get himself down, which required riding the slide, “but like not having any fun at all.” The image of a stone-faced adult sliding down with no visible joy struck Duffy as a tiny absurdity he could easily have missed.

The other example came from a health-care portal. When he tried to log in for a test result, the site told him: “Not available right now. Please log in after some time.” The message was frustrating and useless, but its absurd vagueness made him laugh.

The list matters because attention compounds. Duffy compared it to watching a documentary about birding and then suddenly hearing birdsong everywhere. The birds had not appeared because he had learned about them; they had been there all along. Paying attention had moved them from background blur into awareness. He says humor works the same way: when you start noticing funny, delightful and absurd things, “you discover that the world is actually filled with them.”

That does not mean Duffy presents himself as permanently present. He explicitly resists that. Writing a book about laughing more did not exempt him from being overwhelmed, tired, on his phone, or surrounded by screaming children. He joked that when people expect him to be “the laughing present guy,” his answer is sometimes: “Not right now. I’m not.”

What reliably brings him back is shared laughter. He points to the familiar experience of laughing so hard with a friend or family member that you cry and your sides hurt. That state is not merely fun; it is full attention. You are not half checking email or thinking ahead. You are “100 percent locked in” with the other person.

Duffy also casts this as his own version of meditation. Conventional meditation has felt to him like “homework and broccoli.” Laughter gives him another route into being present. Friends and family, he says, often find it both fun and frustrating to move from one place to another with him because he is constantly stopping to point out a sign, a hat on a mannequin, or a child’s shoes. The cost is that he moves slowly. The benefit is that he sees more that is delightful.

The second pillar is laughing at yourself, and Chris Duffy uses it to challenge what he sees as a common misunderstanding: that being funny means commanding a room. He is not dismissing the appeal of telling a story while everyone laughs. But that is not the form of humor he wants to encourage most.

His preferred model is a life with more shared delight, more laughing with other people, and less pressure for the laughter to originate with you. He connects this to a sociological study he says he read about dating apps. According to Duffy, people broadly reported wanting a partner with a great sense of humor. But when researchers asked what that meant, he says heterosexual women tended to define it as someone they could laugh with, while heterosexual men tended to define it as someone who laughs at their jokes.

To Duffy, the second definition is “a completely misguided understanding” of humor. Humor, in his account, is not primarily about being recognized as the funny one. It is about increasing the amount of laughter and connection in the room.

Elise Hu brought the point into the terrain of friendship, saying she often laughs hardest with friends when they are making fun of her. Duffy responded that Hu is unusually good at this. More broadly, he argues that self-mockery can counter a damaging social assumption: that people want us to be flawless.

Duffy’s view is that perfection is not what makes people approachable. Someone who presents as entirely impressive — “I started 10 billion-dollar companies, and I have a six-pack, and both my kids are going to Harvard” — is more likely to intimidate or repel. Someone who acknowledges being “a little bit of a mess” is easier to talk to. Laughing at yourself can make you feel human, reachable and relatable.

But Duffy is careful not to treat laughter as inherently virtuous. Hu pressed him on teasing, bullying and the common defense that someone was “just joking.” Duffy agreed that laughter can be part of cruelty. The image of a bully, he notes, often includes a group pointing and laughing at someone. That is not the humor he is encouraging.

He does not offer a universal line between harmless teasing and harm. He says the line is subjective and context-dependent. But he does offer tests.

When joking about yourself, the distinction is whether the joke targets a real insecurity or a known foible. Duffy can comfortably joke that if he is on a football field, “something has gone horribly wrong,” because he knows he is bad at sports and is not deeply insecure about it. By contrast, a joke about being an inadequate parent or partner might be doing something else: trying to say the painful thing first so no one else can. That, he says, is not a good way to talk about yourself.

When joking about other people, his advice is to err toward kindness and let them take the lead. If someone is already laughing about their own sports ineptitude, joining them may be fine. If you do not know where someone’s fault lines are, making them the subject of the joke is riskier.

His simplest alternative for people worried about being mean is to laugh more without making the joke themselves. If someone else makes a joke, laughing with them can be generous and supportive. People like when others genuinely receive their humor. That is different from making a joke at them.

That distinction matters because laughter itself is not proof that the humor worked. Duffy learned that partly through failure. Early in his relationship with his wife, Molly, he went to dinner with her friends and one of their parents. He imagined his role as entertainer, told his best stories, and got people laughing. He left thinking he had “crushed.” Molly told him the dinner had been horrible because he had not let anyone else talk.

The laughter had misled him. It was not evidence that he had created a generous social experience. It was compatible with monopolizing the room. Duffy treats that as a key distinction in teaching humor, including to children. The lesson is not simply “be funny.” Children also need to learn that a laugh is not proof that a joke is kind, caring or right.

For children, Duffy also wants humor to loosen the grip of perfectionism. He thinks the belief that others want us to be perfect gets taught young. One antidote is teaching children that mistakes can be gifts. In comedy, a scene where two happy people eat a normal meal and nothing odd happens is boring. Things become interesting when something goes wrong or someone says something unexpected.

The practical implication is that a child’s strangeness or difference need not be treated only as something to correct. Duffy describes trying to teach his own children that “the things that are weird and strange and different about you are gifts.” A mistake, if shared and connected to others, can become material for laughter rather than simply evidence of failure.

The third pillar is taking social risks: being willing to put yourself out there and, at times, be laughed at a little. Chris Duffy presents this as the natural extension of the first two pillars. Once you notice what makes you laugh and develop a sense of humor about yourself, the next step is to share more of it with other people.

He is not only addressing extroverts. For people who are shy or introverted, he recommends low-stakes risks.

One version can be done alone: break routine. Go somewhere you would not normally go, not because it will transform you, but because novelty creates comic possibility. After moving to Los Angeles, Duffy noticed signs for a past-lives regression festival. He expected it to be unusual and funny, so he went. He did not end up connecting with his “12th dimensional self,” as one workshop apparently promised, but he spent a memorable Sunday among crystals and claims about alien selves affecting present human selves. None of it became real to him. It did, however, become a source of laughter, surprise and memory.

The more accessible version is to walk into the odd shop you have always wondered about, or stop at a yard sale or estate sale and look for the strangest object. Nothing has to be publicly performed. The social risk can simply be taking yourself out of your usual pattern.

Another low-stakes risk is conversational. Duffy argues that the safest small talk — “How are you?”, “What do you do?”, the weather — carries very little risk and therefore little chance of connection. There is nothing wrong with it, but it rarely opens a door to laughter.

His suggested alternative is to ask a question that is slightly unusual and genuinely interesting to you. If you have just eaten the best soup of your life, you might ask someone: what is the worst soup you have ever eaten? The other person may find the question odd. But the exchange is likelier to become memorable than another comment about rain.

The underlying idea is that humor requires some deviation from the safest available script. It does not require spectacle. It often begins with a small truthful oddness.

Asked whether someone can train themselves to be funny, Chris Duffy’s answer is yes — with caveats. He describes humor as a muscle and a practice. The more you pay attention, the easier it becomes to notice delightful or funny things.

But he warns against turning the practice into another form of self-punishment. There is an irony, he says, in trying so hard to have fun that it stops being fun, and then punishing yourself for not having fun correctly.

For someone who enjoys wit but does not naturally generate it, he recommends beginning as a collector rather than a performer. Notice what already makes you laugh: the line in a play, the moment in a video, the scene in a film, the joke in a show. Keep the list. Over time, it becomes a record of your own comic taste.

From there, practice attention: this is odd; this strikes me as unusual; I want to know more about why this is that way. Duffy expects that the combination of collecting what makes you laugh and noticing the oddness of ordinary life will eventually “bleed into” other parts of life.

He also emphasizes fit. Even after more than a decade working professionally in comedy, he says there are people with whom he simply does not click on a laughter level. Some of having more humor in your life is finding people whose comic wavelength aligns with yours.

That social fit helps explain why the same joke can work in one room and fail or hurt in another. Duffy later uses emergency room doctors as an example. People in stressful work — emergency room doctors, social workers, teachers, soldiers — often have sharp senses of humor because laughter helps release tension. But a dark joke that connects two emergency room doctors may not be funny coming from an outsider. The shared context matters. The laughter says: you know this too.

Elise Hu raised a line from Roy Wood Jr., whom Chris Duffy quotes in the book: “Comedy is journalism.” Duffy connects the idea to observation, truth and surprise.

He notes that Wood’s father, Roy Wood Sr., was a pioneering civil rights journalist who covered the Soweto riots in South Africa and reported on civil rights issues before other outlets did. Duffy sees the younger Wood’s comedy as carrying an inherited respect for journalism’s capacity to reveal what is actually happening.

The parallel, as Duffy explains it, is that a joke makes the audience pay attention to something in a new way. When a joke lands, people often say, “That’s so true,” or “I never thought of it that way.” A comic observation about bread in a supermarket is not an investigative report, but it still involves looking closely and asking what truth is hiding in plain sight.

Hu framed journalism as relentless observation and curiosity. Duffy agreed and broadened the point to science and innovation. The mythology of discovery often centers on “Eureka,” but Duffy says many discoveries begin instead with “Huh, that’s funny. Why did that happen?” Surprise, curiosity and attention to anomaly matter across domains.

The same is true in interviewing. Duffy says a good interviewer should not already know what the subject will say next. Openness to surprise is part of what makes an exchange alive. It is also frequently what makes people laugh: “Oh, I didn’t think you were going to say that.”

Asked how humor travels across cultures and languages, Chris Duffy resists the premise that the best humor is universal. His own preference is for humor that is specific: the private joke between close friends, family members or a group that has built its own language. That kind of humor, he says, is deeply satisfying because it strengthens the relationship. Only the two of you — or only the group — fully understands it.

Still, he acknowledges research into more universal mechanisms of humor. In Duffy’s account, the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder — whose acronym, HURL, he notes as the lab’s own dad joke — produced a theory called benign violation theory. As he explains it, people laugh when something breaks a rule or violates an expectation, but in a way that is not harmful, scary or painful.

The classic example is tickling. A tickle is an attack that is not a painful attack. Similarly, “I’m going to get ya” can make a baby laugh and has analogues beyond humans. But Duffy stresses the benign part. A tickle from someone you know may be funny. A stranger running up and tickling you is not a benign violation; Hu called it an assault, and Duffy agreed.

He also offered a less elevated candidate for universality: farts and poop. His two-year-old recently pointed at his diaper and said, “Big fart,” which Duffy called one of the funniest things he had ever heard.

A more serious cross-cultural strategy, he says, is to tell the honest thing. Sometimes the comedy lies precisely in what does not translate. Saying, “This would be funny to my friends, but it’s not going to make any sense to you,” can itself become funny because it names the gap.

The sharpest boundary in Chris Duffy’s argument appears when he talks about serious illness, chronic pain and despair. He does not claim that everything becomes funny with the right attitude. Several years ago, his wife developed injuries and chronic pain that significantly limited her independence and mobility. She went from being fully capable to struggling to walk more than a block or two without debilitating pain. Duffy became her primary caretaker.

He describes that period as physically, mentally and emotionally brutal. There was no clear medical answer. Things worsened. His wife felt hopeless and struggled with suicidal ideation. Duffy calls it the darkest and scariest period of his life and their life together.

He is explicit about what humor did not do. It did not make the situation funny. It did not fix the pain, the depression or the underlying condition.

One moment came when Molly, searching for a way to reset her life, found a silent retreat center where people could stay for free if they cleaned dishes and bathrooms. Duffy worried that going somewhere remote, without phone or internet contact, would be unsafe given how much care she needed. Molly replied that he would come with her.

Duffy, who describes himself as “the biggest yapper of all time,” immediately saw the absurdity. So did she. The idea of him trying to survive an extended stay at a silent retreat center — desperately signaling with his eyes to point out something funny — made them laugh.

The laugh changed the hour, not the diagnosis. Duffy argues that this distinction matters. In depression and suicidal ideation, getting through the day, or even the hour, is not a minor thing. A small laugh can create enough lightness to continue.

Because that mattered, he and Molly began trying to end many days with one small laugh. Often nothing in their day was funny. So they looked elsewhere: outtakes from The Office, or a Reddit community called Contagious Laughter, where people post recordings of people laughing so hard that the laughter itself becomes infectious. Not every day, and not on the worst days, but on many bad days, a clip could shift the tone of the evening.

That principle reappeared in Duffy’s responses to member questions about job loss and despair over public affairs. For someone unemployed and facing awkward “what are you up to these days?” questions, Duffy suggested acknowledging the genuine feeling rather than pretending the situation is light. “Ooh, that’s a tough question” may be truer and funnier than a polished answer. He also pointed to the absurdity of job searching itself: LinkedIn, resumes, rejection, and the sudden appeal of scrubbing a toilet if it delays updating a résumé.

For a former government STEM worker grieving the loss of meaningful work and purpose, Duffy rejected the expectation of staying upbeat. Losing one’s life’s work and seeing science or education under assault is not a cheerful situation. Humor, he suggested, may come from laughing with others inside the same experience, or from unrelated silly things. You do not have to laugh directly at scientific defunding to have humor in your life.

The lesson is consistent: humor is not a denial strategy. It is a pressure valve and a connection point.

In the “Comedy Rx” portion, Chris Duffy’s advice repeatedly returns to one move: say the true thing plainly enough that the absurdity becomes visible.

The clearest example came from a professor writing about the “existential dread of generative AI” in higher education. The professor described staring at 19 student essays, analyzing semicolons like a forensic investigator, wondering whether a sentence came from a human heartbeat or “a server farm in Oregon,” and fearing that AI might write the essays while AI grades them, leaving the professor as a middleman in a digital conversation.

Duffy’s first response was that the professor had already found the comedy. The description itself was funny because it was clear, authentic and emotionally precise. His prescription was to say it directly to the students. If they can generate answers with AI and the professor can grade them with AI, “then the two computers have done all the work and neither you nor I have any meaning or purpose in our lives.” Naming the absurdity could make students laugh while opening a more honest conversation.

That answer also clarifies why Duffy’s version of humor is not merely joke-writing. In the examples he favors, the laugh arrives when someone stops performing competence and says what is actually happening: the job search is humiliating, the AI classroom is an “academic hall of mirrors,” the parent is desperate to connect with a teenager who does not want advice, the spouse is trying too hard to engineer a loved one’s retirement happiness.

The target, in those cases, is often the self rather than the other person. Duffy gently redirected questions from people who wanted loved ones to change — a husband struggling with retirement, a strong-willed teenage daughter refusing to listen — toward laughing at one’s own helplessness, over-eagerness or cluelessness. The parent might acknowledge the comedy of wanting so badly to connect and failing. The spouse might laugh at the impulse to assemble the perfect activity, travel guide or hobby gear that will unlock a new passion. Self-directed humor can reveal care without pressure.

Duffy’s broader claim is that humor often works best when it stops trying to force lightness onto someone else. It can make room for the truth of the situation without demanding that everyone feel better on command.

In response to a question about humor in leadership, Chris Duffy introduced an idea from his wife’s work in more corporate settings: selective vulnerability.

The distinction matters. If a CEO stands in an all-hands meeting and says, “We have no idea what’s going to happen next and I’m terrified and I really think it could go badly,” that may be vulnerable, but it is not necessarily helpful. People are unlikely to feel safer afterward.

Selective vulnerability names uncertainty without dumping panic onto the room. A leader might say: there is a lot unknown, I feel that too, and we are going to get through it together. That is still human, but it is bounded by responsibility.

Duffy thinks humor works similarly. Laughing at yourself can make people feel that you are human. But joking in a way that makes others feel they cannot trust you, or that you are cruel, has the opposite effect. The leadership question is not simply whether to use humor, but where humor can serve the same function as selective vulnerability: enough openness to reduce defensiveness and invite change, not so much that it undermines safety or respect.

That principle loops back through the whole account. Humor is useful when it sharpens attention, lowers the performance of perfection, makes space for others, and releases pressure without denying what is hard. It fails when it becomes domination, cruelty, avoidance or a demand that someone else feel lighter on command.