A vast amount of research has focused on therapies to overcome the consequences of mental health problems. Often our knowledge of what is happening to our clients is enhanced, and sometimes useful interventions are developed. Nonetheless, the number of people suffering from mental health issues is stil increasing. The current approach doesn’t seem to be sufficient. So why not try things differently? Humor has always been considered interesting and still is seen as a nice ‘extra’. But maybe, just maybe, the knowledge and the use of humor could be a game changer. The only way to know for sure, is to study it.

In the past different approaches have been taken to theorize about humor and study its application in psychotherapy. What are the different schools of thought in the field of humor? Based on the work of of for example Martin (2007) and Dionigi (2011) we can mainly distinguish 5 different ones: Psychoanalytic, Superiority, Arousal, Incongruity and Reversal. Each of them in their own way have theorized about what humor is, how it works and how we can use it to help clients. Only in the field of Arousal and Incongruity or theories (or theories related to those two) we find research, of which some also on the application in therapy. The lack of clinical research in this field has to do with the problem of defining what humor is and how you can have valid and reliable measurements. Although this is the challenge in every type of research, when concerning humor, investigators seem to shy away for the challenge.

In our systemic review Jose Manuel García Montes and I propose the following approach to humor interventions for future research:
“A humorous intervention in psychotherapy contains surprise which will make clients confused for a moment. Because of this confusion clients are invited to doubt their habitual form of approaching their life and must search for an alternative framework to resolve the confusion. In this process, clients are taking on new perspectives, have a chance to distance themselves from the actual situation, and feel relieved when they discover a solution or realizes that what first seemed to be a problem, stopped being one. Most commonly clients recognize the intervention as a humorous one and/or have to laugh. However, an intervention can be humorous without clients recognizing it and having to laugh because of it.”

This is not a definition of humor that contains all the different aspects that have been mentioned by other authors, but it is at least a point of departure to help focus future research. Our goal and at the same time our appeal to other investigators is to elaborate one direction of research extensively before adapting the mentioned approach and investigate other lines of thought.