Intelligence just wants to have fun

Humour Intelligence

Most people are aware of emotional intelligence however humour intelligence (hi👋🏼), it's lesser known but equally smart sibling, is just starting to get the academic recognition it deserves. Humour Intelligence describes a unique set of highly valuable human abilities, similar but distinct from emotional intelligence and strongly linked to high IQ and Verbal Intelligence. It’s been described as “intelligence having fun”, representing an ability to apply cognitive skills to social situations, in a playful manner. However it goes much deeper than that.

Apart from being a fascinating and emerging concept in modern psychology, humour intelligence is one of the most fundamentally useful and enjoyable capacities we have. Outrageously, until just a few years ago, it wasn't actually recognised as a legitimate form of intelligence in it's own right. It was considered a side effect of other intelligences. You could say it was the Vegemite of intelligences. If you don't get that joke you should really know more about Vegemite. Anyway, as many people have figured out for themselves and comedians will attest, the intelligence of humour is not as overrated as Vegemite. And that's an understatement.

To fully understand humour intelligence we need to understand humour. We might think we know what humour is and all of us clearly have some idea, however on closer inspection the nature of humour is a lot intriguing than one might assume. Of course it includes things like cracking jokes and being silly, stand-up comedy, funny movies and just mucking around and laughing with friends. However if we look at the very origins of the word humour, we get clues to what is now becoming understood by psychologists and scientists a like.

Humour comes from the latin humor, which means fluid. To be in good humor used to mean that all the fluids of the body were in good health. Indeed we are now beginning to understand that ones sense of humour is a fundamental aspect to our health and wellbeing, as a human being. When Bruce Lee said “be like water” he could well have been saying to be in good humour. To be in a state flow because a 'good sense of humour' is about being fluid, over being rigid. It’s about going with the flow but not in a wishy washy ‘peace out man’ kinda way. It's about being flexible, adaptable and resilient in out thinking and finding ways to maintain a creative mindset, even at the risk of sometimes seeming foolish to others.

As artificial intelligence is being incorporated into the way humans interact with the world, it's logical that the role of humour intelligence will appreciate as we are driven to realise what is unique about us humans. While AI stills struggles to understand humour and tends to think it's a glitch in it's otherwise perfectly predictable matrix, it's a good time for humans to double down on our human humour before robots are taking the piss out of us. Not literally I hope.