Just a Joke? Adolescents’ Preferences for Humor in Media Entertainment and Real-Life Aggression

Abstract

Humorous media entertainment frequently punctuates the everyday lives of adolescents. Theorists have suggested that this exposure may impact behavior, particularly real-life aggression. Specifically, exposure to prosocial (coping) humor in media entertainment is posited to decrease aggression, whereas the reverse has been argued for exposure to antisocial (disparaging and slapstick) humor. Despite these suppositions, little empirical evidence about this relationship exists. To fill this gap, this study employed a cohort-sequential design using latent growth curve models to estimate the (co-)development of adolescents’ preferences for television shows featuring disparaging, slapstick, and coping humor and aggression from age 10 to 17. Results showed that at the onset of adolescence, especially boys had a higher preference for shows with disparaging and slapstick humor than with coping humor. However, over the course of adolescence, boys’ and girls’ preferences for shows with coping humor increased, while especially girls’ preferences for shows with disparaging and slapstick humor decreased. These preferences were unrelated to adolescents’ aggression. Our findings provide an important addition to the ongoing media effects debate. Taken together, they offer room for optimism and point toward an increased focus on the potential positive rather than the negative sides of humor in the lives of young people.