Humor as a Defense Mechanism

Humor is not the problem

The psychiatrist George Vaillant followed a group of Harvard men for decades. He studied how they coped with life. He counted humor among the most mature ways of handling stress.

The pattern on this page is narrower. It is humor used again and again to steer a conversation away from you.

What the pattern can look like

None of these means much on its own. People with this pattern often describe moments like these:

• Answering “How are you, really?” with a joke, then changing the subject.
• Turning the conversation back to the other person when it reaches them.
• Being a good listener while few people know what they feel.
• Being called hard to read by people who know them well.
• Feeling an urge to change the subject when someone gets close to something real.

Deflecting, or just being funny?

Being funny is not the pattern. The question is what the joke does. When a joke ends a moment that was about you, that points to deflecting.

Why it is hard to see in yourself

For people with this pattern, the humor and warmth are often real. That makes the pattern easy to miss. It can feel like simply being good company.

Where it comes from

This page does not say where the pattern comes from. A list of signs cannot tell you that. Neither can a short test.

What the Blind Spot Test can show

The Blind Spot Test is ten short statements. You rate each one from “Not me” to “That’s me.” It takes about a minute.

Your answers are scored across five patterns, and the Deflector is one of them. The others are the People Pleaser, the Intellectualizer, the Overachiever and the Controller. Two of the ten statements are about deflecting.

The test’s Deflector is wider than humor. It is about keeping attention away from yourself. Jokes are one way. Questions about the other person are another.

The result shows which pattern your answers lean toward most. It also says how clear that lean is. It may be clearly ahead of the others, or close with one other pattern. If two come out even, it says your answers did not point at one pattern.

What it cannot show

It cannot tell you that you are a deflector. Ten statements cannot measure a whole person, and two statements cannot measure one habit. It is not a diagnosis. It cannot tell you where a pattern came from. It only reads what you answer on the day you take it.

It gives you a starting point. You can check what it names against your own life.

What Seneca said about fear

Seneca was a Roman writer and statesman. In a letter to his friend Lucilius, he wrote:

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca, Letter 13, translated by Richard M. Gummere (1917)

He was writing about fear in general, not about jokes. Applied to this pattern, being seen may hurt less than the fear of it.

One thing to try this week

Notice the moment you reach for a joke when a conversation turns to you. You do not have to stop it. Only notice what you were about to say before the joke arrived.

Sources

• Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13, translated by Richard M. Gummere (1917), Wikisource.
• George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Little, Brown, 1977), on the Grant Study and the mature defenses.
• The pattern description and test statements: the Blind Spot Test, Know Your Ethos.