Do I amuse you? Asymmetric predictors for humor appreciation and humor production

•Humor appreciation, production fluency, and production success were examined.•People who made funnier jokes found pre-written jokes less funny.•The number of jokes made was unrelated to how funny pre-written jokes were found to be.•Appreciation was correlated with all Big Five traits except for agreeableness.•Production success was correlated with demographic variables, but not personality.

A “sense of humor” can be fractionated into appreciation (enjoying jokes), production fluency (making jokes), and production success (making funny jokes). There is scant research on how appreciation and production relate, and their relation to individual differences. Participants (N = 159) rated the humor of captioned cartoons and created captions for different cartoons. People who wrote funnier captions were less amused by the professionally-captioned cartoons. Production fluency, in contrast, was not related to appreciation. Personality predicted humor appreciation, but not production success. Demographics predicted production success, but not appreciation. Appreciation and production success appear to rely on separable mechanisms and motivations. Our results were also inconsistent with the idea that humor creators are motivated by dominance and humor appreciators by affiliation.