The sense of humour and its nuances it has long been known that characterize the personality of a person.
In fact, one of the founders of English Empiricism, Lord Shaftesbury, in his «Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor» (1709), associated it with freedom and morality, as the quality of the cultured and rational subject who can independently perceive the facts and the deontic (legal) dimensions of social life, including politics and aesthetics.
How the man reacts with humor and how he uses it, is a characteristic property, whose social dimension has always been of concern to science. Indeed, the psychologist Rod Martin had, as early as 2003, elaborated four types of humour, which are now recognised and agreed upon by the entire scientific community.
According to Martin there are the benign uses of humor, to strengthen the subject's ego (Self-enhancing) and to improve his/her relations with others (affiliative).
There are, however, also its pathological uses, such as sarcasm and irony with derogatory purposes towards others, aggressive and its self-sarcastic, self-reducing use to enhance the subject's relations with others (self-defeating).
The first type, according to his renowned study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, refers to the people we often encounter in our lives who are constantly telling anecdotes, or interjecting witty remarks into the conversation. The psychologically associative use of humor aims to enhance the subject's image to others and improve his/her relationships.
The second type is aimed at the subject itself because it strives to surround everything in its life with the spirit of humour in his attempt to feel as good.
The aggressive type of humor aims to insult the people and situations surrounding the subject, with ingredients of malicious sarcasm and irony, or ridicule.
The fourth type is characterized by the scientific community «counterproductive», because it resorts to the self-degradation of the subject himself, to self-sarcasm and reduction of his personality in order to attract the attention of others.
