Humour, Anxiety, and Csikszentmihalyis concept of

Flow.
Michael Meany

Abstract
Csikszentmihalyis concept of Flow suggests that the autotelic
experience occurs when the skill level of the individual matches the
challenge presented by a task or goal. An imbalance of skill and challenge
leads to either a state of boredom (too much skill and/or too little
challenge) or to a state of anxiety (too little skill and/or too much
challenge). The state of anxiety is also a key feature of comedy and
humour.
Peter Waldeck argues, like Freud, that the psychological value of
humour is the reduction of anxiety. Where they differ is that Waldeck
argues that the comic experience is closely linked with the reduction of
low level anxiety where elevated levels of anxiety greatly impair the
ability to appreciate humour. The relationship between humour and
anxiety is a useful instrument for the writer attempting to construct a
comedy using the common structures of comedy; repetitions; inversions;
and, the reciprocal interference of series. The focus of anxiety needs to be
alluded to and then discharged. Through comic moments of
superiority/inferiority, humane comedy, reality denial, verbal wit, and
incongruity, anxiety can be discharged to humorous effect.
This paper examines the association between anxiety and humour
in relation to the concept of flow. Can the autotelic experience be achieved
by a reduction in anxiety brought about by humour? Can we laugh
ourselves into flow?
Keywords
Humour, Anxiety, Creativity, Flow, Autotelic Experience.

Humour, Anxiety, and Csikszentmihalyis concept of Flow.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the interrelationships
between humour, anxiety and the concept of flow. The following diagram
illustrates the structure of these interrelationships. The first section
introduces the theories and structures of humour and, by extension,
examines a function of humour; the reduction of low level anxiety. The
second section looks at the concept of flow and its relation to anxiety. The
third section deals with the conflation of humour and creativity. It argues
that the similarities between humour and creativity are more a matter of
our response to novelty than to a deep understanding of either topic.

Balancing Skill
and Challenge

Flow

Achieving Flow
through humour?

Anxiety

Humour

Anxiety reduction
through humour

Figure 1: Illustration of interrelationships

1.

Anxiety and Humour

The writing of comedy has been considered in a range of howto books that suggest strategies, structures and rules of comedy 1,2. Also,
comedy is a well-developed area of psychological research Freuds
theory of Witz, Komik, and Humor appears to have started an ongoing
interest in the psychological value of comedy 3. What all these texts tend
to share is the categorisation of types of comedy. Waldeck suggests the
following types:
Superiority/inferiority - comedy based on our feelings of
superiority or the relative inferiority of another;

Michael Meany

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Humane comedy - the depiction of the social world as
ultimately harmless and benign;
Reality denial - comedy based on the denial of our physical
or social limitations;
Verbal wit - the comedy of brevity, verbal mastery, and
word play;
Gallows humour the darkest comedy that focuses on the
sacrifice of the outer self;
and, Incongruity - the comedy of the bizarre or unexpected
outcome 4.
These categories of humour appear to have evolved in response
to the developments in theories of humour. Goldstein and McGhee in their
1972 text provide a listing of humour theories including:
Biological, Instinct and Evolution Theories suggest that
laughter and humour are built-in and are good for the
body;
Superiority Theories argue that a sense of superiority is
central to the humour experience;
Incongruity Theories suggest that humour arises from
disjointed, ill-suited pairings of ideas or situations;
Surprise Theory argues that surprise or unexpectedness are
regarded as necessary to experience humour;
Ambivalence Theories suggest that the conflict of
incompatible emotions is the basis of humour;
Release and Relief Theories argue that humour functions as
a relief from stress or constraint;
Configurational Theories suggest that humour is based on
the insight of things falling into place, the pleasure of
getting the joke;
and, Psychoanalytical Theory argues that psychic energy
that can not normally be expended due to the strictures of
the superego can be released through humour 5.
Humour, particularly those styles based on irony, satire and
parody, requires that the audience, the implied reader 6, shares with the
writer an experiential world as a touchstone 7. These styles of humour
depend on a duality of meaning based on a recognisable experiential world
and a subverted other world. These styles of humour can be theorised in
terms of the recognition of ill-suited pairings, or emotional ambivalence,
or configurational humour that results from the sudden, surprising

Humour, Anxiety, and Csikszentmihalyis concept of Flow.

_____________________________________________________________
appreciation of a thitherto unrecognised relationship between ideas. All of
these points of view offer insights into the structure of humour.
Waldeck argues, like Freud, that the psychological function of
humour is the reduction of anxiety. More precisely, Waldeck argues that
the comic experience is closely linked with the reduction of low level
anxiety 8 where elevated levels of anxiety greatly impair the ability to
appreciate humor 9. This in some measure explains individual responses
to comedy; that which one individual finds humorous, others find
humourless, possibly offensive. The focus of anxiety needs to be alluded
to and then discharged. A joke seems funny only if it arouses anxiety and
at the same time reduces it 10. Then through comic moments of
superiority/inferiority, humane comedy, reality denial, verbal wit, and
incongruity this anxiety can be discharged to humorous effect.
The requirement that low level anxiety needs to be aroused
before it can be discharged by humour is explained by Lefcourt who
makes the distinction between state and trait anxiety. Anxiety as a
trait may indicate a continued readiness to experience arousal and distress
11
. By contrast, in the state of anxiety, at the moment of arousal, studies
have shown that humor mitigates feelings of hostility and anxiety 12.
Section 3 will examine the relationship between theories of
humour, in particular the Incongruity, Surprise, and Configurational
Theories, and aspects of creativity that have lead to a conflation of humour
and creativity. The following section looks at the relationship between
anxiety and the concept of flow.
2.

Anxiety and Flow

The concept of flow as developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
describes the interplay of skills and challenges as part of an individuals
intrinsic motivation to perform a task. The state of flow is described as a
very positive condition; people should feel happy, strong, concentrated
and motivated 13. Csikszentmihalyi describes nine elements of the flow
experience:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

There are clear goals every step of the way.

There is immediate feedback to ones actions.
There is a balance between challenges and skills.
Action and awareness are merged.
Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
There is no worry of failure.
Self-consciousness disappears.
The sense of time is distorted.
The activity becomes autotelic (it becomes an end in itself) 14.

Michael Meany

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Challenges

Of these elements, the link between challenges and skills is best seen as a
dynamic rather than a static relationship. This is the reason why flow is a
force for growth: Unless people get better at what they are doing, they
cant enjoy doing it any longer 15. The figure below illustrates the ratio
between challenges and skills. When skills are above average and
challenges below this would correspond to the condition of boredom.
When the challenges are above average and skills are below [results in]
the condition of anxiety 16.
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

Anxiety

Boredom
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Skills

Figure 2: Optimal experience is predicted in the

diagonal area where the ratio of challenges and
skills equals one.

The conception of anxiety used here is directly related to

challenge level of the task being undertaken, as such, in Lefcourts terms,
this is another example of anxiety as a state of the individual rather than
as an ongoing trait of the individuals personality. This being the case,
then it seems plausible that humour could be used as means of reducing
anxiety thereby allowing the individual to engage in the state of flow.
However, there appears to be two flaws in this logic. First, the affect of
anxiety in this case has already been aroused by the lack of skills or the
magnitude of the challenge. This would seem to preclude the effectiveness
of humour on challenge-anxiety. The pre-existing state of anxiety may
well be at the heightened level that Waldeck argues impairs the
individuals appreciation of humour. The level of anxiety could be
increased by an attempt to use humour. Second, the state of anxiety in the
flow diagram is an outcome of the interplay between the two variables of

Humour, Anxiety, and Csikszentmihalyis concept of Flow.

_____________________________________________________________
challenge and skill. For humour to operate on anxiety in this context,
anxiety and boredom would both need to be reconfigured as another pair
of variables. This presents the conclusion that flow can be achieved with
sufficient manipulation of four variables: challenges; skills; anxiety; and,
boredom. None of the studies referred to in Csikszentmihalyis works
suggest this as a strategy.
Csikszentmihalyi, in Creativity: flow and the psychology of
discovery and invention, makes the connection between the systematic
nature of creativity and the individual experience of flow. The following
section examines the conflation of creativity and humour.
3.

Humour and Creativity

A straw poll of corporate creativity training websites revealed a
surprising conflation of the concepts of humour and creativity. Sites like
Humor University 17, Think Inc 18, M1Creativity 19, and Creativity
Unleashed 20 all promote their creativity training courses based on the
humorous nature of the presentations. The conflation of humour and
creativity has developed as a result of pattern-matching between structural
aspects of humour and aspects of creativity.
Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the
human mind The significance of humour is precisely that
it indicates pattern-forming, pattern asymmetry and patternswitching. Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the
same basis as humour 21.
Likewise, the M1Creativity website states that, Arthur Koestler
and Edward de Bono both make the point that the mental mechanics of
humour and creative thinking are the same 22. American neurologist
Vilayanur Ramachandran believes humour should be formally taught in
schools. In an article printed in the Melbourne Age newspaper he argued
that:
There is a strong link between creativity and humour.
Humour should even be formally taught, he said. You
wouldn't think you'd normally have jokes and humour as
part of a school syllabus, but I think they're very important
because they teach people how to be creative, he said.
Jokes involve juxtaposing seemingly unrelated ideas,
seeing something from a novel vantage point, and that's the
basis of all creativity. 23.

Michael Meany

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The theories of humour, particularly the Incongruity, Surprise, and
Configurational Theories, appear to mirror much of our recognition of
creativity. A creative idea or object may well be composed of incongruous
elements and surprise us. It may also surprise us by being a new
configuration of older elements or ideas; Guttenbergs printing press is an
example of this. Once we comprehend the new object we may exclaim,
Why didnt I think of that! The response to a creative object is similar to
our response to humour. However, this perceived similarity is more a
matter of our response to novelty than to a deep, structural understanding
of either humour or creativity. Edward de Bono in an article called Serious
Creativity, a work that preceded I am Right, You are Wrong, argued that
the conception of creativity as always having to be fun had made
engaging people in serious creativity training problematic 24. The real
power of using humour in creativity training would be to mitigate the
state of anxiety we feel when presented with learning something new.
4.

Conclusion
All three topics discussed in this paper, humour, anxiety and
flow/creativity share common terms and elements: anxiety is an element
of flow and humour; humour has a relationship with anxiety reduction and
creativity; and, our response to humour and creativity appear to very
similar. However, this paper has attempted to show that the conception of
each of these elements is sufficiently different to make direct parallels
between them deeply flawed.
Endnotes
1.
2.

3.
4.
5.

6.

Vorhaus, J., The comic toolbox: how to be funny even when

you're not. St. Leonards N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin. 1994.
Halperin, M., Writing Great Characters: The psychology of
character development in screenplays. Los Angeles.: Lone Eagle
Publishing Co. 1996.
Holland, N.N., Laughing, a psychology of humor. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 1982. pp.48-49.
Waldeck, P.B., Weighting Delight and Dole: a study of comedy,
tragedy, and anxiety. New York: P. Lang. 1989. p.74.
Goldstein, J.H. and P.E. McGhee, eds. The Psychology of
Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues.
Academic Press: New York. 1972. p 5 13.
Iser, W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Responce.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978. p.34.

Humour, Anxiety, and Csikszentmihalyis concept of Flow.

_____________________________________________________________
7.
8.
9
10
11.

12.
13.

14.

15.
16.
17.
18.

19.
20.
21.

22.
23.

24.

Schlueter, J., Dramatic Closure: reading the end. Madison:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 1995. p.35.
Waldeck, op cit., p.68
ibid., p.66
ibid., p.66
Lefcourt, H.M., Humor: the psychology of living bouyantly. The
Plenum Series in Social/Clinical Psychology, ed. C.R. Snyder.
Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo. 2001. p 115
ibid., p 65
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I.S. Csikszentmihalyi, eds. Optimal
Experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness.
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; New York. 1988., p
260
Csikszentmihalyi, M., Creativity: flow and the psychology of
discovery and invention. First ed. New York: Harper Collins.
1997. p 111-113
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I.S. Csikszentmihalyi, eds. op cit., p
262
ibid., p 262
Fry, A.,Humor University: Fun Solution for Serious Problems,
viewed on 10 January 2007,http://www.humoru.com/index.html
Freedman, P.,Think Inc - Services - Creativity Training And
Talks, viewed on 10 January 2007, http://www.thinkinc.co.uk/serv_training.asp
Weeks, D.M.,M1Creativity - Creativity training, viewed on 10
January 2007, http://www.m1creativity.com/
Birch, P. and B. Clegg,Creativity Unleashed,21 December 2006.
viewed on 10 January 2007,http://www.cul.co.uk/
Bono, E.d., I am right, you are wrong : from this to the new
Renaissance, from rock logic to water logic. London: Viking.
1990.
Weeks, op cit.
Cauchi, S.,Unlocking the creativity gene, viewed on 10 January
2007,http://www.theage.com.au/news/Science/Unlocking-thecreativity-gene/2005/04/29/1114635748788.html
Bono, E.d., Serious Creativity, viewed on 10 January 2007,
http://www.debonogroup.com/serious_print.htm
Bibliography

Birch, P. and B. Clegg,Creativity Unleashed,21 December 2006. viewed

on 10 January 2007,http://www.cul.co.uk/

Michael Meany

____________________________________________________________
Bono, E.d.,Serious Creativity, viewed on 10 January
2007,http://www.debonogroup.com/serious_print.htm
Bono, E.d., I am right, you are wrong: from this to the new Renaissance,
from rock logic to water logic. London: Viking. 1990.
Cauchi, S.,Unlocking the creativity gene, viewed on 10 January
2007,http://www.theage.com.au/news/Science/Unlocking-thecreativity-gene/2005/04/29/1114635748788.html
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I.S. Csikszentmihalyi, eds. Optimal Experience:
Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge; New York. 1988. , p 260
Csikszentmihalyi, M., Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery
and invention. New York: Harper Collins. 1997. p 111-113
Freedman, P.,Think Inc - Services - Creativity Training And Talks,
viewed on 10 January 2007,http://www.think-inc.co.uk/
Fry, A.,Humor University: Fun Solution for Serious Problems, viewed on
10 January 2007,http://www.humoru.com/index.html
Goldstein, J.H. and P.E. McGhee, eds. The Psychology of Humor:
Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. Academic Press:
New York. 1972. p 5 13.
Halperin, M., Writing Great Characters: The psychology of character
development in screenplays. Los Angeles.: Lone Eagle
Publishing Co. 1996.
Holland, N.N., Laughing, a psychology of humor. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 1982. pp.48-49.
Iser, W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Responce. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978. p.34.
Lefcourt, H.M., Humor: the psychology of living bouyantly. The Plenum
Series in Social/Clinical Psychology, ed. C.R. Snyder. Waterloo,
Ontario: University of Waterloo. 2001. p 115
Schlueter, J., Dramatic Closure: reading the end. Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press. 1995. p.35.
Vorhaus, J., The comic toolbox: how to be funny even when you're not. St.
Leonards N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin. 1994.
Waldeck, P.B., Weighting Delight and Dole: a study of comedy, tragedy,
and anxiety. New York: P. Lang. 1989. p.74.
Weeks, D.M.,M1Creativity - Creativity training, viewed on 10 January
2007,http://www.m1creativity.com/
Author Identification
Michael Meany is a lecture in New Media at the University of
Newcastle, Australia.