Laughing makes you smart

(or smartasses laugh)

My love often makes jokes in new company. He doesn't immediately unleash a whole repertoire on them like Jochem Myjer, otherwise I would have to sit down with Carré, but he drops a silly, cheeky, or crude joke in a measured way. I sometimes say for the soft touch ‘well, well, haha’, but actually those are the moments when I read. I love people who can laugh at crude, silly, and cheeky jokes, and I love even a little more people who make them about themselves.  Mart Visser sometimes calls May a false queen, when she makes a small, false joke. And you should know that your favorite editor-in-chief (and mine) has a knack for this. So very subtly in between, you sometimes have to lean over her desk to catch it, in a velvet-soft tone she whispers a hard-hitting joke. She bursts out laughing when a man with a razor-sharp pen takes down the woman who takes herself too seriously. Self-mockery, stubborn humor, and, go ahead, a bit of schadenfreude here and there. I myself engage in a range of silly sayings, which work extraordinarily well in my male friend group. Hard, merciless, and fresh from the gallows. Yes, even the sinister and somewhat dark side is not shunned. You shouldn't take yourself too seriously, nor your fellow human beings. I think.

The Medical University of Vienna in Austria agrees with my love's tactic (or he with theirs, whichever you prefer). Because what does research show? The person who laughs at dark humor has a high IQ, a similar education, and scores low on aggressiveness or the well-known morning grumpiness. People who couldn't muster a grin at a joke about death or illness were more often in a bad mood and had lower intelligence.

Moral of the story? Just drop hard-hitting jokes in the first five minutes of an introduction, then you'll immediately know if you've got a fun one in your pocket. And not during a job interview of course (just do this), I've just been incredibly lucky with May's humor.  Source: Quest Psychology