One of the 24 character strengths
Bringing lightness to things, and doing it for the people around you rather than at their expense.
Humor is the strength of making a moment lighter for the people in it. The direction matters: with the room, never at somebody in it.
Very little of this is telling jokes. It is the remark that lets a tense meeting breathe. It is being willing to be the ridiculous one so nobody else has to be. Mostly it is a refusal to let a difficult afternoon get heavier than it needs to be.
The reliable tell is where it points. Somebody who leads here is usually the first target of their own material, and the room ends up more comfortable than it was. Comedy that leaves one person smaller is doing a different job.
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96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentA presentation crashes in front of forty people. The presenter says something about the laptop having strong feelings about slide nine, and the room comes back to them.
Lightness can arrive before the hard thing has been said. Somebody who leads here can defuse a conversation that genuinely needed to stay tense, and be thanked at the time for a thing that had to be had again later.
It gets read as not taking things seriously. What is usually true is the reverse. This strength turns up most reliably at funerals, in hospitals and in the middle of a crisis. That is where the weight is, and where somebody has to carry a bit of it.
Both raise the temperature of a room. Zest is about how fully somebody throws themselves in; Humor is about making the room easier to be in.
Both depend on reading people accurately. Social Intelligence works out what somebody needs; Humor is one of the things it might hand them.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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