How often do you say LOL? Looking at Humour as a Coping Mechanism

Humour manifests in various styles, each serving different purposes:​

• Affiliative Humour: This style strengthens social bonds through jokes and light-hearted banter, building camaraderie and reducing interpersonal tensions.​
• Self-Enhancing Humour: Here, individuals maintain a humorous perspective in the face of adversity, using laughter to cope with stress and maintain a positive outlook.​
• Aggressive Humour: This form includes sarcasm and teasing, often at the expense of others, and can sometimes be detrimental to relationships.​
• Self-Defeating Humour: Involving self-disparaging jokes, this style can be a double-edged sword, providing temporary relief but potentially undermining self-esteem.​

The Science Behind Smile

Humour serves as a psychological instrument that assists people in regulating their emotions and controlling stress. Adolescents in India who used adaptive humour forms like affiliative and self-enhancing humour, according to Jolly and Lokesh (2022), reported increased self-esteem and subjective happiness. These styles involve using humour to strengthen social bonds and maintain a positive outlook. Implementing aggressive or self-defeating humour failed to produce the same positive psychological effects as adaptive styles.

Humour in Everyday Indian Life

Humour can be found across all regions of India—from the energetic streets of Mumbai to the serene backwaters of Kerala. Indian culture expresses itself through witty banter among friends, satirical media presentations, and memes that dominate all social media platforms. Social media platforms became filled with amusing quarantine content when lockdowns occurred, including song parodies and work-from-home-related memes. Shared experiences between people developed community bonds and resilience through comedy, which showed the importance of humour in social crises.

The Digital Age: Memes as Modern-Day Therapy

Young Indians use memes today as their own distinctive communication method to express feelings, while challenging social practices, and most importantly, to handle their stress levels. Memes succeed as a method of emotional expression because people easily identify with them and wish to share them.

The meme pages on platforms including Instagram and Twitter present both exam stress memes and political satire memes, which combine humour to help viewers engage in discussions about contemporary issues. The digital humour content brings positive feelings while validating mutually experienced situations, thus confirming laughter’s ability to create unity.

Humour and Mental Health: Striking the Right Balance

Although humor functions as an effective coping strategy the number of times people can utilise this method should be cognizant of restrictions. Self-deprecating or aggressive humour styles, along with excessive humour use, might conceal existing emotional problems. When Jain (2022) conducted their research, they established that affiliative humour produced positive results for self-esteem. In contrast, aggressive humour showed negative results, pointing to different humour styles delivering different effects on mental well-being. Using humour effectively to manage daily life requires finding a balance to prevent barriers from blocking emotional support.

Incorporating Humour into Daily Life

These strategies will help people benefit from humour as a coping technique:

• Search for content that speaks to your laughter. This could include a variety of things, like stand-up comedy shows, funny books, or maybe even horror films, if that’s your jam.
• People with similar humour could create social environments filled with individuals who align with their comedic style. Sharing laughter between people creates social bonds in addition to being easily contagious.
• Enhance your own humour through daily minor incidents without making personal degrading jokes or mocking others. The different way of seeing things produces positive alterations in how we interpret our problems.
• Pay attention to how humour is used to avoid facing significant matters. Smiling is acceptable, although one should ideally deal with the emotions attached when needed.

Conclusion

People around us feature humour daily to provide comfort, social bonds, and enduring strength. Such groups that embrace humour during times of difficulty can look at modern existence’s complexities through a lens, minutely different from those who cannot, possibly with their smiles and the search for a silver lining.