It turns out that if you want to be more creative and come up with highly original ideas, laughter will help you.
Laughter can help people solve problems that demand creative solutions, by making it easier to think more broadly and associate ideas/relationships more freely.
Humour is a creative act because creativity, like humour, arouses surprise by breaking certain frames.
Both involve establishing non-obvious links between incongruous elements. And what is a joke, if it is not a combination of different and/or contrasting ideas that creates a discrepancy, disobeying conventional expectations.
Theorists suggest that humour drives cognitive processes that are conducive to creative thinking.
In research studies, participants were shown humourous film clips before doing a creativity test.
Compared to participants in a control group, those who were exposed to something funny and humorous performed better on the creativity test.
