“I’m Just Joking!” - Does Authenticity Matter in Humor Appreciation?

Does authenticity matter in a domain where one’s words and persona aren’t meant to be taken at face value? People often say “I’m just joking” to mean “Don’t take my words or actions literally.” To date, little is known about the role of authenticity in humor appreciation. To explore this question, we used audio recordings of comedic stories told by standup comedians (Experiments 1-3), text-only comedic stories (Experiment 4), and text-only observational jokes (Experiment 5) as comedic materials. We manipulated perceptions of authenticity by alleging the comedian prioritizes authentic self-expression (vs. pleasing their audience) (Experiment 1), performs because they love performing (vs. for fame and money) (Experiment 2), tells jokes that are based on real, personal (vs. fictional, imagined) experiences (Experiment 3), or wrote their own jokes (vs. used another human writer or AI) (Experiments 4-5). Across all studies, people evaluated the allegedly authentic jokes as funnier and expressed greater interest in following or sharing the comedian’s work.