Humor can open conversations, but its ambiguity can also reinforce stigma and cause harm.

Even well-meaning words or jokes can increase stress and make health challenges harder to manage.

Humor-based interventions may help briefly, but effects often fade without deeper belief change.

I have been studying the knock-on effects of living with stigma for people’s health over the last three decades. Stigma matters greatly. It blocks people’s access to services, discourages people from seeking treatment, and worsens psychological and physiological stress. It is a major (if mostly invisible or unacknowledged) driver of systematic differences in who stays healthy and who doesn’t.

And the way stigma works through everyday language can be subtle yet still devastating. Our research in Japan and the U.S. tracked how even seemingly innocuous or well-meaning words can do harm. Everyday “polite concern,” like asking a daughter or a friend whether they really need that second piece of cake, can be emotional torment for those who struggle with weight. And it can make weight loss even harder. It’s not the speaker’s intention that matters—it’s how it is read by others.

A newly released review examines how humor works in these kinds of sensitive, potentially stigmatizing interactions. From an anthropological perspective, humor is not just an individual trait or a mental response. It is something people do together. And it can serve multiple functions at once—shaping how stigma is produced, how it causes harm, and how it might be challenged.

Sometimes humor helps. It can make it easier to manage life with a stigmatized condition, such as mental illness. Because it is framed as “not serious,” humor can open up difficult conversations—for example, between a doctor and a patient. It can ease tension, build connection, and offer a way to cope with hard realities. Humor can also be subversive. It can expose unspoken prejudices, prompt reflection, and challenge social norms. “Stand Up for Mental Health,” for example, explicitly trains people to use humor about their own illness experiences to fight societal discrimination.

But humor can also backfire. As we saw in our research on “polite concern,” even well-meaning comments can cause harm. The same is true for humor. Its ambiguity is part of what makes it powerful—but also what makes it risky. A joke about wheelchair use, body weight, or bipolar disorder can be interpreted in very different ways. Some may see it as playful; others may experience it as hurtful.

This ambiguity can also protect the speaker—“I was only joking”—while placing the burden on the listener to interpret intent. In this way, humor can mask meaning and shift blame. Even attempts to challenge stereotypes through humor can reinforce them if audiences interpret the joke differently than intended. Self-directed humor can be empowering, but it can also slip into self-denigration, reinforcing a sense of lower social value. This is a familiar pattern in the general processes that underpin stigma, wherein the people with a stigmatized condition end up bearing the main responsibility for managing their devaluation, whether it is delivered with or without a laugh.

So, the review poses the question: Are humor-based interventions around stigmatized conditions (like mental illness) more effective than straight-faced ones? Perhaps not surprisingly, humor-based interventions generally work the same as other stigma interventions—where any positive impacts tend to wear off over time. Humor can certainly help with talking about tricky topics and opening conversations. But this is some distance from shifting the beliefs at the root of it.

So, the study concludes, humor as a tool for stigma reduction is most effective if the joke is perfectly matched to an audience that will read the joke exactly as intended. Otherwise, humor risks doing exactly the opposite. Humor is never neutral, even while being neither inherently kind nor cruel. For those living with a stigmatized condition, it can be both at once.

Park, S. (2026). Humor as a double-edged sword: a scoping review of its role in stigma reduction and reinforcement. Review of Communication, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2026.2626318

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