Humorous media and youth

Humor plays a vital role in childhood and adolescence. It helps with forming friendships, gaining peer approval, and solidifying one's social position in the peer group. In addition, humor enables youth to cope with difficult situations and maintain a positive outlook on life. Youth's ability to use humor emerges in early childhood and develops into adolescence. Although humor development is influenced by many sources, entertainment media provide an important way to learn how to use humor effectively, especially now that children are using media more than ever before and at ever younger ages. However, whereas adult humor has received ample research attention, humor in youth has been studied much less extensively, with only a handful of studies touching upon the role of humor in youth's media. Furthermore, the research that has been done is scattered across disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and communication. Therefore, this entry provides an overview of how youth's (mediated) humor preferences are connected to cognitive development, developmentally related themes, and personal characteristics, and identifies key directions for future research.